Introduction by Tom
Engelhardt Here's how President George W
Bush described the enemy in Iraq at his press
conference last week. "The violence is being
caused by a combination of terrorists, elements of
former regime criminals and sectarian militias."
That is, "bitter-enders" aka "Saddamists". The
"sectarian militias" may have been a relatively
recent add-on, but this is essentially the same
list, the same sort of terminology the president
has been using for years.
In the past two
weeks, however, rumblings of discontent, the
urge
for a
change of course (or at least a mid-course
correction) in Iraq have been persistently
bubbling to the surface of already roiling
Washington. Senate Armed Services Committee
chairman John Warner recently returned from Iraq
to rattle the Bush administration by saying that
policy there was "drifting sideways" and if it
didn't improve, "all options" should be on the
table not long after the mid-term elections.
Suggestions are rife for dumping the
president's goal of "democracy" in Iraq and
swallowing a little of the hard stuff. Reports
indicate that in two desperate capitals,
Washington and Baghdad, rumors about possible
future Iraqi coups are spinning wildly. People of
import are evidently talking about the possibility
of a new five-man "ruling commission", a
"government of national salvation" that would
"suspend parliament, declare martial law and call
back some officers of the old Iraqi army". Even
the name of that Central Intelligence Agency
warhorse (and anti-neo-conservative candidate)
Iyad Allawi, who couldn't get his party elected
dogcatcher in the new Iraq, is coming up again in
the context of the need for a "strongman".
This was, of course, the desire of the
elder George Bush and his advisors back at the end
of Gulf War I, when they hoped just such a Sunni
strongman - one who could work with them - would
topple a weakened Saddam Hussein. Dreams, it
seems, die hard. And, as if on cue, who should
appear but former secretary of state and Bush
family handler James A Baker III, a Bush Elder
kind of guy.
While on the talk-show
circuit for his new book, he also spent last week
plugging (but not revealing) the future findings
of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission
he co-heads whose aim is to suggest to a reluctant
president new policy possibilities in Iraq. They
too are putting "all" options on the table (as
long as those options involve "continuing the
mission in Iraq"). The group, according to some
reports, has, however, ruled out the president's
favorite option, "victory". One option it is
apparently considering involves skipping
"democracy", minimizing American casualties, and
focusing "on stabilizing Baghdad, while the
American Embassy should work toward political
accommodation with insurgents".
A
political accommodation with the insurgents?
Curious how word gets around. Sometimes a small
change in terminology speaks volumes for future
mid-course corrections. The other day, General
George Casey, commander of US troops in Iraq, gave
a press briefing with Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. As part of his prepared
introductory remarks (not in answer to some random
question), he offered this list of "groups that
are working to affect [the situation in Iraq]
negatively":
"The first, the Sunni
extremists, al-Qaeda, and the Iraqis that are
supporting them. Second, the Shi'ite extremists,
the death squads and the more militant militias.
In my view, those represent the greatest current
threats in Iraq. The third group is the
resistance, the Sunni insurgency that sees
themselves as an honorable resistance against
foreign occupation in Iraq."
"The
resistance"? "An honorable resistance against
foreign occupation in Iraq"? Where did those
bitter-enders, those anti-Iraq forces go? Take it
as a small signal - noticed, as far as I could
tell, by not a single reporter or pundit of things
to come.
Of course, all of this has
brought to the surface a lot of hopeful
"withdrawal" talk in the media (and the online
world), in part because the Baker group seems to
have been floating "phased withdrawal" rumors.
Before you think about genuine withdrawal
possibilities though, note the announcement by
Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker last
week that he was now planning for the possibility
of maintaining present force levels in Iraq
(140,000+ troops) through 2010; that Casey at that
press briefing left the door wide open to ask the
president for even more troops after the election;
and that the build-up on the ground of permanent
bases (not called that) and our vast, nearly
billion-dollar embassy in the heart of Baghdad is
ongoing.
