| |
Descending
into the quagmire
By Daniel Smith
(Posted with permission from
Foreign Policy in Focus)
Between May 1, when President George W Bush
declared that major combat in Iraq was over, and June
26, 57 US and eight UK military personnel have died in
Iraq. That is more than one death every day. To the US
and UK toll must be added the sometimes tens or scores
of Iraqis, both Saddamists - military, intelligence,
Fedayeen, non-Iraqi volunteers - and innocent civilians.
Having splashed the president's declaration over
their electronic and newspaper front pages and magazine
covers, the media are edging ever so gingerly toward
serious questioning of what kind of "war" US and UK
troops (the "Authority") are fighting in Iraq.
"Counterinsurgency," a 1960s buzzword, has
already re-appeared in some reports. The dreaded
"quagmire" has also been voiced. The Pentagon denies it
is doing "body counts" - although the media always seem
to know the number of guerrilla dead. Can "free fire
zones", "five o'clock follies" (the daily official US
military briefings in Saigon) and "light at the end of
the tunnel" be far off?
These phrases bring to
mind Bernard Fall, author, chronicler and journalist in
the Vietnam War. Very early in that war - December 10,
1964 - Fall delivered a lecture at the Naval War College
on "The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and
Counterinsurgency". Parts of his presentation seem as
current today in the context of Iraq as they were in
1964 for Vietnam.
For example, Fall believed
that the real objective of guerrilla (or small) war
methods is to advance "an ideology or a political
system". The US government saw fighting as the primary
challenge and responded by seeking a military solution.
In so doing, it misjudged the depth and extent of
political action by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong -
the primacy of "political, ideological and
administrative" control - and thus the true nature of
their "revolutionary warfare". Moreover, in failing to
properly assess the political and ideological
(nationalistic) forces at work in Vietnam, the Lyndon B
Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations tended to
mischaracterize (or ignore) the multitudinous economic
and social cross-currents that were represented by those
committed to the cause of Vietnam unification under
Vietnamese leaders.
The result was a steady
buildup of US personnel and equipment and the
expenditures of billions of dollars, none of which
brought the US any nearer to the tunnel's end - but all
of which added to the casualties on both sides and
exponentially increased the alienation of the civilian
population. Even Buddhist monks protested, with some
expressing their opposition to the repressive Saigon
government and the actions of its US ally through
self-immolation. As Fall noted, "One can do almost
anything with brute force except salvage an unpopular
government."
History repeating
Itself
The Bush administration seems headed
toward committing the same mistakes of its Vietnam-era
predecessors - plus a number of its own. Washington
expected that the dominate Shi'ite (62 percent)
population, long subservient to the minority Sunnis (35
percent), would at least welcome its "liberation" by the
Western coalition forces, if not assist them in ousting
Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party cronies. Instead,
the dominant reaction has been a growing disillusionment
with and sustained protests about the continuing absence
of basic services - water, electricity, telephone,
garbage and sewage removal, basic policing, and physical
security - for all classes of Shi'ites and Sunnis under
the coalition occupation.
Prior to the US attack
in March, the Iraqi people were promised participation
in a post-war effort to build a functioning interim
democratic governance structure. In April, two meetings
of 43 and 250 Iraqi "leaders" selected by retired
General Jay Garner, the Pentagon's man-on-the-scene,
were held "to advance the national dialogue among Iraqis
regarding composition of an Iraqi interim authority". No
decisions were made, in part because of unhappiness with
the selection process and dissension about the tribal
and geographical representation (there are 2,500 tribes
and sub-tribes in Iraq). One prominent returned exile,
Ahmad Chalabi, said, "The composition at this time looks
like Noah's Ark, but that is fine at this stage."
Within two weeks, the idea of an "interim Iraqi
authority" was dead. The new top man on the-scene, L
Paul Bremer, said that the security situation remained
too unsettled and that additional "purging" of Saddam
loyalists from the police, civil service and political
parties was needed. Bremer plans to appoint a council of
25-30 "advisers", which he will control. This reversal
almost immediately set off calls for the US to leave
Iraq from the more militant, competing, fundamentalist
Shi'ite factions - Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim's
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
Moqtada al-Sadr's adherents and Abdul Karim al-Enzi's
Dawa sect. (Al-Enzi caught the mood exactly, "Democracy
means choosing what people want, not what the West
wants.")
