Iraq, Iraq, oh that fucking Iraq - will the surge work? will the place fall apart? Various views from pundits

1. I cannot quit my place among the gloom-mongers. We still look like losing
Whatever the tactical successes of the US surge, it is hard to believe that anything other than defeat and disaster await
By Max Hastings/Guardian

Every now and again, grown-up people review their cherished opinions and prejudices. Does the evidence still stack up? Or are there grounds for thinking again? It seems especially important to do this at regular intervals with Iraq, because its fate is critical for the west.

Sceptics have for years been rehearsing a countdown to a day of doom. I am often among their number. But, as a compulsive consumer of the torrent of analysis and situation reports that comes out of Iraq, I sometimes shut my eyes and ask: is there a shred of hope?

Europeans are prone to think of the Americans who run the place as body-armoured oafs. If this was sometimes true in the past, it is certainly not so now. On the contrary, the US has belatedly entrusted the salvation of Iraq to its best and brightest - and I do not use that phrase pejoratively.

David Petraeus, who commands, is probably the cleverest and most imaginative general in the American army. He has assembled around himself a cluster of like-minded people, passionately committed to retrieving the country from the brink of disaster. Colonel HR McMaster, for instance, the most successful unit commander to have served in Iraq, was whisked back to Baghdad from an academic fellowship in London to join Petraeus's team.

Stephen Biddle, a civilian academic from the US Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of some outstanding papers on the country's plight, and was suddenly plucked out of Washington a fortnight ago to work 13 hours a day with Petraeus's brainstormers. Graeme Lamb, Petraeus's senior British deputy, is as able a soldier as the army has got.

Despite the latest Iraqi government figures showing civilian deaths up in March, the evidence is that Bush's "surge", entrusted to Petraeus's direction, is achieving real results. In Baghdad, there has been a dramatic fall in the rate of murders, suicide-bombings, insurgent attacks. Many Sunnis have become deeply hostile to the depredations of al-Qaida's foreign fighters. In some cases, Sunnis have taken violent action to expel or eliminate the intruders, whom they no longer want as allies.

Aided by much improved intelligence, so-called Tier One special forces - of which almost one-third are British SAS - have been carrying out intensive operations to "harvest" insurgent leaders. Hundreds have been captured or killed. The Americans have exchanged a policy of dispatching troops daily on armoured excursions from their huge bases for one of holding positions to provide visible security in the midst of Iraqi communities.

General Barry McCaffrey, a retired US officer fiercely critical of his nation's policies in Iraq, has just visited the country, seen all the top brass, and delivered a report to the US Military Academy at West Point. McCaffrey is full of praise for what Petraeus and his team are doing. He argues that there is now a slim chance of stabilising the country.

Yet everything turns not upon what Americans - much less the British - do, but upon Iraqis. "Reconciliation is the way out," writes the general. "There will be no imposed military solution with the current non-sustainable US force levels."

"Non-sustainable" applies, of course, to both the military and political constraints. Every senior officer engaged in Iraq knows that the British are easing out; the US army is stretched to its limits and beyond; the patience of Congress and the American people is ebbing fast.

It is common ground among all but irredeemable negativists that Petraeus's soldiers are doing better than anyone thought possible a year ago. Unfortunately, however, this is happening at three minutes to midnight. Pumpkin time is very close. Huge problems persist, first, with the paralysis of Iraqi rule. McCaffrey acknowledges "there is no function of government which operates across the nation".

Second, though progress is being made with training Iraqi soldiers and police, these are still a million miles from being sufficiently numerous, motivated, trained, or equipped to assume responsibility for the nation's security. McCaffrey calls for a hugely increased commitment to the forces: "We are still in the wrong ball park."

More than this, there is no chance of stabilising Iraq unless its people are provided with public services that work, and its economy is functioning in a fashion that gives most of its citizens a clear stake in peace. Almost four years after Baghdad fell, basic facilities such as electricity and sewerage, together with local security against crime and kidnapping, work less well than they did under Saddam.

This remains the catastrophic failure of the occupation, and the likeliest cause of its doom. A senior British officer to whom I spoke last week argues that Iraq needs a Marshall Plan, civil aid on a scale greater than anyone has yet attempted - or than the US Congress in its current mood is willing to endorse.

For US policy in Iraq to have a chance of working, the indispensable ingredient is time. Yet the storehouse of this precious commodity was almost emptied before Petraeus arrived. Everybody concerned with Iraq - the American and British governments, the precarious regime in Baghdad, the insurgents, the population across the country - is staring at the calendar, looking towards January 2009.

When George Bush quits the White House, it seems unlikely that any successor will be willing to maintain a big commitment in Iraq. The game will be over. Yet to put Iraq on its feet, to leave behind a viable society, a minimum of five years and hundreds of billions in cash will be needed.

Many of the right things are now being done, too late to retrieve the mistakes of 2003 and 2004. McCaffrey's report mentions the need for regional dialogue. Yet even on this it is hard to turn back the clock. In the early days Iran might, just might, have been willing to talk and act in support of its own rational interest in a stable Iraq. Today, however, the British and Americans are engaged in something close to a proxy war with the Iranians, escalated by the seizure of British sailors.

The foremost challenge is to persuade a sufficient number of Iraq's people to overcome a visceral desire to see their occupiers humiliated, and act on the basis of self-interest. However successful are Petraeus and his brightest and best in holding the ring, only the Iraqis can save themselves.

Today, as McCaffrey acknowledges: "No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection." Surge or no surge, there are not remotely enough western troops in Iraq to alter this wretched reality. Only the people who live there can do it.

At the end of my own spasm of soul-searching, I cannot quit my place among the gloom-mongers. It is hard to believe that, whatever tactical military successes Petraeus's people are achieving - and these are real enough - Iraq's leaders, security forces and citizens can take the strain in real time. We still look like losing.

Yet this should never become cause for exultation, even among the bitterest foes of the Washington neocons. If defeat, chaos, regional war indeed come to pass, the Iraqi people and the security interests of the west will suffer a disaster for which the disgrace of George Bush and Tony Blair will represent wholly inadequate compensation.


2. Iraq: Who’s to Blame?
Chet Meeks / Britannica Blog

The U.S. has now been in Iraq for more than four years. More than 3,000 American soldiers are dead. An October 11, 2006 article in the Washington Post reports that a group of public health researchers from Johns Hopkins University estimate that “655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.” Health Now reports that 92% of Iraqi children are suffering from mental health issues as a result of the American invasion: “the only thing they have on their minds are guns, bullets, death, and fear of the US occupation.”

As recent polls indicate, Americans are now largely opposed to the Iraq War , despite the President’s recent urging for patience. On the other hand, a full 43% still believe we did not make a mistake by invading. How did we get here, Americans seem to be asking themselves. Who’s to blame? We have blamed the President, as his low approval rating indicates. On counterpunch.org, Joshua Frank blames Hillary Clinton and other Democrats for failing to challenge the war resolution in 2003, and for doing very little to stop the war once they gained a majority in 2006. Liberals have also blamed Cheney and other neo-conservatives for hijacking the country, for ruining our global reputation Guantanamo style, and for throwing our own civil liberties in the toilet with the Patriot Act and with the warrantless wiretappings that violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 .

We have blamed the media for not being tough enough on the powers-that-be during the rush to war with Iraq (see David Brock’s mediawatch.org). Many now blame the Iraqi people themselves — for not wanting democracy badly enough, and not doing enough to secure their own country after we left it in shambles with our Rumsfeldian “shock and awe” campaign of terror.

There’s one group of people who seemed to have escaped any blame for this cataclysm: The American Citizenry.

It’s easy to blame the president — and I blame him, too, to be sure — but nothing George W. Bush has done has surprised me in the least since his “election” in 2000. I knew he would be a bad leader from the start. He was then, and is now, a stubborn person who, at one time, claimed not to concern himself with newspapers and polls and who seems impenetrable to the ideas of others when they conflict with his own. Yet this is the man who, after 9/11, had the highest approval rating of any president in the history of our Republic. America loved it when Bush cried on television about 9/11, the same day he was reading a child’s book upside down.

