In Defense of Rumsfeld
The post linked above has a bunch of commentary, but that was one viewpoint I had not heard before. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.The only thing that matters to me is that the generals--be they retired or active, Iraq veterans or not--claiming that more troops in Iraq would solve all the problems are dead wrong. Rumsfeld is right. More troops would have inflamed Islamic passions, created a disincentive among the Iraqi Security Forces to improve, cost the U.S. much more money, and--most importantly--cost us many more casualties.
Rumsfeld knew this, and he knew it by studying the last time a great western power fought a protracted Islamic insurgency, which was the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962).
The French had 500,000 troops in Algeria, which at that time had a population of 9 million. If you scale the troop-to-citizen ratio up to match Iraq's population, that would mean we'd need 1.5 million troops in Iraq. We currently have 138,000.
The French lost 18,000 troops killed over an eight-year period, or 2250 a year. Again, if you scale it up to Iraq ratios, it would be 6750 a year. We're losing about 700 a year, and that figure is falling.
Between 350,000 and 1.5 million Algerians were killed. To scale those figures up to Iraq, multiply them by three. So far in Iraq, about 32,000 have died, including terrorists.
The French used a policy of collective punishment in Algeria: If a village harbored insurgents, the village was bombed from the air or hit with artillery strikes. The French also tortured suspects to death, rounded people up by the thousands and shot them without trial, and put about 2 million in concentration camps. And they still lost the war.
With less than 10% of the troops (proportionally) that France had in Algeria, and with a policy not of conquest but of partnership, look what we've accomplished. More importantly, look at the slaughter we've avoided.
Something to thank Rumsfeld--not the generals--for.
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