Two views of Obama's Libya War

Three, actually. The third being Gene Lyons' cautious defense of Obama's action with particular reference to his Republican critics, Obama gambles his presidency Salon 03/30/2011. It's important to remember that this war has many aspects. There is the policy question of whether it's a good idea, which involves both strategic questions (is the current "global domination" strategy a good one?) and tactical ones (does this war make sense in terms of the current strategy?). There are also partisan (and intra-party) political issues, such as whether the various criticisms being directed at the Libya War make sense, and what they say about how other political players would handle this or similar situations.

As Gene writes of the bold Maverick McCain, "Bellicose chatter has simply become a reflex with McCain. If somebody told him global warming could be halted by bombing Antarctica, he'd start believing in it."

The two views of the title are focused on longer-term issues that relate to the Obama Administration's thinking and behavior: Steven Metz, An Obama Doctrine? Or: Why the president's speech reminded me of Donald Rumsfeld. The New Republic 03/28/2011; and, David Bromwich, The CIA, the Libyan Rebellion, and the President Huffington Post 03/31/2011.

Metz sees two key aspects of the amorphous entity that he and other commentators are starting to call the Obama Doctrine as expressed in Monday's Libya (non-)War speech. First is:

...the belief that the net effect of the Arab Spring is positive—that the operations of history are taking the Middle East toward better governance, greater respect for human rights, and, presumably, increased security and stability.

The second relates to the striking tone of restraint in how Obama describes the Libya War, which seems to daily become more of a contrast to its actual conduct:

The flipside of this view is the second, implicit theme in Obama's speech, which is that if the United States embraces the Arab Spring too tightly and attempts to dominate it, the results would be negative, perhaps even disastrous. Better to tolerate some things that the United States might not prefer than to attempt top control the revolution.

I've been impressed with David Bromwich's close observations of Obama. In this piece, he's engaging in some informed speculation that the United States and Britain may have been playing a bigger role all along in the Libyan uprising than we've been thinking. He observes:

President Obama, who had traveled far already from his origins when he reinstituted military tribunals and defended the treatment of Bradley Manning, is now seen to have cast his lot with a long history of secret wars and overthrows and kinetic military operations extending back to Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Vietnam in 1963, and Nicaragua in 1984.

However well-founded his speculation leading up to that may be (or not) - he's stretching when he tries to guess at what Tom Friedman is not telling us - his observations on Obama's concept of his foreign policy, so far as it can be determined from observation of Obama and what's in the public record, are worth considering. This seems fair enough, addressing the Obama's weird dancing around calling this a war:

Many things President Obama said on Monday were wishful. The affirmation that NATO "has taken command" was wishful. So, too, was the picture of the United States "for generations" as a unique force for justice and courageous sacrifice, in a world otherwise populated by the tyrannous, the craven, the selfish, and the weak. Many other things Obama said were half true: the suggestion for example that the consideration at the front of his mind when he gave his speech was the safety of American jets and American ships far beyond the reach of Libyan gunnery. But we have now, in this baffling administration, passed out of the twilight of ambiguity. We have entered the land of lies. It is a region where many comments add up to no comment, and where every partial truth must be parsed for legalistic reservations folded into fugitive turns of grammar.

This one is also well-founded, addressing the arrogance of power that is a chronic problem for US foreign policy:

Delusions of grandeur, which have always been the lower layer of President Obama's wishful commandments, were made more perilous in this case by delusions of convenience. The president likes things clean. But there is nothing clean about what we are doing in Libya.

In his opening paragraphs, Bromwich falls into the lingo of mindreading, when he tells us how Obama understands things "in his mind." But careless phrasing aside, it does address something important about how Obama sees the power of his own rhetoric:

One of Barack Obama's first acts as president was to say that Guantanamo must go. It did not go. Soon after, he said that the Israeli settlements must go. They expanded. Obama made his peace in the end with Guantanamo and the Israeli settlements. He restarted the military tribunals at Guantanamo -- a feature of the Bush-Cheney constitution which he once had explicitly deplored -- and recently went out of his way to defend the Guantanamo-like abuse (compulsory nakedness and sleep deprivation) inflicted on an American prisoner, Bradley Manning, in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico. One had come to think of "X must go" assertions by Obama as speculative prefaces to a non-existent work. His words, in his mind, are actions. When he speaks them once or twice, he has done what he was put here to do. If the existing powers defy his wishes, he embraces the powers and continues on his way.

The Egyptian protest of January and February saw a new siege of wishful commandments and reversals by the president. He told Mubarak to go. Then he told him to stay a while. Mubarak said he would stay, but after a time, he went, and in the mind of Obama, it appears, there was a relation of cause and effect between his initial request and the final result. He was consequently emboldened. [my emphasis]

I would suggest that the foreign and domestic versions of this could be understood in distinct ways. Lies and deceit are understood on all sides to be standard operating procedure in foreign affairs, along with spying and various other habits that would be considered disreptable in daily life. The American national security establishment tends to have a very elevated estimation of the power of the United States to direct events in other countries. So it's not surprising that a President would easily acquire an inflated sense of the power of his own words in foreign affairs - although the failure of his words to affect Israeli settlement policy that Bromwich mentions should give Obama cause for reflection on that score.

It seems to me that the domestic version may be a clue that Obama is operating on an notion that Nixon followed, which is that liberals were much easier to pacify with symbolism and rhetoric than conservatives are. Obama held fast to his campaign promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Other promises like closing Guantanamo, not so much.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich, gene lyons, libya war, mccain, steven metz

War in Libya: which sides are we on?

A fractuous NATO will be asked to christen the US-French-British war in Libya as a NATO operation to be conducted under formal NATO direction. (Nicholaus Watt, et al, Nato to take control in Libya after US, UK and France reach agreement The Guardian 03/23/2011) There are a couple of Arab countries included for show.

But like much about this less-than-one-week-old war, the new arrangements sound hazy:

Obama, who spoke to Cameron and Sarkozy in separate phone calls during his tour of Latin America, agreed that:

• Nato will assume the day-to-day military command of the no-fly zone, using the alliance's military structures. The operation could be run by Admiral James Stavridis, the US supreme allied commander in Europe, who works from the Nato's military headquarters in Mons, Belgium.

• Political oversight will be provided by members of the coalition and not by Nato. Sarkozy will say this shows Nato is not in complete command, as it was in the bombing campaign against Serbian targets during the 1999 Kosovo campaign. In a traditional Nato-led operation, political control would be provided by the North Atlantic Council, the main political decision-making body of the alliance. [my emphasis]

Lots of considerations go into these diplomatic arrangements, including domestic British and French politics and those countries' roles within the EU and NATO. But it's hard to see who is going to be fooled into thinking this isn't a US-run operation.

In theory, it's possible for the coalition - in particular, the Obama Administration - to just declare we've done enough for the rebels and now we're halting military operations. But that would require a level of principle and boldness in governance that Obama has yet to demonstrate. Once we've committed to ousting Muammar Qaddafi - and we effectively have, otherwise the military operation that has unfolded makes no sense - the conventional logic of the situation will dictate that the US support some anti-Qaddafi faction in at least establishing a foothold that would look a lot like regional autonomy.

It could be a long fight. Steven Metz of the Army's Strategic Studies Institute writes of Libya in Libya’s Coming Insurgency The New Republic 03/20/2011:

History offers a number of sign posts that an insurgency will occur. Unfortunately Libya has almost all of them. At this point the political objectives of the government and anti-government forces are irreconcilable. Each side wants total victory—either Qaddafi will retain total power or he will be gone. Both sides are intensely devoted to their cause; passions are high. Both have thousands of men with military training, all imbued with a traditional warrior ethos which Qaddafi himself has stoked. The country is awash with arms. Libya has extensive hinterlands with little or no government control that could serve as insurgent bases. Neighboring states are likely to provide insurgent sanctuary whether deliberately—as an act of policy—or inadvertently because a government is unable to control its territory. North Africa has a long history of insurgency, from the anti-colonial wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to more recent conflicts in Chad, Algeria, and Western Sahara. Where insurgency occurred in the past, it is more likely to occur in the future. All this means that there is no place on earth more likely to experience an insurgency in the next few years than Libya. [my emphasis]

We're supporting an opposition movement based in the tribes of Cyrenaica against those of Tripolitania. Who knows whose side Fezzan will wind up on? No, this isn't an Orwell/1984 takeoff; Ted Galen Carpenter uses the Ottomon provincial names in Another War of Choice The National Interest 03/18/2011, where he warns:

Bush administration leaders greatly underestimated the depth of the divisions among Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds in Iraq, and that blunder contributed greatly to Washington’s headaches in that country. The Obama administration may be poised to make a similar blunder in Libya. Assisting the Cyrenaica-based rebels to oust Qaddafi will almost certainly provoke resentment from the people of Tripolitania. If the rebels split the country, that will become a focal point of resentment for those defeated tribes—and a new grievance against the West throughout much of the Muslim world. Even if the rebels attempt to keep Libya intact, the Tripolitanians are bound to resent Washington for their new, subordinate status. Either way, the United States and its allies are in danger of stumbling into a situation in which they are almost certain to acquire new enemies. That is the last thing that America needs. [my emphasis]

Phyllis Bennis writes in Libya intervention threatens the Arab spring Aljazeera English 03/22/2011:

The question remains, what is the end game? The UN resolution says force may only be used to protect Libyan civilians, but top US, British and French officials have stated repeatedly that "Gaddafi must go" and that he has "lost legitimacy to rule". They clearly want regime change.

The military commanders insist that regime change is not on their military agenda, that Gaddafi is not "on a target list," but there is a wink-and-a-nod at ''what if'' questions about a possible bombing "if he is inspecting a surface-to-air missile site, and we do not have any idea if he is there or not".

