Strikingly, the big "sweep" against al-Qaeda failed for the exact same reasons that this technique always fails, both in previous iterations in Iraq, and also in other counterinsurgency situations around the world and throughout history.
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Shocking
23 Jun 2007 11:54 am
Comments (24)
The reason why the United States military and much of the public never learns the lessons of guerrilla warfare is that they have a vested interest that there is nothing useful to be learned from it.
Guerrilla tactics - although quite sophisticated in their own way - do not rely upon the high tech, wiz bang gizmos which are so much a feature of American society in general and the American military in particular. To accept the efficacy of guerrilla warfare is to call into question these wiz bang gizmos.
And this would give rise to many vexing questions - such as "Is intellectual property really all that valuable?" or "Is an Ivy League degree worth the trouble and expense it now costs?".
So far, it has been simpler and easier to continue "big sweeps" than to address such questions.
About 40 years ago Bill Cosby had a comedy routine along the same lines about the Red Coats vs. the Americans in the Revolutionary War. We seem to forget that our own unconventional warfare worked out pretty well.
Shucks, and it was only yesterday that Brig.-Gen. Bednarik was assuring us that al-Qaida had decided to stay and make a stand there: "They will not go any further. They will fight to the death." ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/22/AR2007062200305_pf.html )
Well, I wouldn't necessarily say this means it isn't not working . Clear and hold is a testied strategy. We just have to see if the Iraqi troops left behind will do a competent job "holding." Keeping enemies on the run, looking over their shoulder and not planning attacks is also is a tested way to keep terrorist attacks down. It has proven very effective for Israel.
I read Mr. Yglesias' bio, and took note of his concern regarding the death of international liberalism. It should be noted, that internaional liberalism hasn't solved much of anything. Internaional liberalism hasn't found the strength to call genocide in Rwanda, genocide; and not mustered the backbone to do what is necessary to eredicate malaria. All international liberalism has fostered is another form of the "white Raj." Where the best and brightest (mostly White, continental European, self indulgent and self-abhorring rich folks) go off to right wrongs that never seem to get "righted."
I find it interesting that most of you that inhabit this region of the "Blog-O'sphere" have little understanding of what you criticize, oh I know most of you think you do and most likely possess the academic credits to rationalize your behavior. However, and I will indulge myself here with a bit of "fly-over-country", provincial and simplistic language: "Just 'cause you think it so don't make it so..."
With that being said, I proceed.
First I have a question: Insurgents or AQ, are you folks differentiating or not?
Hmmm, it be obvious that you would have preferred that the US would have never undertaken this campaign, and probably hate that that we undertook most of our combat actions since, say 1953. I find THAT sad and horrifying.
Whats this "WWI feel to it" stuff? Try the northern end of Sri Lanka if you want to get a WWI feel, however "WWI" or its "feel" certainly aint' in Iraq. (Whats up with the "Bloodlust and pack madness thing? You need to be clear on what that REALLY means when you apply ad hominem in that fashion...)
Yes, I am one of the so called unlearning types from the pro-war crowd. And I can assure you that most of us have a REAL good grasp on history.
Second, it is interesting that Mr. Yglesias talks as if counterinsurgency is a failing strategic and operaional doctrine. Funny, since "insurgency" became the chic and romantic cause of the post-WWII era, I think that you may be able to count the number of successful insurgencies on the fingers of a single hand. Where as, like it or not, there have been numerous successful counteringency efforts. Unless of couse, you only define insurgency via Cuba and Vietnam.
For the rest of you, you all declared the surge a failure before the first troopers were even deployed. In the same vane, and this displays the childishness of your thought processes, on one hand there is the poopoo'ing of the use of expensive whiz bang, hi-tech, high speed-low-drag systems, and on the other, the lamenting that MNF-I can't get done fast enough. SO, what's it gonna be? (If you want to study real COIN, you will find the key factor to success is persistence over time.)