It’s also easy to blame the neoconservatives, but neoconservatism did not come out of nowhere, and neocons had plenty of public support during the rush to war with Iraq. The basic idea behind neoconservative foreign policy — that America should preemptively attack any country that we feel threatens us, that we should change regimes at will, that we should intervene militarily anywhere in the world any time we want — had broad popular support from the Americans who now blame them (see Ron Suskind’s book, The One Percent Doctrine ).

It’s easy to blame Hillary Clinton because, well, she’s Hillary Clinton. Along with many other Democrats in Congress, she was wrong to support the 2003 war resolution, and she is wrong now in refusing to apologize for her mistake. Still, her support for the 2003 war resolution cannot be separated from the fact that the American public was overwhelmingly in support of the war at that time. Clinton is a smart politician, and she knew in 2003 that to not support Bush’s quest for war would be political suicide.

How about the media? Conservatives think the media is too liberal. Liberals believe corporate interests trump the truth. To be sure, our mass media is not perfect. But people like myself who opposed the war from the beginning were not reading French newspapers; we were getting our news from the same place as every other American. While the media is not perfect and can be rightly blamed for going easy on Bush, I seem to remember plenty of interviews with Hans Blix and Mohamed Elbaradei in which both claimed that the inspections were working and that war was not necessary. I seem to remember Kofi Annan and many member-states of the European Union warning us that a pre-emptive attack would be illegal and would have catastrophic consequences. I seem to remember Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, a US Marine, and a Republican, warning us nightly on CNN and elsewhere that there was no possible way Iraq could have reconstituted its weapons program after the sanctions of the 1990s. They were all right, and the American citizens who refused to listen to them were wrong.

America is the richest country on earth and in the history of humanity. Even our poorer citizens have more money than most people who inhabit the planet. According to Seymour Martin Lipset’s book, American Exceptionalism , 43% of Americans attend church service on a weekly basis, yet America ranks at the very bottom in voter participation per capita amongst democratic countries worldwide (see also the World Values Survey of 1980, 1990, and 1995). Americans go to church, but not to the voting booths. They may know who Anna Nicole Smith was, but less than half of college seniors know what the Ba’th Party is (see the Civil Literacy Report ). Although I have no hard statistics to prove it, I seriously doubt most Americans can explain the differences between the Sunnis, the Shi’a, and the Wahhabiists (if you don’t know, read Scott Ritters brilliant essay ).

When the president decided to go to war, 75% of the American public supported his decision, and a full 1/3 of the American public believed we should declare war even in the absence of UN support (see World Public Opinion for this and other polls). And most Americans are probably of the mind that things didn’t work out in Iraq because Iraqis don’t love freedom nearly as much as we do. Speaking of freedom, most Americans define freedom as the freedom to consume in whatever way they choose without any regard for the social consequences of their behavior: freedom means the freedom to drive an SUV, to consume most of the world’s resources at cheap costs, to pollute the environment however we wish, to live in expensive suburbs where one has little contact with others, and the freedom to watch as much television as possible.

During the rush to war with Iraq, nearly 70% of the American population believed that there was a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Nearly as many believed that there were Iraqis amongst the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. President Bush’s approval ratings were higher than any President’s, ever. Americans applauded when we renamed French fries “freedom fries.” These individuals viewed those of us who were protesting the war as unpatriotic, anti-American cowards who did not “support the troops.” They viewed the war the same way they view a Monday night football game: you have to be for one side, the “good guys,” and if you’re not rooting and waving your foam finger from the bleachers, you’re anti-American. After 9/11, American citizens were thirsty for revenge, and they didn’t seem to care whose blood was spilled.

Now that the war has become inconvenient, Americans are opposed to it. They don’t like Bush anymore. They like Cheney even less. They voted the Democrats in to office. But where was the American citizenry when it mattered? The American public had the power to stop this war, but they didn’t; they handed Bush a second term in 2004. I have a deep suspicion that the turn against the war has less to do with any deeply felt, well thought out opposition to the war itself, and far more to do with the boredom and short attention spans of a spoiled American citizenry who inherited the most powerful democracy on earth, and who allowed one village idiot to pillage it. Four years is a long time to pay attention.

Now that we’re in the midst of disaster, we can blame whomever we choose. But when Joe Q. Public wakes up in the morning and ponders who should be blamed for Iraq, he should look in a mirror.


3. Containing Iraq's Civil War Is Not the Answer – by Ivan Eland

The bulk of expert opinion predicts that the Bush administration's escalation strategy in Iraq will fail. The void created by the administration's lack of a backup plan for that outcome has been filled with proposals from pundits, academics, and think-tank analysts, who recommend containing Iraq's civil war.

Most of these analysts suggest removing U.S. troops from harm's way, pulling them back from major Iraqi population centers, and moving them to outlying areas safer from the raging civil war – for example, the Iraqi borders, more remote regions of Iraq, or neighboring countries – while using those forces to try to prevent the civil conflict from turning into a regional war. In general, this is the opposite of the strategy now being pursued by the administration. The administration is taking U.S. troops from existing large bases on the outskirts of Iraqi cities, and quartering them within those cities, so that they can be closer to the Iraqi people and the "bad guys." So if the administration's Plan A doesn't work, the pundits are advocating doing the opposite. Such containment strategies, however, are almost as flawed as the administration's current tack.

But at least the containment strategies acknowledge the reality that the Bush administration keeps avoiding: the Iraq War has been long lost, and it's time to talk about how to deal with the unpleasant ramifications. The administration is not known for nimbly changing course. For example, although the administration could respond to pressure groups rapidly and fire the secretary of the Army and the commanding general at Walter Reed military hospital for shameful conditions imposed on wounded military personnel, it took the president almost four years after the start of the Iraq War to fire Donald Rumsfeld, a secretary of defense whose very policies were failed, creating more dead and wounded troops. President Bush's current escalation strategy is much like having your finger in the dike, seeing it start to crack, and endangering friends by demanding that they, too, stick their fingers into the many eroding holes. The president is just imperiling more U.S. forces in the upcoming tsunami of civil war.

Yet the containment planning of many of the U.S. foreign policy elite exaggerates the threat that such a civil war – or even a regional war – would pose to U.S. security. Many seem to agree with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's exaggerated claim – advanced to make political hay – that the Iraq War is the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history. (Did Reid forget that the United States started the inconclusive War of 1812, only to see a foreign invasion and the burning of its capital? Or that the U.S. tipped the balance in World War I and helped to cause World War II, the Russian Revolution, and the Cold War?) The same cries of a coming disaster were sounded during the Cold War when the United States withdrew from Vietnam, but were never borne out. Reid's exaggerated prediction of disaster, however, undermines his stated goal of convincing the Bush administration to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq.

In arguing why the outcome in Iraq is so important, the foreign policy elite usually refer to "vital U.S. interests" in the Persian Gulf region. These code words are a euphemism for "oil." Politicians and the foreign policy establishment rarely discuss this topic directly, because the use of U.S. military power to ensure oil supplies might be compared unfavorably to similar behavior by the Imperial Japanese, which led to World War II. In any case, the oil market will deliver oil – which exporters need to sell as much as importers need to buy – without military deployments or intervention by any government in the Persian Gulf. And if some oil production is impeded by an Iraqi civil war or a broader regional conflict, and the price rises significantly, modern economies have shown that they can weather high energy prices and still grow. The United States did so recently.

Some say an Iraq engulfed in civil war will create a haven for al-Qaeda. It already has; but in a worsening internal conflict, al-Qaeda will be so busy helping its Sunni brethren fight the majority Shia there that the group will have less time, energy, and resources with which to attack U.S. targets around the world. Besides, if the United States withdraws its forces from the Muslim country of Iraq, al-Qaeda will be less likely to attack U.S. targets. After the United States withdrew military forces from Lebanon during the Reagan administration, anti-U.S. attacks from the Shi'ite group Hezbollah sharply declined. Then, as now, non-Muslim occupation of Muslim lands is the chief driver of blowback Islamist terrorism.

Lastly, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, always the overprotective parent of Israel, fears that a regional war could adversely affect Israeli security. But this skittishness is unfounded, because Israel's military is very capable, has a good combat record against its foes, and is believed to have between 200 and 400 nuclear weapons.

