Gyroscope

A newsletter for those unmoved by spin.
No. 8, September 15, 2003

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What's going on in Iraq? Is it quagmire or slow progress or something new? I've read quite a bit of Anthony Cordesman's analysis on a number of subjects and they tend to be sober and evenhanded.

His latest piece on Iraq sounds so much like Vietnam about 1964. His perspiration is for all the right measures to counter a guerrilla campaign, and we can see the army not doing many of them. Vietnam was a long time ago, Somalia was also a while back, but it appears that there is a good chance that the American army still hasn't learned how to fight a guerrilla war.

I heard on TV (so it must be true!) that before the actual war, there was some war game fought using Iraq as a situation. The American general charged with playing the Iraqi side took a full blown guerrilla war option - and won. I've never seen anything confirming this.

Read a good history of guerilla war such as "War in the Shadows". I didn't keep a running total, but I strongly suspect that, going back to ancient Greece and running forward to Vietnam, that the guerrilla has a winning record against regular armies.

Why? Regular armies kill innocent civilians and generate new enemies. Regular armies are trained to apply massive force first and ask questions later. Even the LA Police Department has begun to learn that doesn't really work when half the people you encounter are not (yet) your enemies. Regular armies have massive logistical 'tails' that are vulnerable. They move slowly, use massive amounts of people and leak intelligence through the many locals who inevitably wind up working for the army, watching the army or having sex with the troops.

Even if our army has learned about guerrilla war, and I'm willing to bet many of its leaders have, our insecure and arrogant political leadership will never listen to Iraqis or suspect that anyone outside its inner circle has any knowledge worth listening too. An inability to learn from the locals is also a major fault of conventional forces fighting an opposition hidden within the people.

So the conventional army hunkers down, occupying strong points and gives up the countryside to the guerrilla. They count the objective as targets won and land taken and no one notices how the people are slowly turning against them.

People who try to draw attention to the problem are dismissed as "soft hearted", civilian deaths are inevitable in war, the claim is made, and anyone who thinks they are a problem is laughed at as being naive.

If the enemy civilians seem not to like us, this is just further proof of their backward nature, their need to be guided by us. In time, it is said, they will come to love us as we show that we cannot be resisted.

As things get tougher, the conventional army lashes out with more and more force. Both by policy, and by accidents caused by jumpy recruits, the civilian deaths climb, and more of the people turn against us as foreign occupiers.

One thing that is different this time is that the media is much more in the hands of the conservatives. Will quagmire in Iraq happen? Not the question. Even if quagmire does happen, will it be shown on the news? Will the problem just be ignored - already the deaths of Americans are downplayed. And Afghanistan? Doesn't even exist any more.

"What is Next in Iraq? Military Developments, Military Requirements and Armed Nation Building", Anthony H. Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Aug. 25, 2003

Quotes from the above article:

"There is an ongoing debate among US government and outside experts over who the enemy is, and the relative strength and role of Saddam/Ba’ath loyalists, postwar Iraqi nationalists, Iraqi Sunni groups, outside Arab volunteers, and outside organized Islamic extremists groups – some of which have at least loose ties to Al Qaida.

The problem is that all of these groups are involved to some degree, and it is almost impossible to make an accurate count or assessment of the strength, role, and trends in any one element. Intelligence analysts are speculating on the basis of their favorite threat, conspiracy theories abound, and the media seem ready to print or air virtually halfway convincing story." p.1

"The US must seek to win as quickly as possible and it cannot win in Iraq by fighting on the defense. There is no conceivable way it US can protect everything or even enough by focusing on defensive action. It must provide security for its own presence, allies and international organizations, contractors, and friendly Iraqis. It must protect the key links in infrastructure and the economy. Unless it can hunt down and seize or kill the opposition, however, it will always see new successful attacks and sabotage.

The key to winning in this offensive mission is not numbers, but intelligence, skilled cadres of expert troops, area and language specialists, mixed with constant civic action and political warfare to win heats and minds. This is a totally different force from precision air strikes but still a very expert and very disciplined one. Force quality counts and not force quantity. In fact, the smaller and more surgical US offensive operations are, the better.

In hostile areas, the need is for more informed, well-trained and disciplined, and restrained armed protection of nation building along with civic action. Quality troops that have the skills and training to work beside, and with, Iraqis are critical. Isolated force-protection oriented cadres are often a liability" p. 6

From "War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History" (Robert B. Asprey, (1975, Doubleday), p. 308:

"Intervention in another country's affairs is a delicate matter at best. Whatever happens, the intervening agent is apt to reap the lion's share of the blame if things go wrong and none of the resultant credit if they go right. Primarily for this reason, the objective of the intervening party must be sufficiently important to warrant the risk to prestige. Its importance can be defined only by a careful spelling out of one or more specific aims, as opposed to aconglomerate ambition made the more meaningless by the frippery of legalistic and moralistic window dressing. As an operating rule of thumb: the more vage the stated objective, the less the validity and, in natural corollary, the less the chance of attainment."