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Descending
into the quagmire
By
Daniel Smith
Foreign Policy in Focus
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Between
May 1, when President George W Bush declared that major combat in Iraq was over,
and June 26, 57 US and eight UK military personnel have died in Iraq. That is
more than one death every day. To the US and UK toll must be added the sometimes
tens or scores of Iraqis, both Saddamists - military, intelligence, Fedayeen,
non-Iraqi volunteers - and innocent civilians.
Having splashed the president's declaration over their electronic and newspaper
front pages and magazine covers, the media are edging ever so gingerly toward
serious questioning of what kind of "war" US and UK troops (the
"Authority") are fighting in Iraq.
"Counterinsurgency," a 1960s buzzword, has already re-appeared in some
reports. The dreaded "quagmire" has also been voiced. The Pentagon
denies it is doing "body counts" - although the media always seem to
know the number of guerrilla dead. Can "free fire zones", "five
o'clock follies" (the daily official US military briefings in Saigon) and
"light at the end of the tunnel" be far off?
These phrases bring to mind Bernard Fall, author, chronicler and journalist in
the Vietnam War. Very early in that war - December 10, 1964 - Fall delivered a
lecture at the Naval War College on "The Theory and Practice of Insurgency
and Counterinsurgency". Parts of his presentation seem as current today in
the context of Iraq as they were in 1964 for Vietnam.
For example, Fall believed that the real objective of guerrilla (or small) war
methods is to advance "an ideology or a political system". The US
government saw fighting as the primary challenge and responded by seeking a
military solution. In so doing, it misjudged the depth and extent of political
action by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong - the primacy of "political,
ideological and administrative" control - and thus the true nature of their
"revolutionary warfare". Moreover, in failing to properly assess the
political and ideological (nationalistic) forces at work in Vietnam, the Lyndon
B Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations tended to mischaracterize (or
ignore) the multitudinous economic and social cross-currents that were
represented by those committed to the cause of Vietnam unification under
Vietnamese leaders.
The result was a steady buildup of US personnel and equipment and the
expenditures of billions of dollars, none of which brought the US any nearer to
the tunnel's end - but all of which added to the casualties on both sides and
exponentially increased the alienation of the civilian population. Even Buddhist
monks protested, with some expressing their opposition to the repressive Saigon
government and the actions of its US ally through self-immolation. As Fall
noted, "One can do almost anything with brute force except salvage an
unpopular government."
History repeating Itself
The
Bush administration seems headed toward committing the same mistakes of its
Vietnam-era predecessors - plus a number of its own. Washington expected that
the dominate Shi'ite (62 percent) population, long subservient to the minority
Sunnis (35 percent), would at least welcome its "liberation" by the
Western coalition forces, if not assist them in ousting Saddam Hussein and his
Ba'ath Party cronies. Instead, the dominant reaction has been a growing
disillusionment with and sustained protests about the continuing absence of
basic services - water, electricity, telephone, garbage and sewage removal,
basic policing, and physical security - for all classes of Shi'ites and Sunnis
under the coalition occupation.
Prior to the US attack in March, the Iraqi people were promised participation in
a post-war effort to build a functioning interim democratic governance
structure. In April, two meetings of 43 and 250 Iraqi "leaders"
selected by retired General Jay Garner, the Pentagon's man-on-the-scene, were
held "to advance the national dialogue among Iraqis regarding composition
of an Iraqi interim authority". No decisions were made, in part because of
unhappiness with the selection process and dissension about the tribal and
geographical representation (there are 2,500 tribes and sub-tribes in Iraq). One
prominent returned exile, Ahmad Chalabi, said, "The composition at this
time looks like Noah's Ark, but that is fine at this stage."
Within two weeks, the idea of an "interim Iraqi authority" was dead.
The new top man on the-scene, L Paul Bremer, said that the security situation
remained too unsettled and that additional "purging" of Saddam
loyalists from the police, civil service and political parties was needed.
Bremer plans to appoint a council of 25-30 "advisers", which he will
control. This reversal almost immediately set off calls for the US to leave Iraq
from the more militant, competing, fundamentalist Shi'ite factions - Ayatollah
Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
Moqtada al-Sadr's adherents and Abdul Karim al-Enzi's Dawa sect. (Al-Enzi caught
the mood exactly, "Democracy means choosing what people want, not what the
West wants.")