Thus, the United States can and should rapidly withdraw all forces from Iraq and bring them home. Leaving large, vulnerable troop concentrations in Iraq's outlying areas, along its borders, or in neighboring countries is a recipe for getting sucked back into any conflict in the region. Delaying their withdrawal while the administration searches for a way to salvage U.S. prestige will only lead to the faster erosion of such standing – as it did when Richard Nixon tried the same approach in searching for "peace with honor" in Vietnam.

The best bet is to use an impending complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq to pressure Iraqi groups to negotiate a decentralized form of governance: either a loose confederation in which the factions govern their own areas autonomously, or an outright partition. At this late date, however, the Iraqi factions may be too splintered to reach or to honor such a settlement. It's still worth the attempt. But whether it is successful or not, U.S. forces should be withdrawn before the tidal wave of a full-blown civil war hits.


4. The Tao of smart foreign relations
By Paul Woodward/warincontext.com

In Western media coverage of Iran, there are two prevailing images. Firstly, that President Ahmadinejad is a dangerous, unpredictable and reckless leader, and secondly, that the labyrinth of Iran's political structures makes it extremely difficult for anyone to be sure about who is doing what.

Viewed through the American psychological prism with its fixation on power and status, in detaining 15 British soldiers Iran seems to have acted recklessly -- perhaps in retaliation for the detention of officials in Iraq and/or in response to the latest UN sanctions against its nuclear program. As the British scramble to find a diplomatic resolution to the crisis, President Bush accuses Tehran of "inexcusable behavior." Snatching Brits is viewed from the West as an act in defiance of both British and American authority.

But let's not think about this in terms of a challenge to power relations and instead acknowledge that the Iranians might not actually be engaged in a petulant act of defiance. And let's suppose that the soldiers have been detained for logical (even if not acceptable) reasons. So what might be the logic behind the Iranian government's actions and what would be a logical response?

A reader of this site who chooses anonymity (but says that he works as a professional trader) suggests the following analysis.

If the Bush administration was to make use of both this analysis and consequent recommendations it would be displaying an unusual degree of imagination running counter to all its previous tendencies. But as Winston Churchill famously declared, "Americans can always be counted upon to do the right thing, after all other possibilities have been exhausted."

Have we now reached that point?

Victory by withdrawal

To understand Iran's move, follow the money. Oil is Iran's main source of foreign revenue. Using WTI as benchmark, on Friday March 23 the barrel was at $62. On Friday March 30 it was at $66. So revenue per barrel went up 6%. Even more important is to evaluate the Iranian "fiscal surplus" per barrel because, due to its populist economic policies, the Iranian government needs an oil price of around $50 for its finances to break even. Using $50, fiscal surplus per barrel jumped from $12 to $16 or 33%. Not bad at all.

In this light, it is easy to see that every increase of tension in the Gulf plays right into the Iranian regime's pockets. And that if the Bush administration wants to undermine the Iranian regime's support base (and at the same time strengthen its own), it should follow a policy of aggressive reduction of tensions in the Gulf.

A look at a chart of the oil price can easily confirm this. From Christmas to January 16 the price plunged from $63 to $50. On Thursday January 18 the EIA issued an extremely bearish weekly inventory report (stocks had risen much more than expected). However, all the price did was to touch again $50 and start a relentless rise. Why? Because by then the market had started digesting the implications of the January 10 Bush announcement of the deployment of an additional carrier strike group and Patriot air defense systems to the Gulf region (as commented by Tony Karon's January 11 post " Bush’s New Iraq Plan: Bomb Tehran ").

The point is that there is currently about a $20 risk premium embedded in the oil price. So that if the probability of military conflict in the Gulf dropped to zero, the oil price would drop below $50 and the Iranian regime's financial bottom line would drop into the red. Together with the financial sanctions already in place (which should be kept and hardened) that would make the regime's populist economic policies unsustainable and its popular support thinner and thinner. Given that Iran is a democracy and that Ahmadinejad's performance in last December's elections was already disastrous, it's clear that a decisive move towards less military pressure in the Gulf is the shortest way to relegate Iran's hardliners to the dustbin of history.

This view is in line with the following observations from a recent document from Yossi Mekelberg (Head of the International Relations Department in the Webster Graduate Centre and an Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme at Chatham House/RIIA):

“Despite the rhetoric from Tehran, Iran's mismanaged economy is vulnerable to international pressure. President Ahmadinejad was elected to improve the economy and eradicate corruption, not to pursue an antagonistic foreign policy towards large parts of the world. On 4 December 2006 the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, voted overwhelmingly to cut short his term in office by more than a year by holding the presidential elections alongside the upcoming parliamentary ones. Moreover, opponents of Ahmadinejad were successful in the local elections of 15 December 2006. Moderate conservatives opposed to him won a majority of the seats, followed by reformists ousting ultra-conservatives loyal to him. The results were widely seen as a response by the Iranian electorate to the President's constant power struggle with major international forces.”

In January 2007, in an unprecedented action against a sitting president, 150 of the 290 members of the Majlis signed a letter blaming Ahmadinejad for raging inflation and high unemployment, and criticizing his travel abroad at time when he was due to present the Majlis with a draft budget for the coming fiscal year. All this indicates that Iran's political system is more responsive to engagement with the world than is believed by many in the international community, especially in the US and Israel.

The extent to which a bold move to reduce tensions in the Gulf is conducive to the Bush administration's interests has been greatly increased lately by the Saudi king's statements at the Arab League summit (and by the UAE's conspicuous "preemption" of any US activity hostile to Iran that could be launched from their territory). This is equivalent to a girlfriend telling you that the relationship is over. There are basically two ways to react to that. A loser would look disconcerted and beg "Please think again. I need you." A winner would smile and say "Glad you said that. It was exactly what I wanted to hear. I'm free again at last!" So to be a winner, Mr Bush should go out and say at the very least: "We are delighted to see that the Arab leaders have faced up to the challenge of taking the issues of Middle East peace and security in their own hands and have engaged Iran and Syria in that process. And we are extremely pleased that this development allow us to immediately withdraw one carrier strike group from the region."

Now, if I were Mr Bush I would add "and we will start conversations with each of the Gulf countries in order to phase out the US military presence in the region in two years. After that, our military presence there will be limited strictly to the extent each country explicitly asks the US to have. This includes Iraq."

I call this strategy "Victory by withdrawal". And there is a wonderful opportunity to embrace it now.

(The author of this article works as a professional trader.)


5. Never Have So Few Done So Much Damage To So Many
By Hugh Fitzgerald/New English Review

Would it be immoral for Americans to leave Iraq , or to allow it to dissolve? Some have said so. But as to the question of morality, I don't even understand the question. The Kurds resent the Arabs for good reason. Why should they not try to make a move for independence, and if by helping them the American government can weaken Syria and Iran , and have a semi-reliable ally in what was northern Iraq , why not? What is immoral about that?

And as to the sectarian divisions, they date back a thousand years before the founding of the United States . The depth and duration of that division, in other words, owes nothing to us. It is the Americans who have tried, at great human and economic cost, to make the Iraqis less tribal, less selfish, more imbued with a sense of a nation -- and a nation that is not merely a place to be controlled by their sect or tribe or family. The Americans have tried to encourage entrepreneurial activity instead of reliance, as in so many other Muslim states, on either oil money or foreign aid from Infidels, and to encourage the adoption of a Constitution that would actually move away from the Shari'a.

It has all failed. And that is despite the enormous efforts of American soldiers, who were never taught about Islam, and yet persevered, and were puzzled when the Muslims of Iraq did not behave, as those soldiers expected them to, as a grateful "Iraqi people," but rather as a collection -- with a handful of exceptions -- of grasping, whining, greedy, meretricious people, eager to have the Americans do everything for them, eager to have them lavish them with aid money (thrown around, by the billions, like confetti), and distinctly indifferent to American losses when not taking outright pleasure in such losses, yet always willing to blame the Americans for everything.

Does a Sunni bomb go off killing Shi'a? The Shi'a crowds gather, and tell reporters that they blame the Americans. The Sunnis are kidnapped by Shi'a militia, and the Sunnis rant against the Americans. And now 98% of the Sunni Arabs say that all attacks on Americans are justified and that they personally approve of them, and 75% of the Shi'a say the same thing. Only the Kurds express, by a large majority, lack of approval for such attacks.

