Iraq 2007—Part II

Curt Mudgeon

December 2007

Our country is under attack by Islamic terrorists, and our Republican president makes the decision to remove an Iraqi dictator likely to help these terrorists in big ways. For that, he gets the support of a bipartisan majority in Congress, and, in little time, a highly successful military operation removes the dictator, who is put on trial and hanged. Then, Islamists and former supporters of the dictator join to start a war of guerrilla and terrorism. At the same time, Democrats in Congress smarting from having lost the presidential elections orchestrate a relentless propaganda campaign that impugns the president’s motives in starting the war, his ability as commander-in-chief, and his decision to pursue the appropriate military operations towards a withdrawal of our troops. As if this was not enough, they declare that we have lost the war, they trash our military leaders and their strategies and tactics, and demand the public announcement of a time table for the withdrawal of our troops, something unheard of in war time. Meanwhile, a little geeky Representative by the name of Henry Waxman has started dozens of investigations of about anything and everything that has been discussed in the White House during the current administration. Mr Waxman is using the congressional prerogative of oversight to subpoena any documents and records in the hope to fish out some damning evidence that Republicans are evil. Since the takeover of the Congress by the Democrats, the White House has handed over about a million documents. As the most successful radio talk programs support the president, there were reports that Mr Waxman had staffers looking into their transcripts to build a case for a return of the Fairness Doctrine in an effort to effect programming changes by intimidating station managers. The Democrats’ goal is to wrest from the Republicans any political power they may have left, and to keep it for good. The mainstream press is their ally.

All this is to point out that President Bush does not have an easy job, and that the political climate is not what it should be in times of war. As if that were not enough, a former vice president, who fancies himself as a technology guru and seems to favour the establishment of a Hobbesian Leviathan, has united an assemblage of nuts, dupes, and leftists to attack about every aspect of the American—and Republican--way of life by peddling the myth of a man-made warming of the Earth’s climate that only a society copied from a totalitarian model could undo.

Under these conditions, what course of action should a president take? The options are few. One is to “cut and run,” which many Democrats want, and take responsibility for the consequences. To those who advocate an immediate halt to our military involvement, causing a bloodbath comparable to the killing fields of Cambodia does not seem to mean much next to the hope of dominating Washington politics—in any case, the president would be blamed for a disastrous withdrawal. Another option is to keep catching the political flak and to take responsibility for trying to avoid a carnage in Iraq. President Bush opted for the second choice, the only one that makes sense.

The political juggernaut against the president makes five basic claims, namely, (1) that he started a war that was unnecessary, (2) that he lied about his reasons to start it, (3) that he made no plans for a post-Saddam-Hussein Iraq, (4) that he paid no heed to recommendations from military leaders about the conduct of the ensuing operations, and (5) that by refusing to raise taxes to pay for the war he recklessly increased our national debt. Of course, much of that, which rests on hindsight and political spin, deserves a close look.

The first claim assumes that the UN sanctions and the enforcement of the conditions of the 1991 cease-fire would have kept Saddam Hussein under control and suppressed any attempt to support al-Qaeda. Under this assumption, no reason would have existed to remove him. With it goes the consideration that Iraq’s regime was secular, and that the dictator was not one to associate with al-Qaeda terrorists motivated by religion. All that is fine and good, but it remains that after the Afghanistan war al-Zarqawi sojourned in Iraq several times, and that there were terrorist training camps in that country. As to the secular nature of the Iraqi regime, it did not keep Saddam Hussein to present himself as a religious man when it served him, and he certainly would have seized any opportunity to get back at the West through al-Qaeda. As usual, the UN controls, which were easily eluded as revealed by the oil-for-food scandal, would have been utterly ineffective in thwarting such an alliance.

