Digging In For A Fight

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War and tyranny can make a country go mad, and it's pretty clear that in Iraq there's no such thing as a quick recovery. The Americans promise the Iraqis that once things are calm, we'll truly let you run things. But the Iraqis reply that until they are running things, there will be no calm. It is hard to accept the Pentagon's hearty insistence that the scattered attacks in Iraq are just the work of a few thousand Iraqi dead-enders backed by foreign fighters when so much of the country has become so impossibly dangerous in just the past few weeks--when drivers trying to move around Baghdad, even in the supposedly safe neighborhoods, now run into checkpoints manned by insurgents looking for foreigners to confront or kidnap; when Iraqi police officers strip off their uniforms before heading home for fear of being tarred as collaborators with the hated occupiers; when contractors are confined to their walled compounds because they risk voiding their life-insurance policies if they venture out into the country they are expected to rebuild.

If anything, the American public has shown itself more willing than the government to confront the implications of Iraq's bloody spring. When he invaded Iraq with barely four divisions last year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wasn't just trying to win a war; he was trying to make a point--that the U.S.'s post--cold war Army could do more with less and do it better and faster. That proved right as far as the invasion went, but occupying the country was a different matter entirely. "The notion that with [about] 130,000 troops, we have sufficient numbers to provide security is patently wrong," says Ivo Daalder, who was on the National Security Council staff under Clinton and is now at the Brookings Institution. "We need at least twice as many to make sure that the streets in Baghdad are safe enough for people to go out and shop--let alone take care of the counterinsurgency."

When Eric Shinseki, then the Army Chief of Staff, testified publicly before the war that it could take "several hundred thousand troops" to occupy Iraq, he found himself a general non grata, and the rest of the brass got the message. A year later, junior officers are no longer holding their tongues. "He wants to wage a war consistent with this fantasy of what a war is rather than what it is in reality," an Army officer at the Pentagon says privately of Rumsfeld. "It's this bulls___ notion that you can have an efficient military instead of an effective one."