Rich, you point out that Keegan doesn’t understand that we’re not fighting a conventional army we can smash with decisive force. What I wonder is whether we are even fighting a conventional insurgency that one can defeat with military force at all. Since February we are no longer in any kind of classic counterinsurgency situation. The enemy is not really fighting us. They are slaughtering and torturing civilians for the sake of chaos, using small-cell death squads that require little besides recruits, money, household tools and weapons, and homes to go back to after a few hours’ garish work.

My concern with the military strategies now under consideration is that they are not thinking in terms of death squads, which require more emphasis on intelligence than on force. Reuel Gerecht (like Keegan, a luminary of AEI) would say that you need a massive security presence in order to ensure a sufficient flow of actionable intelligence. But it seems to me that the issue of intelligence remains underappreciated, and I worry that this stems from a general failure of the military and outside experts to think in terms of counter-terror and counter-death-squad strategies rather than counter-insurgency.

What I will ask Gerecht at the next opportunity is whether the Americans (because of their unity and capabilities) are better or worse at intelligence-gathering in Baghdad than Iraqis who (despite their lack both of unity and of capabilities) speak the langauge and generally know what’s really going on. If he thinks they are, I will throw my lot in with the “surge now” school. Until then, I must remain skeptical that surging more troops will have any appreciable effect on the levels of violence.