The Diplomatic Times Review

The likely impact of the divergent groups, in the long-run, is that U.S. deaths from relentless ambushes, snipers fire and suicide bombings will wear down U.S. and "coalition forces" and create conditions that will cause public support in the U.S for the war to erode further. As the death toll continues to rise, and the crippled and maimed become more visible, citizens will demand that U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq. As Ivan Eland wrote in an article headlined "Morning in Iraq" and published in the July 7, 2004, edition of Media Monitors Network:

Although the U.S. military believes that the center of gravity in the continuing Iraq War is the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, the Iraqi insurgents believe, as did the North Vietnamese almost 40 years ago, that the center of gravity lies with the hearts and minds of the American people. The Iraqi insurgents must be pleased that in the age of 24-hour news, the Iraq War became unpopular in the United States much faster than the years needed to drain away American public support for the Vietnam conflict. Why would the Iraqi insurgents stop fighting when they are winning? Military experts say that the United States is winning tactically (specific battles), but losing operationally, strategically and on the level of grand strategy. This abysmal state of affairs replicates the U.S. experience in Vietnam, in which the United States won every battle and lost the war because the American public eventually became tired, disillusioned and exasperated with it.

Milt Bearden, who, in his own words, "served as the Central Intelligence Agency's quartermaster and political agent to the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation from 1986 until the Soviets left in 1989," correctly analyzed the insurgents' strategy in a November 9, 2003 piece in The New York Times headlined "Iraqi Insurgents Take page From Afghan Soviet Resistance." For example, these paragraphs still apply:

As the daily attacks against American forces in Iraq increase in number and sophistication, the Bush administration continues to portray its adversaries as an assortment of die-hard Baathists, criminals, thugs and foreign terrorists, all acting out of desperation. Certainly, there are Baathists and foreign terrorists operating against the American-led coalition, and their ranks probably include criminals. But the overarching reality is that the American and British forces are facing a resourceful adversary whose game plan may be more fully developed than originally thought.

And that is what is happening despite claims by American Forces Press Service that a Hotline established by U.S. occupation forces is "succeeding In foiling Iraqi insurgents," and boasts about the capture of dozens of insurgents. Insurgents, including leaders, will continue to be killed or captured. It has been that way for centuries. If the Iraqi insurgency follows the standard insurgency blueprint new leaders and new guerillas will step forward. So will a political arm. It will send out feelers for negotiations. In fact, some groups seem to have already offered feelers although it is difficult to tell who they are. Such gestures usually cause some uniformed Americans to suggest that the insurgents are losing, and see the handwriting on the wall. That's not necessarily so. In fact, it's rarely the case. U.S. military leaders understand this. The potency of the insurgency caused the Army to issue "a field guide to counterinsurgency warfare, an acknowledgment that the kind of fighting under way in Iraq may become more common in the years ahead." As Douglas Jehl and Thom Shanker with Eric Schmitt noted in a November 13, 2004 article in The New York Times:

The Army field manual on counterinsurgency operations is the first since the early Vietnam era, and the first ever intended for the kind of regular Army units now embroiled in battles in Iraq, as opposed to the Special Operations forces who have taken the lead in previous counterinsurgencies.

Under orders issued in February, the manual was prepared on an accelerated basis by the Combined Arms Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and was distributed to all officers, in Iraq and elsewhere, beginning last month. An introduction says the "aftermath of instability" in Iraq that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime underscored the need for an updated Army guide to counterinsurgency warfare.
Until now, formal American military doctrine for fighting insurgencies has been so limited that many Marines were deployed to Iraq with copies of the Marine Corps' "Small Wars Manual," issued in 1940. The most recent Army guides on the subject, written principally for Special Operations forces, were prepared in 1963 and 1965, in the early stages of the Vietnam War. Like the Army, the Marine Corps is also updating its manual.

The new Army guide contains instructions on such matters as searching a family car and setting up a hasty checkpoint. Other passages address the role played by "transnational insurgents," like the foreign fighters in Iraq, and emphasize the role of intelligence, rather than Vietnam-era search and destroy missions, in finding insurgents.

"A long-term U.S. combat role may undermine the legitimacy of the H.N. government and risks converting the conflict into a U.S.-only war," the manual says, using an abbreviation for host nation. "That combat role can also further alienate cultures that are hostile to the U.S."

My final point on this subject is that, if the U.S. builds so-called "enduring bases" in Iraq as planned, another "likely impact of (apparently) widely divergent objectives on the part of different groups of insurgents on the future of the insurgency" is that, they will continue to work parallel to each other to try to destroy those bases, and drive out the Americans, who probably will have been abandoned by their "coalition allies" by then. As David R. Francis, The Christian Science Monitor's chief economics correspondent noted in a September 30, 2004 article headlined "U.S. bases in Iraq: sticky politics, hard math, "a dozen is the number of so-called "enduring bases" located by John Pike, director of GlobalSecurities.org. His military affairs website gives their names. They include, for example, Camp Victory at the Baghdad airfield and Camp Renegade in Kirkuk. The Chicago Tribune last March said U.S. engineers are constructing 14 "enduring bases," but Mr. Pike hasn't located two of them."

Finally, Mr. Britt asks, "at what point does the enthusiasm of some Sunnis for massacring Shiites become a factor in our relations with Iran?" Question: where is the evidence of "the enthusiasm" of some Sunnis for massacring Shiites? If a massacre occurs, how do you place a value such as "enthusiasm" on it? If there are massacres, what do they have to do with U.S.-Iran relations? If U.S. forces massacred Shias--and I don't know that they have or haven't--I could see that impacting U.S.-Iran relations. But not a Sunni-Shia fight unless Iran applies the "but for" rule, which, as those in law knows, means but for your actions, this wouldn't have happened.

Here's a link to comments in response to Mr. Britt's post.

Posted by Munir Umrani at May 1, 2005 02:36 AM

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