Iraq, Guerilla Insurgents, And Foreign Policy
Bruce Wilson, The Mercury (Australia), 1/8/05
They might have gone almost unnoticed by a world understandably preoccupied with the horror of the tsunami but this week there were two very significant messages about Iraq which should have other alarm systems ringing.
The first was from a senior Iraqi interim government security chief who estimated there were 200,000 insurgents active within that country -- or rather more than the combined total of foreign troops seeking to bring peace to that troubled land in the two weeks before absolutely crucial elections.
The second was tucked away in British Prime Minister Tony Blair's first press conference of the year, in which he said:
"What we've got to make sure -- and I think we will be able to give some more details in the coming weeks -- is that we put in place a very clear set of plans for the Iraqi-isation of the security forces, the building up of those forces throughout the coming months.
"That will give us a clearer view of what happens to the multinational forces."
We can forgive him, perhaps, for"Iraqi-isation", although not easily. The rest is more worrying.
He went on to repeat that the overall aim is to get out of Iraq sooner rather than later. In fact, as one British defence source said, that meant as quickly as decently possible. The truth of it is, Blair wants an exit strategy before the British general election that just about everybody believes will be on May 5.
Of the leaders of the coalition in Iraq, Blair is the only one still in a tight spot. Britain has the second-largest force there after the US, about 10,000 all up. President George W. Bush has had his Iraq policy endorsed by his election win. So, too, has John Howard had Australia's comparatively tiny commitment electorally approved.
Blair is in a different hole. Polls in Britain persistently show the majority of Britons opposed to his Iraq policy. Many believe the war illegal and Blair is sometimes accused from within his own New Labour Party and by commentators of being nothing short of a war criminal.
This is not from the foam-lipped radical fringe. Alan Watkins, one of the most experienced and respected of political columnists and a barrister, routinely calls Blair a war criminal. Blair, also a barrister, has seen fit to take no legal action against these accusations, despite the seriousness of the charge. After all, he is being aligned with, say, Hitler or Pol Pot.
So he wants an out and is counting on those elections. If he can find one, Bush will be a grateful man, since it seems his administration can see no way out of it at all.
The assessment of the insurgent enemy of 200,000 is a very gloomy one for Bush and his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose staff in the Pentagon will have long enough memories to recall the grim statistics of anti-insurgency warfare of the kind being fought in Iraq.
So, too, presumably, will the historians in Blair's Defence Department, still known to some of its inhabitants as the War Office. In Washington, they need think only of Vietnam; in London of what used to be Malaya.
It was in Malaya in the 1950s and '60s, and later in Vietnam, that the depressing arithmetic of anti-insurgency operations was computed. Britain, after more than a decade, was able to put down a relatively small communist insurgency in Malaya; America failed on a much bigger scale in Vietnam.
Those fighting the two wars worked out that for each dedicated guerilla (or freedom fighter, depending on your view) in the jungle or paddy fields, they needed 10 men. That did not include air or sea support -- just men on the ground. Not all were fighting men (in fact, most were support) but that was the rough figure.
In Malaya, in the end it worked but not until it was Malaysia and a general amnesty was issued for the couple of hundred fighters still in the jungle. In Vietnam, the most expensive war ever fought at the time, it cost more than 50,000 American lives, millions of Vietnamese lives -- and it infamously didn't work.
If the Iraqi government security estimate is accurate, then Iraq needs a fighting security force of two million men to control the 200,000 insurgents within its borders. It would be considerably easier if the 200,000 were simply 20 infantry divisions -- but they're not.
The huge US operation against Fallujah late last year is considered by many defence observers in Britain to have been a failure. It lost hearts and minds and failed in its major objective of capturing or killing known terrorist leaders."There were no heads on pikes," said one.
As in other anti-guerilla missions, the occupying forces have very limited control."We had the day, they had the night," went the Billy Joel song about Vietnam -- and the fact that just about all Westerners in Iraq must live in heavily-guarded compounds and that much of the country (the size of France) is a no-go area tells the tale.
Washington this week confirmed it needed more and more ground troops to prosecute the war but already is drawing on the National Guard, part-time soldiers who, like conscripts in Vietnam, tend to be treated as the dregs of the army.
Despite going to extraordinary lengths, the US military has been unable to conceal the atrocities happening both on the battlefield and off it -- in prison camps and interrogation centres.
Blair virtually admitted the huge problem when he said this week:
"There is, effectively, a new and different conflict going on in Iraq. The conflict with Saddam was over reasonably quickly. What's happened is that terrorists around the Middle East and those people who want to stop democracy taking hold in the Middle East are absolutely determined to stop Iraq getting its democracy."
He had no answer about how to stop them. The governor of Baghdad was assassinated the other day, despite immense security. The elections are going to be unwieldy and, by the nature of the country, far-flung. It is difficult to know how long queues can be protected against suicide bombers . . . or any bombers.
To produce democracy is asking for more than an act of faith. It is asking for an act of self-sacrifice that might involve death. Is the price worth paying? What will be the ultimate result? Not a government but an assembly to form a government. Is it worth dying for that? Big questions.
The Sunni Muslim minority has already said its parties will boycott it, although there will be Sunni candidates. They know there will be a Shi'ite majority and a government they fear for any number of reasons, not least a link with Iran.
The desert is no easier to police than the jungle. Zealous adventurers from all over the inflamed Islamic world are devoted to stopping the January 30 elections. They own the night -- and half the day. No foreigner is safe.
