The Goldilocks Occupation

How much fear is just enough?

Last week U.S commanders in Iraq announced their intention to reduce the military footprint in Baghdad. Humvees, the Army's standard issue SUV, would replace hulking M1A1 Abrams tanks at intersections. It was part of an attempt to improve the livability of the country and put it on a path toward something like normalcy. Within a day, however, a burst of violence killed and wounded American soldiers, the first combat deaths in weeks. Coincidence?

Probably. Napoleon noticed that war is composed of nothing but accidents. But the quest for the right mix of naked force and deft touch is the primary task facing the U.S. in Iraq. The fancy name is deterrence. In fact, what deterrence means is just enough mortal fear to keep the bad guys from acting out, but not so much that the populace spends the day crouching in the shadows.

The fear has long been recognized as a key component of basic social order. "Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen," the Marquis of Halifax observed in 1685. It was in this vein that the U.S. intention to shoot looters was promulgated several weeks ago. The flip side was the plan to de-militarize U.S. presence by losing the tanks, and the strong-points, and spreading out a little into communities.

This is a shift that has to take place sooner or later if anything resembling order is to come to Iraq, but the change has risks. The Abrams has proven itself to be more or less invulnerable to anything the Iraqi battlefield can muster against it. In contrast, Humvees and foot patrols are one RPG and a machine gun away from leading the evening news.

Offensively there is also no comparison. Tangle with an Abrams and you die. Take pot shots at soft-skinned targets like Humvees, and you might do some damage and get away before you get cut in half. This is quite a deterrence gap, something that the occupation forces cannot ignore.

Your basic looter or other opportunist evil doer might be deterred by a squad of troopers, but someone looking to inflict casualties on Crusaders and enjoy eternal bliss with virgins has a different risk-reward calculus. It all begins to resemble some vast, deadly game. Suppose a looter is willing to risk a 10 percent chance of death in order to loot. That is clearly an activity U.S. forces want to deter, say with fear +1. But what if that is not sufficient to deter the hard cases? Suppose you need fear +5?

This is not a moot supposition given the claims that an organized resistance is behind some of the recent attacks. Even if there is no "General Command of Iraqi Armed Forces, Resistance and Liberation" or "Al-Faruq brigades," someone was willing to organize and conduct the deadly raids in Fallujah. They are hard cases. They will be, by extension, much harder to deter.

Does that mean you need fear +5 on every street corner, and no light "walk about" presence? Only if you can afford to ignore the effect such a presence will have on the morale of the general populace. Suppose stationing tanks everywhere has a -2 effect on public morale. You are effectively shortening the clock you have to install an effective Iraqi government and get out before the very countryside turns against you. This is the box the U.S. now finds itself in: too much force can be as damaging as too little. What presence is just right?

Such back-of-the-envelope dice bag musings suggest the impulse to get out and flatten out the U.S. presence is a correct one for long term success, but one fraught with peril. A wide and small U.S presence is rendered essential now that "de-Baathification" is underway. In the near term, only coalition forces can fill the vacuum left by the banishment of Saddam-era flunkies and terror-keepers.

Add in the desire of Kurdish and Shia elements to find their own way and the forces moving to tear Iraq apart are strong. Can a minimal U.S. presence resist these forces? Such immutable end-game elements are what drove many of us to question he wisdom of taking control of Iraq in the first place. But here we are making and remaking plans for U.S. troops on the ground almost day-by-day, charging them not just with nation building, but boot-strapping civil society.

Winning a war requires overwhelming force. Winning a peace needs just enough fear. Will we be able to tell the difference?