What is the conceivable offense to morality in no longer sending Americans to fight and die for people who cannot overcome Islam, who will in large -- and ever-increasing -- numbers, take delight in the deaths of Americans? And does anyone, does even Bush, still think that Iraq could somehow become a Light Unto the Muslim Nations? Karen Hughes, Bush’s loyal and equally unintelligent aide, is the one who is most directly involved with "reaching out to Muslims." That is the extent of our propaganda effort, an effort that should be made not to win jihadists over, but to fill them with confusion and to demoralize them, and make at least some of them begin to see that their political, economic, and social failures are a direct result of what Islam inculcates -- not only the specific doctrines, but the habit of mental submission that it demands.

It is immoral for Bush and others to persist obstinately in a course that makes no sense. Like the general in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," or like the madly complacent generals who sent people to their death in the trenches in World War I, these people are not thinking straight. Others -- the soldiers and Marines of the regular army, and of the Reserves and National Guard -- at least had every right to expect that they would not be sent to Iraq except in case of absolute national emergency. Yet the war in Iraq is most definitely not a case of "national emergency" but of willful ignorance of Islam, lack of imagination, lack of wit, lack of knowledge about Iraq , at the very top. And then there is always that claque of loyalists, the assorted kagans and kristols or, for that matter, that speaking-truth-to-power admirer of Edward Said, the minor polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who only yesterday began to find out a little about Islam. He's a dab hand at running with whatever little knowledge he acquires, tout en faisant son petit Orwell.

There is nothing "machiavellian" or "immoral" about refusing to continue to keep various groups of Muslims from one another's throats. Who knows? Maybe they'll all make peace. Let's say that is the outcome. I could live with that. I could also live with the other. It is theirs to make or mar. We got rid of a murderous monster. That murderous monster, it turns out, was about what Iraq appeared to need, if the only conceivable good is an absence of the kind of strife that became inevitable, sooner or later, once the regime of Saddam Hussein was removed.

Perhaps some think the regime of Saddam Hussein was moral, and that therefore it was immoral to end it, but Christopher Hitchens is not among them. He thinks the removal of Saddam Husseini was justified and desirable. Unfortunately, he also seems to think it is Americans who should pay, and keep paying, the price for that removal -- instead of those whose belief-system makes them naturally unwilling to compromise, that makes them susceptible to crazed beliefs and conspiracy theories (the Sunni Arabs, for example, really allow themselves to believe that they constitute 42% of the Iraqi population, and they really believe that they have a right to that amount of power, or even more, and certainly they will never acquiesce in the Shi'a rule over Iraq).

Bush and his loyalists refuse to identify the enemy properly -- which consists of all those who think they have a duty to spread Islam through Jihad, until the goal that Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, is achieved, and the world is made safe for Islam because all obstacles to its spread, and imposition, have been removed, so that "Islam dominates and is not to be dominated."

The Bush Amdinistration prates about a "war on terror" and tells us that this war "can be won" but it will take time. Cheney says "a generation." Blair speaks of "twenty, even thirty years." This shows their wilful misunderstanding.

This "war" has no end. Even to think in terms of a war with an "end" shows that you have not thought through the problem of Islam. Even if Muslims are weakened, or appear to have let the doctrine of Jihad fall into desuetude, because they may appear, and may in fact be, too weak to act on it (essentially, from about 1800 to 1960, that was the case, and that was the period when some Muslims, recognizing the weakness of the Islamic world, actually tried to think of ways to "reform" it but aside from visiting Europe and noting the need to rival it in military technology, nothing every came of that "reformist" impulse, tiny and ineffectual as it was).

This war has no end, because Islam cannot everywhere be stamped out -- have Nazis, or neo-Nazis, ceased to exist? Of course not, nor have devout Communists eager for levelling by the state, nor have Fascists, nor have all kinds of human impulses that, if translated into the political sphere, are mortal enemies of civilization and intelligent freedom. But they have been held in check, their numbers limited.

The task of the non-Muslim world is to weaken the Camp of Islam, and the appeal of Islam to the psychically and economically marginal in the West, in the most effective way, and at the lowest cost. Ordinarily that can be done by exploiting the natural pre-existing divisions within Islam. Iraq , for example, offers two of the three main divisions.

The first is the sectarian (Shi'a and Sunni), and sufficiently balanced in power that neither side could easily defeat the other, despite the large Shi'a advantage in population, for the Sunnis are much more ruthless, aggressive, and determined, and have deep-pocketed allies in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait (the Al-Sabah family doesn't want a Shi'a threat from Iran-cum-Iraq to replace what it faced with Saddam Hussein, especially since there are many Shi'a in Kuwait, who may now be regarded as a potential fifth column).

The second is the ethnic: the justified desire of the Kurds to be independent of the Arabs, who have persecuted them, and murdered them, and taken over their lands, and appropriated the oil wealth under those lands (which lands, in fact, were in reality those of the Assyrian Christians who in fact were, in the post-World War I settlement, dispossessed by some of those Kurds moving south, as in turn, the Kurds were later dispossessed --as in Kirkuk -- by the government-sponsored resettlement of Arabs moving north).

The third, not present within Iraq but certainly present among the Muslim states: is economic: the resentment of poor Arabs and Muslims over the unmerited vast wealth of the rich Arabs and Muslims, a resentment that has not been exploited because, idiotically, the Western world has, instead of drawing attention to the grand theft of "Muslim" resources by a handful of rulers and states, and their refusal to share the wealth not only with many of the people in those states, but also with other Muslims, thus showing not the slightest interest in supporting fellow members of the umma (although payments to other Muslims for spreading Islam in the West, or to engage in acts of terrorism against Israel or India or other Infidel states -- well, that can and is supported by rich Arabs).

We need first to recognize, and then to exploit, these fissures. I haven't begun to explain the kind of propaganda that would help, but most of it should be obvious.

But it is not obvious to the likes of Karen Hughes. It is not obvious to the likes of Cheney's daughter, the one involved in bringing "democracy" to Iraq (what makes her an expert? what allowed her to be put in charge of such matters?). And it certainly isn't obvious to Condoleeza Rice, with a most limited view of things, whose claim to fame is that she was a good -- i.e., obedient -- graduate student in some branch of Kremlinology, but lacks the learning, the world experience, and the imagination to push her even more limited boss into something like a comprehension of what Islam is all about, and how it makes best sense to constrain and weaken it.

There are at least three separate Sunni insurgent groups: the Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia who want to fight the Americans, and the Shi'a for being "Rafidite dogs" or the worst kind of Infidels; ; the tribes in Anbar Province who have been offended by Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and are fighting with them and may, mistakenly, be thought of therefore as American allies; the Sunni Arabs in Iraq who refuse to acquiesce in their loss of power to the Shi'a, and to want to fight the Americans, seen as having been responsible for that loss of power, and the Shi'a, but do not quite see the Shi'a as those "Rafidite dogs" that the members of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia do.

There are at least three Shi'a groups: the Shi'a who are genuinely secular, westernized nice. This nearly-infinitesimal group, the very group that presented itself to the Bush Administration as representative of Iraq, has people who are secular, some of whom were once even pre-Saddam members of the Ba'ath Party (see Allawi), and represent the remaining Baghdad elite (Shi'a division), all of whom, of course, were trained by the Jesuits at Baghdad College and all of whom have spent between 10 and 45 years in the West. They represent almost nobody but themselves. The second group consists of the los-de-abajo Shi'a poor, who have rallied around the troglodytic ABD (all-but-desertion) resentful Moqtada al-Sadr, whose face shows exactly what he is, and who support their own Jaish-e-Mahdi and of course some militias. The third group consists of the slightly better off, and slightly more presentable, leaders and members of SCIRI and Daw'a, competing parties, with ideologies or personal agendas that can hardly be distinguished by non-Muslim Iraqis, and need not be. They claim to listen to Sistani, and Sistani, it is claimed by the Americans, is simply solidly on the side of right (that, of course, is nonsense) -- see www.sistani.org and scroll down until you find the list of what is "najis" or "unclean" in the view of Sistani -- you'll find yourself on the list.

