Iraq War: Fog of (Guerrilla) War

The kind of news coming out of Iraq right now is a real "fog of war" situation.  It's hard to get a good idea of what's happening, much less what we should make of it.

But listening to many of the statements coming from American officials and war cheerleaders like the sad David Brooks, I'm reminded again that the Army didn't learn from Vietnam that they needed to prepare to fight guerrilla wars and approach them in a sensible way.  Instead, they learned that they should avoid guerrilla wars.  Now they have one, and they are left approaching it as a conventional war.

Back in September, I quoted from Andrew Krepinevich, Jr., in his 1986 book The Army and Vietnam, a thoughtful analysis and criticism of the Army's unwillingness to embrace a thoroughgoing counter-insurgency strategy in Vietnam, and its implications for later developments (p. 9-10):

In a conventional war, supplies and support are brought up from the rear to support combat operations focused on the destruction of the enemy's armed forces.  In an insurgency, supplies and support are at the front, among the people, and the direction of the logistical flow is opposite that of the line of advance (it flows from the "front lines" - the people - to the insurgents' rear base areas.) ... A common error on the part of "conventional" military people has been to view the interruption of infiltration or external support for the guerrillas as the key to isolating and defeating the insurgents.

So, we are hearing assurances that the occupation forces can retake the cities now controlled by the insurgents, which reportedly includes a big part of Baghdad at the moment, and that is no doubt true.  And is beside the point for the larger political and military goals at which the insurgents aim.  The guerrillas don't need to hold cities.  They need to show that the government, the occupation authority, can't provide securityto its Iraqi supporters (aka, collaborators).

And we're hearing the inevitable reports of "external support," which even if partially true are beside the point of dealing with the insurgency:  Iran's role in violence a mystery - 
Conflicting motivations beg question: Is Tehran friend or foe of militias? San Francisco Chronicle 04/10/04.   If Bush and Rummy decide to expand the war to Iran, let's hope they have better information on Iran's "meddling" in Iraq (Rummy's word) than they did on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction."  One disastrous war based on bad intelligence is already one too many.