Tags: libya war, phyllis bennis, steven metz, ted galen carpenter

Acadmic freedom in US war colleges (Updated)

I wondered whether the military colleges were under pressure from Cheney and Rummy to conform their academic work to the Republican Party line. I frequently quote from papers and articles from the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) and from their quarterly journal Parameters. And I also have used material from other military war colleges and service publications.

While some of those papers and articles do reflect the administration line, for better or worse, many provide information that doesn't conform to the administration's preferred public image of the Iraq War or other situations. The military colleges have long maintained a strong record of quality scholarship and academic freedom, which means they provide materials representing a variety of viewpoints and types of analysis, not just pieces reflecting current official positions. (You can find the PR stuff at the services' press sites, much of it so wooden you'd think they would be embarrassed to publish it.) The Autumn 2008 issue of Parameters includes articles by Travis Sharp of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and Michael Lind of the New America Foundation.

Tom Ricks in his new blog at the Foreign Policy Web site, which started just this week with a whole new look and approach that should make it a more valuable source of commentary on contemporary events, addresses some issues that have arisen at the Army War College in particular. The bottom line: Rummy did try to impose a more Party-line approach at that institution.

Rather bizarrely, professors have been prohibited from assigning the works of radical Islamists. [Update: two commenters have pointed out that Ricks' report on this aspect is not correct, which I'm glad to hear. I take their comments to be accurate. So the comments in the following paragraph don't seem to apply to the actual situation at the Army War College.]

This is another example of the hairbrained notion of shallow-minded Manichaeanism that someone thinks that understanding the enemy (or potential enemies) is a bad thing. Do they think that knowing what Sayyid Qutb's or Mawlānā Abu'l-A‛la Mawdūdī's approach to political Islam was is going to turn them into suicide bombers? This is a real fear of ideas. This notion that you shouldn't even read what the Other Side says about their goals seems to have an underlying assumption that you only read things for instructions, like the directions for how to set up your new TV. (Qutb and Mawdūdī are probably easier to understand than the average electronics or appliance instruction, but that's another matter.)

Ricks' two posts on that topic are Fiasco at the Army War College 01/07/09 and Fiasco at the Army War College: The sequel 01/08/09. The first post involves Steven Metz of the SSI, and includes comments from Metz himself in response. I won't try to summarize the particular dispute here, but the post and Metz' response give a good idea of what happened - which wasn't quite what Ricks seems to have first assumed.

I got a smile from a commenter responding to Metz, saying, "Probably the majority of bloggers have never heard of you before despite your great accomplishments." That's certainly not true here, where I've posted a number of times about Metz' work about the nature of counterinsurgency. I'm also going to be posting about his 2008 book Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy, in which he provides one of the best descriptions I've seen of the whole "revolution in military affairs" and "transformation" that loomed so large in the US military in recent years. He also makes some important points about how the Iraq War is likely to be taken as a paradigm for future wars and why it's important to understand what really happened in a clear-eyed manner.

In his comments to the first post, Metz gives a description of how academic freedom has a different context in the military colleges than in most public or private universities:

There are other important differences between academic freedom in a DoD setting and a civilian academic setting. Much of the analysis done within DoD is about the organization itself--its structure, policies, leadership, etc. Most of the analysis done in civilian academia deals with organizations, policies, and people outside the academic organization itself. This means that as a general rule, critical analysis done under the policy of academic freedom within DoD strikes more directly at DoD itself than does critical analysis undertaken in a university. Very few academics build their careers through critical analysis of academia, particularly their own institution or their own leaders. But that's exactly what DoD academics do.

It is also true that most of the leadership in DoD, whether uniformed military or senior civilians, have not spent all or most of their careers in an environment where the value of academic freedom is inculcated. They understand "strategic communications" used to promote the messages and interests of the organization, but may not be as comfortable with public criticism of their organization from inside it. Given that, there is an amazing depth of tolerance for self criticism from DoD's senior leaders. I have long been amazed that the U.S. Army pays me to, with some frequency, tell it that I think it's wrong. That Army and DoD leaders can understand, tolerate, and value something that they may not have deep personal experience with says much about their sagacity.

Tags: steven metz, thomas ricks

Humanitarian intervention and the Iraq Syndrome

Fairness and Accuracy in Media's (FAIR) Extra! for Jan/Feb 2008 includes an article by Julie Hollar on The Humanitarian Temptation: Calling for war to bring peace to Darfur.

I hope that American political culture will experience a major "Iraq Syndrome" in which the public and Congress will scrutinize US involvement in wars more closely, skeptically and realistically than what occurred with the Iraq War.

Hollar's article is a reminder that even wars for legitimate purposes, such as an international intervention to halt genocide, can go badly wrong. We're seeing right now in Iraq and Afghanistan that American military power has definite limits, more constricting limits than most Americans would like to believe exist.

Resolving a bitter civil war is not easy for outsiders to accomplish. It may require a broad range of counterinsurgency operations, all of which risk turning a humanitarian intervention into a nationalist war against the intervening power(s). Language skills are also a critical factor. So is religion. In the case of Darfur and the Sudan, it may be difficult for many Sudanese and for Muslims in other countries to look at an intervention on the part of armies from Christian or Buddhist or Hindu nations against an Arab Muslim regime as motivated by entirely benign purposes.

It's also the case that the Dick Cheneys and Richard Perles of the world will always find "humanitarian" glosses for their cynical and militaristic foreign policies. After all, the often savage acts of nineteenth century imperial powers was crowned with the rhetoric of civilizing supposedly lesser peoples, e.g., the "white man's burden".

And military forcies large enough and well-trained enough to credible undertake a humanitarian intervention in a hostile, difficult, "non-permissive" environment is also a military that the Dick Cheneys and Richard Perles can use for their own truly dark purposes.

And war is war. It's about killing the enemy. Whatever the legitimacy of the war aims, the notion of "humanitarian war", as Helena Cobban has observed, is a hideous oxymoron. She writes in The myth of 'humanitarian' war 07/15/04 at her Just World News blog:

But trying to claim that any war can be 'humanitarian' is fundamentally dishonest. No war is 'humanitarian', ever. War sucks. War kills people; and by design it is a blatant attack on their most basic human rights--their rights to life, to physical security, to the pre-conditions of material and mental wellbeing. To pretend that any war serves 'humanitarian' aims is fundamentally to ignore those most evident facts about war--facts that too many Americans seem to have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew them.

Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact here. Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing 'humanitarian' war aims... Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of 'humanitarian' rhetoric... Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an 'unjust' or even 'unjustified' war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping. (emphasis in original)

In Crimes of War 2.0 (2007), former humanitarian hawk turned skeptic David Rieff co-authors the article on "Humanitarian Intervention" with Anthony Dworkin. Referring to the often-cited Rwandan genocide as one of his examples, they write:

In practice, humanitarian intervention has often served as a justification for States to act in conflicts where there is no domestic support for more straightforward political interventions. The public in North America and western Europe has, for all the talk of compassion fatigue, proved remarkably sympathetic to the use of force to avert of bring to an end a humanitarian disaster. On the other hand, humanitarian intervention has also been a justification for other political motivations. In Rwanda, in 1994, it was commonly assumed that the French humanitarian intervention dubbed Operation Turquoise used the humanitarian imperative as a cover for France's decision to continue to try to influence events in the Great Lakes region of Africa with military force and, more specifically, to save the French-supported, but genocidal, government. And, historically, many of the imperial campaigns launched by the European colonial powers in the nineteenth century were justified on humanitarian grounds. (my emphasis)

They conclude by observing:

After the American invasion of Iraq, the morality and practical efficacy of armed intervention seem more problematical to many people than they did previously, and the rich world's appetite for humantiarian intervention appears at least temporarily to have wanted. However, the continuing victimization of civilians in internal conflicts such as Darfur means the use of military power for humanitarian purposes is likely to retain an enduring appeal, even in these chastened times.

Hollar's article on various media appeals for armed intervention in Darfur observes:

A “humanitarian intervention,” as benevolent as it may try to sound, at its core means non-consensual military action against a foreign country—war under the banner of humanitarianism. The remarkable thing about nearly all of these media calls for intervention is that, beyond the appeals to urgency and morality, virtually no effort is made to explain exactly why or how one should believe that aggressive military action is what will bring peace to Darfur; readers, apparently, are to take that as self-evident. “If the United Nations is not willing to intervene,” the St. Petersburg Times asked (7/27/04), “how can it be taken seriously as a force for peace and humanitarianism?”

The equation of intervention with peace and humanitarianism is particularly remarkable in the wake of Iraq. Despite the [Sacramento] Bee’s declaration that “nothing” is more globally urgent than rescuing the people of Darfur, Iraq is unquestionably a much larger humanitarian crisis. Best estimates put the death toll in Iraq at over a million. (See page 22.) According the UNCHR, 4.4 million Iraqis are currently refugees or internally displaced, despite widespread media attention on a relative handful of Iraqis returning home.

The "liberation" of the Kurds and Shiites from a genocidal dictator was from the beginning presented as a key justification for the Iraq War, increasingly so as the WMD argument lost all credibility with the public. Even now, calls for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq are based primarily on claims that a pullout will “result” in a humanitarian crisis - as if one were not already well underway. (my emphasis)

Hollar also has some important observations about the experience of the Kosovo War, something on which I hope to post more soon.

I've written before about the distinctions that Steven Metz of the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute makes among various types of situations that may involved the US in counterinsurgency and the kind of careful realism that is required in evaluating those cases. He presents some of those arguments in the Winter 2007-08 issue of the Army War College journal Parameters, New Challenges and Old Concepts: Understanding 21st Century Insurgency. His distinctions are also relevant to humanitarian interventions, which are likely to involve some sort of counterinsurgency/anti-guerrilla operations, especially if "regime change" is one of the goals of the intervention. He sees three major categories of such cases:

Rather than a “one size fits all” American strategy for counterinsurgencies, the United States should recognize three distinct insurgency environments, each demanding a different response:

• A functioning and responsible government with some degree of legitimacy in a nation with significant US national interests or traditional ties can be rescued by foreign internal defense (El Salvador model).