Below, Michael Schwartz considers
the latest in military mid-course corrections and
explains why such corrections can no longer hope
to plug the gaping holes in Iraq's political
dikes. Similarly, Warner, Baker, Casey, Senator
Joe Biden (with his "three-state solution"), and
so many others can all promote their own
mid-course corrections, suggest them to the
president, bring them to the new Congress, promote
them among military figures, but as long as that
embassy goes up and those bases keep getting
hardened and improved, as long as the "mission
continues" (in Baker's phrase), changing troop
levels, tactics, even governments in Baghdad's
Green Zone, not to speak of "policy options" in
Washington, will solve nothing. Wherever that
"table" is sooner or later all options will really
have to be displayed on it.
Nine paradoxes of a
lost war By Michael Schwartz
Recently, the New York Times broke a story
suggesting that the US Army and the marines were
about to turn the conceptual tide of war in Iraq.
The two services, reported correspondent Michael R
Gordon, "were finishing work on a new
counterinsurgency doctrine" that would, according
to retired Lieutenant General Jack Keane, "change
[the military's] entire culture as it transitions
to irregular warfare".
Such strategic
eureka moments have been fairly common since the
Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003,
and this one - news coverage of it died away in
less than a week - will probably drop into the
dustbin of history along with other times when the
tactical or strategic tide of war was supposed to
change. These would include the November 2004
assault on the city of Fallujah, various
elections, the "standing up" of the Iraqi Army,
and the trench that, it was briefly reported, the
Iraqis were planning to dig around their vast
capital, Baghdad.
But this plan had one
ingenious section, derived from an article by four
military experts published in the quasi-official
Military Review and entitled "The Paradoxes of
Counterinsurgency". The nine paradoxes the experts
lay out are eye-catching, to say the least and so
make vivid reading; but they are more than so many
titillating puzzles of counterinsurgency warfare.
Each of them contains an implied criticism of
American strategy in Iraq. Seen in this light,
they become an instructive lesson from insiders in
why the American presence in that country has been
such a disaster and why this (or any other) new
counterinsurgency strategy has little chance of
ameliorating it.
Paradox 1:
The more you protect your force,
the less secure you are
The military
experts offer this explanation: "[The]
counterinsurgent gains ultimate success by
protecting the populace, not himself." It may seem
like a bland comment, but don't be fooled. It
conceals a devastating criticism of the cardinal
principle of the American military in Iraq: that
above all else they must minimize the risk to
American troops by setting rules of engagement
that essentially boil down to "shoot first, make
excuses later".
Applications of this
principle are found in the by-now familiar
policies of annihilating any car that passes the
restraint line at checkpoints (because it might be
a car bomber); shooting at pedestrians who get in
the path of any American convoy (because they
might be trying to stop the vehicles to activate
an ambush); and calling in artillery or air power
against any house that might be an insurgent
hiding place (because the insurgents might
otherwise escape and/or snipe at an American
patrol).
This "shoot first" policy has
guaranteed that large numbers of civilians
(including a remarkable number of children) have
been killed, maimed or left homeless. For most of
us, killing this many innocent people would be
reason enough to abandon a policy, but from a
military point of view it is not in itself
sufficient. These tactics only become anathema
when you can no longer ignore the way they have
made it ever more difficult for the occupying army
to "maintain contact" with the local population in
order "to obtain the intelligence to drive
operations and to reinforce the connections with
the people who establish legitimacy".
Paradox 2: The more
force you use, the less effective you are
Times reporter Gordon summarizes the logic
here nicely: "Substantial force increases the risk
of collateral damage and mistakes, and increases
the opportunity for insurgent propaganda."
Considering the levels of devastation
achieved in the Sunni city of Fallujah (where 70%
of structures were estimated to be damaged and
close to 50% destroyed in the US assault of
November 2004) and in other Sunni cities (where
whole neighborhoods have been devastated), or even
in Shi'ite Najaf (where entire neighborhoods and
major parts of its old city were destroyed in
2004), the word "substantial" has to be considered
a euphemism.
And the use of the word
"propaganda" betrays the bias of the military
authors, since many people would consider such
levels of devastation a legitimate reason for
joining groups that aim to expel the occupiers.
