Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information describes a basic problem in the current US approach in Iraq: The Second End to Major Hostilities? 12/23/03 (.pdf file):
The occupation has been converting what were once welcoming, neutral, or merely taciturn Iraqis – for now mostly Sunnis -- into willing irregular fighters protected by a population that is either hostile and bitterly anxious for the Americans to be gone or simply offended and, for now, seeing no alternative to waiting for the Americans to be gone.
It started with the looting back in May, when our forces – their number inadequate to the task – were ordered to stand by and watch as Iraqi society disintegrated. It continued with the lawlessness exacerbated by American troops responding to guerrilla attacks as if they were on a conventional battlefield and hunting down the enemy as if he were bandits isolated from the population. Apartment buildings riddled with holes from American machine guns, homes bombed from the air based on a tipster’s whisper, relatives imprisoned to help us find people beyond Saddam our intelligence can’t locate, and our soldiers blaring rock music while they bulldoze centuries-old groves of date and citrus trees: they tell us such insults are the exigencies of war. They also expand the ranks of a broader resistance and strengthen its resolve. ...
Iraq is not Vietnam, but we need to heed old lessons. After the American defeat in that war, a U.S. Army officer remarked to a North Vietnamese that his forces never defeated the American Army in a major tactical engagement. The North Vietnamese responded, "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant." Guerrilla wars are won and lost at the moral and strategic levels. The tactical fighting is an extension of the higher conflict; in fact, how tactical engagements are fought is at least as important as whether they are won.
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