War: Iraq: Bush's troop augmentation in Iraq greeted, despite opponents of new policy

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Foreign Policy carries an essay by Donald Stoker, "Insurgencies Rarely Win – And Iraq Won’t Be Any Different (Maybe)" (Jan2k7):

The cold, hard truth about the Bush administration’s strategy of “surging” additional U.S. forces into Iraq is that it could work. Insurgencies are rarely as strong or successful as the public has come to believe. Iraq’s various insurgent groups have succeeded in creating a lot of chaos. But they’re likely not strong enough to succeed in the long term. Sending more American troops into Iraq with the aim of pacifying Baghdad could provide a foundation for their ultimate defeat, but only if the United States does not repeat its previous mistakes.

Myths about invincible guerrillas and insurgents are a direct result of America’s collective misunderstanding of its defeat in South Vietnam. This loss is generally credited to the brilliance and military virtues of the pajama-clad Vietcong. The Vietnamese may have been tough and persistent, but they were not brilliant. Rather, they were lucky—they faced an opponent with leaders unwilling to learn from their failures: the United States. When the Vietcong went toe-to-toe with U.S. forces in the 1968 Tet Offensive, they were decimated. When South Vietnam finally fell in 1975, it did so not to the Vietcong, but to regular units of the invading North Vietnamese Army. The Vietcong insurgency contributed greatly to the erosion of the American public’s will to fight, but so did the way that President Lyndon Johnson and the American military waged the war. It was North Vietnam’s will and American failure, not skillful use of an insurgency, that were the keys to Hanoi’s victory.

In anothr development, CBC reported the endorsement of Bush's troop-augmentation strategy as a basically positive one; the endorsement was somewhat surprising in that it came from a number of strongly Sunni Muslim states. "Arab states voice support for Bush's Iraq stategy" (Jan16,2k7):

Some Arab states are backing U.S. President George W. Bush's plan to send more than 20,000 troops to Iraq to try to stabilize the region.

The foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf Co-operation Council — which includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain —all met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Kuwait Tuesday.

Rice is in the region trying to drum up support for Bush's new strategy to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq to halt violence, mainly around Baghdad.

"We expressed our desire to see the president's plan to reinforce American military presence in Baghdad as a vehicle … to stabilize Baghdad and prevent Iraq sliding into this ugly war, this civil war," Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad al-Salem al-Sabah told a joint news conference with Rice.

In a statement, the foreign ministers said that they "welcomed the commitment by the United States" to defend the security of the Gulf and the territorial integrity of Iraq.

It said that sectarian violence "should be condemned" and that all militias "should be disarmed and dismantled."

These voices go counter to the chorus of knee-jerk critics of the Bush move.

--Politicarp