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From someone who was there (unlike our beloved pundits)

According to Brooks and a lot of other people in Washington (our possible next president, John McCain, among them), everything in Iraq would have been OK from the start, if we’d only had enough troops.

Coming to this realization now — three and a half years late, as it were — gives all these people a chance to argue one more time for a troop increase. They’re going to get that increase now, and if history is any guide, they’ll patiently give that troop increase another few years to work. When it doesn’t, bet on it, they will come back once again and say that what they got was not a big enough increase, that what was needed was a full-blown commitment, a “Super-Marshall Plan,” etc. And then we will be in Iraq until 2011 or 2012, just like everyone in Iraq (who’s seen the huge embassy complexes we’re just now breaking ground on) already knows we will be.

The whole idea that “more troops” are needed in Iraq is absurd on its face. They sell this idea in America as though our soldiers are being sent to patrol the streets like New York City cops policing Malcolm X Boulevard on foot — spreading goodwill, talking to shopkeepers, collaring the occasional fare-jumper, and scaring off the odd stick-up kid by their very presence.

That’s not at all the way it works in Iraq. For one thing, the majority of the troops in a place like Baghdad never leave the massive, seemingly Manhattan-size walled-in Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). Battle-hardened soldiers derisively describe Army personnel who live in the FOBs as “Fobbits” and it is roundly accepted in Iraq that Fobbits make up a clear majority of our deployed military men. For soldiers who actually have to go out and risk getting blown up in patrols, Fobbits are a vile contagion, like malarial mosquitoes — amazingly numerous and deeply annoying. One soldier laughed when I asked if he thought we needed more guys in Iraq. “Not more troops, but fewer Fobbit-motherfuckers,” he growled…

The soldiers have all been trained to fight and they want to help, want to make a difference — but there’s no offensive mission for them. So what they spend most of their time doing is working to sustain their own presence. More than one soldier commented to me that the mission seemed mainly to be to keep the FOBs running.

I wasn’t in Iraq very long, and I wouldn’t presume to say that I know everything or even very much about how the war is being conducted. I’m just bringing this up because this whole debate about troop levels is being conducted under a number of assumptions that I’m not sure aren’t absurd fictions. The argument for more troops assumes that the troops we have there already are actively engaged in making Iraq secure, only there aren’t enough of them.

What I saw was that our troops were mostly engaged in keeping themselves secure — and even that was a very tough job. The Iraq war has gone so wrong that it is no longer an occupation, no longer even a security mission. It’s just a huge mass of isolated soldiers running in place in a walled-off FOB archipelago, trying not to get shot or blown up and occasionally firing back at an enemy over the wall they can’t see. It’s lunacy. Adding more guys to it just means more lunacy. But our government has a high tolerance for that sort of thing, and I wouldn’t bet on it ending anytime soon.

I heart Taibbi.