"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.
Having observed some of the "lessons" people learned from the Vietnam War experience, from the military officer corps to politicians to ordinary citizens and voters, I've tried to pay particular attention to the contemporary analyses and criticisms of the Iraq War. Because if the way the Vietnam War is remembered is any measure, in a few years from now people will be saying some pretty fantastic things about what the contemporary debate really included.
Articles on the Iraq War are pouring out right now. Here are some of the better ones I've recently come across.
One of our leading military analysts, Stephen Biddle, has attracted understandable attention for his article in the Mar/Apr 2006 Foreign Affairs, Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon. (For future reference, if you're looking up this journal online, you need to go to www.ForeignAffairs.ORG. If you pick www.foreignaffairs.com, you may be surprised that its not an Establishment foreign policy publication coming up on the screen.)
Biddle's article tries to suggest a possible way to salvage Bush's "stay the course" policy. I think that is Mission Impossible at this point. But this is what military analysts do, look at various options. And desppite being a proposal to achieve the hopeless, it has some interesting observations.
His title refers to hisargument that the Iraq War should not be seen as a "Maoist people's war", which is how he describes the Vietnam conflict. Rather, he call it a "communal civil war". That word "communal" somehow seems to be popping up a lot lately. I'll admit that I may be missing some nuance of the word that those more "in the know" would pick up on. References would be appreciated if anyone has any.
Here's the bottom line of Biddle's proposal:
But if the debate in Washington is Vietnam redux, the war in Iraq is not. The current struggle is not a Maoist "people's war" of national liberation; it is a communal civil war with very different dynamics. Although it is being fought at low intensity for now,it could easily escalate if Americans and Iraqis make the wrong choices.
Unfortunately, many of the policies dominating the debate are ill adapted to the war being fought. Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces, in particular, is likely to make matters worse. Such a policy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it. Washington must stop shifting the responsibility for the country's security to others and instead threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in order to force them to come to a durable compromise. Only once an agreement is reached should Washington consider devolving significant military power and authority to local forces.
Yes, you read that right. He says the US should hold on to the leading role in the counterinsurgency fight for an extended period and shift sides among the three major "communal" groups in order to manipulate them into behaving the way we want them to. Actually, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad seems to have been attempting something like the latter the last few weeks.
Biddle puts it in Foreign Affair's requisite policy-geek language. But he clearly recognizes some of the key obstacles to even trying such a strategy:
Putting such a program in place would not be easy. It would deny President Bush the chance to offer restless Americans an early troop withdrawal, replace a Manichaean narrativefeaturing evil insurgents and a noble government with a complicated story of multiparty interethnic intrigue, and require that Washington be willing to shift its loyalties in the conflict according to the parties' readiness to negotiate. Explaining these changes to U.S. voters would be a challenge. Washington would have to recalibrate its dealings with Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds with great precision, making sure to neither unduly frighten nor unduly reassure any of the groups. Even the most adroit diplomacy could fail if the Iraqis do not grasp the strategic logic of their situation or if a strong and sensible Sunni political leadership does not emerge. And the failure to reach a stable ethnic compromise soon could strain the U.S. military beyond its breaking point. (my emphasis)
Putting in more everyday terms, to do what Biddle says, we would have to forget the last four years of hearing how everything about Saddam and his regime were evil beyond imagination and suddenly strat siding sometimes with those groups we used to called "Baathist remnants" and such. Not only that, we would have to encourage the Sunni insurgent groups we've been figthing since the summer of 2003, the insurgents who have killed over 2000 of our troops, we would have to encourage them to form a strong leadership among themselves. Doing so would allow them to be more reliable negotiating partners - and of course we would be negotiating actively and openly with those evil, cruel, inhuman, barbaric, monstrous, despicable killers that Bush and Co. have asked us to despise these last four years. A more effective leadership would, of course, presumably make their resistance actions more effective at those times that we're tilting against them.