Here again, the striking logic of the
American military is at work. These levels of
destruction are not, in themselves, considered a
problem - at least not until someone realizes that
they are facilitating recruitment by the
opposition.
Paradox 3: The more successful counterinsurgency is,
the less force can be used Though not
presented this way, this paradox is actually a
direct criticism of the American military strategy
in the months after the fall of the Saddam
Hussein's regime in 2003. In those early days,
active resistance to the occupation was modest
indeed, an average of only six violent engagements
each day (compared to 90 three years later.)
But American military policy in the
country was still based on overwhelming force.
American commanders sought to deter a larger
insurgency by ferociously repressing any signs of
resistance. This strategy included house-to-house
searches witnessed by embedded reporter Nir Rosen
and described in his vivid book, In the Belly
of the Green Bird.
These missions,
repeated hundreds of times each day across Iraq,
included home invasions of suspected insurgents,
brutal treatment of their families and often their
property, and the indefinite detention of men
found in just about any house searched, even when
US troops knew that their intelligence was
unreliable.
Relatively peaceful
demonstrations were forcibly suppressed, most
agonizingly when, in late April 2003, American
troops killed 13 demonstrators in Fallujah who
were demanding that the US military vacate a
school commandeered as a local headquarters. This
incident became a cause celebre around which
Fallujans organized themselves into a central role
in the insurgency that soon was born.
The
new counterinsurgency strategy acknowledges that
the very idea of overwhelming demonstrations of
force producing respectful obedience has
backfired, producing instead an explosion of
rebellion. And now that a significant majority of
Iraqis are determined to expel the Americans,
promises of more humane treatment next time will
not get the genie of the insurgency back in the
bottle.
Paradox 4:
Sometimes doing nothing is the best
reaction This paradox is, in fact, a
criticism of another cardinal principle of the
occupation: the application of overwhelming force
in order to teach insurgents (and prospective
insurgents) that opposition of any sort will not
be tolerated and, in any case, is hopeless.
A typical illustration of this principle
in practice was a January US military report that
went in part: "An unmanned US drone detected three
men digging a hole in a road in the area.
Insurgents regularly bury bombs along roads in the
area to target US or Iraqi convoys. The three men
were tracked to a building, which US forces then
hit with precision-guided munitions." As it turned
out, the attack killed 12 members of a family
living in that house, severely damaged six
neighboring houses, and consolidated local
opposition to the American presence.
This
example (multiplied many times over) makes it
clear why, in so many instances over these past
years, doing nothing might have been better: fewer
enemies in the "hood". But the developers of the
new military strategy have a more cold-blooded
view of the issue, preferring to characterize the
principle in this way: "If a careful analysis of
the effects of a response reveals that more
negatives than positives might result, soldiers
should consider an alternative."
That is,
while this incident might well be an example of a
time when "doing nothing is the best reaction",
the multiple civilian deaths that resulted could,
under at least some circumstances, be outweighed
by the "positives". Take, for a counter example,
the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of
al-Qaeda in Iraq, in an air strike that also
caused multiple civilian deaths.
Paradox 5: The best
weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot
The Times' Gordon offers the following
translation of this paradox: "Often dollars and
ballots have more impact than bombs and bullets."
Given the $18 billion US reconstruction budget for
Iraq and the three well-attended elections since
January 2005, it might seem that, in this one
area, Bush administration efforts actually
anticipated the new counterinsurgency doctrine.
But in their original article the military
strategists were actually far more precise in
describing what they meant by this - and that
precision makes it clear how far from effective
American "reconstruction" was. Money and
elections, they claim, are not enough: "Lasting
victory will come from a vibrant economy,
political participation and restored hope."
As it happened, the American officials
responsible for Iraq policy were only willing to
deliver that vibrant economy, along with political
participation and restored hope, under quite
precise and narrow conditions that suited the
larger fantasies of the Bush administration.
