Lounsbury: Iraq, The Chaos [edit to add better link]

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April 01, 2004

Iraq, The Chaos [edit to add better link]

There are a number of items I thought I would cover.

First, Juan Cole has an interesting, indeed powerful observations (if we leave aside the academic speak):
This degree of hatred for the new order among ordinary people is very bad news. It helps explain why so few of the Sunni Arab guerrillas have been caught, since the locals hide and help them. It also seems a little unlikely that further US military action can do anything practical to put down this insurgency; most actions it could take would simply inflame the public against them all the more.

It seems likely to me that the guerrilla violence will continue for years, since it has a firm class base in the Sunni Arab rentiers who had benefitted from Sunni dominance in the Baath, and to whom the best jobs, infrastructure and most power had been thrown. They are not going to be quietly reduced to a small powerless and much less wealthy minority.

The only hope is political. The Sunni Arabs have to be convinced that they are not playing a zero-sum game. A zero-sum game is one where there is only one pie, and it always stays the same size. In a zero-sum game, if your rivals get a bigger piece of the pie, then your piece will inevitably shrink.

But politics does not have to be a zero-sum game. The Iraqi economy has the potential to expand greatly. So the pie won't stay the same size, and Shiites could get richer without robbing the Sunni Arabs. Likewise, in a parliamentary system, the Sunni Arabs could make coalitions with Kurds and moderate Shiites in such a way as to be a key player and to retain a great deal of political power and to forestall the radical Shiites from taking over. A minority can leverage its power by being a swing vote.

Unless the Sunni Arabs are drawn into parliamentary politics and convinced that the new game is not a zero-sum game, the bombs will continue to go off. ( See http://www.juancole.com/2004_04_01_juancole_archive.html#108080271181902982 )

Could .... Emphasis added. This is Cole's key observation, the underline section. Now before returning to that, let me quote an op-ed piece on counter-insurgency.

"Recent history shows insurgencies span decades. The Chinese Communists fought for over 25 years, the Vietnamese over 30, the Sandinistas 18, the Afghans 10 years against the Soviets, the Chechens over 10 years and the Palestinians over 25 years -- with no end in sight. Even when the British won in Malaysia, it took 12 years.

The trend is clear. Modern insurgencies are lengthy struggles. This is an absolutely critical point. Counterinsurgents need to think in decades, not years."
From:
The Long Haul
By T. X. Hammes
Thursday, April 1, 2004; Page A31
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40800-2004Mar31.html

Now, as to that, Hammes also notes:
" Insurgency has evolved by taking advantage of information-age tools that expand its power and reach. While insurgents still use Mao's basic principle that superior political power can defeat dominant military and economic power, they no longer rely on a Maoist type of hierarchy. They have evolved to make use of loose networks and coalitions of the willing.

As al Qaeda has demonstrated, networks provide exceptional flexibility and resilience under attack. They also make use of all available networks -- political, economic, social and military -- to convince their enemy's political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for any perceived benefit. Insurgents directly attack the will of their opponents.

In Iraq, the pattern of attacks on the U.S. presence, our allies, international aid organizations and cooperating Iraqis shows that our opponents have adopted insurgency. They plan to beat us. A coalition of the willing -- former regime loyalists, international terrorists, criminals and radical elements of Iraqi society -- has become a loose, temporary alliance to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of Iraq. "

I would note myself that I appreciate the author does not engage in silly posturing regarding evil and the like, nor exageration in regards to the nature of the"coalition of the willing" - a fine piece of irony I may add.

Further, and here is the most important point:
" Insurgency is a different type of conflict that the short, intense wars envisioned by proponents of high technology. It requires a fundamentally different approach to win. Most important, it requires a recognition of the duration of this kind of war.

Unfortunately, in Iraq the accelerated transition of sovereignty and lack of a clearly articulated post-transition plan indicate an early departure by the U.S.-led coalition. While early departure is not our strategy, the mere appearance of "cut and run" thinking reinforces the insurgents' greatest strength -- patience. It also provides them with one of their most powerful weapons -- intimidation. They have been telling Iraqis from the beginning not to side with America, that the Americans will go home and the insurgents will remember who helped them. They don't even have to sell the idea anymore: They simply point to the headlines in U.S. newspapers.

To win this kind of war we have to dispel any impression that we will abandon Iraq. We must develop coherent, long-term, interagency plans and processes to execute them. We must articulate them clearly, fund them and then stick to them. Only the concrete expression of our political will across the economic, social and military spectrums can lead us to victory. " Emphasis added.

