Why America is Losing in Iraq

Mao Zedong once famously likened a guerilla to a fish in the sea - the guerilla evades detection by blending seemlessly with his environment, waiting to strike until he judges the corallation of forces momentarily favorable, then fades back into the environment before his opponents can fully marshall their forces against him. In this way a small, ill equipped irregular force and hold its own against a much larger and better armed conventional one, until the conventional force grows weary of the cat and mouse game and throws in the towel. In a nutshell this is what is happening in Iraq now.

Defeating an insurgency means taking the sea away from the fish, by winning the "hearts and minds" of the people of Iraq over to your side and in so doing depriving the insurgents of the recruits, protection, intelligence and other resources that are indispensible to their effectiveness. It is this essential mission that the US military has utterly failed in Iraq, for the following reasons:


1. Insufficient Manpower / Technological Fetishism

There is a struggle going on for the heart and soul of the American military: on one side are the proponents of the so called "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), which is now virtually orthodoxy both within the Pentagon and neocon circles, while on the other is a band of iconoloclastic insurgents who argue that Fourth Generation Warfare has rendered many of the RMA school's assumptions about future conflict obsolete. Specifically, while the RMA school envisions military ascendency through technological domination, proponents of Fourth Generation Warfare argue that future opponents of the United States will not repeat Saddam's mistake of trying to outfight the US in a conventional struggle in which the US holds all the high cards but will instead resort to unconventional tactics and strategy aimed at mitigating the US' conventional advantage. To the extent that the critics are right the rebalancing that has occured since 1989, in which military manpower has been reduced by 33% on the assumption that technological superiority will compensate for smaller forces, has actually hurt American military readiness. Even current American counterinsurgency doctrine estimates that one soldier or police officer is required for every 50 population, which based on Iraq's population of about 26 million would imply a force of over half a million (or about 250 000 if only the Sunni Triangle is counted). The US is currently struggling to maintain a paltry 130 000 troops in Iraq, with the much vaunted "surge" contributing a further 20 000 for a few weeks.

What about Iraqi security forces you ask? I'll deal with that question below.

In a sense what is occuring in Iraq now is a test case of these competing contentions, and as things stand right now the RMA school is wipping a lot of egg from its face. For all its technological sophistication the US military has not been able to contain (much less defeat) the insurgency, in part because it doesn't have nearly enough troops to mount an effective counter insurgency campaign.

Not that much is likely to change in the near future. The military's obsession with fantastically complex and expensive weapons' systems is reinforced by an iron triangle of interests that virtually guarantees it will remain ill adapted the to the challenges of the 21st century. It works like this: senior brass at the Pentagon convince Congress to lavish hundred of billions of dollars on weapons, and in exchange the defence contractors channel part of the windfall profits into campaign contributions to politicians and cushy "consulting" jobs for retiring senior officers. You can see how directing money at more boots on the ground instead of weapons serves the interests of none of the principals. The inviobility of this iron triangle is a key reason why former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was such a vociferous advocate of "lean" fighting forces that would prevail over more numerous opponents through technological superiority, and probably also why the Bush administration was so unwilling to contemplate the possibility of a serious insurgency in the first place. Such an insurgency would -and has- challenged many of the core assumptions that has guided Bush administration defence policy since its inception.


2. Stranger in a Strange Land I - Military Culture

Part of the implicit bargain America has made with its professional warriors is that no expense will be spared in shielding service people from the unpleasant fact that they are actually in a foreign country populated by foreigners. Hence American forces barricade themselves inside fortresses where they can enjoy as many familiar amenities from home as possible -American food, consumer goods, entertainment, even dependable electricity, water and air conditioning. They make only occassional sallies ("patrols") into the strange, threatening OtherWorld beyond the base perimeter, usually for no more than few hours at a time. In short, the physical distance between those inside and outside the wire might only be a couple of hundred meters, but the psychological, emotional and material distance is incalculable -and those on the outside know it.

This distance creates an insurmountable barrier to fostering the shared interests and mutual respect and trust that is essential to win the Iraqi people -or at least a significant segment of them- over to America's side in the conflict. Even those Iraqis who are not fond of the insurgents have no use for the Americans, as evidenced by public opinion polls that show an overwhelming majority want the US to leave, come what may.

3. Stranger in a Strange Land II - Linguistic and Cultural Illiteracy

Turns out Muslim Arabs aren't all that keen to live under military occupation by an army of English speaking Christian Americans. Who knew?

On top of the military culture issues there are national culture ones. There are hardly any Arabic speakers in the whole US government -never mind the military (which coincidentally speaks volumes about the status of the Arab world in Washington's priorities). Most Americans, including much of the country's senior leadership, is so ignorant of the Arab world they aren't even aware of the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite -a difference which is kind of hugely important.

The upshoot is that insurgent networks are almost impervious to American penetration. The Iraqi street, where the insurgency will ultimately succeed or fail, remains for the vast majority of Americans a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Note also that, just as the prophets of Fourth Generation Warfare predicted, America's enormous investment in spy satellites, Predator drones, cryptographic supercomputers, signals intelligence and the rest is mostly ineffective against this type of opponent.