• There is no functioning or legitimate government but there is a broad international and regional consensus favoring the creation of a neo-trusteeship until systemic reengineering is complete. In such instances, the United States should provide military, economic, and political support as part of a multinational force operating under the auspices of the United Nations.

• There is no functioning and legitimate government and no international or regional consensus for the formation of a neo-trusteeship. In such cases, the United States should pursue containment of the conflict through the support of regional states and, in cooperation with friendly states and allies, creating humanitarian “safe zones” within the region of the conflict.

And his concluding observation on counterinsurgencies are also relevant to humanitarian interventions:

Perhaps we need to transcend the idea that insurgency is simply a variant of conventional war and amenable to the same strategic concepts. Such a conceptual and strategic readjustment will not come easily. It will be hard to simply contain an insurgency and possibly witness the ensuing humanitarian costs when no salvageable government or multinational consensus exists that is capable of reengineering the failed social, political, or economic system. It will be particularly difficult to conform to the notion of serving as mediators or honest-brokers rather than as active allies or supporters of a regime. But to not do so — to confront new security problems with old ideas and strategies — is a recipe for disaster. (my emphasis)

Elaborating the same idea in the body of the article, Metz makes the important observation reminding us that the risk of protracted conflict a problem in itself:

Such actions suggest that the US military and broader defense community need a very different way of thinking about and undertaking counterinsurgency strategies and operations. At the strategic level, the risk to the United States is not that insurgents will “win” in the traditional sense, gain control of their country, or change it from an American ally to an enemy. The greater likelihood is that complex internal conflicts, especially ones involving an insurgency, will generate other adverse effects: the destabilization of regions; reduced access to resources and markets; the blossoming of transnational crime; humanitarian disasters; and transnational terrorism. Given these possibilities, the US goal should not automatically be the direct defeat of the insurgents by the established regime (which often is impossible, particularly when a partner regime is only half-heartedly committed), but, rather, the rapid resolution of the conflict. A quick and sustainable outcome which integrates most of the insurgents into the national power structure is less damaging to US national interests than a protracted conflict that may lead to the total destruction of the insurgent base. Protracted conflict, not insurgent victory, is the threat. (my emphasis)

That threat can be just as real in a humanitarian intervention as it is in a Cheneyist intervention.

Tags: anthony dworkin, darfur, david rieff, helena cobban, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian war

Wars in Iraq and Vietnam (4): A liberal Establishment view

The Winter 2008 issue of Democracy Journal just out has several articles that address issues around the direction of foreign policy and aspects of "culture war" symbolism.

One that combines both is Viet Not by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson. It's an attempt to look realistically at the lessons of Vietnam War and what they might tell us about how to get out of the Iraq War. At the same time, there is also an element to the article of framing an exit strategy from Iraq in terms of Vietnam War symbolism that departs from the standard Republican framing.

Both are undoubtedly necessary. But no two situation are exact parallels. And it's awfully tempting to fix the facts of history around a real-time policy prescription. Here, I'm going to concentrate on Simon's and Stevenson's version of the lessons of the Vietnam War.

I was very pleased to see that they address the issue of public support for war in a more realistic framework than John Mueller's, whose flawed interpretation of the experience of the Korean and Vietnam War periods has unfortunately achieved widespread acceptance. For the gory details, see my post on his book about the topic. Mueller attempts to salvage his theory in the context of the Iraq War in The Iraq Syndrome Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec 2005.

Simon and Stevenson write:

As Eric Larson and Bogdan Savych’s RAND Corporation study has shown, the American public will tolerate a high number of casualties if it is convinced they are serving vital American interests in a cause that can be won in the foreseeable future and if it sees wall-to-wall agreement among Congress, the administration, and the punditocracy. When the stars align in this way, as they did during World War II–and, indeed, for much of the Vietnam era–Americans will accept large losses. But when the public regards the spilling of American blood as strategically unnecessary or even pointless, as it did in Somalia in 1993, it is understandably loath to accept casualties in abundance.

To be sure, U.S. fatalities in Vietnam dwarfed the fewer than 4,000 Americans killed so far in Iraq, and the rate of military losses in Vietnam was far higher than that in Iraq. But public intolerance is not attributable to any inherent, quantifiable squeamishness on the electorate’s part. As with Vietnam, the factors most responsible for undermining the national will are the imperturbable and almost surreal incompetence and duplicity of the United States’ war leaders. On account of these transgressions - in particular, the grudgingly conceded fact that the casus belli were at best contrived and at worst simply manufactured, and the extravagantly stupid failure to anticipate a robust insurgency - an open-ended commitment is politically out of the question. Indeed, support for the war was thoroughly gutted by 2006, when Democrats, propelled by intensifying opposition to the war, seized control of Congress. (my emphasis)

Since I'm concentrating on the Vietnam War part, I'll just mention in passing that until a majority clearly turned against the Iraq War in 2005, the public pretty much did see "wall-to-wall agreement among [the Republican-controller] Congress, the administration, and the punditocracy". Somehow, people managed to see through that "wall-to-wall agreement". (And, yes, Virginia, there was and is an antiwar movement.) It's true that public support for the Iraq War was "thoroughly gutted by 2006", even by 2005. Mueller in the article linked above cities a Washington Post poll in August 2005 showing that 61% selected the pro-withdrawal response to the polling question, "Do you favor keeping a large number of U.S. troops in Iraq until there is a stable government there or bringing most of our troops home in the next year?" Yet more than two years later with the Democrats having taken back control of both Houses of Congress, the coalition of the Unilateral Executive, the authoritarian Republican Party and the broken-down mainstream press have so far blocked any measure at all to restrict the number of troops or impose a withdrawal deadline of any kind. On the contrary, The Surge was an escalation of the war.

It's a sign of the times, I suppose, that in their litany of "wall-to-wall" war advocacy, they neglected to include our infallible generals who go in front of the cameras and lie their faces off about how wonderfully the war is going and how we're winning, winning and winning some more. Those also played their role in both the Vietnam and Iraq Wars.

This comparison in their article also suggests that Simon and Stevenson are, at the least, hedging their bets carefully even on condemning the Vietnam War as unnecessary as they focus on the public perception:

The Vietnam intervention could be sold (for a while) as an integral part of the Cold War. Arguably it made sense as a means of reinforcing the trust of collective security partners, setting limits for the Soviets and the Chinese, and strengthening containment, given that the nuclear risks of fighting a proxy war in Eastern Europe were too great. But the Iraq War - despite the Bush Administration’s best efforts - has not scanned as an essential element of the war on terror, at least since it became clear Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no meaningful links to al Qaeda. (my emphasis)

Their historical picture is true in so far as the public and Congress understood the Vietnam War to be an important front in the Cold War. But "setting limits for the Soviets and the Chinese"? Let's put it mildly and say that's arguable. That clause, "given that the nuclear risks of fighting a proxy war in Eastern Europe were too great", really leaves me scratching my head, though. As it's presented, that statement only makes sense if they are saying that in 1961 or 1965, the US had to find a "proxy war" to fight somewhere, and better in Vietnam than in Europe.

That mentality is why the so-called "Vietnam syndrome" was a basically healthy one. And why we really need an "Iraq syndrome" to restrain our Grand Foreign Policy Thinkers from dreaming up useless and avoidable wars for Americans and whichever enemy we pick to die in.

Toward the beginning of the article, Simon and Stevenson do a brief survey of some of the lessons that some students of counterinsurgency (COIN) are drawing from various conflicts, like the British experience in Malaya, which is still often seen as a classic successful COIN effort. But the British eventually left, too. And Simon and Stevenson write:

The Vietnam War has a different and more insidious relationship to the American psyche, one all the more seductive and resonant today because it does in fact bear objective similarities to the Iraq War. Both were major, large-scale American engagements against unexpectedly tough adversaries. Over time, both were met by dwindling public support. But there are also obvious differences. The Vietnam War evolved from a guerrilla insurgency into a major conventional conflict, while the Iraq War has taken just the opposite course. And Vietnam’s crowning characteristic is that the good guys lost. Indeed, the Vietnam War is often cast as the first American defeat. As such, it cries out for redemption of a cause betrayed. It is this last, highly emotive and nationalistic impulse, rather than the war's pedagogical utility, that the Bush Administration seeks most acutely to exploit in implicitly vowing "never again."

A fortuitous cakewalk in the first Gulf War and an unexpectedly precipitous victory in the Cold War shortly thereafter gave us the luxury of shaking off a national leeriness of military intervention – the "Vietnam syndrome" – without coming to terms with how the war was lost or understanding its strategic consequences. (my emphasis)

It's hard to miss in that last sentence what seems to be an implicit assumption that "a national leeriness of military intervention" is inherently a bad thing. Unfortunately, that is an underlying assumption of much Establishment foreign policy thinking, whether of the liberal internationalist, realist, or nationalist/neoconservative varieties, though the latter often seem to view war as a positive, purging force of progress.

It's perfectly legitimate and necessary to talk about the types of leadership and "market positioning" strategies (if that's not too crass a term) that are effective in war leadership. But that doesn't mean we have to assume that a skepticism about war is inherently a bad thing. On the contrary, the best thing about democracy may be that, despite triumphalism and jingoistic media and various other less-than-admirable factors, ordinary voters just don't like wars very much. That's the most fundamental reason why 61% of the public had turned against the Iraq War by August 2005, despite the "wall-to-wall agreement among [the Republican-controlled] Congress, the administration, and the punditocracy" (and lying generals) on many of the basic assumptions of the war. It was only a couple of months before that when Sen. Dick Durbin, who seems to be a decent guy, felt he had to abjectly apologize for suggesting that torture in the Bush Gulag bore any resemblance to German crimes during the Second World War. While even members of Congress who should have known better were still trembling in fear of being branded Patriotically Incorrect if they frontally challenged Bush's "war on terror" policies, a big majority of the public had figured out that the Iraq War was a crock.

