Iraq Breaking the Army

Bush broke the Army:

Among the 513,000 active-duty soldiers who have served in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, more than 197,000 have deployed more than once, and more than 53,000 have deployed three or more times, according to a separate set of statistics provided this week by Army personnel officers. The percentage of troops sent back to Iraq for repeat deployments would have to increase in the months ahead.

The Army study of mental health showed that 27 percent of noncommissioned officers — a critically important group — on their third or fourth tour exhibited symptoms commonly referred to as post-traumatic stress disorders. That figure is far higher than the roughly 12 percent who exhibit those symptoms after one tour and the 18.5 percent who develop the disorders after a second deployment, according to the study, which was conducted by the Army surgeon general’s Mental Health Advisory Team.

The Army and the rest of the service chiefs have endorsed General Petraeus’s recommendations for continued high troop levels in Iraq. But Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, and their top deputies also have warned that the war in Iraq should not be permitted to inflict an unacceptable toll on the military as a whole. "Our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it," Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army vice chief of staff, said in stark comments delivered to Congress last week. "Lengthy and repeated deployments with insufficient recovery time have placed incredible stress on our soldiers and our families, testing the resolve of our all-volunteer force like never before."

Beyond the Army, members of the Joint Chiefs have also told the president that the continued troop commitment to Iraq means that there is a significant level of risk should another crisis erupt elsewhere in the world. Any mission could be carried out successfully, the chiefs believe, but the operation would be slower, longer and costlier in lives and equipment than if the armed forces were not so strained.

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Senior officers at the Pentagon have tried to avoid shrill warnings about the health of the force, cognizant that such comments might embolden potential adversaries, and they continue to hope that troop levels in Iraq can be reduced next year. Still, none deny the level of stress on the force from current deployments.

Iraq remains a lethal place for US soldiers and marines; we lost 38 Americans in March.  Last week Muqtada al-Sadr made it clear that any decrease if fighting in Iraq (that's not due to the already completed population transfers in mixed-sectarian parts of the country like Baghdad) remains tenuous and largely out the control of U.S. forces.  US forces were mostly bystanders during the fighting between Shiite factions, but if our soldiers and marines are asked to engage Iraqi forces casualties could quickly go back to the levels we saw in 2006 and early 2007.  

Iraq could get ugly again, and very quickly.  The administration could decide to help the Iraqi government impose order in Basra.  The Sunni clans we're buying off to not fight against us or other Iraqis could turn on the Iraqi government or against the Shiite militias, putting our soldiers back in the middle of the civil war.  Al Sadr could unilaterally end his on again/off again cease fire.  And the true nightmare scenario is Iraqi Arabs squaring off against the Iraqi Kurds over the Kurds' de facto quasi-independent state-let in the north of the country.

Any of these scenarios is plausible.  The administration and their lackeys in the GOP and the media continue to tout the "surge" as a success, as David Petreus and Ryan Crocker are certain to do before Congress this week.  But there's been almost zero political progress in Iraq.  There's still no effective central control (as we saw with the debacle in Basra).  And the important issues, like sharing oil revenue and figuring out the degree of central control and regional autonomy are no closer to being settle now than they were two years ago.  

The only big differences between two years ago and today is that a lot more soldiers are on their third deployment to Iraq, the Taliban are even more powerful in Afghanistan, more sergeants and captains have left the military, and more of the men and women we're putting in to that war zone are suffering from the strain and shouldn't be standing in Iraq, with a gun, suffering from anxiety, fatigue and PTSD, hoping they don't get blown up.