Iraq's new government was to be an
American ally, hostile to that axis-of-evil
regional power Iran, and it was to embrace the
"opening" of the Iraqi economy to American
multinationals. Given Iraqi realities and this
hopeless list of priorities or day-dreams, it is
not surprising that the country's economy has sunk
ever deeper into depression, that elected
officials have neither the power nor the
inclination to deliver on their campaign promises,
and that the principle hopes of the majority of
Iraqis are focused on the departure of American
troops because of, as one pollster concluded, "the
American failure to do basically anything for
Iraqis".
Paradox 6:
Baghdad doing something tolerably
better than US doing it well Here is a
paradoxical principle that the occupation has
sought to apply fully. The presidential slogan,
"as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down", has
been an expression of Bush administration
determination to transfer the front-line struggle
against the insurgents - the patrols, the convoys,
the home invasions, any house-to-house fighting -
to Iraqi units, even if their job performance
proved even less than "tolerable" compared to the
rigorous execution of American troops.
It
is this effort that has also proved the
administration's most consistent and glaring
failure. In a country where 80% of the people want
the Americans to leave, it is very difficult to
find soldiers willing to fight against the
insurgents who are seeking to expel them.
This was evident when the first group of
American-trained soldiers and police deserted the
field of battle during the fights for Fallujah,
Najaf, Mosul and Tal Afar in 2004. This led
eventually to the current American strategy of
using Shi'ite soldiers against Sunni insurgents,
and utilizing Kurds against both Shi'ite and Sunni
rebels. (Sunnis, by and large, have refused to
fight with the Americans.) This policy, in turn,
has contributed substantially to the
still-escalating sectarian violence within Iraq.
Even today, after the infusion of enormous
amounts of money and years of effort, a
substantial proportion of newly recruited soldiers
desert or mutiny when faced with the prospect of
fighting against anti-American insurgents.
According to Solomon Moore and Louise Roug
of the Los Angeles Times, in Anbar province, the
scene of the heaviest fighting, "half the Iraqi
soldiers are on leave at any given time, and many
don't return to duty. In May, desertion rates in
some Iraqi units reached 40%."
In
September, fully three-quarters of the 4,000 Iraqi
troops ordered to Baghdad to help in the American
operation to reclaim the capital and suppress
internecine violence there, refused deployment.
American officials told the LA Times that such
refusals were based on an unwillingness to fight
outside their home regions and a reluctance to "be
thrust into uncomfortable sectarian
confrontations".
As the failed attempts to
"stand up" Iraqi forces suggest, the goal of
getting Iraqis to fight "tolerably" well depends
on giving them a reason to fight that they
actually support. As long as Iraqis are asked to
fight on the side of occupation troops whose
presence they despise, the US cannot expect the
quality of their performance to be "tolerable"
from the Bush administration point of view.
Paradox 7: If a
tactic works this week, it will not work next week
The clearest expression of this principle
lies in the history of improvised explosive
devices (IEDs), the anti-occupation weapon of
choice among Iraqi resistance fighters.
Throughout the war, the occupation
military has conducted hundreds of armed patrols
each week designed to capture suspected insurgents
through house-to-house searches. The insurgency,
in turn, has focused on deterring and derailing
these patrols, using sniper attacks, rocket
propelled grenades, and IEDs.
At first,
sniper attacks were the favored weapon of the
insurgents, but the typical American response -
artillery and air attacks - proved effective
enough to set them looking for other ways to
respond. IEDs then gained in popularity, since
they could be detonated from a relatively safe
distance. When the Americans developed devices to
detect the electronic detonators, the insurgents
developed a variety of non-electronic trigger
devices. When the Americans upgraded their armor
to resist the typical IED, the insurgents
developed "shaped" charges that could pierce
American armor.
And so it goes in all
aspects of the war. Each move by one side triggers
a response by the other. The military experts
developing the new strategy can point to this
dilemma, but they cannot solve it. The underlying
problem for the American military is that the
resistance has already reached the sort of
critical mass that ensures an endless
back-and-forth tactical battle.
One
solution not under consideration might work very
well: abandoning the military patrols themselves.
