The Occupation Of Postwar Iraq

March 16, 2003 | Harry Levins

[Stavka2]

Concrete Answers Elude Planners, Analysts

By Harry Levins, Post-Dispatch

Any American military conquest of Iraq will bring on an American military occupation of Iraq. And nobody has hard-and-fast answers to three questions about that occupation:

*How many soldiers will it tie up?

*How long will it last?

*How much will it cost?

Some people are setting forth definite figures. But those people won't make the decisions. Meanwhile, the decision-makers shy away from definite figures. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld uses terms like "unknowable."

Even the definite figures vary wildly. For example, estimates of the size of the force start at 45,000 soldiers and march uphill to 200,000.

Part of the uncertainty stems from the fact that nobody will know much until the dust of war settles. Only then can the United States sniff out whether postwar Iraq shapes up as docile, hostile or something in between.

And some of the doubt comes with the duty. In 1957, in a study of the occupation of Germany after World War II, historian Harold Zink observed that "all occupations, by their very nature, are characterized by imperfection, frequent poor judgment, and the like."

Zink wrote that the knottiness of the problems, the pressure for quick action and the abnormal atmosphere of any occupation "combine to promote haphazardness, mistakes and extravagance."

A rundown of the force estimates alone makes "haphazardness" sound especially apt.

"A robust force"

Last week, the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, repeated to a congressional panel what he had said last month to another congressional panel: Occupying Iraq would take 200,000 soldiers.

Army Secretary Thomas White backed his man, saying, "Gen. Shinseki has some experience in this, having run the stabilization force in Bosnia."

But Shinseki will have little say in the size of an occupation force. That's up to Rumsfeld, who raised his eyebrows last month at Shinseki's estimate. Indeed, Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz called Shinseki's estimate "way off the mark."

Still, the Congressional Budget Office said last fall that the U.S. Central Command itself had mentioned the 200,000 figure.

Neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz will allow himself to be pinned down on a number. Both say that only time will tell.

But without attribution, The Washington Post says the Joint Chiefs of Staff are talking of a force in the range of 45,000 to 60,000. A spokeswoman for the Defense Department refused to comment on the Post's figure.

Next up the ladder is a figure of 75,000. Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations used that number in a report titled "Iraq: The Day After."

The report cites the research of retired Army Col. Scott Feil. Last August, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that an occupation would require a corps made up of two divisions, two armored cavalry regiments and supporting units - 75,000 soldiers. And that may be on the low side.

In a phone interview last week, Feil said: "I looked at the five or six crucial missions to be performed and what types of units were needed. Then I looked at the global situation, with its commitments elsewhere in places like the Balkans. And then I looked at the fact that the Army has only about 290,000 deployable soldiers.

"So my estimate wasn't just a matter of missions and units but a question of what we can afford. What can the Army realistically provide? And that's how I came up with 75,000."

A British publication, the Economist, cites unidentified Pentagon sources as talking about a force of 100,000. That number sounds about right to Barry McCaffrey, who led an Army division in Desert Storm and retired later as a four-star general.

In an interview here last week, McCaffrey said: "An Army heavy corps - that's about 100,000 soldiers - sitting in Iraq would have huge benefits for the region. It would serve as a quieting factor on mischief in the Middle East."

But another retired division commander, William Nash, thinks Shinseki's figure of 200,000 "is the right number."

Nash led his 1st Armored Division into Bosnia in December 1995. He said in a phone interview last week, "We went in with enough strength to dominate. If you do it on the cheap, as we're doing in Afghanistan, you'll keep having trouble."

Military writer Ralph Peters agrees - but only to a point that stops well short of 200,000.

"Sure, you want a robust force there in the early going," Peters said in a phone interview last week. "But 200,000 sounds out of line. It doesn't make military sense." Peters echoed historian Zink by saying, "It sounds extravagant."

Peters said, "The Army likes to worst-case things, but 200,000 goes beyond worst case. We can't have an iron-clad rule that every time somebody fires a shot, a U.S. battalion shows up."

Somewhere in the middle sits McCaffrey. He said, "Gen. Shinseki's figure of 200,000 may be too high - but it isn't unreasonable. I don't see how you can do it with a token force. The answer is, 'Nobody knows.' But the answer clearly isn't 20,000."

The Council on Foreign Relations advises "that deployments for peace stabilization err on the side of robustness."

"Stay the course"

How long an occupation will take is another open question. But precedent suggests that American soldiers will be in Iraq for a matter of years.

After WWII, the occupation of Japan lasted seven years, and the occupation of Germany ran for 10. After the Civil War, Union soldiers occupied the South for 11 years. Although the American presence in Kosovo falls short of an occupation, it has lasted almost four years. In Bosnia, the American presence has stretched on for more than seven years.

Feil told Congress that his force of 75,000 "would stay in place as described for at least one year." But the catch is the phrase "as described." Feil went on to say, "The duration for a significant (above 5,000) U.S. presence would be for five to 10 years."

Right after WWII, the United States had 1.3 million soldiers in Germany and 450,000 in Japan. But those numbers ran down quickly. The reason is simple, says Jean Edward Smith of Marshall University, who wrote a biography of Gen. Lucius Clay, the postwar American ruler in Germany.

Smith said in a phone interview: "The Germans were crushed. There was no resistance - no guerrilla activity. They were eager to cooperate, and so were the Japanese. I think that's distinctly different from what might happen in Iraq."

McCaffrey said, "I hope we keep a substantial military force there for 10 years." He explained: "The worst thing we did going into Bosnia was to say it was for the short term. It was ludicrous to tell the American people we'd be out in the short term. And the same thing goes for Iraq."

The Council on Foreign Relations says only that the "United States must be prepared to stay the course to get the job done."

And because duration is an open-ended question, so is cost.

At a press briefing last month, Rumsfeld said, "If you don't know if it's going to last six days, six weeks or six months, how in the world can you come up with a cost estimate?"

In a TV interview, Wolfowitz said, "If we have to occupy Iraq for years, as some people are foolishly suggesting, it's one cost. If ... we're going to be greeted as liberators, it's a very different and much lower cost. We really don't know the cost; that's an unfortunate fact."

But the Council on Foreign Relations thinks it knows the cost: $16.2 billion a year, maybe more.

The council bases its number on Feil's force of 75,000, and his projection of how much it costs to keep each soldier far from home. If the number rises, says the council, so does the total cost.

Feil told Congress that the Army must spend $215,000 per soldier per year. But if the United States can foist some of the soldiering onto other countries, the price gets cheaper.

A Western European soldier can be sustained for $120,000 a year, Feil says. A U.N. soldier comes even more cheaply - $103,000 a year. But given the rough diplomatic waters of recent weeks, foreign countries may well keep their soldiers at home.

That underscores what the Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a study released in January:

"Recent experience in Haiti, the Balkans, East Timor, Afghanistan, and elsewhere has demonstrated that 'winning the peace' is often harder than fighting the war."

Senior writer Harry Levins covers foreign policy and military issues for the Post-Dispatch.

[joesnuffy]

as long as Iraq has oil...they should be paying us...that would be a switch for a country that loses to us..