Then, in late June, a clear signal came
that the US was getting closer to falling into a
Vietnam-like quagmire. Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali
Sistani, who was at first quite tolerant and even
supportive of the invading troops, wrote of "great
unease" concerning the length of the US occupation, the
failure of the US to grant Iraqis self-rule, and what he
saw as the biggest threat to Iraq, "The obliteration of
its cultural identity." As if to accentuate the
ayatollah's remarks, within 48 hours, six UK military
police were dead and another eight UK troops were
wounded in two attacks deep in Shi'ite-dominated
southern Iraq.
Distant rhetoric
The
rhetoric from Washington seems as distant from what is
happening on the ground in Iraq today as it was during
the Vietnam War. The president and his representatives
point to the US$2.5 billion for Iraq's reconstruction in
the March supplemental, of which $700 million has been
committed. They trumpet the vaccination programs for
Iraqi children and the expected troop augmentations of
20,000-30,000 from as many as 41 other countries to
assist with security in Iraq - troops for whom, in many
cases, the US is footing the bill.
Even with
this force augmentation, the US military will continue
to carry the load. There are still 146,000 US military
personnel in Iraq (plus 16,000 UK troops) and another
45,000 providing support from Kuwait. More than 210,000
National Guard and Reserves have been called up for
either homeland defense, duty in the Balkans and the
Sinai Desert, or the Iraq war itself, with many into
their second year of continuous active duty. US planners
say that a new Iraqi army of 40,000 will be ready in
three years, a clear signal that administration
assurances of being out of Iraq in two years simply will
not happen. Some in Congress predict a five to 10-year
presence.
US forces will also continue to bear
the brunt of the casualties. In the fighting up to and
including Baghdad's capture, 138 US forces were killed;
of the 57 who have died since May 1, 20 were killed by
hostile fire (plus the UK dead noted above). Washington
says the casualties are "militarily insignificant",
while field commanders note a seemingly steady stream of
outsiders entering Iraq for the immediate purpose of
killing US soldiers and a longer-range goal of building
pressure in the US for the withdrawal of US troops.
The demonstrations by disgruntled Iraqi
civilians, civil servants and cashiered military
officers seeking back pay or pensions, combined with the
plethora of firearms in Iraq, have contributed to Iraqi
civilian casualties as US troops react to the taunts
("America is the enemy of Allah"), gunfire, and general
chaos in Iraq. In Baghdad's first post-war public
opinion poll, 73 percent said the US had failed to
provide adequate security in the city. But even as they
deride the lack of results, Iraqis sense that, for now,
they have no option; in the same poll, only 17 percent
want the Western troops out immediately. That figure may
start to increase if US troops continue to engage in
"security practices" that Iraqis deem inappropriate -
eg, male soldiers "patting down" Iraqi women while
looking for weapons or arresting minor children. And a
surge in "Yankee go home" sentiment could be expressed
in increased attacks on US forces by new groups in new,
often Shi'ite areas.
Such opposition, armed only
with AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and light
mortars, may seem puny against tanks, infantry fighting
vehicles and modern aircraft with precision-guided
munitions, but that is what Vietnam-era administrations
thought in the 1960s and early 1970s. Between June 9 and
June 22, the Pentagon logged 131 "incidents" involving
US troops in Iraq, including 41 attacks on US compounds,
26 attacks on sentry or observation posts and 26 on
convoys. The next 24-hour period saw an additional 25
incidents. Moreover, not all heavy weapons in Iraq are
being collected by "the Authority". The 70,000 Kurdish
Peshmerga will retain their tanks and artillery until
their expected integration into the new Iraqi army.
(Obviously, not all 70,000 can be amalgamated; those
excluded could cause problems later.)
A question
the Bush White House and the Pentagon still have to
answer is just how many US military men and women will
be needed to pacify and provide security in Iraq. Before
the war, on February 25, then-army chief of staff Eric
Shinseki told Congress that "several hundred thousand"
troops would be needed in post-war Iraq. Both Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz, sharply disagreed, with the latter stating
that Shinseki's estimate was "wildly off the mark". But
the question lingers for many in Congress, the US public
and the armed forces.
How many troops and for
how long?
