Too long at the Times?

In today's topper of both Technorati and Memeorandum, David Brooks touts a new strategy for Iraq.Instead of trying to kill insurgents, Krepinevich argues, it's more important to protect civilians. You set up safe havens where you can establish good security. Because you don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere at once, you select a few key cities and take control. Then you slowly expand the size of your safe havens, like an oil spot spreading across the pavement.. . .

It's not really new and it doesn't sound all that brilliant to me:

But the strategy has one virtue. It might work.

Today, public opinion is turning against the war not because people have given up on the goal of advancing freedom, but because they are not sure this war is winnable. Why should we sacrifice more American lives to a lost cause?

At least, he didn't compare it to a blood spot. The main difference between this and what we're doing is that it would require a lot more troops and would look a lot more like an occupation, like the Russians in Afghanistan.

Krepinevich's article begins with conventional wisdom:

After two years, Washington has made little progress in defeating the insurgency or providing security for Iraqis, even as it has overextended the U.S. Army and eroded support for the war among the American public.

If this is true, why not just pull out and withdraw from the world stage? Surely sending in more troops for a strategy named "oil spot" would be a dream scenario for the people who hate George Bush and want to see him fail. I don't think we can do something like this without doing major damage to our morale and the confidence the people of Iraq have in us. What do we try if the "oil spots" don't grow fast enough for Cindy Sheehan? How about a "checkerboard" strategy?

The strategy calls for mixing indigenous forces with Americans and slowly having them take over. This is supposed to offset our deficiency in gathering intelligence. This sounds a lot like what we're doing now. It's just not progressing as fast as we'd like, and I think that the Krepinevich approach wouldn't move that fast either. I also think that it sounds easier than it would prove to be. The assumption is that we could establish areas of total security, where the enemy can't infiltrate. The problem with that is that we can never establish such areas without violating a lot of our own standards.

This is not Vietnam, no matter how many times the anti-war knee-jerks say so. In fact, sending in more troops would add substance to their fears. I think it's foolish to let the polls pressure us into trying to speed up a process that is inherently slow. How long were we in Germany and Japan after we basically destroyed their countries and subjugated their populace? The first thing we should be guarding against is listening to the hair-on-fire media and screwy left, even if they did lose a son in Iraq. The second is panicking and lurching around after new strategies. All that will do is give the media more to criticize.