Then there are the others, including possibly the most touching and impressive political figure in Iraqi public life, Mithal al-Alusi, the son of a professor of classical Arabic literature, supporter and signer of the St. Petersburg Declaration of "secular" (mostly apostates) Muslims, and a brave visitor to Israel. It should be no surprise that when Mithal al-Alusi's party ran, in a nation of 27 million, it received 4,500 votes. Policy cannot be made on the basis of the nearly infinitesimal group of thoroughly secularized and westernized Muslims. Moqtada al-Sadr has at least a thousand times the support of Mithal al-Alusi, and were the most savage of Sunnis to run, he would command Shi'a millions as well. This is something that the Bush Administration and those who still wish to support its Iraq policy simply cannot comprehend, or will not allow themselves to comprehend.

No one in the intelligent past would have found anything remarkable in the notion that one needs to know what moves the minds of men -- and in the case of Muslim men, above all else what moves them is Islam -- and to know the history of a place, ancient and modern, the history of its people or peoples, their manners and customs and desires and motives.

And without some sense of Iraq's past, in a past-controlled part of the world, with adherents of a belief-system who insist on living, especially in times of mental and emotional desarroi, in that past of fabled and exaggerated greatness, no sensible policies can be constructed.

Here is a florilegium of quotations, culled quickly from both Iraqis (rulers and scholars, including the formidable Elie Kedourie, a Baghdadi Jew who at the university level was educated, and made his celebrated academic career, in England ) and non-Iraqis, and how one wishes they had been known, and studied, and thought carefully about, in Washington four years ago:

#1. The Commander of the British Forces that wrested Mesopotamia [ Iraq ] from the Turks, 1917:

"To the People of the Baghdad Vilayet... our armies have not come into your Cities and Lands as conquerors or enemies but as liberators. Since the days of Hulaku your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of Strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunken into desolation and you yourselves have groaned in bondage. ...It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great nations with whom he is in alliance that you should prosper ...But you, the people of Baghdad, ... are not to understand that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised again. O! People of Baghdad . ... I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political representatives of Great Britain who accompany the British Army so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West in realising the aspirations of your race."

[Source: Atiyyah, Ghassan: Iraq : 1908 - 1921 : A Socio - Political Study. - Beirut : The Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 1973 p. 151.]

#2. Gertrude Bell, 1920:

“In the light of the events of the last two months there's no getting out of the conclusion that we have made an immense failure here. The system must have been far more at fault than anything that I or anyone else suspected. It will have to be fundamentally changed and what that may mean exactly I don't know. I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can't as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn't govern and we have tried to govern - and failed. I personally thought we tried to govern too much, but I hoped that things would hold out till Sir Percy came back and that the transition from British to native rule might be made peacefully, in which case much of what we have done might have been made use of. Now I fear that that will be impossible.”

[Source: Lady Gertrude Bell, 1920, The Letters of Gertrude Bell.]

#3. Gertrude Bell, 1920:

“We as outsiders can't differentiate between Sunni and Shi'ah, but leave it to them and they'll get over the difficulty by some kind of hanky panky, just as the Turks did, and for the present it's the only way of getting over it. I don't for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil.”

[Source: Lady Gertrude Bell, 1920, The Letters of Gertrude Bell.]

#4. King Faisal of Iraq , 1933:

"Regrettably, I can say there is no Iraqi people yet, but only deluded human groups void of any national idea. Iraqis are not only disunited but evil-motivated, anarchy prone and always ready to prey on their government." – King Faisal I, writing in his memoirs shortly before he died in 1933.
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#5. “There are only two political parties in Iraq : the Sunni party and the Shia party.” – Tawfiq Al-Suwaidi, Iraqi Prime Minister, 1929, 1930, 1946, 1950.
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#6. In "The Chatham House Version" the scholar Elie Kedourie comments dryly on the description by the far-less-great scholar Majid Kadduri (in his own book, "Independent Iraq") of “the wise leadership of Faisal, who inspired public spirit in every department of government”:

“If this [Khadduri's description of Faisal] were in any way true, there would be no accounting for the degraded and murderous politics of Iraq from the end of the mandate to the end of the monarchy.” [i.e., from 1932 to 1958, when first Qassem, and then the Ba'athists, took over, and things became even more degraded and much, much more murderous].].

“The fact is, of course, that this kind of language is most inappropriate to Iraq under the monarchy or afterwards.”
.........
“Lack of scruple greater or lesser, cupidity more or less unrestrained, ability to plot more or less consummate, bloodlust more or less obsessive: these rather are the terms which the historian must use who surveys this unfortunate polity [modern Iraq ] and those into whose power it was deliverered.
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Do you think such material, had it been thoroughly read, in its full context, and digested, might have helped make American policymakers a bit more realistic and less messianic about Iraq? Do you think Richard Perle would not have so excitedly declared in 2003 that he wouldn't be surprised if a boulevard were named after George Bush in Baghdad ? Or that Wolfowitz would estimate that the "cost" of the Iraq War might be "$20 billion," and therefore so much more of a bargain, than the cost of the sanctions program --when the cost now, at a minimum, has been estimated at between $1 and $2 trillion dollars, if the costs incurred for the treatment of the wounded, and the macroeconomic costs (see the paper of Stiglitz and Bilmes, and if you wish, forget the macroeconomic costs and take the lower figure, and if you like, reduce even that to something we can all agree on as an absolute base -- say, $750 billion)? Or that Bernard Lewis would confidently predict that when the Americans overturned the regime the spectacle of rapture and gratitude in Baghdad "would make the liberation of Kabul seem like a funeral procession"?

They forgot, or didn't know, with their narrow certainties and dependence on Bernard Lewis. A false choice was offered: on the one hand there was the usual crew of appeasers and hirelings and simply ignoramuses (and they were and are appeasers, and hirelings, and ignoramuses), people who cannot conceive of Islam being the problem. These were the espositos and william-polks and scowcrofts and the djerijians, who wanted nothing done to upset anyone. There was the belief that Harold Rhode, so uncritically worshipful of Bernard Lewis, see Douglas Feith -- so dependent on Harold Rhode, see Cheney, who was so certain about so many things, and similarly thought Lewis the last word on everything to do with Islam, and Iraq -- not a hint of any consulting with the live J. B. Kelly, or the writings of the dead Kedourie. or for that matter with others, including Bat Ye'or -- it was apparently a false polarity: either Lewis, or the likes of such apologists as Esposito, or just as bad, that fake "old Iraq" hand William Polk, with his predictable appeasements. No other conceivable alternatives. There is a good deal that Bernard Lewis is able to forget, or didn't know -- (look at his enthusiasm for the Oslo Accords, and his grotesque minimizing of the menace of Islam and the mistreatment of the dhimmis, quite unlike his two coevals S. D. Goitein and Gustave von Grunebaum on the mistreatment of non-Muslims under Islam) and what would almost certainly happen once the despotism of the Sunni Saddam Hussein was removed? And wouldn't a knowledge of Islam have told them something about the prospects for real "democracy" as opposed to the vote-counting (that the Shi'a were happy to participate in, and voted for whomever their leaders told them to vote lemming-like for?). In other words, isn't a knowledge both of Islam and of the history of Iraq essential, so as not to engage in the kind of folly that is being engaged in.

The Americans, had they informed themselves, would then most likely either have

1) left Saddam Hussein in place, if indeed there was no real reason to suspect his possession, or his being able to acquire, weapons of mass destruction or,

2) if there was indeed sufficient reason to believe [we still do not know that, do but those of us who were long willing to believe that the government was reasonable in fearing the existence of WMDs or of the ability of the regime to acquire them -- I was one of them -- are looking more abashed every day] that he either had or was attempting to acquire, or could soon start acquiring or making, such weapons.

What are the most important things to study to figure out what makes sense, for the wellbeing of Infidels, at this moment, in Iraq , given the instruments of Jihad as we can now identify them, and the behavior, ignorant and often pusillanimous, of much of the Western world?

It is history. The history of Islam, both doctrine and practice. The history of Iraq , especially of Iraq since 1920.

Not "psychoanalysis." Not the "generally applicable rules of counter-insurgency" such as "insurgencies tend, on average, to last 10 years."

