Counterinsurgency

Here's the scoop on this business -- counterinsurgency campaigns sometimes succeed, normally when you have a state repressing an internal insurgency. Very, very, very rarely you see a foreign power successfully crush an insurgency and then organize a "decent interval"-type pause before departing (see Britain in Kenya, South Africa). You have essentially no instances of foreign power demonstrating an ability to stay put over the long haul.

Stepping back, you need to ask yourself questions about goals. I mean, say we did have a method at our disposal for crushing the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq and entrenching SCIRI or the Sadrists in power in Baghdad -- why would we do that? Would would it accomplish? Just "winning" doesn't do anything unless you've picked a battle worth winning. I'd love to see Iraq become a shining democracy, but (a) it's not going to happen and (b) counterinsurgency has nothing to do with it.

Comments

Even the liberal New Republic will tell you that all we need to win this thing is to show some spine.

Posted by dj moonbat | January 17, 2007 1:48 AM

Actually, with all this talk about pre-war predictions going on right now, the one result that I don't remember seeing predicted on any blog I frequented was just how much this war would help strengthen Iran's position, or that the end result might well be turning Iraq into an Iranian ally. I think we all assumed we'd install some pro-west strongman (most likely Chalabi) before we let that happen.

Just imagine if this war had been sold on the premise of making Iraq a pro-Iranian Shiite theocracy.

Posted by Royko | January 17, 2007 2:56 AM

Right now the only goal in the minds of the maniacs in the Executive branch is saving face and possibly handing off responsibility for the catastrophe to someone else. The remote possibility of crushing the Sunnis could maybe maybe make all this look like marginally less a farce, so throwing away more lives in pursuit of it is a no-brainer.

Posted by jim | January 17, 2007 4:14 AM

I think our main goal now should be to minimize the chances that the army we're training and equiping in Iraq doesn't bite us in the ass sometime in the future.

Posted by alphie | January 17, 2007 5:05 AM

I don't know if you've heard, but the Shiites are actually responsible for more of the attacks than the Sunnis at this point. That's the last that I've heard anyway.

Posted by Peter | January 17, 2007 6:19 AM

"counterinsurgency campaigns sometimes succeed"

The squirrels are defeated.

Posted by Petey | January 17, 2007 6:32 AM

Christ. If our model is going to be the British operations against the Mau Mau and the Boers, then there really ought to be a vote or something about this, because this would involve the sort of thing that we call "genocide" when people we don't like do it.

Posted by dsquared | January 17, 2007 6:33 AM

Don't worry-Bush is reading at Kissinger's recommendation "A Savage War for Peace", about the Algerian insurgency, and from that he is going to figure out how to win.

Posted by bob h | January 17, 2007 7:07 AM

"I don't remember seeing predicted on any blog I frequented was just how much this war would help strengthen Iran's position, or that the end result might well be turning Iraq into an Iranian ally"

Well, I remember people saying that, although obviously there were so many other things wrong with the idea of attacking Iraq tht it wasn't the center of any discussion. But, we all knew that the majority of Iraqis were Shiites, and who do you think a Shiite regime would ally with? It isn't rocket science . . . .

"Nobody could have expected . . ." is, of course, the adminstration's all-purpose excuse. Just like nobody expected 9/11 or Katrina, nobody could have expected the Iraqi Shiites to be hostile just because we invaded their country, cause mass death and suffering, and offend their religion . . .

Posted by rea | January 17, 2007 7:11 AM

On a few moments reflection, let me take back a big part of my last comment. The possiblility of an Iraqi Shite revolt was only anticipated by those of us who knew what Shiites are, and knew that Iraq contained them. For everyone else, (e. g., much of the adminstration and its supporters) it must have come as an unpleasent surprise . . .

Posted by rea | January 17, 2007 7:15 AM

There were at least three Shia factions, two Arab Sunni, two Kurd, and the amorphous cosmopolitan secularists. Sistani played it fairly well, but sought dominance with less than a working majority. His disappointment shows that he miscalculated the unity of his own followers. What we could have attempted was to convince the various factions that neither dominance or independence was available to anybody. Apparently we are still trying.

Forming the consensus centrist identity is very difficult. If Britain had a strong minority in favor of privatising health care the politics would be more strident, as America's is.

I fear Iraq inevitably will look like Italy with guns for a long time.

Posted by bob mcmanus | January 17, 2007 8:06 AM

Actually, with all this talk about pre-war predictions going on right now, the one result that I don't remember seeing predicted on any blog I frequented was just how much this war would help strengthen Iran's position, or that the end result might well be turning Iraq into an Iranian ally.

Not a blog reference as such, but Big Tent Democrat at Talkleft has a lengthy quote from Gen. Clark's pre-war Congressional testimony to exactly this effect. Here's part of it:

SEN. CLELAND: And if you took out Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party, the secularist party, don't the . . . Shi'ite Muslims make up a majority of the population in Iraq, and wouldn't that give Iran a strong hand there, and we ultimately end up creating a Muslim state, even under democratic institutions?

GEN. CLARK: Yes, sir. I think that there is a substantial risk in the aftermath of the operation that we could end up with a problem which is more intractable than we have today.

Posted by DrBB | January 17, 2007 8:15 AM

dsquared has crossed the line - we are involved in ethnic cleansing, not genocide.

Posted by theCoach | January 17, 2007 8:25 AM

If our model is going to be the British operations against the Mau Mau and the Boers, then there really ought to be a vote or something about this, because this would involve the sort of thing that we call "genocide" when people we don't like do it.

The call for the use of greater savagery has been going out from the right wing for a while now. And not just from marginal nutcases posting on LGF. Niall Ferguson has been arguing that imitating the British Empire at its worst is precisely what we should be doing. Oh they'd certainly not want the word "genocide" to be used. That would be counterproductive. Not conducive to a constructive frame of mind. Not, perhaps, entirely accurate even, in the strictest technical sense.

