I found this article in the Washington Post interesting:
BAGHDAD — Before 8,500 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers methodically swept through Tall Afar two months ago in the year’s largest counterinsurgency offensive, commanders described the northern city as a logistics hub for fighters, including foreigners entering the country from Syria, 65 miles to the west.
“They come across the border and use Tall Afar as a base to launch attacks across northern Iraq,” Col. H.R. McMaster, commander of the Army’s 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which led the assault, said in a briefing the day before it began.
When the air and ground operation wound down in mid-September, nearly 200 insurgents had been killed and close to 1,000 detained, the military said at the time. But interrogations and other analyses carried out in recent weeks showed that none of those captured was from outside Iraq. According to McMaster’s staff, the 3rd Armored Cavalry last detained a foreign fighter in June.
In a recent interview, McMaster maintained that, before insurgents were driven from Tall Afar in September, foreigners were at least partly responsible for the “climate of fear” that pervaded the city — a result of beheadings, suicide attacks and the abduction of young men to conscript them as fighters.
“They trained indigenous terror cells and moved on somewhere else,” he said.
Note that the fact that they haven’t captured any foreigners among the insurgents doesn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any. The foreigners may have fought to the death; they may have escaped. We just don’t know.
Some, like Randall Parker, find this to be prima facie evidence that what’s going on in Iraq is a homegrown insurgency for which the only solution is Coalition withdrawal:
The bulk of the insurgents in Iraq are Iraqis. Most of them are fighting because US troops are in Iraq. Some fight because they want Sunnis to rule Shias. The main connection between the war in Iraq and the counter-terrorist battle against Al Qaeda is that the US troop presence is like a big expensive recruitment advertisement for Al Qaeda: “See, those infidels reallly do intend to invade and rule us”.
That’s certainly what Juan Cole and quite a few people who know a lot more about the Middle East than I do believe. Cori Dauber of Rantingprofs finds it (or at least the coverage) puzzling:
Once again the Washington Post seeks to cast doubt on the role played by foreign jihadists in Iraq. This article is rewritten every few months either by the Post or by the Times.
Not that many, they say. (Oops, that one’s USA Today.)
The number is exaggerated, they write. (Oh, wait, that one’s the Christian Science Monitor — and look, basing its story on the Post’s big source. And look how the Post’s breakdown of countries of origin matches up with that source’s as well.)
The real problem isn’t the foreigners, you see.
Except when they aren’t rewriting this article, they’re rewriting the article about the role the foreigners play in the most spectacular attacks, the suicide attacks. (And while grousing about the relative numbers, today’s article does point out that the majority of suicide bombers are foreigners.)
I won’t reproduce Cori’s links—you’ll have to go over there and follow them for yourself.
I find it puzzling, too, but for a very different reason.
I don’t know for certain how many foreign fighters there are in Iraq or what proportion of the insurgency they constitute. I don’t think that Randall Parker or Juan Cole or the Washington Post writer who wrote the article do, either. But, arguendo, let’s assume that all of the attacks in Iraq are being performed by Iraqis.
It’s simply incontrovertible that the overwhelming preponderance of these terrorist attacks are against Iraqis. I won’t bother showing you the supporting statistics—just pick up any newspaper. Surely, the insurgents must know by now that the attacks won’t provoke us into reprisals nor will they foment an open sectarian civil war. They’ve been going on for a year and a half for goodness sake and have progressively been more directed at other Iraqis rather than less. Why?
Is their strategy “Leave—or we’ll kill more Iraqis”? Why is that a credible explanation? Why , if we’re as horrible as they believe, would we respond that way?
I think the only reasonable conclusion we can draw at this time is that the insurgents want either to return to the status quo ante or establish a Taliban-style state in Iraq. And can anyone doubt that either of those outcomes would result in reprisals against those who collaborated with the Coalition (which includes practically everybody at this point) that would make Saddam’s reprisals his political opponents look like minor mischief? I don’t think those are outcomes we can tolerate regardless of how unpalatable the implications are.
Whether the Iraqi insurgency is foreign or homegrown doesn’t make much of a difference. We have little alternative at this point but to see to it that a decent, stable government has a chance of survival in Iraq. I don’t know enough to know whether that means staying the course or escalating our efforts or something completely different. But it means we’re not done there yet.
The arab world has thousands of years of primitivism to overcome. Let’s hope the Iraqis take advantage of this rare opportunity to take a quantum leap into the twenty first century. That would put them at least two centuries ahead of any other arab country. If Iraqis are pulled back into the atavism of arab status quo, it may be another century before a similar chance comes again, if ever. If Iraqis are lucky enough to establish a beachhead of modernity in their country, the rest of the arab world may have a glimmer of a chance.
Can anyone say with a straight face that the administration is not planning on getting out of Iraq next year? Do you really think that Bush & Co. isn’t already planning an exodus ahead of the 2006 elections?
Little Bush doesn’t have to get elected so he doesn’t care about 2006. The way the little pussy repos have been acting, why should little Bush care about them? It might be different if they had some backbone.
W. might not care, but brother Jeb and his neocon pals at PNAC don’t want the balance of power in Congress tipped to the Dems.
