One battle rarely wins or loses a war, at
least in the moment. Gettysburg crippled General
Robert E Lee's army in 1863, but the Confederates
fought on until 1865. Stalingrad broke the back of
the German 6th army, but it would be two and a
half years before the Russians took Berlin. War -
particularly the modern variety - is a complex
mixture of tactics, technology and politics. Then
there are the intangibles, such as morale.
But while a single battle may not end a
conflict, it can illuminate an underlying reality
that generally gets lost in the thunder of
propaganda, illusion and wishful thinking that
always accompanies the horsemen of the apocalypse.
Now that some of the dust has settled over
the recent battle of the southern city of Basra
that pitted Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi
Army
against the armies of the United
States and Iraq, it is time to examine what that
clash meant, and what are some analogies that
might help bring it into focus. There were
certainly echoes of Vietnam in last month's
fighting, and some of those parallels,
particularly to the 1968 Tet offensive, are worth
a closer look.
Remembering
Tet As Frank Rich pointed out in The
New York Times, there was indeed a whiff of Tet in
the debacle in Basra. Just before the 1968 attack,
US General William Westmoreland made his historic
"light at the end of the tunnel" prediction. In
recent testimony before the US Senate, General
David Petraeus said the United States was making
"significant" progress in Iraq, and his spokesman,
Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, bragged that the
United States had the Mahdi Army on the ropes:
"We've degraded their capability."
"There
is a parallel to Tet here," says military
historian Jack Radey. "We have won the war,
violence is down, the surge works [the US told
itself], and then Kaboom! The Green Zone is taking
incoming."
Radey argues that the American
"victories" against the Vietnamese in the period
leading up to the Tet offensive were an illusion.
"If the enemy seems to be missing from the
picture, this is not proof you have wiped him
out," he says. "It is more likely proof that you
have lost track of him, and he will, at his own
chosen time, find ways to remind you of his
presence."
Which is exactly what Muqtada
and the Mahdi Army did.
According to
historian Gareth Porter, the United States
mistakenly concluded that the ceasefire Muqtada
declared six months ago was a sign that the Mahdi
Army was vulnerable. When the Americans began
attacking Muqtada strongholds - more than 2,000
militia members and leaders have been arrested
since last July's truce - and the Mahdi Army did
not react, the United States was convinced that
the militia was weak.
Other
analogies But Tet is not the only
relevant Vietnam analogy. The other parallel was
Operation Lam Son, the 1971 invasion of Laos by
the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). The United
States pushed South Vietnam to attack Laos to
demonstrate that the ARVN could stand on its own
two feet, and to make the point prior to the
upcoming 1972 US elections that Richard Nixon's
policy of "Vietnamization" was working.
Instead, US audiences watched as panicked
ARVN troops clung to helicopter landing skids in
their desperation to escape from Laos. Lam Son
"was a disaster", writes historian A J Langguth in
Our Vietnam: The War, 1954-1975:
"Vietnamization became one more doomed fantasy.
After 10 years of training and costly equipment,
South Vietnam's troops seemed to be no match for
the communists."
Radey says the Lam Son
analogy is a useful one. The invasion didn't work
"because the [ARVN] soldiers didn't believe in the
cause they fought for", while their opponents,
with far less fire power, "believed in what they
were doing. Vive la difference."
As for
Iraq and the recent fighting: "Was anyone paying
attention the last time this lesson was taught in
Vietnam?" Radey asks. "Did anyone do the reading?
Hello? Do I have to start throwing chalk?"
In
Basra On the surface, the battle of
Basra - which quickly spread to virtually every
major city between Basra and Baghdad - was a major
setback for Prime Minster Nuri al-Maliki and the
Americans. As Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar
points out in Asia Times Online, the principal
outcome of the fighting is that "the Bush
administration's triumphalism over the so-called
Iraqi 'surge' strategy has become irredeemably
farcical". (Iran torpedoes US plans for Iraqi
oil April 3.)
The fighting also exposed the Iraqi army
as a hollow shell, much as the Laos invasion
revealed the incompetence of ARVN. While Petraeus
was telling the senate that "recent operations in
Basra highlight improvements in the ability of the
Iraqi security forces to deploy substantial
numbers of units, supplies and replacements on a
very short notice", journalists were reporting
that thousands of Iraqi troops refused to fight
and abandoned their weapons.
According to
Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail of the Inter Press
Service, much of the Iraqi army simply
disintegrated. A Baghdad police colonel told
reporters that the "Iraqi army and police forces,
as well as the Da'wa and Badr militias, suddenly
disappeared from the streets, leaving their
armored vehicles for the Mahdi militia to drive
around in joyful convoys". The Badr militia is
associated with the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council,
a major ally of Maliki's Da'wa party. Like the
Mahdi Army, both parties are Shi'ite.
So,
after three years and $22 billion in training and
equipment, the Iraqi army got shellacked. The only
thing that prevented a full-scale rout was the
intervention of US troops and air support.
While the Americans have tried to distance
themselves from the disaster by claiming that
Maliki never consulted with them, historian Porter
argues that the claim is ludicrous. "No
significant Iraqi military action can be planned
without a range of military support functions
being undertaken by the US command," he writes,
pointing out that US trainers are embedded with
every unit in the Iraqi security forces.
It's
the oil Rather than as an assault on
"criminal militias", virtually every independent
observer saw the attack as an effort by Maliki and
the Americans to take control of Basra's oil
resources preliminary to turning them over to
private oil conglomerates. Standing in the way of
both those goals was the nationalist-minded Mahdi
Army as well as Iraq's oil and dockworkers unions.
As the George W Bush administration saw
it, a successful attack on the Mahdi Army would
not only clear the way for privatizing the Iraqi
oil industry, it would demonstrate that the Iraqi
army was ready "to stand up", thus boosting the
campaign of Republican presidential candidate John
McCain.
But as Prussian soldier and
military historian Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
once pointed out, no plan survives contact with
the enemy. Historical analogies are tricky. They
may obscure as much as they reveal. But history is
the only guide we have, and it is one the Bush
administration has willfully chosen to ignore.
As it did in Vietnam, the United States
looks at Iraq though the lens of firepower and
troop deployments. But war is not just about
things that blow up, and occupiers always ignore
the point of view of the occupied.
For
starters, people don't like losing control of
their country. With the exceptions of the Kurds
and Maliki and his allies, Iraqis are
overwhelmingly opposed to the occupation. That
disconnect between occupied and occupiers was
summed up by Luu Doan Huynh, a Vietnamese veteran
of the war against the Japanese, the French, and
the Americans, and one of the key diplomats in the
Vietnam peace talks. "The Americans thought that
Vietnam was a war," he said. "We knew that Vietnam
was our country."
Conn Hallinan is
a Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org)
columnist.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