Now the, I do not think that in fact "only the concrete expression of our ...will" across the spectra can lead to "victory" in the sense of the original goals.

As I have often argued, previously on The Straight Dope message boards before the war, and elsewhere, execution matters and once one poisons the well, it is damned hard to cleanse the waters. Damned hard if not impossible.

The piss poor execution of policy - in terms of the self-indulgent and arrogant (in an obvious and clumsy way) lead up, in terms of the equally short-sighted truimphalism of April-June 2003 when valuable time was wasted, when allies needlessly insulted and driven away and when myopic, drunken self-congratulatory triumphalism blinded Washington to the fact that the "enemy" was not in any way defeated, it had only melted away - has consequences. Consequences that make it harder and harder to achieve the original goals, themselves while rather stupidly expressed, not bad in theory.

Of course to pull something like the democratisation of Iraq off, one needs to have a realistic idea of what can be achieved in a given time frame and the realities of what any given society is capable of (at that moment) in terms of change. None of this, as I have argued was in place. I have witnessed first hand the clumsiness and time-wasting (reminds me have to log a call into CPA today, bloody steel people never got back to me - we're all about you! they say. Well bloody well execute because investors like my people are not going to tolerate this bloody mess forever.) of the CPA and the degree to which political vision ("all is going well!") has driven policy more than on the ground intelligence. I recall for longer term readers how I reported in post-briefing comments - Summer 2003 - CPA people would tell us off the record it was much more dangerous than they were briefing, or would suggest they themselves feared for their lives. "Just hope to get home..." Mind you this was senior staff.

Worse, however, as the author above suggests, and as an article I quote below (from a pro-war observer) suggests, the current Administration has no clue as to how to go forward. None whatsoever. Policy is at present driven by short-term political expediancy and is incoherent. It is failure in the making.

As Hoagland, otherwise a supporter says: " The Bush administration went into Iraq with a bold political vision of regime change and a daring military strategy that used speed instead of armored mass to conquer the battlefield. A year later clarity and decisiveness have gone missing in both the political and military spheres in Iraq.

Fewer than 100 days remain before "sovereignty" and presumably power are to be transferred from the U.S.-British occupation authority in Baghdad to . . . ? I can't tell you. Neither can the White House, which drifts toward subcontracting the job of organizing a sovereign interim Iraqi authority to the United Nations. Washington has also decided that a new U.N. Security Council resolution should provide the legal basis for the continuing presence of nearly 150,000 American and other foreign troops in Iraq after the June 30 turnover -- even though the administration had agreed last autumn to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement with Iraq's Governing Council.

Washington takes for granted that the Iraqis, who have not been consulted, will accept this quiet reversal. "
From
Dangerous Indecision in Iraq
By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, April 1, 2004; Page A31
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40801-2004Mar31.html

Now his argument is rather Shiite centered and I think fallacious in its understanding of the situation at the level of the power plays - and in its dismissal of Lkhdar or the criticisms of Chalabi's cynical exploitation of the Baathist ban, however he gets one essental point right:
" But every bomb blast, and every appalling massacre, such as the butchering of four American contractors in Fallujah yesterday, is a message meant for Washington: "You have not beaten us. We have regrouped in a Sunni heartland that you never conquered, whatever your president announced."

....

U.S. flexibility is important to winning this war. But a constant shifting of strategy, of clients, of goals and methods for establishing political structures, all under the pressure of the calendar, is a self-defeating exercise -- especially if it is carried out by fiat and with an air of imperviousness. Neither Americans nor Iraqis can be content with the policy message that we will "leave it to Lakhdar.""

That is indeed true.

The problem is there is no sign that this Administration has truly grappled with the changes necessary to change direction and save themselves from a Vietnam like disaster, that is a disaster created not by military inadequacy but a fundamentally flawed vision of the political and social landscape upon which they are trying to write down their macro-political theory into reality. This utter lack of comprehension of the real driving forces, the strange incoherence which seems to stem from cognitive dissonance between their theoretical structures and the reality.... it is the recipe for a mini-Vietnam for the political framework in which they are trying to operate in Iraq is a failure and always will be.

Final note, using an upload client for the first time, rather than the web, it does seem more efficient, but...

Also, I need to find the time to write something about the Dhimma and the like. I have seen some comments out and about that really irritate me for their combined historical and current illiteracy. Someone call me on this.

April 01, 2004

Iraq, The Chaos [edit to add better link]

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