Jan 20, 2005
The Guerrillas Always Win
William R. Polk has an excellent piece in The American Conservative in which he talks a bit about the nature of the war we are fighting in Iraq. Polk writes: Guerrilla warfare is not new. In fact, it is probably the oldest form of warfare. But in recent centuries, so much attention was given to formal warfare that most soldiers forgot about informal war. Although few guerrilla leaders have given us accounts of how they organized, got their supplies, fought, retreated, regrouped, and fought again, history provides a rich lode of information. We can study experiences dating from the 20th-century conflicts in Europe, Asia, and Africa, including the Irish struggle against the British, Tito’s and the Greek ELAS’s struggles against the Germans in the Balkans, Mao Zedong’s war against the Japanese and then against the forces of Chang Kai-shek in China, the Viet Minh’s defeat of the French in Indo-China, the Algerian war of national liberation against the French, the Chechens’ centuries-long war against the Russians and, of course, our Vietnam and Russia’s Afghanistan.
For me, what jumps out from the above list is the fact that in each and every example mentioned (except the Chechens so far) the guerrillas eventually won. Given that kind of history, it no longer a matter of winning or losing because the Sunni Iraqis fighting us now will never accept a Quisling Shia dominated government. Instead, it is a question how many more lives have to be lost or shattered before we as a people come to our senses and leave.
Hat tip to my friend Kenny.