"Going to War with the Army You Have"
Why the
U.S.
Cannot Correct Its Military Blunders in Iraq
By Michael
Schwartz
March 5, 2005
The Latest American Theory about the Iraqi
Resistance
In early February, a
Newsweek team led by Rod Nordland produced a detailed account
of current theorizing among American and Iraqi officials about the
structure of the Iraqi resistance.
Here, in brief, is what these officials
told Newsweek: The initial American assault on Iraq was so
successful that Saddam Hussein's plan for systematic resistance fell apart
almost immediately, leaving a dispersed, unruly guerrilla movement with
little or no coherent leadership. In the two subsequent years, however,
the Saddamists formed a wealthy and savvy leadership group in Syria. In
the meantime Abu Massab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist with ties to
Al Qaeda, asserted his domination over the on-the-ground resistance.
Pressure from recent American offensives drove the two groupings into an
increasingly comfortable alliance. Here is how Newsweek described
developments since last summer, based on an interview with Barham Salih,
the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister:
"According to Salih,
‘The Baathists regrouped and, in the last six or seven months,
reorganized. Plus they had significant amounts of money, in Iraq and in
Syria.' Those contacts and networks that Saddam's key cronies began
developing months before the invasion now paid off. An understanding was
found with the Islamic fanatics, and the well-funded Baathists appear to
have made Syria a protected base of operations. ‘The Iraqi resistance is a
monster with its head in Syria and its body in Iraq' is the colorful
description given by a top Iraqi police official…. Zarqawi's people supply
the bombers, the Baathists provide the money and strategy."
The current situation was succinctly
summarized for Newsweek by Brig. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, the Deputy
Minister of the Interior: "Now between the Zarqawi group and the Baathists
there is full cooperation and coordination."
This portrait has been further fleshed
out
in other accounts, including a
New York Times report in which U.S. Commanding General George W. Casey
declared that the Baath Party in Syria was "providing direction and
financing for the insurgency in
Iraq."
This new theory about the nature of the
Iraqi resistance helps to illuminate the renewed saber-rattling against
the Syrians, which began even before the assassination of the former
Lebanese Prime Minister. On January 25, for example, former Secretaries of
State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, writing together for the first
time, made the connection explicit
in a Washington Post op-ed. They asserted that the Bush administration
must have a "strategy for eliminating the sanctuaries in Syria and Iran
from which the enemy can be instructed, supplied, and given refuge in time
to regroup." The new theory may also help to explain why (according to
such diverse sources as
Newsweek and
former U.S. weapons inspector Scott Ritter) the U.S. is considering u!
sing assassination squads to eliminate enemies. One whole category of
targets for these squads (if formed) would certainly be the Syrian-based
leadership of the resistance.
And then, at the end of February, came
news of the first fruits of American operations based on this new insight,
the capture in Syria of Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan, a half brother and
political lieutenant of Saddam, and one of only 11 of the original "deck
of cards" Saddamist leaders who still remained at large. The capture
vindicated the saber-rattling as well, since high level Iraqi officials
told reporters on February 28 that the "capture was a goodwill gesture
by the Syrians to show that they are cooperating" with the new American
campaign to decapitate the insurgency by removing its Syrian-based
leadership.
The New Theory Is Probably Not
Accurate
This new portrait of the Iraqi
resistance may be an accurate description of one aspect of the ongoing
war; and its key new element -- a working alliance between Saddamist
exiles and Zarqawi's fighters inside Iraq -- may be an important new
development. But the foundation upon which these descriptions are built --
that these forces now dominate the resistance, supply its leadership, or
provide the bulk of its resources -- is likely to prove profoundly
inaccurate.
This is most easily seen by consulting
-- of all sources --
the CIA, which issued a contrary report about the time the Newsweek
article appeared. According to the CIA, the Zarqawi faction and his
Saddamist allies were "lesser elements" in the resistance, which was
increasingly dominated by "newly radicalized Sunni Iraqis, nationalists
offended by the occupying force, and others disenchanted by the economic
turmoil and destruction caused by the fighting." There is, in fact, a vast
body of publicly available evidence in support of the CIA's perspective,
including, for example, most first-hand accounts of the resistance in
Falluja and other cities in the Sunni triangle.
In the short, dreary history of
America's Iraq war, our leaders have repeatedly acted on gross
misconceptions about whom they were fighting -- sometimes based on faulty
intelligence, but sometimes in the face of perfectly accurate
intelligence. This is, in all likelihood, another instance where they
believe their own distortions, and it is worthwhile attempting to
understand the underlying pattern that produces this almost predictable
error.
