Editor's note: This is the beginning of a weekly series. Every Thursday, Daily News Editor Jamie Bologna will interview a faculty expert on a relevant current events topic.
Shortly after Gen. David Petraeus' testimony before Congress on the progress of the troop surge in Iraq, President Bush announced that some 30,000 American armed forces will return home by next summer. To get a better understanding of the political and military situation in Iraq, I sat down with Associate Political Science Professor Richard Eichenberg, who specializes in U.S. foreign policy, public opinion and political behavior.
Jamie Bologna: Do you feel that the pledge to bring home 30,000 troops is enough to satisfy the American people?
Richard Eichenberg: There are [multiple] answers to that question. The first is I don't know. The second is it depends. ... If things settle down in Iraq and American casualties drop or the Iraqi government makes substantial progress in settling the civil war, then I think yes, it will be enough. Because I think the elements tha have upset the American people - the high costs with little signs of progress - will be somewhat eased.
JB: What about support for immediate withdrawal?
RE: I don't think the American public is demanding "get us out or else." I think what they are saying is this is a civil war, it is likely to be protracted, the costs are high, and we need to start getting out.
JB: Then do you see a U.S. presence on the ground in Iraq for the foreseeable future? How long do you think U.S. troops will be deployed?
RE: This one is a little more speculative. Up until [several] days ago, certainly this administration and the main body of the Republican Party in Congress ... were saying without being terribly specific about it, that even if we withdraw from combat we are going to need a substantial presence in order to secure Iraq's borders [and] target whatever terrorists might happen to be attempting to take refuge in the more lawless parts. ... If the United States cannot secure Iraq with 160,000 troops, what is to make us believe that it will be able to secure it with 130,000 troops?
JB: In your analysis, did we go in with enough troops to begin with?
RE: No, it is patently obvious that we didn't. ... I'm sure you're aware of the tons upon tons upon tons of ammunition dumps that were left unguarded. The reason they were left unguarded, and this is literally the case, is that we did not have the troops to guard them. ... The military is very clear about this, they say they would have been very happy to do something about this, but they were told not to. We didn't have enough troops to secure the [Baghdad]. The issue of disbanding the Iraqi army is independent of the number of American troops, except to say that had we moved to call the Iraqi army back into being and begun paying and training them, we would've had more troops at our disposal before the sectarian fissures started to tear apart the security institutions.
JB: A recent General Accounting Office report said the Iraqi government only met three of 18 benchmarks, but Gen. Petraeus said in his testimony that we're making progress. What is your analysis of the surge policy? Was it successful?
RE: On the security side, of course, there's some controversy about whose statistics are right. Is violence up? Is violence down? Do we mean total civilian casualties? Do we mean only sectarian casualties? If we mean sectarian, what's the definition of that? ... If the city of Los Angeles doubles the number of police officers on the street over a two-month period do you think crime would go down in L.A.? Probably. And it sort of confirms the wisdom of the argument that had we had enough troops there in the first place, we might have been able to keep this Pandora's Box closed. In a sort of common-sensical way it would be very surprising [for additional troops] largely in Baghdad not to improve some things. However, and it's a huge however, it's not clear that this short-term improvement in security to the extent that it even exists is going to make any contribution to any long-term political consensus formation.
JB: But the violence has gone down?
RE: The statistics are controversial enough that maybe the violence isn't really down. But to the extent that it is, the question is how permanent is it? And virtually all those things I mentioned I suspect will disappear the moment we leave. The moment we're not manning the checkpoints, ... the moment we're not staffing the security centers in the neighborhoods, the moment we're not sitting on the Iraqi army ... all the evidence suggests that it will revert to fighting once again and the violence will spiral upwards. We are really politically, militarily, morally in a pickle.