That last quote from Simon and Stevenson show how decent observations can come bundled with some very questionable ones. It's true that the Cheney-Bush administration is appealing to a sense that the defeat in the Vietnam War needs to be redeemed. But it's worth breaking that down a bit.

First of all, there is no such thing as "the American psyche". For historians, concepts like a national "character" or a national "mind" are, like, so 1950s. Journalists and pundits still use the notions, which in some instances might make sense when clearly understood as a metaphor.

I try to avoid it myself, though, because more often than not it's a cover for fuzzy thinking of some kind. There are 330 million or so American psyches, but not an "American psyche". (Actually, in California we typically have two or three psyches per person. But that's another story.)

The revanchist, stab-in-the-back theory of the loss of the Vietnam War to which they refer is a well-known one. But I really question how much of the public buys into it. Conservative Republicans have actively promoted it. And the military officer corps by all reports widely accepted it, though fortunately such notions are discussed more thoroughly in the military than typically in civilian publications. So there's hardly a unified military "psyche" on the matter.

Cheney and Bush are appealing to their hardcore base with pitches like that, to keep Congressional Republicans enough in line so that they can continue their extremely unpopular war in Iraq through Bush's last term and pass the disaster on to the next President. But the very fact that a large majority of the public came to reject the Iraq War despite the "wall-to-wall" solidarity of the Congress/President/Punitocracy/Lying Generals bloc is in itself a strong argument against the idea that such a view of the Vietnam War and its applicability to present situations is any kind of majority view, much less part of an imaginary "American psyche".

One of the strange things about Simon's and Stevenson's discussion of the Vietnam War is that their view seems self contradictory in an important way. For instance, in the previous quote, they write almost as a throwaway line that the Vietnam War's "crowning characteristic is that the good guys lost." Okay, if we automatically assume that Americans are the Good Guys, yeah. But you don't have to be any fan of the Vietnamese Communists to recognize that "our side" in the real world was a corrupt, very unpopular, brutal government in South Vietnam that was widely viewed by the Vietnamese as illegitimate. And they themselves explain that at some length. For example:

In taking up a stiff counterinsurgency challenge in Vietnam, the United States made itself hostage to the effectiveness and commitment of the South Vietnamese government. Furthermore, it became obvious that in Vietnam–as in virtually all counterinsurgency situations - an agreement changing the political conditions that spawned the insurgency was indispensable to a sustainable peace on terms acceptable to Washington and Saigon. Unless that happened, military gains, no matter how audacious, could not be sustained. Yet throughout the U.S. involvement, the South Vietnamese government remained decadent, stagnant, and incorrigible. As historian George Herring has noted, "The United States found to its chagrin that as its commitment increased, its leverage diminished." While there were undeniable counterinsurgency successes in the early 1970s, Saigon was not up to consolidating them by winning the confidence of its citizenry. (my emphasis)

This is true. Aside from the Grand Questions of the Cold War context, US military support for the South Vietnamese government only made sense if the government itself was viable and could carry the the military and COIN fight to success mostly on its own. It never could.

When the US combat troops withdrew in 1973, the South Vietnamese government had a huge army and air force, trained largely by the Americans, and still enjoyed major US military assistance right up until the fall of Saigon in May, 1975.

In that kind of effort, the US can't blindly commit to an open-ended military role. Steven Metz in his 2007 paper "Rethinking Insurgency" (see my post of 06/29/07) suggests a differentiated definition of COIN efforts depending on the situation in the country involved.

His reality-based approach to military intervention includes a far more pragmatic concept of success that the one that currently prevails in our political culture and military assumptions. He summarizes the categories of situations and the broad approach this way (directly quoted here):

• A functioning government with at least some degree of legitimacy is suffering from an erosion of effectiveness but can be “redeemed” through assistance provided according to the Foreign Internal Defense doctrine.

• There is no functioning and legitimate government, but a broad international and regional consensus supports the creation of a neo-trusteeship. In such instances, the United States should provide military, economic, and political support as part of a multinational consensus operating under the authority of the United Nations.

• There is no functioning and legitimate government and no international or regional consensus for the formation of a neo-trusteeship. In these cases, the United States should pursue containment of the conflict by support to regional states and, in conjunction with partners, help create humanitarian "safe zones" within the conflictive state.

Conflicts like these, even the first category, are unlikely to end with the enemy laying down their arms and surrendering to be shipped off to Guantánamo for the rest of their lives. As Metz puts it:

[T]he U.S. goal should not automatically be the defeat of the insurgents by the regime (which may be impossible and which the regime may not even want), but the most rapid conflict resolution possible. In other words, a quick and sustainable resolution which integrates insurgents into the national power structure is less damaging to U.S. national interests than a protracted conflict which leads to the complete destruction of the insurgents. Protracted conflict, not insurgent victory, is the threat. (my emphasis)

Simon and Stevenson don't seem to see the Vietnam War in any of those ways. In fact, despite their accurate descriptions of the South Vietnamese government's inability to survive on its own, they still seem to think that the policy of the Ford administration in the war's final months (Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, Rummy was Ford's chief of staff, and Dick Cheney was Rummy's chief assistant) was actually a correct one. They write:

The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam over the course of 1973 to 1975 proved so divisive precisely because a fictional "who lost the war" story line was pushed by conservatives in an effort to mask the inept conduct of a war they had backed. This stratagem recalled that of German nationalists during the Weimar era, who cultivated the myth that the Ludendorff Offensive of spring 1918 had effectively won World War I, but that democratic German politicians–the so-called "November criminals," some of Hitler’s favorite scapegoats–had discarded victory through craven capitulation. Such tendentious posturing should not cloud the fact that U.S. involvement in Vietnam ultimately exceeded what the public would tolerate. The decline of public support, coupled with U.S. indecision, led to a frenzied withdrawal behind a political fig leaf and a dearth of post-withdrawal support for any legitimate South Vietnamese government. (my emphasis)

That's self-contradictory enough to make me dizzy. Their description of the stab-in-the-back story line pushed by conservatives is accurate so far as it goes.

But then in the latter part of that paragraph, they proceed to elaborate what looks an awful lot like the stab-in-the-back fiction. The problem, as they put it there, was that "U.S. involvement in Vietnam ultimately exceeded what the public would tolerate". Uh, yeah, that's true. But the public wouldn't tolerate it because a majority figured out that the costs of the war far exceeded anything that the US might conceivably gain from it.

And in what parallel universe did the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam resemble "a frenzied withdrawal"? Probably in the parallel reality where Norman Podhoretz and some of the other neocons live, but not in this one. The withdrawal took place from 1969-1973, pretty protracted period for a frenzy. By the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973, most American combat troops had already been withdrawn. Nixon and Kissinger could almost certainly have negotiated a very similar arrangement in 1969 and withdrawn American troops much faster, minimizing American and Vietnamese deaths and even leaving the Saigon government in a better position militarily and politically than they did in 1973.

And "a dearth of post-withdrawal support for any legitimate South Vietnamese government"? The only "dearth" was that Congress banned any further bombing in support of the failing South Vietnamese government. Again, in the parallel neocon universe, that might have saved the South Vietnamese regime indefinitely. But not in this one.

It's hard to read the bottom line of Simon's and Stevenson's argument as anything other than a "soft" version of the argument that the real problem in the Iraq War is not that its an irredeemable disaster but that the wimpy public may lose our Will and develop an "Iraq syndrome":

If we do not exercise strategic discretion and design a near-term military disengagement that incorporates residual U.S. support for Iraq, we are likely to be forced - by domestic opinion at least as much as facts on the ground in Iraq - into a Vietnam-esque withdrawal that leaves no room for such support for Iraq and diminished American standing throughout the world. That fate is the one we tempt by keeping troops in Iraq when their presence there cannot secure America's interests and only weakens the United States’ strategic position. At the end of the day, America's allies value, and its adversaries fear, not its persistence in a dubious policy that is unlikely to serve its own interests, but its preservation of viable strategic options. (my emphasis)

Even that paragraph is self-contradictory. They argue that the US military presence in Iraq "cannot secure America's interests and only weakens the United States’ strategic position". Yet they complain that "domestic opinion at least as much as facts on the ground in Iraq" could compel withdrawal, and that somehow that would be a bad thing.

Say what? How is it a bad thing if public opinion opposes continuing a policy that "cannot secure America's interests and only weakens the United States’ strategic position". Not what I would call a Jacksonian democratic perspective.

This article is an illustration of how strong a hold the stab-in-the-back theory has, not so much on the general public, but on military and political thinkers and strategists who feel the need to adhere to the conventional wisdom shared among themselves. It also shows how the lessons of the Vietnam War can be shaped, or mangled, to fit current ideologies or policy presriptions. That's not at all to say there's nothing to be learned from past wars. It's just that we need to look critically at lessons being fixed around a current policy, to borrow a famous concept from the Downing Street Memo.

Tags: iraq war, jonathan stevenson, stab-in-the-back, steve simon, steven metz, vietnam war

Rethinking insurgency, redefining success and providing "strategic methadone"

Steven Metz, who has previously provided analysis of counterinsurgency in papers like The Future of War (1993), Counterinsurgency: Strategy and the Phoenix of American Capability (1995), Learning from Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy, and others, has a new monograph called Rethinking Insurgency (US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute; June 2007).