Traditional military doctrine estimates
that a conventional army requires roughly a 10-to-1 size
advantage if it is to defeat a well-equipped,
well-executed, persistent insurgency. But where
insurgents, while less centrally organized, are still
too powerful for standard police (or where standard
police do not exist), responding to and measuring
against armed insurgent strength may not be the best
gauge. In 1995, James Quinlivan, writing in the Army War
College's quarterly, Parameters, suggested that force
requirements should be based on the need for population
control (to cut off support to the insurgents) and local
security - that is, the need to "win hearts and minds"
and therefore requires a force proportional to the
population.
Quinlivan describes three historical
force ratio levels. The first, one to four security
personnel per 1,000 population, is essentially the ratio
for ordinary policing. In a military setting, the US
Constabulary force in post-World War II Germany was
staffed at 2.2 per 1,000 for "enforcing public order,
controlling black market transactions and related police
functions". The same ratio existed in the UN
Transitional Authority in Cambodia (1992-1993), whose
duties included "supervision of the ceasefire and
voluntary disarmament of combatants, supervision of
about 60,000 indigenous police to provide law and order,
and administration of a free and fair election". But the
UN had little real presence outside the main urban
areas.
The second force ratio is from four to
ten security personnel per 1,000 population. India's
campaign against militants in Punjab, viewed as quite
punitive by many, was implemented at a ratio of almost 6
per 1,000 population. At the high point of the 1965 US
intervention in the Dominican Republic, whose purpose
was preventing civil war and restoring "stability", Army
and Marine personnel operated at a ratio of 6.6 per
1,000 population.
Quinlivan's third ratio level
is above 10 per 1,000 population. Military examples of
this level are the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s when
foreign and full-time indigenous security forces
operated at a ratio of 20 per 1,000 population. The same
ratio pertained to the combination of the Royal Ulster
Constabulary and British troops in Northern Ireland for
much of the period 1969-1994. Here, multiple small
groups advocating separation from or continued union
with Great Britain waged war on each other, and one side
fought "occupying" security forces with a goal of
forcing them out - conditions that are unfolding in Iraq
today.
Applying the average of 2.2 per 1,000 of
level one to Iraq would require 52,800 individuals. But
Iraq is not a defeated, broken, devastated country like
Germany. Nor is it at peace or semi-peace, where the
main task is maintaining public order. It is still a
country at war, a country saturated with weapons, a
country that is becoming more and more restless under
its "liberator".
Level two ratios of six and 6.6
yield 144,000 and 158,400, respectively. These are
comparable strength totals to what the US and its allies
have in Iraq today. Yet these forces seem unable to
isolate Iraqi and foreign militants who have come into
Iraq to fight "the Authority" and to provide both the
perception and reality of public safety. Perhaps even
more important is the need to avoid any hint of punitive
measures that inevitably would lead to a precipitous
decline in general Iraqi tolerance of foreign forces.
At 10 per 1,000 population, the point of
intersection between levels two and three, Quinlivan's
numbers skyrocket to 240,000. (Interestingly, just in
Baghdad, where the population is roughly 5 million,
there are 55,000 troops, producing a ratio of 11 per
1,000.) Matching the British experience in Malaysia and
Northern Ireland at 20 per 1,000 doubles this total to
480,000, which is the total authorized strength of the
active US Army. Clearly, any of these levels are
impossible to sustain given the demands for and on
people. Even level two ratios may be impossible, given
that five of the Army's 10 active divisions currently
are engaged in Iraq.
In Iraq, as one phase of
the "global war on terror", the Bush administration
chose war and occupation, and must now face the
consequences of its choices. Having dislodged the
previous regime by force, the US increasingly is caught
in the quagmire of depending on force to control the
Iraqi people in the name of national and regional
"peace". But "peace through war" or the threat of war is
a costly chimera, both for the "victor" and the loser.
This truth was well understood by the 19th century
British statesman Edmund Burke, who noted that "war
never leaves where it found a nation".
What
remains to be seen is what price will be exacted from
the US public - and in what condition Iraq will be in
two, five or 10 years.
Daniel
Smith dan@fcnl.org is a
military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, a
retired US army colonel and a senior fellow on military
affairs at the Friends Committee on National
Legislation.
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
