This evolution of the surge into an escalation is precisely what the United States does not need in Iraq, and at the same time it is completely predictable, given the logic that has run this war from the start.

When President Bush first announced the surge in January, many saw it as a bold, but perhaps also last, attempt to regain the initiative in Iraq. In reality, the surge was an obvious and predictable option.

At the beginning stages of Iraq war planning Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki set out manpower requirements far greater than those preferred by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In the end, Rumsfeld steamrolled Shinseki, thereby laying the groundwork for the retrospective conventional wisdom in Washington that the United States went to war in Iraq with too few troops.

As U.S. forces lost control of the situation in Iraq and the subsequent insecurity nurtured an environment of destabilization and insurgency, the surge became a reasonable excuse, under acceptable conventional wisdom pretenses, for increasing the number of troops operating within Iraq. The surge was not a bold new tactic according to this logic, but a "too-little, too-late" strategy for escalating forces.

With the foot in the door and the false promise that the surge would be temporary, Bush's White House put itself on the same escalation treadmill as President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s in Vietnam. Their logic is the same: although the American occupation of an alien land brings only a deepening conflict with absolutely no prospect of success, doing more of what brought us to where we are will bring us that elusive success.

While the escalation of forces in Iraq does, indeed, have its own internal logic, the external reality is that it is counterproductive. Since the implementation of the surge, the U.S. military has not quelled the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces, nor has it eliminated sectarian divisions. In fact, the move now threatens instead to both weaken U.S. national security and contribute to failure in Iraq.

Military readiness for U.S. ground forces is at an all-time low -- so low that serious questions have been raised about the U.S. ability to conduct any other ground operations beyond those to which we are now committed. Even with Defense Secretary Robert Gates' extension of deployments to 15 months, the current deployment timeline cannot be maintained.

The increase of forces in Iraq will only require longer deployments. Subsequently, the longer the deployments become, the exponentially faster the equipment, vehicles and especially the personnel will be degraded from combat operations. This degradation threatens the military leg of the national security apparatus and undermines U.S. power.

Strategically, a troop increase is not necessarily a successful tactic for bringing stability to Iraq. Indeed, the first three months of the surge have seen an increase in the number of attacks against U.S. forces. And while Shiite death-squad activity against Sunnis has decreased, Sunni suicide attacks and other violence against us, perhaps some of it by Shiites, has increased.

America has a vested interest in uniting the different ethnic and sectarian groups of Iraq to instill stability, but it appears that the only unity the surge is bringing is the common hatred of the United States.

The reality is that the United States is not in the beginning of a surge in Iraq, it is in the early stages of an escalation. This escalation was predetermined not because of actions on the ground but a failure of planning at the Pentagon and facile conventional wisdom in Washington.

Regardless of tactics, the die has been cast in Iraq. There is no increased number of troops that can fix the mistakes that have been made. The surge policy amounts to an investment in a failing company, a reinvestment in failure. As we invest more of our soldiers in this fruitless endeavor, we only decrease our national security and insure an ultimate failure on a grander scale. It is a recommitment to a failed war that has no foreseeable conclusion favorable to American interests.

(Richard May served as an officer in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is currently the Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the World Security Institute's Center for Defense Information.)

(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)

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