Then, in late June, a clear signal came that the US was getting closer to
falling into a Vietnam-like quagmire. Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who
was at first quite tolerant and even supportive of the invading troops, wrote of
"great unease" concerning the length of the US occupation, the failure
of the US to grant Iraqis self-rule, and what he saw as the biggest threat to
Iraq, "The obliteration of its cultural identity." As if to accentuate
the ayatollah's remarks, within 48 hours, six UK military police were dead and
another eight UK troops were wounded in two attacks deep in Shi'ite-dominated
southern Iraq.
Distant rhetoric
The
rhetoric from Washington seems as distant from what is happening on the ground
in Iraq today as it was during the Vietnam War. The president and his
representatives point to the US$2.5 billion for Iraq's reconstruction in the
March supplemental, of which $700 million has been committed. They trumpet the
vaccination programs for Iraqi children and the expected troop augmentations of
20,000-30,000 from as many as 41 other countries to assist with security in Iraq
- troops for whom, in many cases, the US is footing the bill.
Even with this force augmentation, the US military will continue to carry the
load. There are still 146,000 US military personnel in Iraq (plus 16,000 UK
troops) and another 45,000 providing support from Kuwait. More than 210,000
National Guard and Reserves have been called up for either homeland defense,
duty in the Balkans and the Sinai Desert, or the Iraq war itself, with many into
their second year of continuous active duty. US planners say that a new Iraqi
army of 40,000 will be ready in three years, a clear signal that administration
assurances of being out of Iraq in two years simply will not happen. Some in
Congress predict a five to 10-year presence.
US forces will also continue to bear the brunt of the casualties. In the
fighting up to and including Baghdad's capture, 138 US forces were killed; of
the 57 who have died since May 1, 20 were killed by hostile fire (plus the UK
dead noted above). Washington says the casualties are "militarily
insignificant", while field commanders note a seemingly steady stream of
outsiders entering Iraq for the immediate purpose of killing US soldiers and a
longer-range goal of building pressure in the US for the withdrawal of US
troops.
The demonstrations by disgruntled Iraqi civilians, civil servants and cashiered
military officers seeking back pay or pensions, combined with the plethora of
firearms in Iraq, have contributed to Iraqi civilian casualties as US troops
react to the taunts ("America is the enemy of Allah"), gunfire, and
general chaos in Iraq. In Baghdad's first post-war public opinion poll, 73
percent said the US had failed to provide adequate security in the city. But
even as they deride the lack of results, Iraqis sense that, for now, they have
no option; in the same poll, only 17 percent want the Western troops out
immediately. That figure may start to increase if US troops continue to engage
in "security practices" that Iraqis deem inappropriate - eg, male
soldiers "patting down" Iraqi women while looking for weapons or
arresting minor children. And a surge in "Yankee go home" sentiment
could be expressed in increased attacks on US forces by new groups in new, often
Shi'ite areas.
Such opposition, armed only with AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and
light mortars, may seem puny against tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and
modern aircraft with precision-guided munitions, but that is what Vietnam-era
administrations thought in the 1960s and early 1970s. Between June 9 and June
22, the Pentagon logged 131 "incidents" involving US troops in Iraq,
including 41 attacks on US compounds, 26 attacks on sentry or observation posts
and 26 on convoys. The next 24-hour period saw an additional 25 incidents.
Moreover, not all heavy weapons in Iraq are being collected by "the
Authority". The 70,000 Kurdish Peshmerga will retain their tanks and
artillery until their expected integration into the new Iraqi army. (Obviously,
not all 70,000 can be amalgamated; those excluded could cause problems later.)
A question the Bush White House and the Pentagon still have to answer is just
how many US military men and women will be needed to pacify and provide security
in Iraq. Before the war, on February 25, then-army chief of staff Eric Shinseki
told Congress that "several hundred thousand" troops would be needed
in post-war Iraq. Both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz, sharply disagreed, with the latter stating that Shinseki's estimate
was "wildly off the mark". But the question lingers for many in
Congress, the US public and the armed forces.
