I know that I promised that I would mostly stay away from the war on this new blog, and I know that I haven't fully kept that promise. However, I am prepared to deal with the matter somewhat more clinically, for lack of a better term. So if you're convinced that splattering explostions like today's means that we are headed for an embarassing defeat on a truly Vietnamese scale, I am not going to attempt to persuade you otherwise. What I am going to do is perhaps give us a set of terms we can agree upon for determining when we will have lost, and when (if ever) we will have won.
The truism of guerrilla war/counterinsurgency is that for the insurgents to win, they merely need to not lose, that by continuing to exist, they will sap the morale of the government forces and defeat them by convincing them that they cannot be destroyed: resistance is futile. Conversely, for the counter-insurgency to not lose, it must win: overwhelm and hunt down the guerrillas, while turning the populace against them.
Both of these are true, as far as they go. But I challenge their status as universally true, because both of them are dependent on a politically determined stratum of victory. In other words, for both guerrilla and government, victory comes when the people believe that the other side has not won and, moreover, will not win. Both insurgent and counterinsurgent aim to drive the enemy to the Futility Point.
In truth, the same could be said for any variety of war. But with unconventional warfare, the Futility Point becomes the more difficult to gauge. When the Red Army took Berlin in 1945, the Futility Point of WW2 had been reached for every German, including Hitler (whose opinion, given the nature of the Third Reich, mattered most). But how can we convince Zarqawi of the same? CAN we convince Zarqawi of that, and how much does that matter?
I argue that the relative position of the Futility Point for either side, in a guerrilla or any other kind of war, is dependent on the goals that both sides begin with. For example, in the Greek insurgency of the late 1940's, the Greek Communists were setting out with the goal of overthrowing the government and establishing a communist state in Greece. The postwar Greek government, on the other hand, was first concerned with survival, and then with the disruption of Communist activities, to weaken their capacities. By 1949 this had largely been accomplished, without government forces destroying guerrillas in large numbers. What tipped the Greek Communists past the Futility Point was the closure, on Tito's orders, of the Yugoslav frontier, which denied the insurgents the sanctuary from government operations that they had previously depended on. This and the failure of the insurgents two major offensive operations in the north of the country signalled the end of their ability to command respect in Greece.
Now, let us look at the goals of the two opposing sides in Iraq. The U.S. Government invaded Iraq with the following goals in mind:
1. Overthrow the Baathist regime headed by Saddam Hussein. Capture or kill Hussein and his major leadership.
2. Catalog and destroy Hussein's stockpile of WMD's.
3. Rapidly repair war damage and improve Iraq'a economic infrastructure.
All of which leads up to:
4. Establish effective control over the country, until such time as a new government could be created, one which reflected the goals and aspirations of the Iraqi people, and one which would be, if not grateful to the United States, then at least opposed to being a haven and source of Islamic terrorism, as Saddam had been.
Meanwhile, the goal of the insurgency has been:
1. Inflict major casualties on coalition forces, to the point where anti-war opinion worldwide precipitates a withdrawl of the coalition forces from Iraq.
2. Seriously disrupt the growth of the new Iraq. Prevent the new Iraqi government from functioning.
3. Cow the Shi'ites and Kurds into accepting continued Sunni dominance. Barring that, provoke a civil war which will hasten coalition withdrawl.
All of which lead up to:
4. Either re-establish a Baathist or establish a fundamentalist Islamic state in Iraq, or perhaps a hybrid of both.
While no one can effectively argue that the insurgency has been put down, few can argue that it has achieved any of its goals, or argue that the U.S. has not achieved most of its goals (#2 being the obvious exception, for reasons which are as yet unclear). All of which might still be awaiting events. Shi'ite dominance in Iraq might yet lead to a fundamentalist state. Even if it doesn't, the insurgency might be yet be able to survive long enough to overpower the new government, provoke the civil war and win the peace.
Such things are not beyond the bounds of possiblity. Yet as the U.S. presence in Iraq remains without a definite withdrawl date, while diplomatic pressure on the Baathist Syrian government, which supplies the insurgents with a possible source of haven and supplies, increases, while the new Iraqi government continues to enjoy legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of the country, these things become less and less likely.
Thus, while the U.S. has not yet achieved complete victory in Iraq, neither has it lost, and it appears that time is on its side. This would seem to be a rare position for the counter-insurgent to be in, and to explain this, we must look to the terms of victory.
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