As Ibn Warraq noted in his brilliant essay, comparing Islam and Fascism, both are belief-systems fixed on past glories. Compare Mussolini on "Mare Nostrum" (the Mediterranean) and the greatness of Rome, or for that matter, Hitler on the supposedly bottled-up greatness of the Aryan or Germanic peoples, and his dithyrambs, and that of his ideological collaborators, on the past greatness of Deutschland, and even more than Germany, of the Germanic peoples, with that natural energy and life-force, so different from the Slavs and Latins and everyone else.

You didn't have to psychoanalyze anyone to comprehend that living in the past is essential to Islam. And that helps to explain something: the significance of Iraq and Baghdad to Sunni Arabs everywhere. Because they live in that Muslim mythology, and because Baghdad was for 500 years the most important city in Islam, at the time of Islam's greatest glory (for Arabs Constantinople doesn't count -- it was the center for their oppressors, the Ottoman Turks, not for Arab Islam), they simply cannot allow it to be controlled by those "Rafidite dogs" the Shi'a.

When historians write about the years 2000-2008, they will gasp at the expense, at the squandering, at the obstinate naiveté and failures of intelligence (of every kind) and of imagination. They will be amazed at the lack of ability of the people in charge to comprehend, to articulate, to instruct, and to protect. They will be flabbergasted at the trillion dollars wasted, at the great damage done to the morale of the military and to its capability, at a time of peril. They will not understand why nothing started to be done, then, about the campaigns of Daw'a and the slow but seemingly inexorable (it is not inexorable, it can be halted, and it can be reversed, but this requires a recognition of the problem and an intelligent awareness of what is at stake, and what is permissible – (see the Benes Decree of 1946 for a guide) considering the demographic conquest of the heart of the West -- Europe.

The historians will compare the failure of our leaders, or rather, of those "taking a leadership role" -- with the intelligent awareness, and acts of mass auto-didacticism, whereby many, including those who come to this website, have begun to undertake their own study of Islam, because they sense the discrepancy between what they are told in the press and on television and by their "taking-leadership-role" leaders, and what they see all about them, if they are not deaf, and dumb, and blind.

The political class, the ruling classes, the elites all over the West have failed. They failed when, without study or thought, they began some thirty years ago to let in Muslim migrants. They failed when they continued to avert their eyes from what such migration meant for the indigenous Infidels, their legal and political institutions, their freedoms, their art, their free inquiry, their physical safety. They failed for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity, cupidity, timidity - the Esdrujula Explanation that has been put up here many times. They will not be forgiven by posterity. So many things, now so difficult to deal with, could have been so easily avoided in the first place, had intelligence been properly applied.

Future historians will sum it up this way:

Never have so few done so much damage to so many.


6. How to Win in Iraq—and How to Lose
Arthur Herman/Commentary Magazine

“It is best if an enemy nation comes and surrenders of its own accord.” —Du You (735-812)

To the student of counterinsurgency warfare, the war in Iraq has reached a critical but dismally familiar stage.

On the one hand, events in that country have taken a more hopeful direction in recent months. Operations in the city of Najaf in January presaged a more effective burden-sharing between American and Iraqi troops than in the past. The opening moves of the so-called “surge” in Baghdad, involving increased American patrols and the steady addition of more than 21,000 ground troops, have begun to sweep Shiite militias from the streets, while their leader, Moqtada al Sadr, has gone to ground. Above all, the appointment of Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the author of the U.S. Army’s latest counterinsurgency field manual, as commander of American ground forces in Iraq bespeaks the Pentagon’s conviction that what we need to confront the Iraq insurgency is not more high-tech firepower but the time-tested methods of unconventional or “fourth-generation” warfare. 1

In Washington, on the other hand, among the nation’s political class, the growing consensus is that the war in Iraq is not only not winnable but as good as lost—Congressman Henry Waxman of California, for one, has proclaimed that the war is lost. Politicians who initially backed the effort, like Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden, and Republican Congressmen Walter Jones and Tom Davis, have been busily backing away or out, insisting that Iraq has descended into civil war and that Americans are helpless to shape events militarily. A growing number, like Congressman John Murtha, even suggest that the American presence is making matters worse. The Democratic party has devoted much internal discussion to whether and how to restrict the President’s ability to carry out even the present counterinsurgency effort.

In short, if the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis still continues and is showing signs of improvement, the battle for the hearts and minds of Congress, or at least of the Democratic majority, seems to be all but over. In the meantime, still more adamant on the subject are many of our best-known pundits and media commentators. According to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times , who speaks for many, Iraq “is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war,” and America is therefore now left with but a single option: “how we might disengage with the least damage possible.” To the left of Friedman and his ilk are the strident and often openly anti-American voices of organizations like moveon.org .

It is indeed striking that war critics like Senators Harry Reid and Joseph Biden, who in 2005 were calling on the Pentagon to mount a proper counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, and to send enough troops to make it happen, should now be seeking ways to revoke legislative authority for that very operation. Exactly why they should have changed their minds on the issue is not obvious, although they and their colleagues do claim to be expressing not only their own judgment but the opinions and sentiments of the American people at large. If recent polls are to be trusted, however, these politicians may well turn out be wrong about popular sentiment. 2And if past history and our current experience in Iraq are any guide, they are certainly wrong about the war on the ground.

In fact, the historical record is clear. The roots of failure in fighting insurgencies like the one in Iraq are not military. To the contrary, Western militaries have shown remarkable skill in learning and relearning the crucial lessons of how to prevail against unconventional foes, and tremendous bravery in fighting difficult and unfamiliar battles. If Iraq fails, the cause will have to be sought elsewhere.
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II
Most wars are lost, not won. To most Americans, the nearest example of a failed war is Vietnam. As in Iraq today, we came up against a guerrilla-type insurrectionary force led by ideological extremists; in the end, we were forced to withdraw and surrender the country of South Vietnam to the aggressors. But an even more striking parallel to our present situation exists in the French experience in Algeria almost exactly 50 years ago. There, French troops and a beleaguered local government faced an insurgency mounted by Muslim extremists who had managed to gain the upper hand. In response, the leadership of the French army had to figure out, almost from scratch, how to fight unconventional wars of this kind—with results that have influenced the thinking of counterinsurgency experts ever since.

The armed insurrection against French rule in Algeria began in November 1954. The insurgent force, the National Liberation Front (FLN), was a direct prototype of today’s al Qaeda and the insurgent forces in Iraq. Its leaders were motivated less by nationalism than by virulent anti-Western (and, not incidentally, anti-Jewish) ideologies. Their goal was not military victory, which they knew was impossible in the face of French conventional force. Instead, they set out to provoke reprisals against Muslims by Algeria’s whites in order to trigger an all-out civil war. To this end they employed terror bombings, torture, and the savage murder of Muslim moderates and Algeria’s professional class. “One corpse in a suit,” an FLN leader was quoted as saying, “is worth twenty in uniform.” All the while, the main audience they were trying to reach and influence was not in Algeria; it was in France itself. As the American counterinsurgency expert Bruce Hoffman has written, the Algerian rebels “were counting on the fatigue and disenchantment of the French to help turn the tide if the war lasted long enough.”

It was a brilliant plan. Like American troops in Iraq today, French troops in Algeria found themselves reacting to one crisis after another, while a succession of commanders, strategies, and resources was rotated into the effort in piecemeal fashion. Even with 140,000 soldiers on the ground, in a country with less than half the population of Iraq in 2007, the French government found itself helpless to reverse the course of events. The rapidly deteriorating situation prompted Algeria’s white population to turn against its government. By late 1956, when terror bombings in the capital city of Algiers killed 49 people and maimed many more, the overstressed, overstretched French police and army were ready to throw in the towel.

But on August 1, 1956, a French lieutenant colonel of Tunisian descent named David Galula had taken command of the mountainous and rebel-infested Aissa Mimoun area of Kabylia. To the FLN’s unconventional mode of warfare, Galula responded with unconventional methods of his own. These proved so successful so quickly that they were soon adopted by French commanders in other parts of Algeria.

As early as January 1957, French General Jacques Massu and intelligence chief Roger Trinquier were ready to apply some of Galula’s techniques to the urban environment of the capital, Algiers. After weeks of hard fighting, Massu and his paratroopers broke the back of the insurgency in the city, installing a block-by-block intelligence network that kept the FLN on the run and encouraged moderate Muslims to step forward.