Be not fooled and duped by your romantic notions of guerrilla tactics. They are very simple and they are reliant on much more than "popular support," especially in the Middle East. Brutality, torture (I am mean real torture, the kind that relies on the extraction of fingernails and the application of lengths of rubber hoses filled with lead shot applied forcibley to the soles of an individuals feet. Not the college pranks we saw out of Abu Ghraib...) all forms violent coercion, are standard fair the "Insurgents" use in Iraq. These "tools" are most efective there, because a generation and a half of Iraqis know nothing else. Dirty little secret: most Iraqis think your weak if you don't utilize those "tools," sad but true.
I do remind you all, OPERATION ARROWHEAD RIPPER is just one of many concurrentt operations. Those of you who think BG Bednarik a foolish mouth-piece, should ask yourselves this: "Where is the AQ leadership is going to run?" It is likely they may not get too far.
Failed? Are you out of your mind? The big "sweep" you're talking about only got underway on Wednesday, and it's expected to last all summer.
Could you even guess at a specific number for how many individuals "80%" of AQI's "top leadership" actually represents without having to google around for it? Just pluck a sentence from a briefing -- there will always be something you can cite -- and claim all is lost. Now there's a metric the left can live with! At least you didn't embellish your own post with the kind of sophomoric snoot your link reveals. If you had any idea how to tell one sweep from another, your post would be shorter still.
Could you even guess at a specific number for how many individuals "80%" of AQI's "top leadership" actually represents without having to google around for it?
JM Hanes, obviously, al qaeda's top "leadership" in Baquba was 5 people and 4 of them left. 10 people is too many for a top leadership, and if it had been 8 people and 6 of them left the report would have said 75% instead of 80%.
Obviously, our guys over there know what's going on, they wouldn't have said 80% left unless they knew. They probably have transponders on all those guys to keep track of precisely where they are.
This whole discussion is silly. The reports our military present to the public are simply designed to make them look good and have no correspondence to reality whatsoever. So it makes no sense to try to pick them apart and figure out what they really mean. They don't mean anything.
And how do we decide how well the occupation is going so we can tell whether to give up? Well, we can support the troops until the troops get sick of it. That's about it. And the troops are getting real tired of being in iraq. At least all the ones I've talked to.
Why does yglesias keep pretending to know the first thing about military strategy?
Operation arrowhead ripper is consistent with what Sir Robert thompson termed the four stages of clearing, holding, winning and won. The point of operation arrowhead ripper and similar operations is not to turn designated areas into kill zones. It is to clear the area of insurgents, assert security and then improve the social and economic prospects of the area. To quote benedict on this point "“The key significance, though, is getting the Iraqi ministries engaged to provide fundamental goods and services, such as food, fuel, displaced persons support, and education...The governor will have oversight and the people will start to see improved basic services which will build the trust and confidence of the people not only in the provincial government, but in the central government as well.”
Yglesias has deemed this operation a failure by simply attributing to it an arbitrary objective and pointing to its 'failure' to acheive something it never intended.
Farley is also an idiot, presenting an interview with Odierno as vindication of his previous prediction when it flatly contradicts it. Farley claimed that the majority of insurgents would escape, the interview reveals that a majority are still in the city.
Failed? Already?? yannnnnnnnnnnn libs pitooey
Pump hand, the interview doesn't establish anything at all. It presents some talking points that Odierno would like people to believe.
"Clear, hold, winning, and won" is in general a failing strategy. It is based on mistaken objectives.
Here is a simple explanation of an alternative. First, you send in people to do reconstruction. You point out that they're providing services that people can use, and they're providing jobs for locals who will get money for doing some of the work and then get to use the services. When we did this in vietnam the insurgents went along. They said "We'll let them build power plants and sewage treatment plants and all that, and after we take over those things will be ours." And the insurgents were right, it worked out that way that time. But you get the reconstruction started, you don't have to keep tearing things up while you wait to do reconstruction. And it's especially easy for iraq because their government has oil money and doesn't have to collect a lot of taxes. They get to give things away -- free! -- and not send out unpopular tax collectors that people like to see shot, who have to be protected while they take stuff from people.
