The pretty face on the new Bush policy for Iraq, announced on Wednesday, is Lieutenant-General David Petraeus, who got a warm, positive profile in The Globe and Mail, along with a sort of John Wayne photo that looked posed — unlike John Wayne, who never looked like he was posing when he led the cavalry. You get a sense the general goes nowhere without his PR perimeter. A Newsweek cover called him “Iraq’s repairman.”
His middle name is, aptly, surge, as in “classical counterinsurgency strategy,” the field he’s expert in and wrote a PhD on, titled The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam. Fortunately, he didn’t serve there, so he was unimpeded by the lessons of real experience.
A New Yorker article explained that counterinsurgency focuses on “the civilian population: isolating residents from insurgents, providing security . . . allowing . . . development to take place so that the government commands the allegiance of its citizens.” That sounds logical; why didn’t someone think of it before Gen. Petraeus? Maybe because it’s not as obvious as it sounds, especially on the matter of occupation. Counterinsurgency “recognizes” that “this war is for the people of Iraq.” But why is it up to Gen. Petraeus to vie for the people of Iraq. Can you picture Iraqi forces in Colorado, where U.S. counterinsurgency forces train, vying for the people of Denver?
The U.S. trainees wear dishdashas and role play: “What are they going to see at the traffic control point? They’re possibly going to have a walk-up suicide bomber — okay, let’s train that. They’re going to have an irate drunk guy that is of no real threat — let’s train that. They’re going to have a pregnant lady . . .” Note that you’d have none of those dilemmas if you weren’t occupying the place to start with. Hmm, maybe it’s better not to think about that.
Patrick Cockburn wrote in The Independent that “the occupation has always fuelled the insurgency. More U.S. troops means more resistance.” Counterinsurgency centres on the local population, “protecting” them from insurgents, by isolating them in strategic hamlets, Ã la Vietnam, using informers, or bribing them with jobs, gum etc. It’s all about occupation. Yesterday’s Globe story said the new U.S. counterinsurgency manual, co-authored by Gen. Petraeus, explains “the imperative of isolating insurgents from the population.” That makes it sound a lot like they’re already integrated.
You end up controlling ordinary people because they’re easier to find than the guerrillas, who move among them like fish, as is always said. Then, as resistance gets rolling, good intentions about hearts and minds and three-week courses in Arabic culture don’t pan out, so you call in the air strikes, kill people in their homes, bomb weddings, spreading rage and resistance.
You end up, an ex-Pentagon analyst wrote, “providing greater security to Baghdad’s local population by destroying their city.” Another word for “classical counterinsurgency doctrine” is quagmire, and Donald Rumsfeld, who I think of as evil but not stupid, probably knew it. His now-maligned approach may have been based on feeling that classical counterinsurgency didn’t work — not in crucial cases such as Vietnam, Algeria or Iraq.
Did you know the Iraqi government has “requested more operational control over Iraqi troops”? Were you even aware that the U.S. totally controls Iraq’s army? The New York Times calls it a “paradox” that Iraq doesn’t want more U.S. forces. So George Bush told its leader that the new counterinsurgency plan “has to work or you’re out.” Not we’re out, you’re out. But the Iraqi prime minister wants the U.S. out. Maybe he should say he wants them to stay, and then they’d leave. What is this except an occupation? Yet it sounded so logical when they laid out the theory.
It’s why we’re in over our heads with our own troops in Afghanistan. That’s classical counterinsurgency, too. It began as an invasion and carried on as an occupation. We think we’re just helping the locals. Sorry, but it isn’t about motives or intentions; it’s about the reality we become part of, and how we’re perceived by those we go there to protect and “develop.”
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Nick Seebruch, editor