Here is where the Bush administration is trapped not only by its own approach to rallying support for it's GWOT (global war on terror). Its also trapped by the nature of today's Republican Party. They obviously have been able to switch their Party line with amazing effectiveness for most of the last five years. But the public outcry over the UAE port-security deal is evidence that even the increasingly authoritarian Republican Party can't just change direction on everything overnight. And the enormous influence of the Christian Right with their "Manichean", good-vs-evil, apocalyptic view of war, especially in the Middle East, will also make it difficult to shift back and forth between first supporting and then opposing the various major groups in Iraq.
As Franklin Roosevelt said in the 1944 speech I quoted in a recent post, "We have all seen many marvelous stunts in the circus but no performing elephant could turn a hand-spring without falling flat on his back."
There are a couple of things about Biddle's article that are not central to his policy proposal but are worth noting. There's something forced about the distinction he tries to draw between "Maoist people's war" and "communal civil war". I don't recall that the Vietnamese Communists, who had a brief but serious military clash with China not long after Saigon fell, normally described their struggle as "Maoist". But the style of revolutionary war they practiced was very close, so I'm willing to see that as a valid description.
But here is how he frames the distinction:
A Maoist people's war is, at bottom, a struggle for good governance between a class-based insurgency claiming to represent the interests of the oppressed public and a ruling regime portrayed by the insurgents as defending entrenched privilege. Using a mix of coercion and inducements, the insurgents and the regime compete for the allegiance of a common pool of citizens, who could, in principle, take either side. A key requirement for the insurgents' success, arguably, is an ideological program - people's wars are wars of ideas as much as they are killing competitions - and nationalism is often at the heart of this program. Insurgents frame their resistance as an expression of the people's sovereign will to overthrow an illegitimate regime that represents only narrow class interests or is backed by a foreign government.
Communal civil wars, in contrast, feature opposing subnational groups divided along ethnic or sectarian lines; they are not about universal class interests or nationalist passions. In such situations, even the government is typically an instrument of one communal group, and its opponents champion the rights of their subgroup over those of others. These conflicts do not revolve around ideas, because no pool of uncommitted citizens is waiting to be swayed by ideology. (Albanian Kosovars, Bosnian Muslims, and Rwandan Tutsis knew whoseside they were on.) The fight is about group survival, not about the superiority of one party's ideology or one side's ability to deliver better governance.
The problem I see with this is that it seems Biddle is overstating the extent to which an amorphous group identity among Sunnits, Shi'a and Kurds is decisive and downplaying other factors. Although he refers to those groups by name and also to "sectarian" differences, the word "religion" doesn't appear in his article. And, in fact, Islam clearly provides a great deal of ideological inspiration and even strategic guidance in the Iraq conflict. Unless we artifically define "ideology" to exclude religious beliefs about politics, it's clear that ideology does play a huge role in this conflict.
Likewise, the notion that nationalism is a minor factor also seems misleading. Muqtada Al Sadr's Shi'a group takes a more Iraqi-nationalist position than the larger and more Iran-oriented parties SCIRI and Da'wa. The Sunnis presumably want to hold Iraq together in its current form, with the Sunnis back in charge, in order to avoid being excluded from the oil production in the Shi'a and Kurdish areas. The Kurds obviously have a strong nationalistic inspiration, too; it's just that it's Kurdish nationalism rather than Iraqi nationalism.
Also, he says some odd things about the criticism of the war. In the very first paragraph, he declares, "According to the antiwar movement, the struggle is already over, because, as it did in Vietnam, Washington has lost hearts and minds in Iraq, and so the United States should withdraw."
Well, not exactly. Obviously, there are lots of antiwar critics with many different viewpoints. But that seems to be a strange formulation. What war critics mainly say is that things are plainly going badly, for whatever reason. And since there is no practical possibility of the US fielding enough troops in the immediate future to hope to suppress the insurrection and the growing civil war, even if there were to be massive conscription which the Bush administration and the Republican Party are clearly not going to propose as things stand now, the prospects for a good outcome for the US diminish by the day.
