Is the surge part of the counterinsurgency? Will it help or hurt? Those are the questions in play for those of us who know we have to try harder to accomplish our goals in Iraq. Aaron Mannes at the Counterterrorism Blog has a timely analysis. I note his admonitions now because it will be important to remember, say, a year from now that we went into this tactical shift in Iraq with our eyes open (even if our options were very limited):
Dr. David Kilcullen, an Australian Lt. Colonel advising the U.S. government has described the goal of counterinsurgency as returning “the insurgency’s parent society to its normal mode of interaction, on terms favorable to us.” The means are, in Kilcullen’s words, “armed social work.” … [But] in an insurgency an adaptive foe is devoting all of its energies to undermining the re-establishment of lawful order.
Yes, we all get that. Here comes the tricky part, though:
While 20,000 troops dedicated to securing Baghdad may help on the ground it may hurt in that other crucial front – the information war. [emphasis mine]
It’s been a while since I wrote about the information war, but to my mind it’s the most important front in the global counterinsurgency against jihadism. Mannes notes that we should be prepared for attacks on the information-war front:
As international communication has become faster, counter-insurgency has become more difficult. Even successful counterinsurgency will include many setbacks. To citizens at home the news of these continual setbacks can create the image of an endless morass of violence and undermine public support for the war. The surge, along with more assertive confrontations with militias and terrorists, could actually lead to increased U.S. casualties. Ironically, in counterinsurgency sometimes that can be a good sign (casualties can indicate that the insurgents – who prefer to avoid direct combat – are being forced into it or that the counterinsurgent forces are operating deep in the insurgents’ territory). While the President noted that violence would continue for some time, American support for the Iraqi endeavor and confidence that the President knows how to turn the situation around are very low. Consequently, even if the surge of troops does improve the situation on the ground, it will probably not lead to a perception of improvement among the U.S. public. Most importantly, it must be understood that the insurgents know this too, and are consciously trying to increase the perception that American troops are powerless to impose order in Iraq.
Bush, of course, is aware of this conundrum. In a television interview in October—before the ISG report and the election and the pressure intensified for him to do something different—he said that we could well suffer a Tet-type “defeat” in Iraq. Nevertheless, he is taking a gamble on the surge. In truth, he has nothing left to lose. For the rest of us, the stakes are higher than ever.
We need some good counternarratives to come out of Iraq—and out of the Middle East. Genuine ones. I fear we’ll be waiting a long time.
I’m not a regular reader of the New York Post—though I usually note the headline when I walk past the newsstand in the morning—so I don’t know if the paper always takes the high road and the low road simultaneously as it does in today’s editorial, which blasts California senator (D) Barbara Boxer for her “low blow” aimed at Condi Rice:
Rice appeared before the Senate in defense of President Bush’s tactical change in Iraq, and quickly encountered Boxer.
“Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price,” Boxer said. “My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young.”
Then, to Rice: “You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family.”
Breathtaking.
Simply breathtaking.
We scarcely know where to begin.
And the editorialist’s indignation builds and builds…until he/she warns:
[T]he next two years are going to be a time of bitterness and rancor, marked by pettiness of spirit and political self-indulgence of a sort not seen in America for a very long time.
Hmmm. Is it me or does the Post seem to be promising lots and lots of mud-slinging and smackdowns to the masses?
My gloomy read on The Speech?
That, contrary to the ludicrous and hollow way it has been presented for four years by both the administration and the media, it is now incontestable that this war is for real; that we are in it (along with the players in the Middle East) for the very long, haul; and that those of us who think we have already seen too much blood had better get prepared. Because it’s just now beginning.
(As a corollary to this—or perhaps as evidence?—I note an item at Eat the Press, where Nick Douglas is taken aback and indignant over Newsweek’s prominent use of a photo of Dead Saddam on its website:
The top of Newsweek’s online “War in Iraq” section prominently displays a photo of Saddam Hussein, hanging from the gallows. The shot is apparently taken from the infamous cell-phone video of Hussein’s hanging.
Mercifully, the editors chose a still in which the dead man’s eyes look closed. Still, after all the hand-wringing about showing Saddam “after the drop,” when did the magazine decide that it was fine to run what is clearly a photo of a dead man still swinging from the gallows? … What happened to that late-December squeamishness?