Indeed, the 1957 battle for Algiers marked a crucial turning point in the fight against the FLN. By 1959, Galula’s principles had been extended across Algeria. Some 600 “specialized administrative sections” were set up, each headed by army officers to oversee civil as well as military affairs. The new structure finally allowed the French army to use effectively its superior numbers (including 150,000 loyal native troops, more than a third of the total) and conventional military hardware. Helping to put the guerrillas on the defensive were such tactics as the division of troops into “static” and “mobile” units to deal with terrorist outbreaks; the use of helicopters for counterinsurgency operations; and construction of a 200-mile, eight-foot-high electric fence (the so-called Morice Line), which shut down the FLN’s sources of support from neighboring Tunisia. By January 1960, the war that many had considered lost three years earlier was virtually won.
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Galula’s subsequent book, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice , laid out the blueprint for success in this form of warfare. From the start, Galula had discarded the assumptions governing conventional conflicts. A decisive battlefield victory of the kind familiar from World War II, he saw, would never work against indigenous, loosely organized, but deeply committed insurgencies like the FLN. As he had learned from watching the British mount successful counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Greece, neither heavy casualties, nor the loss of weapons and bases, nor even the loss of leaders would stop the rebels. Ultimately, indeed, “military action [was] but a minor factor in the conflict.”

What then? Essentially, Galula grasped that the new form of warfare had reversed the conventional relationship in war between combatant and civilian. No longer bystanders or useful adjuncts to the war effort, as in World War II, civilians were the critical determinants of success or failure. Without the help or at least the passive acquiescence of the local population, the government would be doomed. In a crucial sense, it did not matter how many guerrillas were killed, or how many regular soldiers were on the ground; the center of gravity was the opinion of the local community.

Thus, the key to success lay in bringing to the surface the portion of the populace that hated the guerrillas, and then turning that minority into a majority by a combination of political, social, and cultural initiatives. But of course that crucial portion, Galula wrote, “will not and cannot emerge as long as the threat [of insurgent retaliation] has not been lifted.” This was where military strategy came into play. Galula’s approach boiled down to three stages, each with its own lesson for Iraq today.

The first was concentration of force . Whereas terrorists were able to do much with little (witness, in today’s Iraq, the improvised explosive device or the lone suicide bomber), government forces could do but little with their much. Even after having expanded in number to 450,000 men—nearly one soldier for every 23 Algerians—French forces could not confront the elusive FLN everywhere. So Galula divided his own district into zones: “white,” where government control was complete or nearly complete; “pink,” where insurgents competed with the government for control; and “red,” where the insurgents were in complete control. A successful counterinsurgency involved turning pink zones into white zones, then red into pink, through a block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood struggle to force the terrorists into the shadows.

The second of Galula’s lessons was the need for a visible and continuous military presence, in order to build civil institutions of support and trust. In counterinsurgencies, the classic Clausewitzian dictum—that war is the continuation of politics by other means—turned in on itself. Through constant policing and patrolling, by running down insurgents and punishing them on, if possible, “the very spot” where they committed a terrorist attack or outrage, and above all by visibly supporting and rewarding allies, the military occupation would itself became a political weapon: outward and conspicuous proof that supporting the government translated into increased security, peace of mind, prosperity, and eventually social and political advance.

Toward this end, Galula’s third lesson was that the counterinsurgency must project a sense of inevitable victory . The local populace had to see the military and civilian authority as the ultimate winner. For that, native troops were essential. In counterinsurgency terms, they were more than just auxiliaries in the fight; they were also signposts of the future, of a secure post-insurgency order around which the local populace could rally.
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III
As recently as two years ago, Galula’s book was virtually unknown in Pentagon circles. Today it has become the bible of American counterinsurgency thinkers like General Petraeus, whose field manual (known as FM 3-24) it largely informs. Its masterful approach to breaking, isolating, and then uprooting a terrorist insurgency is the core of our revised near-term strategy for Iraq, a strategy based, in Petraeus’s words, on the principle that “you’re not going to kill your way out of an insurgency.”

The current surge of 21,500 troops in Baghdad is a textbook example of Galula’s lessons in action. First, as in the northern city of Mosul in 2003-4, where he used a similar grid system, Petraeus aims to turn things around in the single most vital “pink” zone—namely, Baghdad and its environs, within whose fifty-mile radius 80 percent of the violence in Iraq takes place. Critics have already charged that our recent successes in suppressing the militias in this area signify only a temporary respite. But Petraeus, like his predecessor Galula, understands that in counterinsurgency warfare, temporary respites are all there is. The goal is to make those respites last longer and longer, until eventually they become permanent. As he has said, “The idea is to end each day with fewer enemies than when it started.” Anything more ambitious leads to overreaching, disenchantment, and ultimately failure.

The Baghdad surge also illustrates the second of Galula’s lessons. “Increasing the number of stakeholders is crucial to success,” writes Petraeus, again self-consciously following both Galula’s model and his own prior experience. In the northern district of Kabylia, for example, Petraeus had his men operating schools for 1,400 children, including girls, offering free medical support, and helping with building projects and road construction. One of his proudest accomplishments was the help given by troops of the 101st Airborne in rebuilding and opening Mosul University.

Petraeus’s field manual states: “Some of the best weapons do not shoot.” They come instead in the form of meetings held with local leaders, wells drilled, streets repaired, soccer leagues organized. In the current surge, one of his stated goals is to get American soldiers out of Baghdad’s Green Zone to meet, eat with, and even live with Iraqi families. Such “cultural awareness,” to quote Petraeus again, “is a force multiplier.” Political victories won street by street and neighborhood by neighborhood do not so much destroy the insurgency—it cannot be destroyed in any traditional sense—as replace it, forcing the bond between insurgent and citizen to give way to a new bond between citizen and government.

Finally, in an application of Galula’s third lesson, Petraeus’s men in northern Iraq trained more than 20,000 Iraqi police who even now continue to patrol the border between Iraq and Turkey. It was, in fact, Petraeus’s success in organizing and staffing a reliable Iraqi security force that convinced his superiors to put him in charge of training the new Iraqi army and to make him commander of American ground forces this year. Now his experience is being put to the test on a broader scale as we attempt, in his words, to “build institutions, not just units”—a process as vital to American success in Iraq as it was to French success in Algeria fifty years ago.
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IV
Will it work? That is not the crucial question. It has been done before, and it can be done again; at least, it can be done on the ground. The crucial question is whether the political will exists to see it through to the end. Here, too, the French experience in Algeria is instructive—in a wholly negative way.

In under two years, as I have noted, the fight against the FLN insurgents in Algeria was all but won. But the war itself was lost. By late 1959, even as the army was scoring victory after victory, French President Charles de Gaulle had concluded that he had no choice but to offer Algeria “self-determination.” Within two years, the French had pulled out and the FLN’s leader, Ben Bela, was Algeria’s president.

What happened was this: while the French military had been concentrating on fighting the insurgency in the streets and mountains in Algeria, an intellectual and cultural insurgency at home, led by the French Left and the media, had been scoring its own succession of victories.

In its haste to defeat the FLN, the French army had left a crucial hostage to political fortune. Military commanders had authorized army interrogators to use certain forms of torture to extract information from suspected terrorist detainees. This is not the place to debate the merits or demerits of torture in counterinsurgency operations—for the record, Galula himself considered it counterproductive. Nor was French opinion particularly sensitive to brutality per se; the FLN’s own use of torture and outright butchery—Arab loyalists routinely had their tongues and testicles cut off and their eyes gouged out—had aroused little or no outrage. But, as with the incidents at Abu Ghraib 50 years later, news of the army practice gave domestic opponents of the war a weapon with which to discredit the entire enterprise.

Led by Jean-Paul Sartre, a campaign of denunciation got under way in which French forces were accused of being the equivalent of Nazis—an especially freighted charge coming only a decade and a half after World War II and the German occupation of France. Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s companion, went so far as to say that the sight of a French army uniform had “the same effect on me that swastikas once did.” Although many of the antiwar agitators were Communists or leftist fellow travelers, their petitions and demonstrations included enough authentic heroes of the Resistance and eminent liberals like François Mauriac to bestow upon the movement a credible public image. The constant message it conveyed was that the true authors of violence in Algeria were not the FLN at all but the French, and that only when the latter departed would Algerians be able to sort out their destiny for themselves.

