Lost in all the argument over numbers and timetables of withdrawal, and even the wear and tear of these long rotations, is the central political issue: U.S. casualties. The American public has no deep-seeded objections to the presence of American troops overseas in the Balkans for nearing a decade, or six decades in the case of Germany, Italy, and Japan, or in Qatar and Kuwait. All troops have to be quartered and maintained somewhere at fixed costs, either here or abroad.
The key issue, of course, is the tragic loss of young Americans, whether you have 50,000 in Iraq or 160,000, for one year or five. In the political sense (rather than the immediate tactical challenges), what matters is not the troop levels, but the number of Americans dying in Iraq; and the two are not always connected.
Should we lose continually 50-70 lives a month with 50,000 stationed in Iraq the policy is not sustainable, no matter what the good news on the Iraqi political front, whereas few losses with 160,000 might well be–facts well known to the enemy.
So the key in these postmodern wars of counterinsurgency, where information is scare and metrics of success controversial, is not just to look at the number of troops that surge in and out of Iraq in any given week, but more the number of Americans lost.
That is what the public is concerned about and, in a war of counterinsurgency without demarcated lines of battle, will ultimately determine the duration of our stay. The Balkans–no UN approval, no Congressional approval, plenty of collateral civilian damage–was sustainable in a way smaller actions in Lebanon or Mogadishu were not, primarily because of the absence of Americans killed in action in the airspace of Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia.
The present strategy, then, is a gamble to send soldiers out into harm’s way in the hope that as a ripple of that exposure eventually far fewer will be lost and victory achieved; the former strategy was a sort of backing out of the saloon guns blazing, hoping to reduce our losses while turning over the country to Iraqis to save or lose on their own–our own force protection being the key.
A sense of morality in what we do, and real progress in Iraq toward stability can affect how the public feels about such sacrifices. But no one knows really the approximate human cost that the public is willing to pay for a stable, secure and reformed Iraq, or how it will react, should we withdraw to cut our losses–and watch a televised genocide in Iraq as the dividend.
So in the meantime we talk about numbers and time, but the real determinant remains a sort of unspoken thanatometer, the number-reckoning of American dead.