With the reconstrution going on, you say "We'll have free elections to decide who runs the government. You don't have to fight over that, just say who you want and whoever you want will be the government." We failed at that in vietnam. They were divided among catholics and buddhists (and others) and they didn't agree. And of course we didn't let the guys who wanted to unite with the north run for office, so of course they fought. When the vietnamese government didn't do what we wanted we OKed a coup, and then another coup, and we pretended they had a democracy, and it failed. We muffed that this time around too. We delayed the democracy for *years*, and then we didn't let the insurgents run. We did lots of things that made it look like a puppet government.
Everybody who really believes the iraqi government represents them, is ready to solidly back it. So why is it hiding in the Green Zone? If it represented iraqis it would be somewhere else. And iraqi militias and volunteers would be protecting it. Every time that insurgents successfully killed a legislator then the next guy on that party's list would step forth and take his place. And insurgents who went after the iraqi government would be real real unpopular. But we can't let them do it that way, because if the iraqi government was independent they'd probably tell us to get out of their country. And we can't have that.
If most of the people supported the independent iraqi government, then they would tend to investigate suspected insurgents in their neighborhoods. "Hello, this is the welcome wagon. Here, have some halvah. Ah, my neighbor's son said you were moving in a lot of explosives, we really wouldn't want those to accidentally blow up here, you're storing them safely? Good. Oh, your group is the Holiness Martyr's? Would you like to join our neighborhood watch? We're pretty much apolitical but we protect the whole neighborhood and we don't attack anybody elsewhere, and of course we don't want to draw fire." They'd tend to persuade insurgents to move elsewhere, or report them. That tends not to happen now because they have no reason to prefer us to the insurgents.
Imagine if it was that way here. Some terrorists move in next door, and you worry because if the chinese army finds out where they are there will be violence that might get you killed. But if you report them to the chinese army they're likely to do a precision airstrike that will destroy the neighbor's house and yours too. What do you do?
So the next step is, you help the neighborhoods set up neighborhood police forces, and let them start unifying up toward city police forces. That's the way we do it and it works. Each town and city and county have their own police forces that are responsible to the mayor and the town council. We have state police, and we have FBI. If the FBI head phones the police chief in Waco, Texas and tells him to arrest his mayor and bring him to DC for interrogation, the Waco guy might do it but it's going to take some explaining and such. The Waco police don't answer to the FBI, they answer to their mayor. They cooperate with each other but they try to make sure the guys they're cooperating with are right. It's another kind of checks and balances.
Police who're responsible to the neighborhoods they serve will cut back on crime. It's a lot easier to get a strong police force that way than to build one that's responsible to the puppet government. We tried for national police that are responsible to us, and surprise! We think they're corrupt because they don't do everything we say, and the people they're supposed to police don't trust them because they're supposed to report to us. And criminals get away with a lot.
"Clear, hold" works when you're fighting an enemy who's just as unpopular as you are, and when the public is unarmed. Then the public won't interfere while you drive the weaker enemy away -- they just want the fighting to stop and they can't do anything to make it stop. But when as in iraq the public is armed, you can't clear an area without moving the civilians out. The more intrusive you are the more unpopular you get, and the more insurgents you create. It's a mug's game.
Euuuwwww! I misread. I made a serious response to somebody who calls himself "Pimp Hand Strikes!".
Yuck. "Pump Hand" was bad enough. Oh, I can't believe I took this guy seriously.
I think it's pretty obvious that nothing has failed here - the operation the author is talking about is in its opening act. What this article does is point out one dreadful fact - the author, and indeed the left in general - WANTS our efforts to fail. The left believes that the more deaths, the more powerful al Qaeda becomes, the better.
To these people, it doesn't matter what actually happens in Iraq, good or bad. People like this can always be counted on to offer up a gholish, self-serving opinion that is utterly divorced from reality. I'm willing to bet that they don't actually know anyone in the military much less have served themselves, and they generally have nothing to lose in Iraq. Their simple, decadent lifestyles will remain unaffected no matter what happens, so they take the, "why not support al Qaeda if it shows how well I can hate Bush like I'm instructed to?" position.