The French military and political leadership was completely blindsided by the attack. No amount of justification of the selective use of torture, not even the cancellation of the original authorization, could halt the criticism or stem the loss of public support for the war. Even as the FLN took to setting off bombs in France itself, leftist Catholic priests continued to raise funds for it, while those like Albert Camus who harbored doubts about the wisdom of handing victory to the terrorists were derided and silenced. The consensus that had informed French politics as late as 1956—namely, that abandoning Algeria was “unthinkable and unmentionable”—fell apart.

Divisions over Algeria doomed France’s Fourth Republic. For its successor, the price of political survival was handing over Algeria to a totalitarian band that had lost the war on the battlefield but managed to win a stunning victory in France itself. The result was the massive flight of Algerian whites and, at home, a bloodbath as FLN terrorists put to death tens of thousands of Muslim Algerians who had been loyal to the French regime. Soldiers who had fought alongside the French were forced to swallow their medals before they were shot.
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Before long, a similar process would play itself out in Vietnam. By 1972, the American military there had broken the back of the Vietcong insurgency; had fought the North Vietnamese army to a standstill; and had forced the government in Hanoi to the bargaining table. 3Here at home, meanwhile, the end of the military draft had removed the domestic antiwar movement’s most powerful wedge issue. Nevertheless, reorganizing itself, the movement began vigorously to lobby Congress to cut off support for the pro-American governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The refrain, exactly as in the Algerian case, was that this would both bring the killing and suffering to an end and allow the Vietnamese and Cambodians to “find their own solutions to their problems.” Once Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency, and “peace” Democrats took control of Congress in the 1974 mid-term elections, funding to keep South Vietnam free from Communist control evaporated. Victory was turned into defeat; the “solution” advanced by the anti-war Left turned out to be the crushing and disappearance of the country of South Vietnam.

It is hardly difficult to see the same process at work in present-day Iraq. Of course, as in the past, one can point to mistakes made in the conduct of the war. From the Galula perspective, for instance, splitting civil and military functions between the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and CENTCOM was a grave initial error. Another lay in the assumption that war-making in Iraq would yield quickly to peace-keeping, the way it had in Bosnia in the 1990’s. The difference, though, was that in Bosnia, Americans arrived on the scene when Christians and Muslims had fought each other to a standstill, while in Iraq the military’s main problem was not winding down a civil war but preventing one from breaking out in the first place.

Some critics have argued that there were also not enough American troops in Iraq to provide the kind of sustained visible presence demanded by counterinsurgency operations. In the first three years of the war, these critics point out, American soldiers and Marines were forced to abandon friendly territory and collaborative allies on account of the paucity of their numbers. Even Petraeus’s district around Mosul fell into chaos, and much of his work was undone, when his troops had to leave before Iraqi forces were ready to assume the security burden (and as the Iraqi civil administration fell into turmoil following the handover of authority from the CPA).

But mistakes are hardly unknown in war; nor are they necessarily irreparable. In fourth-generation conflicts in particular, as the case of French Algeria suggests, turnarounds can be achieved quickly by changes in thinking and action. General Petraeus’s appointment, and the early success of the so-called surge, point to just such a major and hopeful change. Yet the current clamor to cut off funding, or to strip away congressional authorization for the Iraq effort, threatens to undo this potential turnaround before it has a chance to prove itself.

Under the slogan “strategic redeployment,” for example—to cite the title of a position paper on Iraq released by the Left-liberal Center for American Progress—we have been assured that what incites the violence in Iraq is not the terrorists or insurgents but the American “occupation.” Left to themselves, the contention goes, Sunnis and Shiites will have no choice but to reach an accommodation and live together in peace. Indeed, to Sarah Shields, a Middle East expert at the University of North Carolina, today’s jihadists are but the “latest example in a long line of peoples’ fighting against occupation.” The sooner we depart, she writes, “the fewer people will have been compromised by their connection with our occupation.”

The argument is virtually identical to the one pursued by home-front defeatists in Algeria and Vietnam. What will happen to those already “compromised by their connection” with us, let alone to the hopes of millions of ordinary Iraqis, does not evidently concern its proponents—any more than it concerned Jean-Paul Sartre in Algeria, or Tom Hayden in Vietnam.
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In fourth-generation warfare, whoever seems to own the future wins. To this day, thanks to Gille Pontecorvo’s celebrated and highly propagandized 1967 film, most people assume that “the battle of Algiers” was an FLN victory when in fact it was anything but. Similarly, most people believe that the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam was a major setback for the United States, for so it was successfully portrayed in the media; in fact, it crippled the Vietcong as an insurgency. The same happened more recently in the battle of Falluja in 2005, where our eradication of a vicious jihadist network was presented almost entirely in terms of too many American casualties and too much “collateral damage.”

Thus far, the antiwar forces in both the United States and Europe have been greatly successful in presenting the Iraqi future in terms of an inevitable, and richly deserved, American defeat. Not even positive results on the ground have deterred them from pressing their case for withdrawal, or from winning influential converts in the heart of the U.S. Congress. If they succeed in their ultimate goal of forcing a withdrawal, they will take their place in another “long line,” joining the shameful company of those who compelled the French to leave Algeria in disgrace and to stand by as the victorious FLN conducted a hideous bloodbath, and of those who compelled America to leave Vietnam under similar circumstances and to similar effect.

Unlike the French in Algeria, the United States is in Iraq not in order to retain a colony but to help create a free, open, and liberal society in a part of the world still mired in autocracy and fanaticism. Will we stay long enough to defeat the jihadists, to engage Iraqis in the process of modern nation-building, and to ease the transition to a free society? Or will we quit before the hard work is done, leaving this vital part of the world to become an al-Qaeda sanctuary, bathed in chaos, anarchy, and blood? As the polls suggest, a large constituency at home is waiting to learn the answer to this question, and so is a much larger constituency abroad. But time is running short.

“Act quickly,” Petraeus wrote in January 2006, “because every army of liberation has a half-life.” This is true not only in the field but at home. James Thurber once said that the saddest two words in the English language are “too late.” Terrible as it is to think that our surge may have come too late, it is much more terrible to think that feckless politicians, out of whatever calculation, may pull the plug before the new approach is fully tested.

And terrible not only for Iraqis. For the French, the price of failure in Algeria was the collapse of one Republic and a permanent stain on the next—along with the deep alienation of the French military from the political establishment that it believed (with considerable justification) had betrayed it. Here at home, it took the American military almost a decade and a half to recover its confidence and resiliency after the failure and humiliation of Vietnam. How we would weather another and even more consequential humiliation is anybody’s guess; but the stakes are enormous, and the clock is ticking.

Footnotes:
1) In the modern period, first-generation conflicts like the American Civil War were characterized by decisive battles between large standing armies. Second-generation conflicts involved static defenses and industrial-size mobilization of resources and command, as in World War I. World War II inaugurated third-generation warfare, in which the decisive ingredients were large mechanized blitzkrieg-style maneuvers and devastating air power. That era culminated in the first Iraq war. In today’s Iraq war, by contrast, big decisive battles have been replaced by low-intensity running skirmishes with guerrilla-style combatants aiming not for military triumph but for political and ideological success.
2) Thus, an IBD/TIPP poll taken in February of this year showed 66 percent of respondents believing that it is “important” that the U.S. succeed in Iraq, including 53 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans; the number of those “very hopeful” that the U.S. will succeed had risen from 29 percent in December to 35 percent. A Public Opinion Strategies poll taken at the same time showed much the same result, with 53 percent believing that Congressional Democrats were pushing President Bush too hard to withdraw American troops.
3) The best recent account is Mark Woodruff, Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army, 1961-1973 (1999).

(Arthur Herman, who has taught history at George Mason University and Georgetown University, is the author of The Idea of Decline in Western History and To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, among other books. His essay, “Getting Serious About Iran: A Military Option,” appeared in the November 2006 COMMENTARY.)