It’s a good question. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that America, a nation of perpetual adolescents on the hunt for new ways to enjoy ourselves and cool gadgets to buy, is in (inconvenient) fact a nation at war and that it’s starting to poke through the haze of sanitized infotainment we have been used to.
Speaking of reality, Niall Ferguson warns in The Atlantic ($$) that the incipient civil wars in the Middle East could well engulf us all:
Sixty years ago, Central and Eastern Europe was entering the final phase of a succession of wars and civil wars that originated with the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Before 1914, the Habsburg lands had been characterized by high levels of ethnic heterogeneity. Consequently, the transition from empire to the nation-states of the post-World War I era proved painful in the extreme.
Two minorities were especially ill-placed in the new order of the 1920s: the Germans and the Jews. The former fought back against their minority status in places like Czechoslovakia and Poland and, under the leadership of a messianic Austrian, temporarily created a Greater German Empire. The latter were among that bloodthirsty empire’s principal victims. Only with the expulsion of the Germans from Central and Eastern Europe and the creation of truly homogeneous but Soviet-controlled nation-states was peace restored. It is no coincidence that the one country that remained both heterogeneous and independent— Yugoslavia—was, in the 1990s, the scene of Europe’s last great ethnic conflict.
The aftermath of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire (also dealt its death blow during World War I) has taken a different, more protracted course. The Turks did not submit to the breakup of empire as readily as the Austrians. Having already murdered the Armenian Christians under the Young Turk regime, they expelled the Orthodox Greeks from Asia Minor and consolidated their Turkish nation-state (albeit retaining a substantial Kurdish minority, whose strivings for autonomy they ruthlessly crushed).
But the rest of what had been the Ottoman Empire did not immediately adopt the model of the nation-state, as Europe had done. Instead, the victors of the First World War established “mandates” (de facto colonies) in the losers’ former possessions—Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria. Independence did not come to most of the Middle East until after 1945, and it was seldom accompanied by democracy (Israel being the exception). Instead the multiethnic states of the region were ruled by either feudal monarchs or fascist strongmen. And a new empire—which preferred to be known as a superpower—generally helped keep these rulers in place, and the region static, if only to hold another superpower at bay.
Only in our time, then, has the Middle East reached the political stage that Central and Eastern Europe reached after the First World War. Only now are countries like Iraq and Lebanon experimenting with democracy. The lesson of European history is that this experiment is a highly dangerous one, particularly at times of economic volatility and chronic insecurity, and particularly where tribes and peoples are mixed up geographically, both within and across borders. The minorities fear—with good reason—the tyranny of the majorities. People vote their ethnicity, not their pocketbook or ideology. And even before the votes are counted, the shooting begins.
What will the United States do if Iraq’s neighbors fail to contain the ethnic conflict that is now consuming Iraq? The simple answer would be to leave the people to kill and displace one another until ethnic homogeneity has been established in the various states. That has effectively been American policy in central Africa. The trouble, of course, is that Iraq matters more than Rwanda, economically and strategically. Does anyone seriously believe that a regional conflagration would leave Israel and Saudi Arabia—America’s most important allies in the Middle East—unscathed?
Ask a different question. Did anyone seriously believe that a war in Central and Eastern Europe in 1939 would leave Britain and France unaffected? The really sobering lesson of the twentieth century is that some civil wars can grow into more than just regional wars. If the stakes are high enough, they have the potential to become world wars too.
(link via Belmont Club)
To cap off my gloomy mood, I end by copying and pasting two comments from the Belmont Club:
Maybe the reason it is easier to talk about troops numbers and weapons is that at all events, they are obtainable from somewhere. But where does one obtain “decisiveness”? Where does one get the “will to win”? In the White House, at the NYT editorial offices, at Nancy Pelosi’s inauguration? It’s ineffable. You can’t find it in any stockroom or store shelf. And maybe in the end, it is easier to send men instead.
Much of American society, including the ‘human rights’ claque responsible for the nonsense you describe, don’t really believe we are even under attack, let alone that we risk losing. Consequently they believe that just about anything else that attracts their fleeting interest is more important.
The war will have to come to us before they believe (and don’t expect any apologies from them when it does). If a million mostly ‘little brown people’ are killed in foreign countries between now and then, as seems likely, the consciences of our secular priesthood will not be ruffled, any more than they were by the slaughter following our exit from and subsequent abandonment of South Vietnam, for which they had clamored so enthusiastically.