But such a tactic would also require abandoning
counterinsurgency and ultimately leaving Iraq.
Paradox 8: Tactical
success guarantees nothing This point is
summarized by Gordon of the Times this way:
"[M]ilitary actions by themselves cannot achieve
success." But this is the smallest part of the
paradox. It is true enough that the insurgency in
Iraq hopes to win "politically" by waiting for the
American people to force the US government to
withdraw, or for the cost of the war to outweigh
its potential benefits, or for world pressure to
make the war diplomatically unviable.
But
there is a much more encompassing element to this
dictum: that guerrilla fighters do not expect to
win any military battles with the occupation. In
the military strategists' article, they quote an
interchange between American Colonel Harry Summers
and his North Vietnamese counterpart after the US
had withdrawn from Vietnam. When Summers said,
"You know you never defeated us on the
battlefield," his adversary replied, "That may be
so, but it is also irrelevant."
A tactical
victory occurs when the enemy is killed or
retreats, leaving the battlefield to the victor.
In guerrilla war, therefore, the guerrillas never
win since they always melt away and leave their
adversary in charge.
But in Iraq, as in
other successful guerrilla wars, the occupation
army cannot remain indefinitely at the scene of
its tactical victories - in each community, town
or city that it conquers. It must move on to quell
the rebellion elsewhere. And when it does, if the
guerrillas have successfully melted away, they
will reoccupy the community, town, or city, thus
winning a strategic victory and ruling the local
area until their next tactical defeat.
If
they keep this up long enough and do it in enough
places, they will eventually make the war too
costly to pursue - and thus conceivably win the
war without winning a battle.
Paradox 9: Most
important decisions are not made by generals
Because guerrilla war is decentralized,
with local bands deciding where to place IEDs,
when to use snipers, and which patrols or bases to
attack, the struggle in different communities,
provinces, or regions takes very different forms.
Many insurgents in Fallujah chose to stand
and fight, while those in Tal Afar, near the
Syrian border, decided to evacuate the city with
its civilian population when the American military
approached in strength. In Shi'ite areas, members
of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army chose to join the
local police and turn it to their purposes; but
Sunni insurgents have tried, instead, to disarm
the local police and then disband the force. In
every city and town, the strategy of the
resistance has been different.
The latest
American military strategists are arguing that
what they call the "mosaic nature of an
insurgency" implies the necessity of giving
autonomy to local American commanders to "adapt as
quickly as the insurgents". But such
decentralization cannot work if the local
population supports the insurgent goal of
expelling the occupiers.
Given autonomy
under such circumstances, lower-level US military
officers may decide that annihilating a home
suspected of sheltering an insurgent is indeed
counterproductive; such decisions, however,
humane, would now come far too late to convince a
local population that it should abandon its
support of a campaign seen as essential to
national independence.
There may have been
a time, back when the invasion began, that the US
could have adopted a strategy that would have made
it welcome - for a time, anyway - in Iraq. Such a
strategy, as the military theorists flatly state,
would have had to deliver a "vibrant economy,
political participation and restored hope".
Instead, the occupation delivered economic
stagnation or degradation, a powerless government
and the promise of endless violence. Given this
reality, no new military strategy - however
humane, canny or well designed - could reverse the
occupation's terminal unpopularity. Only a US
departure might do that.
Paradoxically,
the policies these military strategists are now
trying to reform have ensured that, however much
most Iraqis may want such a departure, it would
be, at best, bittersweet. The legacy of sectarian
violence and the near-irreversible destruction
wrought by the American presence make it unlikely
that they would have the time or inclination to
take much satisfaction in the end of the American
occupation.
Michael Schwartz,
professor of sociology and faculty director of the
undergraduate college of global studies at Stony
Brook University, has written extensively on
popular protest and insurgency, as well as on
American business and government dynamics. His
books include Radical Protest and Social
Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative
Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email
address is Ms42@optonline.net.
(Copyright 2006 Michael Schwartz)
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission Unaccomplished:
Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts
and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first
collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