Metz calls for "a radically different way of thinking about counterinsurgency" from that which currently shapes US political-military thinking. Unfortunately, the amount of this discussion that leaks out into the general public is limited, which is more than unfortunate, because the decisions made around this question will shape our future in major ways.

Defining success

He also advances what I would describe as a reality-based approach to military intervention that focuses on the particular situations of the country and - critically - includes a far more pragmatic concept of success that the one that currently prevails in our political culture and military assumptions. He summarizes the categories of situations and the broad approach this way (directly quoted here):

• A functioning government with at least some degree of legitimacy is suffering from an erosion of effectiveness but can be “redeemed” through assistance provided according to the Foreign Internal Defense doctrine.

• There is no functioning and legitimate government, but a broad international and regional consensus supports the creation of a neo-trusteeship. In such instances, the United States should provide military, economic, and political support as part of a multinational consensus operating under the authority of the United Nations.

• There is no functioning and legitimate government and no international or regional consensus for the formation of a neo-trusteeship. In these cases, the United States should pursue containment of the conflict by support to regional states and, in conjunction with partners, help create humanitarian "safe zones" within the conflictive state.

Conflicts like these, even the first category, are unlikely to end with the enemy laying down their arms and surrendering to be shipped off to Guantánamo for the rest of their lives. As he puts it:

[T]he U.S. goal should not automatically be the defeat of the insurgents by the regime (which may be impossible and which the regime may not even want), but the most rapid conflict resolution possible. In other words, a quick and sustainable resolution which integrates insurgents into the national power structure is less damaging to U.S. national interests than a protracted conflict which leads to the complete destruction of the insurgents. Protracted conflict, not insurgent victory, is the threat. (my emphasis)

This will be a hard sell with military strategists, I would imagine. For politicians who must contend more immediately with the general public's conception of "victory", it may be an even harder sell.

Dealing with that aspect of war-making is beyond the scope of his new monograph. But as one can easily hear in the campaign speeches of Mitt Romney, Rudi Giulani, Fred Thompson and Maverick John McCain, they all assume that their party base demands "tough" talk of victory, torture (whatever euphemisms they pick) and the destruction of evildoers.

And on the Democratic side, for all their criticisms of the Iraq War, most of them remain leery about exposing themselves now or in the distant future to a charge that they may have shown insufficient martial spirit on some foreign policy issue.

But Metz argues that we should be willing to accept less-desirable but acceptable outcomes. He notes that sometimes the best option may even be "to deliberately encourage the insurgency to mutate into something less dangerous such as an organized criminal organization" because "there may be rare instances where organized crime is less of a threat than sustained insurgency". He suggests we could call such an approach "strategic methadone".

Rediscovering "classical" insurgency

We might say at this point in time that the military started into the Iraq War hoping to avoid fighting a counterinsurgency war at all. Now that we're well into the fifth year of that war, and even further into the (now-)NATO intervention in Afghanistan, the generals have relearned the lessons of the Vietnam War counterinsurgency.

The problem is, the assumption that seems to prevail among the officer corps is that the US military won that war. After the Vietnam counterinsurgency experience, the military re-concentrated its focus on conventional warfare. The basic approach to counterinsurgency was, "avoid it". Metz describes the approach this way:

During the 1970s, American national security strategy was shaped by what became known as the "Vietnam syndrome." The disastrous outcome of the war in Southeast Asia made Americans reluctant to intervene in Third World conflicts. Americans, it seemed, were ill-suited for participation in morally ambiguous, complex, and protracted armed struggles, particularly outside the nation’s traditional geographic area of concern. Better to eschew them than to become embroiled in "another Vietnam." (my emphasis)

Metz describes how drastic this turn away from thinking about or preparing for counterinsurgency was:

From the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s until 2001, the U.S. military and defense community paid scant attention to insurgency and counterinsurgency. It faded from the curricula of professional military education. There was little interest in developing new doctrine, operational concepts, or organizations. The general sense seemed to be that American involvement in counterinsurgency was a Cold War phenomenon, irrelevant with the demise of the Soviet Union and the mellowing of China.

Now that counterinsurgency (COIN in the military abbreviation) is of necessity a leading concern again for military leaders, much attention has been focused on previous counterinsurgency conflicts, like the Phillipine War, the Algerian War, post-Second World War British colonial wars and, inevitably, the Vietnam War. Metz calls attention to the irony of what he calls a new Vietnam syndrome:

When insurgency and counterinsurgency again became important elements of the global security system and American strategy after 2001, many American policymakers, political leaders, and defense strategists used Vietnam as a model. The Viet Cong were treated as the archetypical insurgency. Insurgents who did not use the Maoist strategy stood little chance of success (defined as seizing the state and becoming the new regime). The tendency was to seek new ideas from old conflicts, preparing, as so often happens, to fight the last war. (my emphasis)

This approach was recently incorporated into what is known in Pentagonese as "FM 3-24", aka, Counterinsurgency, the Army's new manual on the subject, the final version dated 12/15/06. This is the manual that Gen. David Petraus, now chief US commander in Iraq, is often mentioned as having presided over its development.

Metz is part of a debate that goes beyond the question of whether the military needs to give a longer-term emphasis on counterinsurgency rather than conventional warfare - a debate that is also raging and will for a while. He's challenging the model on which current COIN doctrine, including that of FM 3-24, are built. As he said, the Vietcong (National Liberation Front) have been "treated as the archetypical insurgency." Maoist "people's war" is the framework (leaving aside here what differences there were between the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutionary approaches). Frank Hoffman, who was part of the writing team for FM 3-24, has suggested the term "neo-classical counterinsurgency" for this approach. (Neo-Classical Insurgency? Parameters Summer 2007). Thomas Marks calls this approach, which he supports, "classical counterinsurgency", in Modelo de counterinsurgencia: La Colombia de Uribe (2002-2006) versus las FARC Military Review Julio/Augusto 2007.

Whether the "neo-classical" term sticks or not, the framework assumption is a problematic one. As Hoffman writes:

The classicists ignore the uniqueness of Maoist or colonial wars of national liberation, and over-generalize the principles that have been drawn from them. Today’s insurgent is not the Maoist of yesterday. In point of fact, there is not as much common ground among the “masters” as the classicists would have you believe. The so-called classical principles are really a commonly accepted set of key principles and practices that have emerged over time. Some of the classical principles are just blatant flashes of the obvious, such as Robert Thompson’s somber advice "the government must have an overall plan." (Given our experience in Iraq, perhaps this principle is not so obvious after all).

Metz' monograph discusses some of what the "neo-classical" approach misses, with reference to more recent experience in countries such Angola, Bosnia, Colombia, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Croatia, East Timor, Kosovo, Lebanon, Liberia, Papau New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, and Uganda. He discusses Lebanese Hizbullah at some length. And, of course, Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Third" and "Fourth" Forces

The "neo-classical" school of counterinsurgency thinking views insurgency largely in terms of an established state versus a more-or-less unified insurgency. This model would provide a decent description of the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Algerian and a number of other well-known revolutions.

But Metz discusses some of the ways in which globalizaation of information and commerce have changed the framework in which the US needs to udnerstand insurgency. As I've discussed before, the Cold War view understood terrorism as a problem of state sponsorhip of terrorism. The same was largely true of guerrilla warfare and insurgency more generally. And there was some strategic logic in this, however much the idea led policymakers to inflate threats, e.g., the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954. Because if a government deemed unduly sympathetic to the Soviet Union or China came to power in a country, to some degree it was likely to augment their strategic clout, even if only in a miniscule way. And a hostile government coming to power could in turn become a state sponsor of terrorism and insurgency in its turn.

Metz argues that today it is not state sponsorship that presents the main threat of terrorism but failed states:

The strategic context for 20th century insurgency was the political mobilization of excluded groups, rising nationalism, and proxy conflict between the superpowers. The strategic context of contemporary insurgency is the collapse of old methods of order and identity leading to systemic weakness and pathology. This creates failure or shortfalls in the security domain. One of the dominant characteristics of the contemporary global security environment is that it continues to give nation states responsibility for systemic maintenance and stability at the very time that they are increasingly incapable of providing acceptable levels of security, prosperity, and political identity. A variety of sub- and supra-state organizations are filling the vacuum. (my emphasis)

This means that insurgencies today co-exist with other results of the weaknesses of states, such as "militias, powerful criminal gangs and syndicates, informal economies, the collapse of state services, humanitarian crises or disasters, crises of identity, and transnational terrorism."

This proliferation of sub-state organizations that are competing to take advantage of the vacuum left by failing states allows insurgents to make extensive links to other groups, like organized crime gangs, in order to raise funds and secure weapons. One implication of this is that present-day insurgencies have less of a need to win active or passive public support than the "classical" Maoist insurgencts:

Like their forebears, contemporary insurgents still seek acquiescence from the populace - an unwillingness to provide information to the regime. But they rely less on the general population for information, money, and labor. This allows them to devote fewer resources to "carrots" designed to develop a mass base - social programs, administration, patronage, and so forth - and more to “sticks” which generate passivity (but not active support). Twentieth century insurgencies, particularly those based on the Maoist model, sought to balance carrots and sticks. Contemporary insurgencies (like contemporary organized crime) are more focused on violence, on coercion rather than patronage.

I can imagine the advocates of the most hardline methods of counterinsurgency seizing on this kind of argument to say, oh, forget all this "hears and minds" stuff, let's just crack down on the bad guys! But the real significance is that different situations require a different approach. In the case of a functioning state with established legitimacy facing an insurgency, a change of policies to compete for "hearts and minds" could be effective. But in a situation where such a viable state does not exist, an insurgency can prove to be intractable even its basis of popular support is relatively narrow compare to the "classical" insurgencies.

A large part of Metz' monograph is devoted to analyzing what he calls "third" and "fourth" forces, organizational players other than insurgents and governments that have acquired far greater significance in the context of fighting insurgencies.