One way to characterize this propensity
to mis-analyze the resistance is to see that all the portraits thus far
generated of the Iraqi resistance have been based on the assumption that
it is organized into a familiar hierarchical form in which the leadership
exercises strategic and day-to-day control over a pyramid shaped
organization. Such a structure is described by both military strategists
and organizational sociologists as a "Command and Control" structure.
After the battle of Falluja,
Air Force Lt. General Lance Smith even used this phrase to
characterize Zarqawi's operation: "Zarqawi… no doubt …is able to maintain
some level of command and control over the disparate operations."
This command-and-control image applies
well to a large bureaucracy or a conventional army; but invariably
provides a poor picture of a guerrilla army, which helps explain American
military failures in Iraq. Whether or not Zarqawi maintains command and
control over his forces (who are, as far as we can tell, not guerrillas)
no one exercises such control over the forces that fought against the
Americans in Falluja or Sadr City
and those that are currently fighting a guerrilla war in Ramadi and
other Sunni cities that boycotted the recent elections.
Guerrilla wars violate the
command-and-control portrait in two important ways: local units must, by
and large, supply themselves (since an occupation army would be likely to
interdict any regular shipments of supplies); and they are likely to have
substantial autonomy (since hit-and-melt tactics do not lend themselves
well to central decision making).
This lack of command and control is a
curse and a blessing. On the negative side, lack of central coordination
means that guerrilla armies are normally doomed to small, disconnected
actions -- a severe limitation if the goal is to drive an enemy out of
your country. On the positive side, they are less vulnerable to attacks on
supply lines and to the targeting of commanding officers -- two key
strategies of conventional warfare.
The resistance in Iraq reflects this
dialectic of guerrilla war.
The mujaheddin in Falluja, for example, seem to have been notoriously
decentralized; even local clerical leadership reportedly achieved only a
tenuous discipline over the troops. This same lack of discipline, however,
made it impossible for the U.S. to identify and eliminate key leaders.
During the second battle for the city in November, their hit-and-run
tactics allowed them to hold out for over a month against a force with
overwhelming technological and numerical superiority.
The command and control portrait is not
a useful tool when it comes to analyzing a large component of the Iraqi
resistance, and it is of little use if it is applied to the movement as a
whole.
The Drumbeat of Command and Control
Nevertheless, the U.S. military has
assumed such a structure at every juncture in the war.
In the Fall of 2003, when the
resistance first began to trouble the occupation, U.S. military strategy
was based on the conviction that the resistance was led by Saddam Hussein
and the "deck of cards" leadership. Here we see command-and-control logic
applied for the first time.
By mid-December 2003, the occupation
forces had arrested or killed the vast majority of the men on that deck of
cards, while Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay Hussein had died in a
spectacular gun battle, and Saddam himself had just been captured in a
dirt dugout. Occupation authorities confidently predicted that the
Baathist "bitter enders" were done for and the resistance would subside,
since without its leaders, local fighters were expected to be rudderless
and ineffective.
Instead the disparate parts of the
resistance became stronger, and in April 2004 emerged with a victory in
Falluja -- after a siege of the city, the Marines pulled back without
taking it -- and a bloody standoff in Najaf. By then, American
intelligence had discovered Abu Massab al Zarqawi and declared that he was
actually the linchpin of the resistance.
Once again, a command-and-control
portrait of the enemy remained dominant, and the second battle of Falluja
was fought in good part on the basis of that theory: to disrupt or destroy
the Zarqawi leadership group. But despite the expulsion of the
guerrillas (and just about the entire population of Fallujans) from the
city, the rebellion quickly spread to other cities and intensified,
refuting the claim that the decapitation of the movement would be
incapacitating.
The command-and-control theory has, in
fact, turned out to be as resilient as the resistance itself. American
commander Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, for instance, explained the post-Falluja
battle of Mosul
to the New York Times by saying that Zarqawi and/or his leadership
team had moved to that city and fomented the uprising, ignoring the
indigenous character
of the mujaheddin who were fighting there. Later, it would be
announced that Zarqawi had set up a new "nerve center" south of Baghdad
and a major new search-and-destroy operation would be mounted there.
Even after these actions failed to
quell the fighting, the occupation forces clung to command-and-control
logic. General Kamal, for example,
told Newsweek, "Even if Zarqawi continues to elude capture, nailing
al-Kurdi [one of Zarqawi's lieutenants] was a critical score. It might --
just might -- -eventually help change the course of this war." Similar
statements were made a month later when Saddam's half-brother, identified
as a key leader and funder of the insurgency, was captured in Syria.
