Iraq War: State of the insurgency

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

I seek out articles and commentary on the Iraq War all the time.  So it's hard for me to tell when the Iraq news is getting more general attention than at other times.  It seems to me that it has been getting more than usual in the mainstream press the last week or two.

The Knight-Ridder news service continues to provide some of the best reporting on the war.  Nancy Youssef reports on the insurgency: Iraq's insurgency persistent, deadly and flexible 05/18/05

Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman, estimates there are up to 20,000 inveterate insurgents in the country and 162,000 trained Iraqi security personnel, which is consistent with earlier U.S. government estimates. Gen. Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani, the Iraqi intelligence chief, estimated in early January that there were 40,000 hardcore insurgents. It's unclear how U.S. or Iraqi authorities count insurgents. ...

U.S. and Iraqi officials break down the insurgency into four major groups, all dominated by Sunni Muslim Arabs: Baathists from the former regime of Saddam Hussein who want to resurrect the old government; nationalists who want a state absent of foreign intervention; Sunni Arab Islamists fighting a holy war against occupiers and against domination by Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority; and foreign jihadists, who think Iraq is a good battlefield to fight the United States. ...

The fact that the surge in violence began one day after the new government was named suggests that the insurgency has no plan other than to thwart any government, Iraqi government officials said. ...

Even so, Sunni  Arab groups have some common demands, namely a timetable for when the multinational forces will leave. Others want to be included in the new political process. Still others consider any government elected under occupation illegitimate. Those groups want their attacks to show just what little control the new government has over its country's security.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) also has a new, long paper out on the insurgency and the progress of counterinsurgency efforts:  Iraq's Evolving Insurgency by Anthony Cordesman with Patrick Baetjer "Working Draft", 05/19/05 version (*.pdf file).  I'm likely to be quoting from it more than once.

Let's start with the section "America's Strategic Mistakes."  That heading is a bit generous to the current administration; it could be called "The Bush Administration's Strategic Mistakes."  But let's not quibble.  Cordesman writes:

The United States made major strategic mistakes in preparing to deal with this situation. It did demonstrate that it could fight the war it planned to fight: a conventional regional war with remarkable efficiency, at low cost, and very quickly. The problem was that the US chose a strategy whose post-conflict goals were unrealistic and impossible to achieve, and only planned for the war it wanted to fight and not for the “peace” that was certain to follow.

Its most obvious mistake was its basic rationale for going to war: A threat from based on intelligence estimates of Iraqi efforts to create weapons of mass destruction that the US later found did not exist. At a grand strategic level, however, the Bush Administration and the senior leadership of the US military made the far more serious mistake of wishing away virtually all of the real world problems in stability operations and nation building
and making massive policy and military errors that created much of the climate of insurgency in Iraq. (my emphasis)

It's important to remember that behind the scenes, at least behind the scenes of what makes it onto the front pages of the paper normally, there is already a furious game of placing blame for "who lost Iraq."  The more conservative Army officers who would still love togo back to planning to fight the Soviet Army Central pouring throught the Fulda Gap will be happy to blame Rumsfeld and his meddling civilians for all the problems.  Rummy will be happy to blame pretty much anybody.

Understanding what is happening in the war, and also understanding whatever "lessons of the war" are learned (or at least declared!) afterwards requires keeping this dynamic in mind.  Cordesman's paper is helpful in that regard.  There will be more than enough blame to go around:

[I]t is also clear that too much credence was given to ideologues and true believers in the ease with which such a war could be fought and in effective nation building. These included leading neoconservatives in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Office of the Vice President, and some officials in the National Security Council, as well as in several highly politicized “think tanks.” ...

These problems were compounded by leadership within the Office of the Secretary of Defense that put intense pressure on the US military to plan for the lowest possible level of US military deployment, and then for delays in that deployment because of the political need to avoid appearing precipitous to the UN. At the same time, the leadership of the US military actively resisted planning for, and involvement in, large-scale and enduring stability and nation building activity, and failed to plan and deploy for the risk of a significant insurgency. (my emphasis)

And those are just some of the major items he lists!

I want to call attention again to that last statement quoted.  I'm happy to see Rummy and his henchmen take lots of blame for this mess.  But what he says about the generals' failures in strategic planning is also important.  The generals want to fight Soviet Army Central, not a counterinsurgency war.  The US military is structured, trained and armed for nuclear war and for conventional war.  Not for counterinsurgency.  And they want to stay away from nation-building because that's too close to involvement in Vietnam- and Iraq- and Afghanistan-type wars that they would rather avoid.

Not that that is an entirely unhealthy instinct.  But everyone should try to be realistic about what decisions along those lines mean.  If we want to fight Bush-style wars of liberation to bring the blessings of freedom and democracyto other countries by bullets, bombs and torture, the military needs to be prepared to fight counterinsurgency wars and engage in nation-building functions.

Cordesman's paper is worth checking out.  I've found that his commentary is always worth paying attention to, even when I find myself disagreeing with him.