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3 SPEAKING
FREELY Why 21,500 wrongs won't make it
right By Julian Delasantellis
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
Attributed to
Confucius is a maxim that advises, "Never kill a
mosquito with a cannon." If adapted and updated by
the operational strategists directing the United
States' war in Iraq, including Tuesday's battle of
Haifa Street in Baghdad, it would
now
advise never to kill a mosquito with a cannon when
you can drop a 500-pound bomb from an F-16
instead.
US President George W Bush's
Wednesday address in which he committed 21,500
more troops to Iraq proves that he thinks real men
don't eat quiche or listen to the Iraq Study
Group, and as for the Democratic opposition,
they've been cowed into obedience by the prospect
of Fox News digging up a 1960s picture of them in
tie-dyed shirts flashing peace signs. The upshot
is at least two more years of war.
With
that the case, some are wondering whether the war
can be fought better in the future than it has
been in the past, whether anything has been
learned from the myriad mistakes over the past
three years. Along those lines, much media
interest is being focused on the US military's
"new" counterinsurgency strategy.
Co-authored by army Lieutenant-General
David Petraeus (now nominated by Bush to replace
the reportedly insufficiently victory-minded
General George Casey as US commander in Iraq),
along with marine Lieutenant-General James F Amos,
the report's recent unrestricted release has
generated some controversy.
Some say the
US is giving away military secrets by letting the
terrorists know their strategy. Don't worry,
America, all the new strategy really says is that
everything you've done in Iraq for the past three
years is wrong, and if anybody knows that, it is
the Iraqi insurgency.
One might have
thought that after Vietnam, US ground forces would
have obtained a bellyful of hard-won expertise
about how to conduct counterinsurgency operations.
Too bad they'd rather forget than remember. As
Conrad C Crane, the director of the Military
History Institute at the Army War College, said in
the New York Times on October 6, "Basically, after
Vietnam, the general attitude of the American
military was that we don't want to fight that kind
of war again - the army's idea was to fight the
big war against the Russians and ignore these
other things."
In the early days of the
Iraq war in 2003, from the crossing of the Kuwaiti
border to the fall of Baghdad, this was exactly
the war the US wanted and exactly what it got. The
decrepit Iraqi army on the Tigris played the part
of the 1980s Soviet army by the Oder. But after -
in the president's words on the USS Abraham
Lincoln - "major combat operations had ended", the
Iraqis changed their tactics, from stand-up
battles against the vastly technologically
superior Americans, in which they were getting
slaughtered, to insurgency.
Would that the
Americans had changed their tactics at the same
time.
Petraeus and Amos stress that
counterinsurgency is completely different from
conventional warfare, in that its objective is not
to direct massive firepower on to, and thus
annihilate, the armed-force groupings of the
enemy, but to win the support of the civilian
population. Using the US football metaphor that
resonates so strongly with military-minded
Americans, one commentator stated that in
conventional warfare, the civilian population is
the field on which the game is played, while in
counterinsurgency the support of the civilian
population is the end zone - when you reach it you
win the game.
As Petraeus and Amos put it,
"The military forces that successfully defeat
insurgencies are usually those able to overcome
their institutional inclination to wage
conventional war against insurgents."
Successful counterinsurgents support or
develop local institutions with legitimacy and the
ability to provide basic services, economic order,
opportunity and security. "These efforts
purposefully attack the basis for the insurgency
rather than just its fighters and comprehensively
address the nation's core problems."
In
other words, Petraeus and Amos want the troops off
those huge US superbases, with their
air-conditioning, clean running water and food
courts that would put the Mall of America [1] to
shame, into the Iraqi towns and villages so they
can talk to actual Iraqis and find out what's
bothering them, and how the Americans can help.
The most controversial aspect of the new
approach, and the one that contrasts most sharply
with current operational doctrine, is what
Petraeus and Amos call the "paradox of force".
"Any use of force produces many effects,
not all of which can be foreseen. The more force
applied, the greater the chance of collateral
damage and mistakes. Using substantial force also
increases the opportunity for insurgent propaganda
to portray lethal military activities as brutal, "
write Petraeus and Amos.
The passage that
probably best explains why the bright hopes of
Baghdad's liberation have gone so terribly wrong
states, "Counterinsurgents should carefully
calculate the type and
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