Evident in all of this is the faith
that American military leaders have in a strategy of identifying and
targeting the supposed leaders of the insurgency. Despite the direct
evidence of an increasingly ferocious movement, the capture of a key
leader, it has repeatedly been claimed, could "change the course of the
war."
Why the U.S. Military Can't Abandon
"Command and Control" Logic
So why does the U.S. military
relentlessly build its anti-insurgency strategy around the idea of
decapitating the leadership of the Iraqi resistance? The answer lies just
beneath the surface of Donald Rumsfeld's
now infamous statement, "You go to war with the Army you have."
This is a comment pregnant with meaning
for organizational sociologists, because it illustrates a familiar pattern
of organizational problem-solving. If a product is not selling well, for
example, an engineering organization might conclude that better
engineering of the product was in order; a manufacturing firm, that more
efficient production technology was needed; and a marketing company, that
better advertising would do the trick. This sort of organizational idée
fixe has led to some truly horrendous failures in business -- and
military -- history. For example, when a flood of automobile buyers began
to demand fuel-efficient cars during the first oil crisis in the early
1970s, the American automobile industry did not have the capacity to
produce such vehicles. Instead of investing vast resources in developing
that capacity, it tried to use its superior marketing skills to win
Americans back to luxurious gas guzzlers. That is, the Big Three "went to
war with th! e army they had" and convinced themselves that they were
facing a marketing problem. The results: a permanent crisis at General
Motors (during which it lost world leadership in the industry), a
fundamental restructuring of Ford, and the demise of Chrysler.
Or take the French in World War II.
They knew about the new German tanks that had made World War I trench
warfare obsolete, but the French army was only equipped to fight in the
trenches. So they "went to war with the army they had," devising a
trench-war strategy that they managed to convince themselves would contain
the German Panzer divisions. They lost the war in three weeks.
The American army is also fighting with
the army it has. This army is the best equipped in the world for advanced
conventional warfare -- with tanks, artillery, air power, missile power,
battlefield surveillance power, and satellite imaging to support highly
mobile, well equipped, and superbly trained soldiers. No supply route is
safe from its firepower, and no conventional army would be likely to hold
its ground long against an American assault. But the most intractable part
of the resistance in Iraq is fighting a guerrilla war: they do not have
long supply lines and they rarely try to hold their ground.
Guerrilla armies hide by melting into
the local population. (Everyone knows this, including, of course, American
military men.) To defeat them, an occupying force must have the
intelligence to identify guerrillas who can disappear into the civilian
world; and it must station troops throughout resistance strongholds in
order to pounce upon guerrillas when they emerge from hiding to mount an
attack. American military strategists know this, too. But these lessons --
painfully drawn from Vietnam -- can't be implemented by the army that
Donald Rumsfeld sent to war.
The Americans, in fact, have neither of
these resources. Anti-guerrilla intelligence, after all, requires the
cooperation of the local population, which, at least in the
Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq, the U.S. has definitively alienated,
largely through its use of blunt-edged conventional army attacks on
communities that harbor guerrillas. And it cannot station enough troops in
key locations because too small an occupation force is spread far too
thinly over contested parts of the country. Estimates for the size of an
army needed to pacify Iraq range upward from
General Eric Shinseki's prewar call for "several hundred thousand"
troops.
The American military simply lacks the
tools it needs to fight the guerrillas, just as in the 1970s the Big Three
automakers lacked the production system needed to produced fuel-efficient
automobiles, and the French army lacked the technology it needed to defeat
German tanks in 1940. In response, military leaders are doing exactly what
their organizational forbears did: They continue to develop theories about
how to win the war "with the army they have." This backward logic leads
inevitably to imagining an enemy that might be far more susceptible to
defeat with the tools at hand; that is, an opponent with long supply lines
(from Syria, for example) and a command-and-control leadership (Zarqawi
and his Saddamist allies, for example) capable of being "decapitated."
This portrait of the enemy then justifies a military strategy that seeks,
above all, to kill or capture the theorized leaders. Such tactics almost
always fail (even when leaders are captured); and in the ! process
of failing, only alienates further the Iraqi population, producing an ever
larger, more resourceful enemy.
The newest portrait of the resistance
as a Zarqawi-Saddamist led amalgam will sooner or later die a lonely death
-- in all likelihood to be replaced by yet another command-and-control
portrait of the insurgency whose features are as yet unknown. As long as
the U.S. continues to fight "with the army it has," it will also continue
to generate -- and act on -- distorted (sometimes ludicrous) descriptions
of the nature of the rebellion it faces.