How disgusting.
Many of the above comments confuse the two basic types of insurgencies. There are insurgencies against foreign occupiers (it does not matter how well-intended the occupiers). The insurgent’s methods -- called non-Trinitarian warfare, 4th generation warfare, or whatever – reached maturity with Mao and have succeeded almost 100% of the time since then.
The two disputed cases are Northern Ireland and the Malaysian Emergency. Neither fits the mold well for obvious reasons. The first because of the large ethnic English population and the centuries-long relationship of these two highly similar groups. The second because Malaysia had a legitimate and functioning local government, and the English were clearly leaving soon – hence the victory was that of the locals, not the colonial power (although the Brits, of course, claimed full credit).
Everywhere else, with some very minor exceptions, foreigners have lost. No matter how long they tried, how savagely they fought, or how much they effort they expended.
Insurgencies against a local government sometimes win, sometimes lose. But these tell us little about Iraq, where there the local national government is neither legitimate nor functioning -- existing only due to support from foreign infidels.
Also the "clear, hold, build" model is an untested theory. Since western armies have lost these all war like this, all counter-insurgency theory is untested -- written by losers.
For a basic intro to this history I suggest reading Martin van Creveld’s new book “The Changing Face of War.”
Fabius Maximus you really aren't in a position to be telling anyone to brush up on their basic history. Your claim that insurgencies have almost universally won since 1949 is hilarious. I guess I should get on the phone and call the Tamil Tigers, Palestinians, the Chechnyans, the Kosovars, Laosians, Cambodians, etc., that they won and successfully expelled the Israelis/Russians/Serbs/Sri Lankans/Vietnamese/etc. Because, you know, ever since Mao, the insurgents have always won. Please. Go brush up on your "basic history" you arrogant twit.
Of course, unless, you are counting withdrawal as defeat for the foreign power regardless of whether their objectives were met or not. In that case, bask in your warped, ultimately invalid point.
Also hilarious is how Yglesias declares an operation less than a week old a failure. The surge didn't start in the spring. The build-up for it did while the current forces started implementing the basic steps of the new plan. The surge always meant military offensive, which just began.
Bad timing for Yglesias anyway, where is your sense man? You should've waited until July 4.
Matt,
Too bad you never served in the Army. Or the Marines. Those dumbasses could have learned so much from you.
-- Uber Pig
Chaos -- Did you read my post? I explicitly did NOT say that “the insurgents almost always won since 1949” nor was I “counting withdrawal as defeat for the foreign power.”
Wars to "disintegrate" States are called civil wars. The insurgents may have been part of one state for a long time, but still consider their neighbors as "others." A civil war is when a part rebels against a whole (State) that has sufficient legitimacy to resist. Sometimes the insurgents win, sometimes they lose.
We're talking about foreigners who come over to occupy your land. Occupier’s record of successfully resisting insurgencies is near zero since WWII. Not just western nations. South Africa was expelled from Namibia. Ethiopia from Eritrea. India from Sri Landa. Israel was forced to leave Lebanon.
Of course, there are gray areas, difficult to classify as "liberation from foreign occupiers" or "civil war." That's life.
The Palestinian insurgency is still in progress. The original title for Mao’s work “On Guerilla Warfare” was “Protracted Warfare.” Insurgencies can run a long time. Kissinger: so long as the insurgents don’t lose, they win.
Some of your counter-examples are difficult to understand. Does Vietnam still occupy Cambodia or Laos? Raids often succeed; the key is a fast exit.
Bush might be a hero for his invasion of Iraq – if only we had not wanted those “enduring bases” and access by western companies to Iraq’s oil.
Chaos has a point. Occupying powers have mostly succeeded when they were willing to do genocide. How many Chechnyans got killed? Is it still only 25% of their population? Those russians know how to run an occupation.
There's the example of panama. Just a few years ago we invaded, killed the opposition, installed a new puppet government, and mostly moved out again. No insurgency to speak of. Apparently they don't object to that government enough to risk bringing in the Marines again.