Among "third" forces he includes militias, which he defines as opportunistic organizations that are distinguished from organized crime groups by having both service-providing as well as self-aggrandizing roles. He gives a good background on Lebanese Hizbullah, which he uses as an example of a successful militia group. In the context of Lebanon, Hizbullah does not seek to lead an insurgency to overthrow the Lebanese government. Rather, it operates as a military and service organization for the Shi'a Muslims concentrated in southern Lebanon.

Militias can arise in a variety of ways:

Some militias are based on personal patronage. In Congo-Brazzaville, for instance, the three major militia groups—the Ninja, Cobra, and Cocoye—are the private armies of powerful politicians (Denis Sassou Nguesso, Pascal Lissouba, and Bernard Kolelas). Similarly, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) is the personal militia of Thomas Lubanga and Floribert Kisembo, and the Party for Unity and Safeguarding of the Integrity of Congo is the private army of Chief Kahwa Mandro Kisembo. Alternatively, militias can be based on group identity such as clan, ethnicity, or sect.

Militias, he writes, can be dealt with in a variety of ways by a government fighting an insurgency in a country where independent militias also operate, including simply treating them the same as insurgents, coopting them with money or other incentives, or even working together with them. His caution on the latter approach are very relevant to the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq: "Tolerating militas ... condemns a state to perpetual weakness, increasing the likelihood of future conflict."

That proved to be the case in Afghanistan, where the rapid US/Northern Alliance victory over the Taliban was facilitated by massive payoffs to local militias, not to mention the fact that the Northern Alliance itself was mostly a coalition of militias. Hamad Karzai's government has never been able to establish clear national state authority throughout the country, in part because the method of dealing with militias in ousting the Taliban bolstered their power and status.

Another important "third force" types of groups are criminal organizations and private military companies (PRCs). Insurgents can cooperate with criminal gangs in profitable activities like drug smuggling to fund themselves. And while PRCs can provide flexibility and expertise to governments - or other belligerants - immediately in need of them, they present their own kinds of problems. Metz uses as an example the PRC Sandline, which was employed by oil and minerals firms to protect their facilities and personnel in various harzardous locations. But it was badly discredited when it got involved in an illegal gun-running scheme in Sierra Leone, eventually being driven out of business due to this and other legal problems.

And, as we've seen with PRCs in Iraq, their methods and priorities may conflict with those of the government or the government's allies.

I did a double-take on one of his points about organized criminal groups. Referring to Iraq immediately after the US invasion, he writes that corruption tolerated under Saddam's rule provided the kernel for some such groups. And he continues:

Since former regime members played a major role in the early days of the insurgency, it was easy for the insurgents to capitalize on the criminal connections and procedures already in place. Iranian based criminal gangs added to the problem. A good portion of the looting that took place in March and April 2003 was engineered or funded by these gangs. (p. 31)(my emphasis)

This is the first mention I recall seeing of Iranian gangs playing such a significant role in the looting at that time. Metz sources the point to an interview with Col. Martin Stanton of the Civil-Military Affairs section of the Coalition Forces Land Component Command on 05/14/03. Given that Iraqi Sunnis are said to often refer to Iraqi Shi'a as "Iranians", I wonder if this information could have come originally from Sunni sources who were coding Iraqi Shi'a gangs as "Iranian".

The "fourth forces" Metz treats briefly include multinational corporations, international media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I want to mention his discussion of the media, in particular.

This is obviously a massive subject and he doesn't pretend to treat it in more than brief form in this monograph. He focuses largely on the usefulness of publicity for insurgents, e.g., when setting off a bomb in Baghdad can instantly become news all over the world, and particularly in other parts of Iraq. The point of terrorism is to terrorize, and when such an event occurs and is widely reported, it can spread fear and the apprehension that the government is unable to insure basic security far beyond the location of the attack.

Here's how he puts it:

International media and other sources for the transmission of information level the psychological playing field. In the 20th century, insurgents struggled to reach external audiences. Only bold and intrepid reporters would venture to the difficult, dangerous areas where insurgents operated. It was the paradoxical logic again: insurgents protected themselves by remaining in remote regions, but this made it difficult to publicize their cause. Now the global media, satellite communications, cell phones, the Internet, and other information technology gives insurgents instant access to national and world audiences. Once the communications channels opened, the flexibility of insurgents and their lack of ethical and legal constraints gave them advantages in the psychological battlespace.

His discussion on this is general enough that it's hard to say whether I agree with his particular perspective on this or not. He mentions the Egyptian state-owned broadcaster Nilesat, which "is considered the semi-official voice of the Sunni insurgents" operating in Iraq, and also Al Jazeera. The latter, he writes, at a minimum "complicated counterinsurgent information operations [in Iraq] and provided the insurgents publicity (and hence legitimacy) they would not otherwise have had."

Here, I'll mention two considerations that need to be a part of the discussion on the effect of "the media" in wars involving insurgencies. One is that just as state armed forces worry about their public relations, so do insurgent groups. And insurgent groups can be as bone-headed about their propaganda as government armies. For instance, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was alive and leading "Al Qaida in Mesopotamia", the Internet and various other forms of media helped them publicize their dramatic beheadings of captives. But while such videos may be useful in firing up young recruits to jihad groups, they seem to have done Zarqawi's group more harm than good. To the point where Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri reportedly even told them to back off with the beheading videos. When a group's PR is too brutal for even Bin Laden, it's hard to say their cause was strengthened by that PR approach.

The other consideration has to do with the US armed forces' approach to public relations and news managment. I've been amazed and dismayed during the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars at the extent to which the lesson the military learned from media coverage of the Vietnam War was, let's do a better job of persuading reporters to use images and story-lines that we dream up. So you get incredible gaffes, like the Jessica Lynch dramatic-rescue story. Or the lies about Pat Tillman's death.

What they failed to understand was that stunts like those, combined with years of stock, repetitive declarations of progress in those wars, would wreck their credibility. Our generals don't need to be convinced that media coverage can help the enemy in some cases. They're already so convinced of that that the Secretary of Defense felt it necessary recently to remind a military audience that the press is not the enemy. And they're never going to get their approach to media right until they realize that dishonest PR can work in the short term, but that it's major-league counterproductive in the longer term. Censorship and happy-face stories can only do so much.

Can "we the people" handle a more pragmatic view of Victory?

Metz' monograph is directed primarily toward a military audience. It's significance for a broader public is that it reminds us that Insurgency is not a static concept or a stable reality. As he notes in the introduction, the essence of war - "the use of violence for political purposes" - does not change, but its nature or character does. The same is true of the insurgency form of warfare.

And globalization, along with changing organizational forms (e.g., less central command-and-control for insurgent organizations), has produced changes in how insurgencies function. Perhaps even more critically, there are no magic counterinsurgency formulas that will prevent "another Iraq". Because any formula wrongly applied, or applied without a realistic idea of conditions in a particular country, can lead to disaster. Metz argues that such analysis should allow war planners to distinguish between three broad categories of insurgent situations, each of which calls for a different approach.

And though he doesn't put it exactly like this, his argument requires that the US government, armed forces and the public be willing to accept "good-enough" outcomes in such wars as opposed to Victory with a capital "V". Part of the peril of dressing up every war as a re-run of the Second World War and making every opponent into a new Hitler is that it creates an expectation of complete victory, with an equivalent of a V-E Day and a huge parade in Times Square where handsome soldiers smooch with pretty women.

But, however accurate Metz' analysis of contemporary civil conflicts may be, political ideology and the contingencies of electoral politics will present real barriers to acceptance of his analysis. Particularly since it points toward a definition of Success as "good enough" rather than unconditional surrender of the enemy.

The experience of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as the experiences of other other "failed states" and countries with intractable civil conflicts is telling us, screaming in our faces really, that we need a different approach when it comes to the necessity to intervene in such countries.

And whether or not the US in the future has leaders that adopt "realist" or "liberal internationalist" or Kissingerian cynicism as their foreign policy approach, we definitely need a more reality-based approach to understanding the countries in which we may see the need to intervene, one that doesn't assume an absurd best case like the "cakewalk" analysis on Iraq.

I didn't include the neoconservative foreign policy outlook in that list of foreign policy approaches, because it's been clearly proven to be a disaster. And, ultimately, no amount of country-specific understanding, or informed counterinsurgency strategy, or careful preparation for contingencies can prevent another disaster from occuring if another President embarks on a reckless, faith-based foreign policy like that of the Cheney-Bush administration.

The brand of "strategic methadone" that Metz recommends would be far preferable to the kind of hard drugs with which the neocons injected us in producing the Iraq War.

Tags: afghanistan war, steven metz, rethinking insurgency, iraq war

Drawing lessons from the Iraq War

As Gary Hart recently wrote, there will soon be a small industry in the "lessons of Iraq", which I would hope we could call "lessons of the Iraq War". But "lessons of Iraq" is likely to be what we usually hear.

An early entry in this field is Learning From Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy by Steven Metz (US Army Strategic Studies Institute) - paper dated Jan 2007 but placed on Web site 12/22/06.

The heavy temptation will be for the armed services to revert back to what they prefer, which is planning for fighting the Soviet Red Army in Europe. But at least for now, the questions of how to plan for counterinsurgency wars, what that requires and what it implies are getting at least prominently lip service from military analysts. Metz writes:

The United States has a long history of involvement in irregular conflict. During the Cold War, this took the form of supporting friendly regimes against communist-based insurgents. After the Cold War, though, the military assumed that it would not undertake protracted counterinsurgency and did little develop its capabilities for this type of conflict. Then the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, forced President Georege W. Bush and his top advisers to reevaluate the global security environment and American strategy. The new strategy required the United States to replace regimes which support terrorism or help bring ungoverned areas which terrorists might use as sanctuary under control. Under some circumstances, such actions could involve counterinsurgency. Iraq was a case in point. It has forced the U.S. military to relearn counterinsurgency on the fly. ...