Michael Schwartz, Professor of
Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written
extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business
and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the internet at
numerous sites including TomDispatch, Asia Times, MotherJones, and ZNet;
and in print at Contexts and Z magazine. His books include
Radical Politics and Social Structure,
The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and
Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo).
His email address is Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net
Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz
=============
"'If you look back over the last year
we estimate we have killed or captured about 15,000 people as part of this
counter-insurgency,' [Gen. George] Casey, the only four-star American
general in Iraq, told reporters."
(January
26, 2005)
"[Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard]
Myers said getting an accurate count of insurgents is difficult. ‘I'd say
the insurgents' future is absolutely bleak. So precise numbers in an
insurgency where people, some people, come and go is always going to be
hard to estimate. And that's what we're trying to say,' Myers added."
(House Armed Services Committee,
February 16, 2005)
"It's frustrating, because we can't
be everywhere at once," Lt. Col Stephen Dinauer, who commanded the 3rd
Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion in operations in the Iraqi city of
Hit, told Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor. "… These sentiments
echo the scaled-back expectations among troops on the ground. Gone is the
talk about breaking the back of the insurgency that was floated before the
November battle for Fallujah, where hundreds of militants were dug in and
ready to fight."
[This
week. Lt. Col. Dinauer's unit was part of "River Blitz," the latest
major American military operation in Sunni-dominated Anbar province.]
"Sergeant David Phillips, 23, sighed
and patted his flak jacket. ‘I just want to stay alive and go home with
all my body parts.' He spoke for 150,000 American soldiers in Iraq.
Yesterday the number of US military deaths since the March 2003 invasion
crept over 1,500. There was no official acknowledgment of the milestone,
just curt statements that three soldiers had died in two separate attacks
on Wednesday. ‘Names are being withheld pending notification of next of
kin.'" [British
Guardian reporter Rory Carroll with American troops patrolling Mosul
this week.]
In fact, in the week when the American
death toll crept over another grim mark almost without notice and, just
this Friday,
four American soldiers were reported killed in Anbar Province and a
fifth in a vehicle accident, oil and gas pipelines also went up in the
northern part of Iraq; politicians dithered and negotiated and
argued over a future Iraqi government that may have little power and
less ability to rule the country; while, as a BBC headline had it,
"Iraq insurgents seize initiative"
; one of the most devastating car bombs of the war hit a gathering of
potential police recruits in Hilla; a judge, his son, and
a trade unionist were among the assass! inated; suicide bombers hit
the Ministry of the Interior; numerous Iraqi policemen and army troops as
well as recruits and potential recruits were slaughtered; more roadside
bombs killed American soldiers; uncounted civilians died;
America's detention centers in the country, themselves incubators for
insurgents, were reported to be bursting with prisoners; the contested oil
city of Kirkuk grew yet more combustible, given Kurdish demands, Shiite
desires, and
Turkish threats ("Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has said that
‘in case of fighting in Kirkuk, Turkey cannot remain a spectator'); and in
a bizarre twist which caught something of the madness of the situation (though
it is also a commonplace for Iraqis), as the week ended, a! kidnapped
Italian journalist, freed by her captors, and in a ! car driv ing towards
Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport to return home, was wounded
and an Italian intelligence officer with her killed by quick-to-shoot
American troops,
potentially tossing Italian politics and a close Bush ally in the
"coalition of the willing," Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, into
turmoil; and finally,
an NPR journalist, Deborah Amos, threw up her hands and declared that,
between escalating dangers and American military control over reporting,
the state of Iraq was essentially an unreportable story for American
journalists. "When you read a news report, look at the second line. More
and more you will find it reads: ‘according to the U.S. military' or
‘according to officials.'" She added, "You can no longer just rely on your
news du jour, whether it's NPR or the New ! York Times," and went on to
describe NPR's offices in Iraq in this way: "She said most NPR reporters
are holed up in a compound on a hilltop that resembles a base for a
Colombian drug lord. The guarded compound has a vault that journalists can
step into if ‘they' come to get them."
Under the
circumstances, it might be reasonable to ask exactly whose future in Iraq
was, in General Myers phrase, "absolutely bleak." Certainly, Iraq's was.
And yet, amid that bleakness, the American military effort barrels on, as
Michael Schwartz explains below, based on a strategic theory of the Iraqi
insurgency which is only likely to lead to further failure, more chaos,
more slaughter, and an ever stronger insurgency. When you've read
Schwartz, check out the striking collection of quotes that acts as a
perfect illustration for his piece at
Ari Berman's Daily Outrage blog
at the Nation magazine on-line. Tom
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