The vote may well go on but only a supreme optimist would forecast a blood-free exercise in an enforced democracy.
They might have gone almost unnoticed by a world understandably preoccupied with the horror of the tsunami but this week there were two very significant messages about Iraq which should have other alarm systems ringing.
The first was from a senior Iraqi interim government security chief who estimated there were 200,000 insurgents active within that country -- or rather more than the combined total of foreign troops seeking to bring peace to that troubled land in the two weeks before absolutely crucial elections.
The second was tucked away in British Prime Minister Tony Blair's first press conference of the year, in which he said:
"What we've got to make sure -- and I think we will be able to give some more details in the coming weeks -- is that we put in place a very clear set of plans for the Iraqi-isation of the security forces, the building up of those forces throughout the coming months.
"That will give us a clearer view of what happens to the multinational forces."
We can forgive him, perhaps, for"Iraqi-isation", although not easily. The rest is more worrying.
He went on to repeat that the overall aim is to get out of Iraq sooner rather than later. In fact, as one British defence source said, that meant as quickly as decently possible. The truth of it is, Blair wants an exit strategy before the British general election that just about everybody believes will be on May 5.
Of the leaders of the coalition in Iraq, Blair is the only one still in a tight spot. Britain has the second-largest force there after the US, about 10,000 all up. President George W. Bush has had his Iraq policy endorsed by his election win. So, too, has John Howard had Australia's comparatively tiny commitment electorally approved.
Blair is in a different hole. Polls in Britain persistently show the majority of Britons opposed to his Iraq policy. Many believe the war illegal and Blair is sometimes accused from within his own New Labour Party and by commentators of being nothing short of a war criminal.
This is not from the foam-lipped radical fringe. Alan Watkins, one of the most experienced and respected of political columnists and a barrister, routinely calls Blair a war criminal. Blair, also a barrister, has seen fit to take no legal action against these accusations, despite the seriousness of the charge. After all, he is being aligned with, say, Hitler or Pol Pot.
So he wants an out and is counting on those elections. If he can find one, Bush will be a grateful man, since it seems his administration can see no way out of it at all.
The assessment of the insurgent enemy of 200,000 is a very gloomy one for Bush and his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose staff in the Pentagon will have long enough memories to recall the grim statistics of anti-insurgency warfare of the kind being fought in Iraq.
So, too, presumably, will the historians in Blair's Defence Department, still known to some of its inhabitants as the War Office. In Washington, they need think only of Vietnam; in London of what used to be Malaya.
It was in Malaya in the 1950s and '60s, and later in Vietnam, that the depressing arithmetic of anti-insurgency operations was computed. Britain, after more than a decade, was able to put down a relatively small communist insurgency in Malaya; America failed on a much bigger scale in Vietnam.
Those fighting the two wars worked out that for each dedicated guerilla (or freedom fighter, depending on your view) in the jungle or paddy fields, they needed 10 men. That did not include air or sea support -- just men on the ground. Not all were fighting men (in fact, most were support) but that was the rough figure.
In Malaya, in the end it worked but not until it was Malaysia and a general amnesty was issued for the couple of hundred fighters still in the jungle. In Vietnam, the most expensive war ever fought at the time, it cost more than 50,000 American lives, millions of Vietnamese lives -- and it infamously didn't work.
If the Iraqi government security estimate is accurate, then Iraq needs a fighting security force of two million men to control the 200,000 insurgents within its borders. It would be considerably easier if the 200,000 were simply 20 infantry divisions -- but they're not.
The huge US operation against Fallujah late last year is considered by many defence observers in Britain to have been a failure. It lost hearts and minds and failed in its major objective of capturing or killing known terrorist leaders."There were no heads on pikes," said one.
As in other anti-guerilla missions, the occupying forces have very limited control."We had the day, they had the night," went the Billy Joel song about Vietnam -- and the fact that just about all Westerners in Iraq must live in heavily-guarded compounds and that much of the country (the size of France) is a no-go area tells the tale.
Washington this week confirmed it needed more and more ground troops to prosecute the war but already is drawing on the National Guard, part-time soldiers who, like conscripts in Vietnam, tend to be treated as the dregs of the army.
Despite going to extraordinary lengths, the US military has been unable to conceal the atrocities happening both on the battlefield and off it -- in prison camps and interrogation centres.
Blair virtually admitted the huge problem when he said this week:
"There is, effectively, a new and different conflict going on in Iraq. The conflict with Saddam was over reasonably quickly. What's happened is that terrorists around the Middle East and those people who want to stop democracy taking hold in the Middle East are absolutely determined to stop Iraq getting its democracy."
He had no answer about how to stop them. The governor of Baghdad was assassinated the other day, despite immense security. The elections are going to be unwieldy and, by the nature of the country, far-flung. It is difficult to know how long queues can be protected against suicide bombers . . . or any bombers.
To produce democracy is asking for more than an act of faith. It is asking for an act of self-sacrifice that might involve death. Is the price worth paying? What will be the ultimate result? Not a government but an assembly to form a government. Is it worth dying for that? Big questions.
The Sunni Muslim minority has already said its parties will boycott it, although there will be Sunni candidates. They know there will be a Shi'ite majority and a government they fear for any number of reasons, not least a link with Iran.
The desert is no easier to police than the jungle. Zealous adventurers from all over the inflamed Islamic world are devoted to stopping the January 30 elections. They own the night -- and half the day. No foreigner is safe.
The vote may well go on but only a supreme optimist would forecast a blood-free exercise in an enforced democracy.