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June 13, 2003
Guerrilla
Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.
Tacitus posted a speculation that what is happening in Iraq right now - the daily attacks, and the US response - is the beginning of an organized guerilla war, with substantial support from the population. He asks where others who supported the war stand on this.
My opinion: Tacitus is mostly correct. Events in Iraq today are mostly a result of the fact that the Iraqi power structure was not really defeated in their own mind. Certainly, the government was thrown down and the army and police disbanded, but Saddam and his sons are still at large, and the people who had the power before the war still have it now to a large extent, though the scope of their power is much reduced. This, combined with the large caches of small arms, machine guns and RPGs in Iraq, means that the ingredients for an uprising in central Iraq - particularly the area between the rivers to Tikrit - are all in place: leadership, a grudge, fighters, weapons, a target.
But I don't think that the situation is going to get bad, unless the military has suddenly become willfully blind to reality on the ground. In Iraq, we have all of the capabilities and rules of engagement to end this quickly. We can remove the leadership by killing, capturing or determining the fate of Saddam Hussein and his sons, and by rousting out the Ba'athists, who are largely well-known - and we are doing this. These operations remove many of the fighters as well, though foreign fighters will continue to be a problem until we kill them and figure out how to stem the supply.
We can remove the grudge by building local governments and putting forth a set of concrete steps towards Iraqi independence. We have not done this very well yet, and time is running down on this. We have to make clear what is necessary for us to turn Iraq back over to the Iraqis - not a time frame but a sequence of steps - before we become the enemy to the broad mass of Iraqis.
The weapons are a problem, because Iraqis have a legitimate need to own them in a society where there is not good order. That said, I think at the very least, we need to round up the RPGs. That will reduce the lethality of attacks on us without undermining legitimate self-defense by Iraqis. If we were to form local militias, along with the local governments, and give them the power to enforce good order in their areas, this would go a long way to removing the grudge, the weapons and the fighters and putting people more on our side. I don't think that we can disarm Iraq in time otherwise. We need to get locals disarming those who cannot be trusted with the arms, rather than having US troops do so (except in exceptional circumstances, as where the nascent guerillas are too strong for the local militia to handle).
As long as we are there, and as long as we show real power in the street, we will be a target. The only fix for this - short of leaving the job undone - is to do the job. Until and unless we fix Iraqi society for real, we are going to be targets.
Where I think we've been falling down, as far as I can tell from existing reports, is in allowing local self-government, and only stepping in to fix the local issues when it's obvious that the local governments are failing or have to learn how to govern properly. If we set up a clear set of rules, including the rights we expect to be respected for all Iraqis, and then let the local governments figure out how to govern, we'll come out ahead of the game. If we don't - and indications are we are not - let local governments form organically under a defined set of rules, we are risking the long-term objective of stabilizing Iraq, because we are setting up conditions where we would just leave and let a new strongman take over. This would undermine the entire war on terror, so it cannot be allowed to happen.
As a side note, the situation in Iraq, as with the situation in Afghanistan, shows the downside of the American way of warfighting. We win very quickly, but very lightly. We throw down the enemy, but we do not kill large numbers of people or destroy large amounts of national wealth. This is good, in that it is humane, but it is bad, in that it drags out the endgame. By not being brutal, we leave the enemy undefeated in his own mind. He has lost nothing, in his mind, but position. He is still intact, and his country is still intact. Much of the good will he had - to the extent that it was present before the war - is unchanged, and his supporters are often powerful in the followon regimes.
This is OK, I think, in cirumstances where we don't care what happens after we solve the immediate problem (vis Kuwait in 1991, or Haiti any time we've intervened there, or arguably in Afghanistan). It is not so good where we want to build a functioning society before we leave. In those cases, we more troops dedicated to nation building and civil administration - in other words, a ready-to-go occupation force, to replace the heavy divisions once they've done their work.
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