Posted 9:07 AM by steve

Let me use an (admittedly somewhat superficial) analogy of inner-city gang warfare to illustrate why sending more troops into Iraq will not accomplish what its proponents hope...

The typical response of big-city mayors and police chiefs to an outbreak of gang warfare is to send in more police. They go in with lots of fanfare and lots of TV coverage, they're initially welcomed by the locals and, for a while, the gangs tend to cut back on the violence.

But the issues that drove the violence don't go away. Whether it is a battle over control of the local drug scene or just plain old neighborhood feuds, the warring gangs don't make peace... they don't give up their goal of controlling the neighborhood.

They simply shift tactics. Sometimes they take their fights elsewhere, almost always to one of the neighborhoods from which the police offensive took officers from. But most of the time they they simply hold their fire until such time - and it never takes long - for the strains of too few officers elsewhere in the city and too much overtime leads to city leaders to declare the crime emergency over and redeploy officers away from the once-troubled spots.

And then the gangs re-emerge and the violence levels go right back up.

I guarantee the same thing will happen in Iraq. Even assuming we had the troops to deploy there, the warring factions will simply do what our inner-city gangs do: they'll just wait us out. They know we don't have the manpower or the patience or the budget to keep troops in Iraq for an infinite period of time.

So we send in troops... and things will get quiet for awhile. Not because the factions have decided to give up their arms and leave in peace and harmony with their neighbors... but rather because they're just biding their time, waiting for an impatient President and Congress to declare the problem over and pull the troops out... at which time the militias will re-emerge, determined to make up for lost time.

Someone once said of the Palestinians that there would never be peace until such time as the Palestinians loved their children more than they hated the Israelis. And, as much as our policymakers won't admit it, the same holds true in Iraq: there won't be a real peace so long as enough of them hate each other to the extent they do.

More troops won't solve that problem. I'm not sure what will. I just know it is beyond our ability and power to make people who hate each other as much as the Iraqis do to give up their grudges. It ain't going to happen... not in my lifetime, not in my children's children's lifetimes.