There was greece. After WWII we didn't want to let them have a communist government so we (and the british) suppressed it. Very bloody, but eventually the communists were mostly suppressed. The greeks who were against the communists were very strong, though, apart from their foreign assistance. I guess that one could be considered civil war.
There's the russians in eastern europe. They set up puppet governments and mostly moved their army out pretty quick. Every now and then there was a revolt and the russian army came back and stomped around for awhile, and the puppet government got re-established and the russians left again. There was no insurgency that lasted long at all, until they thought the russian army wouldn't be back and then the governments fell pretty fast. What made the difference? Was it that the eastern europeans had just been through WWII and knew how bad things could get? Was it that they had enough dedicated communists among them that they knew it would be civil war if they resisted? Was the russian army brutal enough to win?
Sukarno won in indonesia. He killed somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million indonesians in a couple of days. (The number keeps getting revised downward as the indonesian government minimises it.) The rivers literally ran red with blood. He destroyed the opposition before it became much of an insurgency. That's more like civil war too, though. We supported him but he was pretty independent, and he had enough dedicated followers to kill a million or two people in a couple of days. If it had been a foreign army they wouldn't have known which million people to kill.
The insurgency in cuba failed utterly, Bay of Pigs and all that. But apparently they didn't have popular support. Oops, another civil war.
And the Contra insurgency failed in nicaragua. But they were trying to start another civil war.
Except for eastern europe which I'm unclear on, I guess that's the central theme. If there's a civil war a foreign power can support one side and help them win. But when it's an occupation without a strong local faction supporting it, the occupiers lose. And it tends to take a lot of killing before they win, when a strong local faction opposes them.
So, how strong is the faction we support? They run a government from the Green Zone and they can't leave it without being killed. Not hopeful. So we need a stronger faction to be on our side. We tried talking to the sunnis but we can't switch sides that quick.
And most of the shias we try to support appear to be pretty closely aligned with iran. Not hopeful.
Lacking a significant faction that likes us, we need a nationalist faction that at least doesn't tilt toward iran. We should try to make a deal with Al Sadr.
Amazing that this simple concept is so difficult to communicate. It's not that every foreign occupation yeilds an insurgency, but that insurgencies almost always defeat foreign occupations.
We do not occupy Panama; we established a local government able to achieve legitimacy and function. Raids often work, if combined with a fast exit.
The US and UK did not occupy Greece, but supported one side in a civil war -- then left.
There were no insurgencies against Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.
Sukarno was not a foreign occupier of Indonesia.
There were no domestic insurgencies in Cuba and Nicaragua. There were foreign-backed invasions, which failed due to lack of local support.
The Iraq War is a typical instance of the post-WWII pattern of foreign occupations fighting local insurgencies. The odds are that the outcome will be the same.
Nothing is certain in life, but this is the way to bet. Nor are we doing anything that has not been tried and failed before.
Fabius, I tend to agree right down the line. There were attempts against soviet puppets in hungary, poland, czechoslovakia which were all crushed with soviet troops. The soviets didn't spend a lot of time occupying those countries, but they did something that worked for them. If they couldn't find a local government that would work well enough for them they would have been obligated to keep an occupation force in place, and likely the occupation troops would have faced some violence, and the reprisals would lead to more resistance until they did enough repression that the resistance was crushed. I note that hasn't exactly happened in Chechnya even though they've killed over a quarter of the whole population.
The foreign-backed invasions in cuba and nicaragua were *supposed* to be done with expatriots who would get popular support. They were *supposed* to be civil wars. But they didn't actually get expected popular support. So where that leaves me is that when the insurgents *do* get popular support, foreign occupations eventually fail. But when the insurgents *don't* get popular support, foreign occupations merge into civil wars that could be won by either side.
Which is iraq? We may have go the civil war started OK. And various factions want us not to go away yet because they hope to use us against other factions. Presumably they'll tell us to go away as soon as they've won their civil war. So for us to stay, we need to keep the civil war boiling with no winner.
But this is senseless. We don't want iraq for an expensive live-fire training facility. We don't want to pay them to keep a perpetual civil war going so we can keep our overstrained army there indefinitely. The only way it makes sense is for Bush to do that until 2009 so he can dump the problem on somebody else.