Widespread public opposition in Iraq to the American presence is obvious a major elementof the problem. But I don't recall seeing any war critics basing their judgment of even that phenomenon on some shallow Vietnam War analogy.
This comment also struck me as very odd: "Journalists scorn U.S. officers who insist on overusing firepower - a mistake made in Vietnam - and lionize those who try to bring good governance to Iraq by holding local council elections, fixing sewers, and getting the trash picked up - the good lessons of Vietnam." Is he relying on FOX News talking heads for this observation? A great deal of the press coverage has been pitifully uncritical. But what journalist in the mainstream press has expressed "scorn" for US officers on the air power issue? Seymour Hersh? Robert Fisk? Tom Lasseter? Judith Miller? Bob Woodward? (Little joke on those last two.)
In fact, the two writers I've seen emphasize the increasing reliance on airpower that is part of the current strategy are academics, not journalists, Tom Engelhardt and Juan Cole. And only in the OxyContin fantasies of the Freeper crowd have they expressed scorn for US officers on that particular issue that I've ever seen.
Now several of those (obviously not the warmongering Judith Miller or the court historian Bob Woodward) have expressed major concerns about the strategy of escalating bombing. I recently quoted Andrew Bacevich (an academic and former officer himself) on the risks of overestimating the precision of bombing, and the negative political effects of killing civilian noncombatants with it, on top of the moral issues involved. But far from expressing "scorn" on this issue, most press coverage has scandalously ignored it.
Thse are the kind of things that a few years from now will be popping up after being passed through the urban folklore process and coming out as, "critics of the war expressed total scorn for the officers fighting it" and "war critics just said its like Vietnam and claimed everybody in Iraq supported The Terrorists". God himself probably can't prevent that urban-folklore process from occurring, short of some kind of repeat of Noah's Flood. But serious journals like Foreign Affairs might show a little more caution in carelessly encouraging it.
I've been ragging on Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo for beingarightwing isolationist lately. But he shows his analytic ability in an article commenting on Biddle's article, called Biddle's Pivot: The ominous implications of a new strategy for winning the war in Iraq Antiwar.com 03/08/06. And he shows some creative imagination in observing one very possible implication of Biddle's proposal:
However, Biddle's strategy, as irrational and counterintuitive as it appears, does make a certain amount of sense. Seen in light of the looming confrontation with Iran, an alliance with the Sunnis against the pro-Iranian Shi'ite parties that dominate the central government in Baghdad is not only sensible: it is inevitable. Biddle's proposal paves the way for the U.S. to pivot from the present intervention to the next. ...
If we are moving toward war with Iran and its Syrian ally, then it is perfectly logical to change course and try to rehabilitate Iyad Allawi, the "ex"-Ba'athist official whose party, the Iraqi National Accord, was soundly defeated in the recent elections for National Assembly (despite large amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars funneled into his campaign coffers). As a strategy to advance the grand design of the War Party – "democratizing," i.e., subjugating, the entire Middle East – Biddle's scenario is persuasive.
I'm not sure Allawi is necessarily so central to any such strategy. But there is some real plausibility to his idea, and may be partially behind Khalilzad's attempts to tilt more toward the Sunnis. If we're going to bomb Iraq's nuclear facilities, the Shi'a parties in Iraq are likely to become much more hostile to the United States. Even Muqtada's has said his group would defend Iran in such a case. So if we have 135,000 sitting there as targets for Iran and their Iraqi allies, it makes some sense that we would want the Sunnis at least feeling less hostile to the US.
None of this is to suggest that any of these scenarios lead to anything but a deepening disaster. The chance for good or even half-decent results from the US point of view are gone. The question is are we going to accept a bad alternative like rapid withdrawal, or stay there while the possible options get worse and worse. As this quote with which I end so many of my Iraq War posts says:
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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