And the strictest technical sense can be very narrowly drawn, if need be. That care with terminology, after all, is what separates the Intellectual nutcase from his brethren openly slavering for "final solutions" to the raghead problem that involve vast amounts of sand being turned into glass.

But in reality it is about the only thing that separates them.

Posted by DrBB | January 17, 2007 8:33 AM

Phillipines, 1899-1904. It was even a muslim insurgency. And gosh, the anti-war movement then was led by Democrats.

1862, 1902, 2007 - the Democrats can always be counted on to root for failure

Posted by James Robertson | January 17, 2007 8:43 AM

A query: Can us new-media liberal extremists get together and smash the stupid argument about how we can't leave because that will only get more Iraqis killed? By now it seems amply clear that the only function the U.S. is serving is enforcing a stalemate: making sure no one side has the ability to establish a monopoly on violence, and thus prolonging the current free-for-all that's killing at least 30,000 civilians a year; and merely postponing -- not preventing -- the inevitable chaos that will come when we leave.

I want as few Iraqis as possible to die, so I think we should withdraw now. It's very distressing that nobody is making this argument and thus basically allowing Bush to claim that his Iraqi-killing policies are better for the Iraqis than withdrawal would be.

Posted by neil | January 17, 2007 9:14 AM

Isn't it the case that when a foreign, occupying power demonstrates an ability to defeat a native insurgency it eventually becomes or at least displaces the native population.

For instance, the British Empire successfully defeated the North American & Australian natives, but not the Indian or Middle Eastern.

The existence of the United States, Canada, Australia, & New Zealand are the products of successful counterinsurgencies.

Posted by Hank Porter | January 17, 2007 9:38 AM

I'd love to see Iraq become a shining democracy, but (a) it's not going to happen

Why not? What time frame are we talking about?

Posted by Al | January 17, 2007 9:50 AM

Why not? What time frame are we talking about?

The foreseeable future? Because Iraq doesn't even have a functioning state and liberalism has no domestic constituency?

Posted by Scott Lemieux | January 17, 2007 11:22 AM

Why not?

Because it's an occupied country, with artificial borders set long ago by colonial powers, in the process of being partitioned by civil war. If and when democracy comes to the region, it will not come to 'Iraq.'

This has been another in a seemingly endless series of simple answers to stupid questions.

Posted by neil | January 17, 2007 11:50 AM

James Robertson -- how thoughtful of you to weigh in immediately after my post just to illustrate my point:

Phillipine casualties:
16,000 soldiers killed
est. 250,000 to 1,000,000 civilians died of war, famine, or disease

What a shining moment for America. And if people me are there to root for "defeat" in these imperial adventures, people like you will be there cheering on the pointless slaughter.

Posted by DrBB | January 17, 2007 12:25 PM

Re: You have essentially no instances of foreign power demonstrating an ability to stay put over the long haul.

This can be done, but it requires two things that aren't going to happen in Iraq. First the foreign power must be absolutely ruthless to the point of brutality in suppressing the rebellion, with little or no concern for collateral damage. Secondly in teh aftermath it must assimilate the conquered peoples to its own culture and settle large colonies of its own people among them to hasten this end. This is how the Romans conquered and pacified their empire despite facing insurgenecies among the conquered, and this is also how the US conquered the Native American lands.

Posted by Jonf | January 17, 2007 12:32 PM

But our strategy now is not just to eliminate the Sunni insurgency. It's to provide security to Iraqi neighborhoods, including those that are being threatened by Shi'ite criminals and militias. Or rather for the Iraqis to do it (with us supporting) and show that they aren't biased towards faction when it comes to upholding the law.

Posted by Jeff | January 17, 2007 12:33 PM

JonF,

You're absolutely right. Civilization has evolved to the point that its impossible for us to act with the brutality necessary to conquer Iraq or any other country. I mean its easy enough to occupy a country, but the only sure way to pacify a population is to assimilate the willing and to either kill or exile the rest.

Matt had a thread on counterinsurgency last September. http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2006/09/americans_as_insurgents_and_co/

I commented then that the only successful occupiers in the last 100 years were the Nazis in France. Someone made the point that they didn't face a true insurgency because, "the French Resistance was not created as a guerilla army and by policy did not make a habit of killing German soldiers, because of the effective countermeasure of shooting large numbers of innocent hostages...".

Which is exactly the point, massive reprisals against innocent hostages is an effective technique to stop an insurgency. We're not Nazis. Since we're not willing to take the barbaric steps necessary to win a guerilla war, the only way we can succeed is to avoid being stuck in one in the first place.

Posted by beowulf | January 17, 2007 1:54 PM

Beowulf-- It's also worth pointing out that the French Resistance did not HAVE to engage in a guerrilla insurgency because they had allied armies plotting to come to their rescue. As a result, they did a truly stellar job at aiding and abetting said allied armies from the inside.

The real anti-Nazi insurgencies to discuss would be the two Warsaw uprisings. The former was defeated by a systematic campaign of genocide. The latter might have actually survived the Nazi barbarism if it had not been (quite literally) stabbed in the back by the Soviets.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | January 17, 2007 2:42 PM

Reading that article was a complete and total waste of time. I have learned that insurgencies sometimes succeed, and sometimes they don't. Brilliant. How on earth did this 'journalist' get his job??
www.minor-ripper.blogspot.com

Posted by MinorRipper | January 17, 2007 2:54 PM

Britain crushed the Irish 1798 rebellion and weren't forced out until 1922. That's long haul enough. The 1857 Indian army "mutiny" was put down - Indian independence 1947.

Posted by DC | January 18, 2007 4:58 PM