If you want the current, unvarnished news, look at Mike Yon's blog.
Also, read or listen to Austin Bay's recent interview of Dr. KilCullen, General Petraeus' COIN expert.
Unlike Harvardista Matthew Yglesias, these guys know what they are talking about.
Counter-Insurgency operations are all about earning public acceptance and local support. Insurgets (terrorists) live in areas where they can hide, plan, train, prepare and conduct operations. Local support for these operations may be voluntary or forced by Al Qaeda.
The local people fear Al Qaeda because they are heavily armed and they punish those who refuse them. Typically, they move into a Sunni neighborhood and knock on the residents' doors. "Have your sons between 20 and 30 report to this address tonight at 8 o'clock." If your kid does not show, a team invades your house at midnight and kills everyone there.
Any resident who is suspected of cooperating with the MNF is killed. Fear is their most effective weapon, hence the term "terrorist." The locals know where Al Qaeda cells are, where they build their bombs and where the IEDs are planted, but they are afraid to tell us.
The current operation is brilliantly designed to deny the terrorist use of fear.
First, we sweep through occupied areas and chase off the terrorists. Al Qaeda, on the way out of town, tells the locals that they will be back when we leave and they will kill anyone who cooperates with us. We then put teams of Iraqi and MNF troops into neighborhoods.
The act of stationing American soldiers and Marines in a town to protect the locals is a powerful message. We all share the risk of defense. Iraqis manning these posts are locals who have the trust of their community (or tribe). Life begins to return to normal. Kids play in the streets; people pick up litter and reopen their little shops. We become the good guys.
Should Al Qaeda return, the locals call the post's tip line and the Iraqi-MNF troops engage them with minimum force necessary and we, together with the locals, prevail. The terrorist threat of retribution rings hollow. They are all dead.
Rent The Magnificent Seven. Give Chris [Yul Brynner] Apache and Cobra gun ship support. That's what Operation Ripper is doing.
Fabius your arrogance is funny as hell, another two lame-ass posts from you.
You did say that "4th generation" tactics almost always are successful, so don't insult your intelligence by trying to lie out of it.
Your history is again ignorant. There were significant local rebellions against Castro in the mountains of Cuba - where Castro himself took refuge during his campaign against Batista - that lasted until the late 60s, farmers resisting collectivization and such. The same thing happened in the Ukraine and Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia until the middle 1950s.
I don't know what history you're reading, Fabius, but Vietnam didn't raid Cambodia or Laos and left. They invaded, crushed local resistance, and put in place puppet governments. The Sino-Vietnamese War started because China didn't like Vietnam taking over Laos, not because they saw an opportunity to bleed Vietnam by helping Laotian insurgents or any such thing.
My examples are not difficult to understand if you're not dense. Looks like you don't apply. You said guerilla tactics work almost always - clearly they do not. You cannot say "Well Vietnam isn't there anymore is it?" 4th generation tactics wasn't what made them leave, so sorry your fallacies don't fly.
Also laughably weak is your attempt to discredit the Israeli solution to insurgency. Don't insult yourself with "but the Palestinian insurgency isn't over yet, it might still work!" Clearly Israel has militarily, diplomatically, and politically defeated the Palestinians. They broke the Palestinians' military power in 2005. They split the Palestinian people apart into pro-Fatah or pro-Hamas camps. Mahmoud Abbas cannot fight Hamas alone and he cannot attack Israel or lose his allies and have to fight Hamas alone. Hamas cannot hope to fight Israel effectively unless it has both the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas can't hope to take the Bank if Israel continues its support of Fatah.
I don't see how the Contra insurgency "failed" unless once again you place invalid standards for "victory." Did the Sandinistas turn Nicaragua into a Soviet puppet state, as was clearly what would have happened? No. They were forced to accept democracy and today, however much I disagree with their politics, they do appear to respect the democratic process and have no intent of going Hugo Chavez.
"There were no insurgencies against Soviet rule in Eastern Europe."
