One of the reasons I’m still convinced that the US and its allies should withdraw from Iraq as quickly
as possible, despite the very serious consequences this would have, is the fact that the US army is wholly unsuited to fight a guerilla movement. Let me explain.
In guerilla warfare, you have a small group of hostiles subsumed in a much larger civilian population, with the differences between the two often difficult to spot. To defeat these hostile groups, you not only most defeat them military, you must also be able to win the support of the larger population, as well as erode the support the guerillas recieve from it. The guerilla movement has to do the opposite: it probably cannot win the war directly, but can make it too costly for its opponent to continue by gaining the support of the majority of the population. Without this support guerilla movements wither away or become just another group of bandits.
To get this support, a guerilla movement has to offer people a genuine alternative to the current regime and it has to make sure people do not want to collaborate with their enemies. The latter they can achieve either by targeting those collaborators, (as already seems to happen in Iraq, with the new Iraqi police force being a regular target), or by making sure their enemies alienates people through their own action. For every innocent victim, another guerillas may be created. Up to a point, the more repressive the current regime is, the more alluring the guerillas’ alternative becomes.
I don’t know if there is a broadbased resistance movement to the US-led occupation in Iraq right now, but there certainly is a nascent one. And the US Army is hard on its way to recruit people for it, by the way it operates in Iraq. As one senior British army officer said:
Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: “My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans’ use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don’t see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it’s awful.
“The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn’t in Iraq. It’s easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them.”
[…]
The American approach was markedly different: “When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area.
This attitude is deeply ingrained in the US Army, which at least from World War II onwards has always elevated the safety of its troops above nearly all other considerations. If you are fired upon, you strike back with all the firepower at your disposal; if this causes civilian casualties (“colletoral damage”) than so be it. Which is an attitude that serves it well in a conventional war, where the enemies are known and civilians mostly absent. It works not so well in a guerilla war, where the fighting often takes place in densily populated urban areas…
Making this situation worse, is the fact that the US Army has little to no institutional experience with trying to keep the peace in a largely hostile territory. Whereas the British Army has its decades of hardgained experience in Northern Ireland, since Vietnam the US Army has until now mainly been involved in quick campaigns, avoiding the kind of situation they’re in now in Iraq. In fact, the last situation in which the US Army was involved comparable to Iraq, Somalia, was an unmitigated disaster. As now, it began operations with the best of intentions only to quickly alienate the population there, with the end result being an ignoble retreat after an operation to snatch some Somali warlords which had been causing trouble ended with three helicopters shot down and 18 US soldiers dead, not to mention some 500 hundred Somalis, combattants and non-combattants both.
The same mistakes that were made then, I fear are being made in Iraq now: an overreliance on firepower and technology, little clue as to how to win over the civilian population and an attitude at the top which thinks its troubles are due to some mastermind or other working against them and if only he can be eliminated all its troubles will end. What I fear is another Somalia, or worse, another Vietnam. What I fear is that the US is being sucked into a long running guerilla war, devastating Iraq even more than a civil war would.