Referring to former Iraqi Viceroy Jerry Bremer's off-the-reservation remarks recently, Juan Cole relates some estimates of what troops levels might be necessary to give a reasonable chance of winning the counterinsurgency war in Iraq: Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bremer: Deserting a Sinking Ship 10/06/04.
Bremer's remark clearly puts the blame for the Iraq quagmire squarely on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the two architects of the new Pentagon policy of "small force wars." Both were harsh to Gen. Shinseki for daring to suggest that pacifying Iraq would require 300,000 troops. Actually, this is already a low estimate. Calculating on the basis of the situation in the Balkans, some security specialists at the National Security Council estimated in spring of 2003 that 500,000 troops would be needed. In contrast, Rumsfeld forced the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accept an invasion force of only 100,000, which was good enough to win the war but not enough to secure the peace.
There are currently about 140,000 American troops known to be there, with another 20 thousand or so if we include soldiers-for-hire and "coalition" troops.
The Iraqi army is still almost non-existent, although Bush promised on Wednesday that 125,000 Iraqi soldiers will be trained by the end of December.
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