[NYTr] Iraqi Resistance Confounds Bush's New "Realism"
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UPI - Mar 22, 2006
http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20060322-125444-1918r
Commentary: Strategic Conundrum
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, March 22 (UPI) -- Chased out of one Iraqi town after
another, the insurgents would wait for U.S. and Iraqi troops to depart
and then slowly infiltrate back. They knew the coalition and the new
Iraqi army did not have sufficient numbers to stick around in every
major population center. This week President Bush said the growing
strength of the Iraqi army had facilitated a new strategy -- clear,
hold and build.
No sooner enunciated by Bush than the more flexible insurgency came up
with a riposte -- recoil, redeploy and spoil. This was a leaf out the
classic guerrilla textbook: attack only when you can overwhelm with
superior force. If the shoe is on the other foot and the enemy has the
numbers in his favor, melt away without contact.
Hit-and-run attacks against Iraqi police stations, local prisons,
recruiting centers are standard tactics in every insurgency. Tracts,
pamphlets, and al-Qaida web sites that attack the established U.S.
order with grievances to sway public opinion in favor of the
insurgents, are all part of the mix.
Almost all Iraqis tell inquiring journalists that while they feared
and despised Saddam Hussein, fear of the unknown and uncertainty about
the future amid a growing sense of insecurity, generated by
indiscriminate nightly killings, is a great deal worse. Youth
unemployment is driving many teenagers into the ranks of the
insurgency.
While the coalition has double-timed the training and fielding of
Iraqi forces, the insurgency's ranks have grown correspondingly. The
U.S. command's estimate of enemy guerrilla fighters has grown from
5,000 to 15,000 to 30,000, with an estimated support group of some
200,000 civilians. Why that many? Electricity alone tells the story.
Under Saddam Hussein, Baghdadis had 18 hours of electric power each
day. Today, it's 8. Drivers stay in line for several hours -- some
days twelve hours -- to fill their gas tanks. Cheap gas was never a
problem before liberation.
Since World War II, insurgencies in different parts of the world have
had the nasty habit of hanging around for an average of six years.
Algeria's guerrilla war of independence lasted 8 years. The IRA war
against British loyalists in Northern Ireland never fielded more than
300 terrorists or freedom fighters (depending on one's viewpoint), and
they kept half the British army pinned down for a quarter of a
century.
Bush has recognized these unpleasant verities when he said U.S. troops
would be in Iraq past the 2008 presidential election year. Their
departure would have to be decided by the next U.S. president. Bush
urges his visitors to take the long view of history. He firmly
believes what he is doing in the Middle East is comparable to the
Truman-Acheson period in Europe after World War II and the Reagan-Bush
41 era with the implosion of the Soviet empire.
While failure in Iraq is not an option for president Bush, failure
remains a real possibility, especially if Democrats recapture one or
both houses of Congress next November.
Last week, U.S. and Iraqi forces launched Operation Swarmer, billed as
the largest operation of the war. Some 50 helicopters and 200 tactical
vehicles took some 1,500 troops to the Samarra area 80 miles north of
Baghdad on the Tigris river. Intelligence had indicated a target-rich
area of ten square miles. Apparently overlooked was that such an
operation, at least two weeks in the planning, was bound to leak out
in advance. Insurgency intelligence operatives are known to have given
a high priority to infiltrating the ranks of the new Iraqi army,
police and intelligence agency. A few insurgency suspects were taken
prisoner and several arms caches uncovered. But the enemy had melted
away.
In Jan. 1966, the U.S. army launched the largest operation of the
Vietnam war. Operation Masher took three brigades of the First Air Cav
division (16,000 men) by C-123 troop transports and helicopters from
their camp at An Khe to an area near Bong Son on the South China Sea
coast where they hoped to surprise a large Vietcong unit. We reporters
had been notified off-the-record a week before to be in An Khe, the
Air Cav's base, "next Thursday for a big one" that would keep us in
the field for several days. If the press knew in advance, chances were
the enemy did too.
The only casualties in the opening phase of Masher were the 50 U.S.
soldiers killed when their C-123 troop transport, the first one off
the ground, crashed into a mountain. The Washington Post's Ward Just
and this reporter were bumped off the same aircraft to make room for
two more troopers, and scrambled onto the next one.
Village after village was surrounded, but the only action was the
occasional sniper round to slow down the U.S. advance as guerrillas
vanished down spider holes and tunnels. Masher was a costly failure.
And the last such operation spectacular of the Vietnam War.
The high-flown Operation Swarmer in Iraq was a mini replica of Masher
45 years ago. What the counter-insurgency campaign needs is a
different historical parallel -- the 1952 arrival of Gen. Gerald
Templer in Malaya (before it became Malaysia) with orders to crush a
Communist insurgency.
As part of a wider, Soviet-inspired drive to gain strategic and
economic control of key areas of Southeast Asia, Moscow had decided to
launch the 1948 campaign of murder, sabotage and terrorist mayhem,
which was designed to morph into an armed revolution. Templer's recipe
was part political, part psychological, part socio-economic
initiatives, all with limited use of firepower.
Templer's counter-insurgency comprised aerial drops of millions of
"strategic" leaflets, including handwritten letters together with
pictures of surrendered guerrillas; "voice-aircraft" with personalized
messages from ex-terrorists; an intelligence service with lots of
spare cash for informers. MI6 operatives fluent in local languages
coordinated sophisticated psyops. Templer's strategy paid off with
total victory in 4 years.
In Iraq today, such an "oil stain" strategy of stability would require
strong local police presence all over the country, beginning with the
14 Iraqi provinces that are relatively quiescent, before coopting the
Sunni areas and splitting them from al-Qaida's foreign imports. Four
more years takes on a different meaning in Iraq.
Copyright 2006 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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