LOL
What basic intro to history have you been reading?
"There were no domestic insurgencies in Cuba and Nicaragua. "
Seriously, what history man? Native Cubans and Nicaraguans supported by foreign arms now constitutes a foreign invasion? You know they would have fought with or without American support. Try stop spewing nonsense in your hilarious pseudo-academic style of writing already.
"The Iraq War is a typical instance of the post-WWII pattern of foreign occupations fighting local insurgencies. The odds are that the outcome will be the same."
What is this man talking about? Seriously J Thomas, how did you manage to let yourself get sucked into this pathetic echo chamber Fabius has set up? Insurgencies have routinely lost up and down the line when the foreign power has fought back without letting up. Algeria is one of the few examples where the insurgents outlasted the foreign occupier when that occupier seriously fought back. Indochina. Where else? India and Pakistan didn't have an insurgency. Most sub-Saharan African nations gained independence peacefully or the Europeans withdrew not because the insurgency was winning but because they didn't find it in their best interests to expend the money and blood to beat them. You may classify that as an insurgency "winning," I do not.
South Africa? That wasn't an insurgency, de Klerk gave in because he saw that the writing was on the wall and if he didn't give in there would be an insurgency pretty quick he had no hope of winning. That's still not an insurgency though.
A clear example of insurgencies routinely winning would be in South America, which you didn't mention. Unsurprising, as the South Americans were facing a tottering, weak Spanish Empire. Not really the best of examples for your argument.
The insurgents in Somalia don't seem to be having much success, even though they're facing a Somali army that isn't much more than a joke and an Ethiopian force that while among the best in Africa isn't anything special compared to the West.
Saying that American tactics have failed is to spout ignorance. American tactics have succeeded where applied in Iraq. The problem was and, to a lesser degree, is the lack of capacity to apply those tactics strategically nationwide. If we could have an offensive in the Baghdad area at the same time as there was one in Tikrit, in Mosul, in Kirkuk, in Basra, Kufa, Najaf, Nasiriyah, etc., the insurgency could be put down probably within a year. As it stands, we can have an offensive in the Baghdad area (I'm including the "Baghdad Belts" and all of Diyala in that) and move SOME blocking forces in what we think are the most likely escape routes, and that's it. The bulk of all this is going to have to be done by the Iraqis.
Can the Iraqi Army do it? Maybe, maybe not. If we continue on with the current strategy, I think its undeniable that the Iraqi Army will be able to do the job on its own. Does the political support at home exist for that? Unless Petraeus can show hard, tangible, undeniable progress by Spring 2008 - Bush probably still has the support for one more veto on the war, but no more - then that will will not exist, and the insurgency will at least succeed in causing an all-Iraqi civil war.
But as it stands now, an all-Iraqi civil war would be far more contained regionally than it would have been a year ago. If we can batter al-Qaeda in Iraq into a coma, turn the Iraqis against it, is it really that bad if we leave and they fight each other a while? I don't really think so. As long as al-Qaeda stays out the Sunnis and Shiites can fight themselves forever as far as I'm concerned.
The Cubans didn't last long enough to get popular support, and the Contras did get some popular support. Enough to survive against the Sandinista government and become a part of the political process once the civil war ended. So I don't know where you're getting that from J Thomas.
You guys exist in an echo chamber here. You get basic history wrong. Fabius especially. Get your heads out of the sand, it's pathetic. Of course, you comment on Matt Yglesias' blog, I should have realized from the start that real discussion wouldn't actually happen here.
Arch, you're clear on the theory.
However, you may have noticed that we didn't get a whole lot of extra troops to do this stuff, and soon after they reach their maximum level they start dropping again. All the talk we've been hearing about how it hadn't really started because some of the troops weren't there yet? Well, by that standard it's about to be over because the troops that weren't there yet are replacing troops that are about to go home. Give it a few months and the surge will be over. So if it isn't getting its best results right now, it isn't likely to.