The Iraq conflict reinforced what national security specialists long have known: the United States is adept at counterinsurgency support in a limited role but faces serious, even debilitating challenges when developing and implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy for a partner state. Most policymakers, military leaders, and defense analysts, though, believe that American involvement in counterinsurgency is inevitable as the "long war" against jihadism unfolds. This means that the United States needs a strategy and an organization that can conduct counterinsurgency effectively. Since 2003, the Department of Defense has undertaken a number of reforms to augment effectiveness at counterinsurgency and other irregular operations. (my emphasis)

One fault that I see in some of the early "lessons of the Iraq War" writing is that two important questions are often treated as one. Or, more precisely, one is avoided. The one that is discussed is the practical benefit of preparing for counterinsurgency warfare and in doing so, to de-emphasize preparation for conventional and/or nuclear war. The question that is not asked nearly enough is, does it make jack for sense for the United States to adopt a foreign policy that requires massive counterinsurgency operations like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Metz does ask in this paper, "At the grand strategic level, does the United States want a security apparatus optimized for counterinsurgency?" What does not come out clearly in his analysis, like it fails to come out in so many others, is that this is a serious foreign policy decision that needs to made in a serious way. It's not just a "military" question.

The Cheney-Bush foreign policy assumes what is effectively perpetual war and massive, absurd levels of military spending.

Metz' account of the early months, April and May 2003, is important. Because it shows that the US military knew very well even then that an insurgency was developing, an insurgency that military and civilian officials should have taken far more seriously than they did. It almost goes without saying that our sad "press corps" was snoozing on that one, too. The Pentagon expected the conventional war to end quickly and that they could draw down the forces to around 30,000 by late 2003. But, as Metz recounts, reality intervened in a rude way:

Unfortunately, events did not follow script. As soon as the old regime was destroyed, Iraq collapsed in a nation-wide spasm of looting and street crime. The Iraqi security forces disappeared. With nothing to take their place, violence ran unchecked. The anarchy sparked public anger which grew into a storm, gathering energy with passing weeks. For a brief interlude, little of the violence was directed against the American forces. But that did not last long. Trouble first broke out in the restive city of Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad. Fallujah was insular, conservative, intensely religious, and resistant to outside control, attracting radical clerics like moths to a flame. It was a traditional hotbed of smuggling and a city where complex tribal connections mattered greatly, helping define personal loyalty, obligation, and honor. Even Saddam Hussein largely had left the place alone. It was bypassed in the original assault on Baghdad, but elements of the 82d Airborne Division arrived in late April 2003. The citizens did not take kindly to occupation. Within a few days, a rally celebrating Saddam Hussein’s birthday led to angry denunciations of the U.S. presence and heated demands for withdrawal. Shooting broke out, leaving at least 13 Iraqis dead. Two more died the next day in a second round of clashes. Attackers then tossed grenades into a U.S. Army compound. Without drawing a moral comparison, Fallujah was like Lexington and Concord — an inadvertent clash that funneled discontent toward organized resistance.

Still, the turn to violence was not immediate across Iraq. Frustration grew gradually to a storm-like intensity, faster in some places than others. "Thank you for removing the tyrant," more and more Iraqis concluded, "but now go home." At the same time — and contradictorily — they complained that a nation as powerful as the United States could restore order and public services if it desired, so the failure to do so was punishment intended to dishonor them. Even many who had opposed Hussein believed that intervention was designed to control Iraq’s oil and promote Israeli security. Frustration led to anger. Anger began turning violent. At first it was sporadic. In early May two American soldiers were killed in Baghdad, one in a daylight assassination while directing traffic and the other by a sniper. On May 27, two more died during a nighttime attack on an Army checkpoint near Fallujah.
Iraq’s south appeared quieter but was far from stable. British forces, despite a June incident in the town of Majar al-Kabir which left six military policemen dead,
took a more relaxed approach to occupation duties, leaving local religious and militia leaders (and, as it turned out, criminal gangs) to compete for power. In the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, clerics preserved a fragile order.

In the middle of May [the same month Bush made his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech], several thousand Shiites marched in Baghdad, demanding an immediate transfer of power to an elected government. Grand Ayatollah Ali Hamid Maqsoon al-Sistani, Iraq’s senior Shiite cleric, issued a fatwa condemning the idea of a constitutional council named by the American occupation authority, saying Iraqis should draft their own constitution. But the most worrisome development in the Shiite areas was the emergence of Moqtada al-Sadr, son of an esteemed cleric killed by Hussein who was gaining fervent supporters, especially in Basra and the sprawling slum on the east side of Baghdad. He quickly discovered that opposing the Americans (along with the social services programs his organization operated) built support among the Shiite lower classes. As often happens during times of political turmoil, extremism trumped moderation in the quest for attention. Controlling Sadr became a persistent and vexing problem.(my emphasis)

If you have days of time to waste, you might consider searching for a statement at the time from administration officials or officers giving press briefings or - I know this really sounds silly - for news articles in the mainstream press that explained that the first violent encounter in Fallujah that Metz describes there was the political equivalent of "Lexington and Concord", key clashes that initiated the American Revolution.

It's worth repeating: what Metz is describing in those paragraphs is the situation in April and May of 2003. A little further on, he continues the account with events of June and July of 2003:

As early as June, some strategic analysts warned that the fighting constituted an organized guerrilla war, not simply the final spasms of the defeated regime. But U.S. officials rejected this idea. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attributed the violence to “the remnants of the Ba’ath regime and Fedayeen death squads” and “foreign terrorists” who were “being dealt with in an orderly and forceful fashion by coalition forces.” Major General Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, described his unit’s operations as “daily contact with noncompliant forces, former regime members, and common criminals.” “This is not guerrilla warfare,” he continued, “it is not close to guerrilla warfare because it’s not coordinated, it’s not organized, and it’s not led.” As summer wore on, though, it increasingly was difficult to sustain that argument. Finally, on July 16, General John Abizaid, the new commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), concluded that the United States was facing “a classical guerrilla type campaign.” “It’s low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms,” he said, “but it’s war, however you describe it.” The optimism of a month earlier, the hope of a quick and relatively painless transition to a post-Hussein Iraq, was gone. As Thomas Ricks put it, the insurgency was in “deadly bloom.” The U.S. military thus found itself thrust into
a type of conflict it thought it had left behind with the end of the Cold War - counterinsurgency.

Neither our civilian leaders nor our military leaders nor most of what we generously call our "press corps" was telling the truth about what was going on in those early months. And the Republican Congress, of course, wasn't about to conduct any oversight of war. But I don't want to overstate matters. The quotes he gives there from Odierno and Abizaid were in the public record at the time, and some American reporters like those from Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) were doing a decent job of reporting this. A telling portion of the information was there for readers who were willing to dig a bit.

Metz' paper describes much more about the recent past that influenced American military doctrine away from counterinsurgency considerations. What I want to emphasize in the remainder of this post is the early signs he rocounts of serious trouble in Iraq and how poorly senior commanders responded, and a very disturbing trend in how some military thinkers conceive the priorities in counterinsurgency war.

As terrible as the civilian leadership was and is (Bush, Cheney, Rummy), there were real failures by the military leaders as well that they shouldn't be allowed to alibi off onto the civilians, incompetent and dishonest as the latter were.

Metz writes about 2003:

General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander, instructed his subordinate commanders to expect an Iraqi government to be in place within 30 to 60 days, thus relieving them of administration and governance tasks. (p.22)

There also were problems deciding what to make of the violence in Iraq. When it first emerged, DoD portrayed it as a combination of criminal opportunism and the last spasms of a few lingering Hussein loyalists. Secretary Rumsfeld blamed “people who were the enforcers for the Saddam Hussein regime — the Fedayeen Saddam people and the Ba’ath Party members and undoubtedly some of his security guards” and “50 to 100 thousand prison inmates who were put back out in the street, criminals of various types.” In early May, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted, “we continue to root out residual pockets of resistance from paramilitary forces and Ba’ath Party personnel.” During a June press conference, Ambassador Bremer also characterized the attacks on American forces as originating from small groups of “Fedayeen Saddam or former Republican Guard officers.” This led American leaders to conclude that there was no need for a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy, but only for continued vigilance and assertive action until the criminals and the former regime loyalists grew tired, were caught, or were killed. (p. 26; my emphasis)

Did these fools believe their own propaganda? Sadly, they probably did.

David Galula, a French army officer, noted that counterinsurgency often involves a “vicious cycle” when military operations turn the public against the military and the military, in turn then begins to see the public as the enemy, thus amplifying the mutual hostility and making it more difficult to win public acceptance or support. The June and July [2003] offensives suggested that the vicious cycle had begun. They probably angered more Iraqis than they captured, leading to an aggregate increase in support for the resistance and convincing many that the United States was an occupier, not a liberator. When civilians were killed or mistreated during raids, it increased sympathy and outright support for the resistance. Methods used by American forces during arrests of suspected insurgents were particularly antagonizing. After interviewing a number of detainees, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) wrote:

Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into tins room (sic) under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexi-cuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people. Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time of arrest — sometimes in pyjamas or underwear - and were denied the opportunity to gather a few essential belongings, such as clothing, hygiene items, medicine or eyeglasses. Those who surrendered with a suitcase often had their belongings confiscated. In many cases personal belongings were seized during the arrest, with no receipt being issued. Certain CF (Coalition Forces) military intelligence officers told the ICRC that in their estimate between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.