4. Obsession with Force Protection

Another implicit bargain between Uncle Sam and the troops is that the US will never place the life of a non American on the same level as the that of an American serviceperson (or contractor). What this means in practice is that the US military would rather kill 100 innocent Iraqis than risk the death of one American soldier, and the rules of engagement and American tactics reflect this. This means, first of all, that American forces have already killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis in order to invade and occupy their country, although Americans collectively remain in deep denial about this. It means, second, that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis blame American for the loss of loved ones, in many cases fairly, in some not, but as a practical matter this is a distinction without a difference. Those Iraqis will never be reconciled to the American presence, never mind actually supporting it. In fact, many of them will make common cause with America's enemies not out of ideological sympathy but on the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".

5. Unreliable Allies

If Americans were better imperialists they would, like Fox Muelder, have already adopted "Trust no one" as their motto. Instead, senior American officials continue to talk as if the "Iraqi government" and the "Iraqi army" are legitimate national institutions -and worse, they act as if they believe it. This accords with American interests, which are served by a secular, nationalist Iraq.

The problem is that Iraq isn't really a nation or, perhaps more accurately, it is a highly circumscribed one. Iraq's deeply fractured society means most people have multiple loyalties -confessional, ethnic, tribal, nationalist- that sometimes are in conflict. This is obvious in the composition of the Iraqi parliament, where parties are readily identified by sectarian affiliation. Similarly, it is naive to believe that when someone puts on an Iraqi army uniform they abandon their identity as a Sunni, Shiite, Kurd or Turkman. The upshoot is that these key national institutions mirror rather than transcend the divisions that exist in Iraqi society at large. Americans want desperately to believe that sometime in the near future these institutions will be able to shoulder the primary burden for holding the country together, thus redeeming their own botched efforts at empire building and creating conditions for a face saving withdrawal of American combat troops. The last thing the US wants is an Iraqi pullout that looks anything like this. In reality however when put to the test these institutions will almost certainly prove far too fragile and weak to play the part for which they have been cast in America's script ("Victory in Iraq 2008", Cinderella version) -the most likely outcome once the stabilizing influence (such as it is) of American forces is withdrawn is an intensification of the civil war and the marginalization or collapse of the political process and national army, much as occured in Lebanon after the outbreak of the civil war in 1975.

As you can see I'm not sanguine about Iraq's future, nor do I have patience for the many war propagandists who, confronted with the enormity of their miscalculations, have no better retort than "well what's your plan for getting us out of this mess?" My plan was elegantly simple -don't invade Iraq in the first place. There was never a compelling case made that such an invasion served a bonified national interest. It is worth remembering that not that long ago anyone who dared speak such heresy was shouted down as a naive advocate of appeasement at best (the historical illiterati, not leastly the President himself, digging deep in their profoundly shallow grasp of 20th century history for such insipid analogies), and quite possibly a traitor.

Even at that, it seems in retrospect that at every turn where the Bush administration faced a choice, it chose wrong. Rather than emulate the example of his father and build a broad coalition to overthrow Saddam for example Bush 43, deep in the thrall of his neocon braintrust, modelled its relations with former allies on that of the Soviet Union's dealings with the nations of Eastern Europe, profoundly alienating potential supporters. The Bushites clearly intended to rule Iraq through an American proconsul for at least several years, using Iraqi quislings (first Ahmed Chalabi and then, when they realized he had virtually no constituency in the country, the laughably misnamed Iraqi Governing Council) as window dressing. They only became converts to the virtues of democracy when the extent to which they had underestimated Iraqi resistance became apparent and popular elections seemed an expedient means to undercut support for the insurgents or, failing that, at least give the Americans some local saps to share the blame when the whole project finally went under. I have already mentioned some of the more egregious errors made in the administration of occupied Iraq in a previous post -disbanding the Iraqi army, staffing the occupation authority with unqualified ideological fellow travellers, using tens of billions of dollars obstensibly for badly needed reconstruction as a slush fund to reward American companies that were political allies of the administration.

It's true that even if the Bush administration had done everything right in Iraq we might still have come to the same point we are at today. This is a reminder that war is always the most capricious of enterprises -a point forgotten not only by the Bushites but a long list of other leaders throughout history who led their peoples to catastrophe after being seduced by the apparent simplicity of using force to solve complex problems. The very fact that war is such a blunt and unpredictable instrument of policy is exactly why it should only be resorted to in the most dire circumstances, with the most deliberate forethought, and only after every other possible recourse has been exhausted. Obviously Iraq never came close to meeting any of these criteria.

At the end of the day policymakers and other human beings sometimes face circumstances in which all of their options are bad, and this is the situation the US now confronts in Iraq. Some people -the architects of this fiasco primary among them- are still looking for the silver lining, hoping against hope that just one more empty gesture, like sending another 20 000 troops to Iraq, will save them from the consequences of their decisions (coincidentally, in the military this is a cardinal sin called "reinforcing failure"). What they are still unwilling to accept is that they are no longer the masters of their own fate, the time when a few more right decisions might have tipped the scales in their favor is long past.

They, like everyone else, are now just awaiting the inevitable.