To the extent that iraqi civilians are supporting insurgents because they're afraid of them, we might be able to protect them to the point they support us instead. But you don't get much of an insurgency by scaring people into supporting it. The big deal with the insurgency is they have to keep doing things that can get them killed. Every time they bury an IED they might get killed from the air. Every time they aim a mortar. We're real good at killing insurgents and people who look like they're doing something kind of suspicious, we've killed something like 100,000 to 200,000 of them so far. It takes a lot of fear to make people face that kind of threat.
So when it's iraqi civilians who support insurgents because they want to, we might be able to scare them into quitting, sort of.... While we have our weapons on them and never turn our backs....
See, our theory always says people support the insurgents out of sheer fear. We said that about vietnam too, and of course korea. It sounds good to us, and it makes us the good guys, and it means we're going to have an easy war. But it usually doesn't work out that way. Figure, on average we're going to be killing at least one civilian for each actual insurgent we kill. And the dead civilians' relatives tend to blame us for killing them. We just plain haven't built up a lot of good will in the last 4 years or so. I can see people exposing al qaeda guys to us. Al qaeda doesn't look like they're very popular, the main thing they do that people like is attack us. And I can see people siccing us on their personal enemies. But why would anybody prefer US troops to their own insurgents? They have a lot less excuse to support US troops than americans had to support the Redcoats during our own occupation. We're foreigners, we mostly don't speak the language, we mostly don't share the same religion, we're taking their oil, we do airstrikes that sometimes miss and sometimes take out a lot more than the target, we have never promised that we'll ever go away.
Your theory didn't work very well in vietnam, and the iraqi government has far less support than the south vietnamese government did. At least in Saigon they didn't have to keep their government leaders in a secure US facility to keep the vietnamese from killing them. And the ARVN was far stronger than the iraqi forces we've trained.
It just doesn't look very good. And now we're changing the strategy again, because Petraeus's surge strategy wasn't getting enough results.
We've done lots of sweeps against iraqi cities. In fallujah we stayed behind and controlled the place, with the result that we don't get as many attacks inside fallujah as we do other places. But it takes too many US troops to occupy many places the way we do fallujah.
So after fallujah, our plan was that we were going to attack the cities and the iraqi army was going to occupy them for us. But that didn't work.
So Petraeus had the idea we'd get the iraqi army to help us attack the cities, and then we and the iraqi army would occupy them. And that didn't work either.
So now we're back to more "sweeps" where we don't really try to run an occupation after we sweep through. And the "surge" is approaching half over.
Petraeus did real well when he had a town full of minorities who were afraid of sunnis and afraid of shias. They begged him to stay there and protect them. They cooperated fully in getting rid of insurgents in their area. But there just aren't enough places like that in iraq. His experience doesn't generalise.
Hey guys, can we jump in here? this discussion is valid, except you are missing a vital bit of information, we think, like any direct data about the people who are opposing the coalition forces in Iraq at the moment. As two of a very small group of journalists who have gone out and actually interviewed people actively involved in the fighting, we can tell you that they are overwhelmingly Iraqi and that they are motivated by a secular or religious nationalism that inspires them to fight to end the occupation. While the situation is more complicated than that, it can be boiled down to that very basic concept, and one that we as Americans shouldn't have that difficult a time understanding as Nat notes...
If you're interested in learning more and finding out about our documentary "Meeting Resistance" which lays out what we found in our ten months of reporting, please visit our website www.meetingresistance.com and you can develop your opinions about Iraq based on first hand reporting...
Comments closed July 07, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Mistakes are unfortunate but part of normal life.
The aspect of Operation Ripper I find most disturbing is our failure to learn. As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over – always hoping for a different outcome.
This has a WWI feel to it. Again and again we send our boys (they are almost all male) onto the streets, casualties rise, the insurgents escalate their efforts, and afterwards Iraq is more of a ruin than before we started.
Also odd: the enthusiasm of the pro-war crowds for each new offensive. The Instapundit and his friends seem to have amnesia about our past efforts. Or perhaps it is pack madness or blood lust.
Sad. Horrifying.
Posted by Fabius Maximus | June 23, 2007 12:08 PM