Juan Cole: Just How Many Insurgencies Has the West Succeeded in Putting Down?
Juan Cole, at his blog (12-2-04):
John Yaukey of Gannett has a good analysis of the Sunni Arab problem in Iraq and how it affects the elections. Read all the way to the end, where he compares American Iraq to French Algeria:
"One sobering lesson from the past, however, is that well-armed insurgents have rarely ever lost. The French fought Islamic insurgents for eight years in an attempt to hold on to Algeria. In 1959, it appeared the French army had suppressed the insurgency. But it flared up again, reinforced by insurgent recruits driven to arms by harsh French measures, and France gave up in 1962 and granted Algeria independence. By then, 15,000 French soldiers had died and Muslim casualties were estimated at between 300,000 and 400,000."
Imperialist, warmonger journalist Max Boot's standard reply to this sort of argument is to point to the early-twentieth century Philippines, where the US killed some 200,000 Filipinos and succeeded in ruling the country until the Japanese invasion during WW II. But contemporary Iraq is highly socially and politically mobilized-- urban, sophisticated, literate, industrialized-- compared to the Philippines of that time, and so is much more formidable. There is for the same reason no analogy to British Malaya; and in any case, as John Mearsheimer has pointed out, the British were unable to keep Malaya (they would have liked to-- the tin and rubber there were a significant part of the British economy after WW II).
I was trying to think of an instance in which a Western occupier has successfully put down a nativist insurgency in the global South since 1970, and could not come up with anything. There are some indirect such victories. The Algerian military, backed strongly by France, appears to have defeated the Islamic Salvation Front and the Armed Islamic Group, after a decade of civil war that killed 100,000. But it isn't clear that this victory could have been attained had Algeria been occupied by 140,000 French troops. Likely, the Islamic Salvation Front would have picked up enormous support from anti-colonialist Algerians.
The only thing the US has going for it in Iraq is that the Shiites and Kurds are still afraid of the Baathists and radical Muslim fundamentalists among the Sunni Arabs. But a lot of Shiites have come to loathe the American troops, and that they may in the future demand that they leave is entirely possible.
John Yaukey of Gannett has a good analysis of the Sunni Arab problem in Iraq and how it affects the elections. Read all the way to the end, where he compares American Iraq to French Algeria:
"One sobering lesson from the past, however, is that well-armed insurgents have rarely ever lost. The French fought Islamic insurgents for eight years in an attempt to hold on to Algeria. In 1959, it appeared the French army had suppressed the insurgency. But it flared up again, reinforced by insurgent recruits driven to arms by harsh French measures, and France gave up in 1962 and granted Algeria independence. By then, 15,000 French soldiers had died and Muslim casualties were estimated at between 300,000 and 400,000."
Imperialist, warmonger journalist Max Boot's standard reply to this sort of argument is to point to the early-twentieth century Philippines, where the US killed some 200,000 Filipinos and succeeded in ruling the country until the Japanese invasion during WW II. But contemporary Iraq is highly socially and politically mobilized-- urban, sophisticated, literate, industrialized-- compared to the Philippines of that time, and so is much more formidable. There is for the same reason no analogy to British Malaya; and in any case, as John Mearsheimer has pointed out, the British were unable to keep Malaya (they would have liked to-- the tin and rubber there were a significant part of the British economy after WW II).
I was trying to think of an instance in which a Western occupier has successfully put down a nativist insurgency in the global South since 1970, and could not come up with anything. There are some indirect such victories. The Algerian military, backed strongly by France, appears to have defeated the Islamic Salvation Front and the Armed Islamic Group, after a decade of civil war that killed 100,000. But it isn't clear that this victory could have been attained had Algeria been occupied by 140,000 French troops. Likely, the Islamic Salvation Front would have picked up enormous support from anti-colonialist Algerians.
The only thing the US has going for it in Iraq is that the Shiites and Kurds are still afraid of the Baathists and radical Muslim fundamentalists among the Sunni Arabs. But a lot of Shiites have come to loathe the American troops, and that they may in the future demand that they leave is entirely possible.