How many troops and for how long?
Traditional
military doctrine estimates that a conventional army requires roughly a 10-to-1
size advantage if it is to defeat a well-equipped, well-executed, persistent
insurgency. But where insurgents, while less centrally organized, are still too
powerful for standard police (or where standard police do not exist), responding
to and measuring against armed insurgent strength may not be the best gauge. In
1995, James Quinlivan, writing in the Army War College's quarterly, Parameters,
suggested that force requirements should be based on the need for population
control (to cut off support to the insurgents) and local security - that is, the
need to "win hearts and minds" and therefore requires a force
proportional to the population.
Quinlivan describes three historical force ratio levels. The first, one to four
security personnel per 1,000 population, is essentially the ratio for ordinary
policing. In a military setting, the US Constabulary force in post-World War II
Germany was staffed at 2.2 per 1,000 for "enforcing public order,
controlling black market transactions and related police functions". The
same ratio existed in the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (1992-1993),
whose duties included "supervision of the ceasefire and voluntary
disarmament of combatants, supervision of about 60,000 indigenous police to
provide law and order, and administration of a free and fair election". But
the UN had little real presence outside the main urban areas.
The second force ratio is from four to ten security personnel per 1,000
population. India's campaign against militants in Punjab, viewed as quite
punitive by many, was implemented at a ratio of almost 6 per 1,000 population.
At the high point of the 1965 US intervention in the Dominican Republic, whose
purpose was preventing civil war and restoring "stability", Army and
Marine personnel operated at a ratio of 6.6 per 1,000 population.
Quinlivan's third ratio level is above 10 per 1,000 population. Military
examples of this level are the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s when foreign and
full-time indigenous security forces operated at a ratio of 20 per 1,000
population. The same ratio pertained to the combination of the Royal Ulster
Constabulary and British troops in Northern Ireland for much of the period
1969-1994. Here, multiple small groups advocating separation from or continued
union with Great Britain waged war on each other, and one side fought
"occupying" security forces with a goal of forcing them out -
conditions that are unfolding in Iraq today.
Applying the average of 2.2 per 1,000 of level one to Iraq would require 52,800
individuals. But Iraq is not a defeated, broken, devastated country like
Germany. Nor is it at peace or semi-peace, where the main task is maintaining
public order. It is still a country at war, a country saturated with weapons, a
country that is becoming more and more restless under its "liberator".
Level two ratios of six and 6.6 yield 144,000 and 158,400, respectively. These
are comparable strength totals to what the US and its allies have in Iraq today.
Yet these forces seem unable to isolate Iraqi and foreign militants who have
come into Iraq to fight "the Authority" and to provide both the
perception and reality of public safety. Perhaps even more important is the need
to avoid any hint of punitive measures that inevitably would lead to a
precipitous decline in general Iraqi tolerance of foreign forces.
At 10 per 1,000 population, the point of intersection between levels two and
three, Quinlivan's numbers skyrocket to 240,000. (Interestingly, just in
Baghdad, where the population is roughly 5 million, there are 55,000 troops,
producing a ratio of 11 per 1,000.) Matching the British experience in Malaysia
and Northern Ireland at 20 per 1,000 doubles this total to 480,000, which is the
total authorized strength of the active US Army. Clearly, any of these levels
are impossible to sustain given the demands for and on people. Even level two
ratios may be impossible, given that five of the Army's 10 active divisions
currently are engaged in Iraq.
In Iraq, as one phase of the "global war on terror", the Bush
administration chose war and occupation, and must now face the consequences of
its choices. Having dislodged the previous regime by force, the US increasingly
is caught in the quagmire of depending on force to control the Iraqi people in
the name of national and regional "peace". But "peace through
war" or the threat of war is a costly chimera, both for the
"victor" and the loser. This truth was well understood by the 19th
century British statesman Edmund Burke, who noted that "war never leaves
where it found a nation".
What remains to be seen is what price will be exacted from the US public - and
in what condition Iraq will be in two, five or 10 years.
Daniel Smith dan@fcnl.org is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in
Focus, a retired US army colonel and a senior fellow on military affairs at the
Friends Committee on National Legislation.
(Posted
with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
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