Iraq management and strategy

On a recent article by Matthew Yglesias at TPMCafe on "Catastrophic Success":

First couple of paragraphs: a) we’ve known for about three years that bombing Sunni cities, towns, neighborhoods, wedding parties, and so on makes Sunnis really unhappy about pretty much everything having to do with Americans, let alone the American-installed Green Zone Shiite-dominated government (check out Baghdad Burning, Raed, and others for some descriptions of life near the Green Zone citadel). In fact, there’s good evidence that has long suggested that a large part of the insurgency is not pro-Saddam Sunni, but anti-American Sunni; b) Juan Cole already reported (if we can trust him on this — but who better?) that Tal Afar is basically empty, most insurgents having left the area through a system of tunnels and speedy footwork before the real bombings began.

This is pretty basic to all guerilla warfare. You don’t stand in the middle of the desert and let them shoot laser-guided missiles at you. The insurgency is "terroristic" (in Rumsfeldian terms), but probably more accurately called "unconventional" or even just people engaged in "guerilla warfare." Many Americans worried before the war began about the capacity of the US to fight a guerilla war that would be part urban and part blended into the civilian population. If you’re thinking tactically on the insurgent side, drawing an overmatched power into such a war is brilliant and the American military has been outsmarted. This is largely because they’ve had to kill massive numbers of civilians to get at "insurgents" and have lost a lot of American troops because they have to fight on the ground. It’s also, tactically-speaking, good local politics on the insurgent side because the Americans have indeed been drawn into the role of violent oppressors.

But this is how the war has been fought since day one. So, I agree with Yglesias’s comments here, but I’ve heard them all before, including prior to the war, and including post-Vietnam; also including about twenty other pundit columns per week. "Unconventional warfare" isn’t even of recent coinage. It has existed in any war fought between two dramatically asymmetrical warring parties. It’s an historical truism, and at the root of many military planners’ pre-war doubts (usually the ones who were retired early). The US itself was partially built on this kind of insurgent warfare, as was Israel, etc. The accompanying rhetoric is, of course, that which Reagan made famous — "freedom fighter" versus "terrorist." The side you like the least politically or self-interestedly are the "terrorists," although both sides may use the same terroristic, murderous tactics. The baffling thing, which Yglesias points out, is why the American military continues to insist on fighting the war in this way, where the odds of something-anything resembling "victory" are growing worse every day (even if "victory" means getting the hell out of an anarchic Iraq but making the American public proud enough of their leader in some way or another — another "mission accomplished" moment). The humanitarian portion of the invasion/occupation argument has always had a low strategic-political priority, though a high rhetorical-political priority. Both Sunnis and Shiites know this, as now do Kurds formerly enamored with the invasion.

So, the next step: yes, conflicts are also political. You piss off, detain, kill, torture the people of the country you occupy and you’ve lost the war politically, especially when 80-90% or so of them aren’t guilty of what they’re accused. That fact is already said and done, and there was very good reason to think it was a fait accompli even prior to the invasion. The political crisis, in my view, is not only in Iraq, but also at home in the US. Both are pieces of a political puzzle no one seems to be able to fit together.

Yglesias’s conclusion: the sorry excuse we have for congressional Democrats saying the war was right but "better management is welcome" is a joke. Yup. Yglesias says what we need is a "better strategy" in Iraq. Yup.

I fully agree with all of that. What’s not to like? But, then, I and a few hundreds of thousands of other people — maybe millions — agreed with that three or more years before Yglesias wrote it. I agree with it every other day when I read a column by so-and-so pundit saying once again the same thing.

This is the trap we’re in. We can’t think our way out of this box in any way other than a devastatingly clear loss of the war. So we keep redescribing what the inside of the box looks like, and we’ve got all sorts of people willing to keep at that fairly straightforward project, but not at the risk of discomfort (excepting real journalists like Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, some amazingly courageous Iraqi writers and cameramen, and a small handful of others). This goes for those on the political right and the political left.

This is not to diss Yglesias, though his basic claim is not much of an argument or strategically helpful or whatever else. It’s simply to say that there’s an awful lot of talk about management, strategy, etc. in the face of what’s clearly a failed war with a clearly trumped up justification, and which had pretty clear foreshadowing about how all this would play out. "See, we were right," is also pointless now except for those engaging in the Great Domestic Hypocrisy War. We could get into further details here too — about Iraqi citizen alienation from the Green Zone government, about the very real possibility of an Iranian-styled Islamic state, about the US giving up on the potential resources of Iraq, about political shenanigans back in the US, about the role of destabilizing Kurdish rebellion and claims to autonomy in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. But we should know the whole story fairly well by now.

What’s the strategy? Now, that’s something worth discussing, playing out in genuinely serious ways that in some instances may involve considering highly unpalatable options for American hegemony. But repeating the claim that we need a strategy is — I’m sorry — just plain lame. I’m hoping there are real options being discussed, but it’s not really discussed publicly because so much of it is indeed political but on the American side of the equation.

So, let’s go pundits, strategists, brilliant thinkers of all stripes: any comments on how to move forward? Even by baby steps? That would be the beginning of having something to say.

This might sound simplistic, but I’ll toss it out there — let’s at least start by sending a giant shipment of house wiring, generators, and lightbulbs to Iraq with some non-Halliburton contractors. Hell, ask some of the people made homeless by Hurricane Katrina who are trained in this kind of work and pay them the same wages as private contractors, if they’re willing to go to Iraq in the first place.

Next let’s get to the serious work of rebuilding American international legitimacy in a more equitable, pluralistic way to match the material, intellectual, and spiritual needs of our time. See my post on international legitimacy for starters. This will, of course, require a different administration and a post-realist / post-neo-realist and philosophically pragmatic and fallibilistic view of the role of the US in the international sphere. I think this can be done without sacrificing up the valuable aspects of American hegemony. [*]