... Even though most of those arrested by mistake were quickly released, they considered themselves dishonored, often in front of their families, thus amplifying anger, resentment, and hostility. At least some American units treated everyone as potential insurgents. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some U.S. commanders grasped this, others did not. The hostility of the Iraqi public then hardened. This angered the American troops, particularly those who had lost friends in combat. By the end of his unit’s tour, for instance, a company commander in the 4th Infantry Division advised officers coming after him to remember, “most of the people here want us dead, they hate us and everything we stand for, and will take any opportunity to cause us harm.” In the broadest sense, Americans had forgotten, after 225 years of independence, the humiliation and anger that comes from foreign occupation. They had as much difficulty understanding why Iraqis resisted efforts to help and protect them as British colonialists had in the 1770s. (pp. 29-30; my emphasis in bold)

Again, this was back in 2003, four years ago. Where were the Republicans leaders of Congress whose duty it was to exercise oversight on this? Where were most of our "press corps"? What were our Big Pundits saying about all this? It's a sad, sad story of failure on the part of most of them.

Those last two sentences of that quote are important. It's one of the severe faults in Americans' approach to the world - Congress, the press, our foreign policy "wise men" and women, certainly our "press corps" and Big Pundits - that they have next to no understanding of the revolutionary side of American history. And in situations like this, that makes a big difference. His comment on that is more than a rhetorical flourish.

Metz:

Eventually November 2003 ended as the deadliest month for the United States to that point, surpassing the conventional battles of March and April. In response, military units heightened the emphasis they gave to force protection. Again, the paradoxical logic was at play: limiting casualties was good for morale and public support but hindered pacification. In November, Clay McManaway, a retired ambassador serving as CPA deputy, gave Bremer a paper, arguing that the Army had gone into a “passive mode.” Operations were not running at the same tempo as over the summer, and some units had cut back on patrolling. (p. 37; my emphasis)

Of course, in this case, "pacification" had to rely almost exclusively on US and some British troops, almost none of whom spoke Arabic, with no indigineous government forces - or even a government - to support them. Metz sums up matters at the close of 2003:

In general, the first year of the counterinsurgency was a time of rapid learning for the U.S. military. It had made great strides in many areas. Still, U.S. strategy had shortcomings. This particularly was evident toward the end of 2003 as mounting casualties and hostility from the Iraqi public, combined with the inherent aggressiveness of the military’s warfighting ethos, led some American units to concentrate more on eliminating insurgents than dominating the psychological battlespace. As Major General George Fay later noted in his investigation of the Abu Ghraib Detention Facility, “as the pace of operations picked up in late November–early December 2003, it became a common practice for maneuver elements to round up large quantities of Iraqi personnel in the general vicinity of a specified target as a cordon and capture technique.” Such actions did eliminate enemy fighters, but they also amplified public anger and resentment. In many cases, operations which were successful militarily were political and psychological losses, inspiring new recruits or supporters for the insurgency. While most U.S. commanders understood the psychological priorities of counterinsurgency and acted accordingly, they were overshadowed by the negative effects of those who did not. To concentrate on eliminating enemy fighters rather than discrediting them or undercutting their support was very much within the U.S. military’s tradition — it was a strategy of attrition in which victory came from killing or capturing enemy combatants until the opponent’s will collapsed. This often worked in conventional war. It had, after all, led the United States to stunning victories in World War II and the Gulf War. But, history suggests,it seldom brings success in counterinsurgency.(pp. 40-41; my emphasis)

Finally, Metz offers a couple of observations from early 2004 that don't fit well with the administration's preferred history. One is this quotation from the now-dead jihadist Abu Musab al Zarqawi who headed the so-called al-Qaida in Iraq group:

... Shiism is the looming danger and the true challenge. They are the enemy. Beware of them. Fight them. By God, they lie...Most of the Sunnis are aware of the danger of these people, watch their sides, and fear the consequences of empowering them. (p. 42)

With their posturing against Iraq, the Cheney-Bush crew don't want to be reminding people right now that the Al Qaida type jihadists are Sunni Salafists, not Shi'a like most Iranians.

Metz also writes of early 2004:

The jihadists quickly put this concept into practice, using suicide bombers to attack participants at the religious festival of Ashura in Karbala and Baghdad, killing 140. While Iraq’s Shiites recognized the threat to their community from the Sunni Arabs, this did not translate into full support for the occupation and American-engineered transition. Many of them grudgingly accepted the U.S. presence, but others appeared to believe that, with Iranian support, they could take care of themselves. (p. 42)

The deadly potential of these sectarian tensions was evident at the time.

The very disturbing trend in military thinking about counterinsurgency that I mentioned has to do with the notion that the most important thing in winning a counterinsurgency war - a war where Americans are fighting against nationalist insurgents in another country where most of the Americans don't even speak the language - is to have the political support of the American public.

In practice, this is only a small step away from assuming that it is the duty and the right and responsibility of the US military to propagandize the American public on behalf of the war supporters in the United States. And maybe not even a small step away from it in many cases.

Here are some quotes from Metz' paper on this topic:

The insurgents and their outside supporters probably assumed that American will could be shattered by terrorism — the "Black Hawk down" syndrome. (p. 19)

Metz does procede to say, "This proved wrong," in the particular context of August 2003. But he doesn't bother to explain why he thinks such an assumption was probable.

Gradually the insurgents settled on a four-part military strategy: causing steady U.S. casualties in order to sap American will, sabotage to prevent the return of normalcy, attacks on Iraqis supporting the new political order to deter further support, and occasional spectacular attacks and shows of force to retain the psychological initiative. (p. 20; my emphasis)

Whether accurate or not, this was the perception among the Iraqi population. And in counterinsurgency, perception matters more than reality. (p. 30; my emphasis)

Like Tet 1968 in Vietnam or the January 1981 national offensive of the Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in El Salvador, the Ramadan offensive [in 2003] tried to demonstrate the insurgency’s courage and power, expose the weakness of the Coalition and, galvanize public support. As in those earlier offensives, the insurgents suffered a tactical defeat but made psychological gains. U.S. Government assessments soon after the offensive provided a bleak picture, noting that a growing number of Iraqis believed the insurgents could defeat the United States.

While ebbs and flows are normal in counterinsurgency, the Bush administration could not take the continued support of the American public and the Congress for granted. Counterinsurgency seldom involves constant, demonstrable progress and quick resolution, but that was what the American public had come to expect of military operations after Operation DESERT STORM. In the decades after Vietnam, the public and Congress appeared to have forgotten what insurgency was like. The administration thus realized that it only had a limited period of time before public and congressional support eroded. The dilemma was whether to seek the quickest possible transfer of responsibility to Iraqi security forces, or a modulated pace of change that did not demand more of the new Iraqi forces than they could provide, thus maximizing the chances that Iraq would end up stable and democratic. Strategic failure, in other words, could come from two sources: the collapse of the new Iraqi government and security forces, or the collapse of American will. The Bush administration had to navigate a treacherous course between these dangers. (pp. 37-8; my emphasis)

Other observers talked of a “powerful, deeply symbolic myth” emerging from Fallujah. This was an important idea: myth creation is often the goal of major insurgent offensives. Insurgency, after all, is armed theater. ...

Ultimately, Fallujah did not have the impact of Tet or Dien Bien Phu but did increase sympathy for the insurgents, both within Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world. It also had a polarizing effect, eroding the number of neutrals among the Iraqi public and driving the majority into one camp or the other. Even in the United States, the furor of the April 2004 battles increased criticism of the counterinsurgency strategy and was the beginning of a long decline in public and congressional support for American involvement. As always, trends and expectations were central in the evolution of the insurgency. Politically and psychologically at least, Fallujah was an insurgent victory, creating a sense among the insurgents and their supporters that victory was possible, and raising the idea within the United States that defeat could happen. (p. 44; my emphasis)

Fourth forces in insurgency were unarmed nonstate organizations which affected the conduct and outcome of the conflict. They include international organizations, nongovernmental organizations involved in relief and reconstruction, private voluntary organizations, the international media, and international finance and business (which influence the conflict by deciding to invest or not invest in the country). Both third and fourth forces played a central role in Iraq: al Jazeera and other Arab and Iranian broadcasting organizations played a major role in shaping public opinion in Iraq, in the region, and in other parts of the world. But neither the U.S. military nor CPA had effective programs to deal with them. Doctrine offered little guidance on how to do so.(p. 47; my emphasis)

Moreover, contemporary insurgencies, particularly "Iraqi model" ones, are even more adept than their forebears at manipulating the psychological effects of violence. Many of the armed actions of Cold War era insurgencies took place in isolated areas, so the psychological and political impact was limited to audiences in the immediate vicinity. Now with the Internet, satellite television networks, and cheap digital video cameras, the audience for insurgent violence is immediate and extensive. Even more than in the past, contemporary insurgency is "armed theater." In addition, modern insurgency is shaped by the role of third and fourth forces. In Iraq, for instance, criminal gangs have worked with the insurgents on kidnappings, killings, and sabotage. Sectarian militias and death squads shape the conflict. The international media — whether intentionally or not — amplify insurgent psychological operations. But American counterinsurgency strategy and doctrine have not addressed the important role of third and fourth forces. It does not indicate how to think about them or what to do with them. (pp. 77-8; my emphasis)

We will hear much, much more about this whole notion of a failure of Will on the part of the wimpy American public over the Iraq War. The temptation for military officers to embrace the notion that public opinion can be controlled with the proper censorship and propaganda seems to be almost overwhelming.

For here, I'll just say some mistaken assumptions are being made about this and bad "lessons" drawn, even among many military analysts and the officer corps. This is bound to cause problems in the future. Certainly it's possible to make realistic assumptions about US public opinion when it comes to wars. But this theme of the public Will is already strong enough that people who don't like being bamboozled should put on their critical-thinking hats immediately whenever the topic comes up in this context. Particularly if the military-theory phrase "center of gravity" is associated with it.

Tags: iraq, iraq war, learning from iraq counterinsurgency in american strategy, stab-in-the-back, steven metz