I should like to plead with all list members to read
the following
article
“Insurgency and Counterinsurgency” in Iraq by Stephen
Metz. He is a
leading figure on this issue at the US War College and
teaches many of
the
officers now facing and in the future to be facing the
counterinsurgency
task in many lands.
http://www.twq.com/04winter/docs/04winter_metz.pdf
There is now much of an historic record for what was
done in our
counterinsurgency response to the Iraq insurgency and
how it worked
out.
Mr. Metz’s article is important because it was written
early in the
insurgency and offered solutions to ongoing problems,
many of which
were
put into practice. Thus, this article is invaluable,
not only for what
it
admits to be the misjudgments of the Pentagon but also
for its
assumptions as to what the insurgency and Iraq are all
about. To my
mind,
this article is a radical departure from the Vietnam
experience. So I
particularly look forward to the opinions of those who
may have
experienced Vietnam insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Personally, I
fear
that, unless this article was neutralized by others–
and I think not–
it
represents a pathological gold mine to understanding
where we went
wrong and
where we thought wrong, being culture blind and
language deaf. Worst of
all,
it seems to me, the Pentagon operated on a series of
ideological assumptions, as this article indicates,
that support my
opinion
that we went in truly intelligence blind.
Daniel E. Teodoru
************************************************
A very interesting story made yet another scandal
for
the White House:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100854_pf.html
At the end of a basic training ceremony, Iraqi Army
recruits in Anbar province tore off their uniforms and
refused to serve. According to the Wash. Post:
The protest was triggered by an announcement that the
new soldiers, all residents of Anbar province —
widely considered the heartland of Iraq’s Sunni Arab
insurgent movement — would be required to serve
outside their home towns and outside the province as
well.
To me, having posted Mr. Metz’s 2003 article on the
Iraq insurgency, I am encouraged that someone finally,
in effect, said: Rumsfeld goes or we go!
To understand this view, one must first recall the
imperial McNamara solution to the Vietnam War: a large
central army. I was in Danang Airport waiting for my
plane to Saigon when I met and ARVN soldier on
emergency leave to go back home to his Mekong Delta
village. He was stationed in a unit near Danang and
the local Viet Cong Committee of his village tried to
talk him into deserting, using the well known
nice–>mean “binh van” tactics scripted way back by
Lenin. First he was sent requests to return to protect
his family; then he was sent a death warrant if he did
not desert; then he was sent a threat to his family;
finally, he received a package with a small child’s
hand in it. Thinking it was his young son’s, he asked
leave to return home. There was no other way to
confirm that. I have no idea what happened. But the
story came to mind when I read the above story about
the Anbar training camp. In fact, we succeeded in
Vietnam only after the Tet Offensive, when we
concentrated our assets and efforts into training
local forces– RFs and PFs– to resist the VC from the
villages. That spelled the end of the Viet Cong and
the war became against Hanoi’s regular troops sent
south.
Let us remember that Rumsfeld ordered our “liberator”
troops to not interfere with looting, violence and
murder after Saddam fell on grounds that “freedom is
messy.” Thus, the insurgency began as a crime spree.
As a result, we could not disarm people; they needed
their AK-47s to protect their homes. It was only when
our troops came under constant attack that all Iraqis
were deemed suspect of trying to kill our troops until
proven innocents.
The more we preempted, barging into homes in the
middle of the night, the more we turned the Iraqis
into outraged resistors. Soon they went from avenging
insults to their Iraqi dignity to avenging dead
relatives. Apparently none of Gen. Sanchez’s
commanders read Lora Blumenfeld’s book REVENGE, as
seen by Mediterranean peoples. We kept, as Metz wrote,
assuming that we were dealing with Jihadists from
abroad. And so, as in Vietnam, when we realized that
we couldn’t stay, we concentrated on building up an
Iraqi army to replace ours.
To make a long story short, we turned an unleashing of
criminals into a foreign Jihadist insurrection from
abroad (for Rumsfeld ideology substituting for
intelligence). And so we focused on creating a Shi’ite
Army to protect against Sunni insurgents and then a
Sunni Army to protect against Shi’ia Death Squads (not
to speak of the Kurd Peshmerga we fully armed). When
we tried to put it all together into a national army
that we control, we only repeated the ARVN catastrophe
of mass desertions.
But now the lowest soldiers have made it clear that
this is a LOCAL war, to protect their neighborhoods
and villages. Perhaps now Mr. Bush will go the next
step and fire Rumsfeld and replace our military
trainers with able Arab speaking advisers who can
train local police forces to protect their own
families.
At the same time, withdrawing our troops on a fixed
schedule and asking the UN to replace us with police
advisers will refocus this war into the many local
wars that it really is. The Central Government can be
helped by us with reconstruction funds that are
performance standards based (their corruption could
never be as bad as that of our contractors).
In the end we may not get credit for Iraq’s police
suppression of a bandit insurgency fought and won at
the local level, the UN police advises will, but them
we also will be remote from any final failure if it
occurs. Yet I really think that our ability to
persuade Iraq at the central and local levels will
only manifest once we remove our ham-bone military and
empower Iraqis one local sector at a time.
Daniel E. Teodoru
deteodoru