For the second claim to hold, one must assume that the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapon arsenal was bogus, and that the president knew it. Of course, he would not have known it. That intelligence had been confirmed by a variety of credible sources including Britain and France. It is also possible that some of that resulted from a bit of disinformation on the part of Saddam Hussein himself to discourage a possible attack. In any case, most of the Congress—including the administration’s current worst adversaries—when presented with the same information agreed with the president on the danger posed by Saddam Hussein. While it is true that we could not find in Iraq the weapons that we were supposed to find, it is not entirely certain that they did not exist. Intense truck traffic between Iraq and Syria on the eve of the war hints that they could have been moved to Syria. In any case, it is a fact that the dictator had such weapons which he used in his war against Iran and in indiscriminate retaliation against the Kurd resistance. It is also a fact that he had the know-how and the capability any time to go ahead with a program of production.

To imply that the president would have lied to start a war for some hidden purpose is irresponsible. It is an accusation of treason, an accusation that Al Gore made explicit in a speech apparently composed in one of his frequent fits of insanity. But we know that there is no longer a “loyal opposition” in Washington. The opposition has turned to vicious methods of subversion and personal attacks. Anyone who knows a bit of modern history can see an eerie similarity between the Democrats’ methods and rhetoric and those practised by the European communist parties of the post-WW2 period. Wrecking our political system to install a power monopoly of “democratic” socialism is the goal of the opposition. This should not be surprising, as the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), which was created in the early 1990s as the legislative arm of the Democratic Socialists of America, has taken over the Democratic Party. A look at the membership listed on the CPC’s web site is quite instructive. It should be noted that Mrs Pelosi was cited as a member until she became speaker of the House.

Political adversaries turned haters have contrived many reasons for which Mr Bush would have started the Iraq war, each one of them more ludicrous than the other. They include: a personal vendetta to get rid of the man who wanted to assassinate his father; a lust for oil; a scheme to make oil companies and their shareholders richer; an excuse to grant Halliburton profitable contracts; and a contribution to a grand plan of American world domination. The sad part is that many of the Bush haters who like to spread such lunacy—and may even believe it—vote.

Plans concerning a post-Saddam-Hussein Iraq certainly missed the mark. It seems to rest on a basic assumption that the experience gained in Japan and Germany at the end of World War II could have somewhat applied to Iraq. Such an assumption, based on faulty intelligence and claims made by Iraqi exiles, was dreadfully wrong. The administration was faulted by the congressional armchair generals for having disbanded the Iraqi military, under the hypothesis that its hierarchy would have come to our side to participate in the suppression of the insurgency. This was another absurd criticism, another “you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t” situation, as no evidence whatsoever indicated that we should have reasonably trusted Saddam Hussein’s forces. The post-Saddam-Hussein situation was tricky, and the self-appointed military pundits of the press rooms who claimed to have found in Trinquier’s and Galula’s writings the magic recipe for beating the Iraq insurgency overlooked only one element, which is time.

Col. Roger Trinquier, a French officer in an elite airborne corps, developed principles of counterinsurgency (COIN) strategies and tactics from his extensive combat experience in France’s last colonial wars in Indochina and in Algeria. He was Gen. Massu’s intelligence officer during the 1956 successful Battle of Algiers, in which the Algerian organisation responsible for the many daily terrorist attacks against French and Algerian civilians was annihilated within a few months. Trinquier went on to write a series of important books about what he called “modern war.” The first one, “Modern Warfare—a French view of counterinsurgency,” published in 1961 and made available online by the US Command and General Staff College, is an authoritative analysis that offers workable principles of successful COIN warfare. David Galula’s 1964 book, “Counterinsurgency Warfare—theory and practice,” the essence of which is expounded in the 1963 RAND report “Pacification in Algeria,” picks up on certain aspects of Trinquier’s strategy, mostly those involving civilian populations. Galula’s ideas also derived from field experience, including two years as a French infantry company commander in Kabylia during the Franco-Algerian war.

That which the journalists who thought of themselves as COIN experts for having read Galula or Trinquier did not realise is that the circumstances of our war in Iraq were drastically different from those under which the French operated in Indochina and in Algeria. In those former colonies, France had had the time to establish an administrative infrastructure based on the French model and operated by French functionaries, and had had the opportunity to gain some competence in understanding the local cultures and languages. At the onset of the Battle of Algiers, Gen. Massu, who had been granted full powers over the city, got a lode of information in the form of police and census files, which Trinquier could use effectively. In addition, one tenth of the population of Algeria, one million people, comprised Europeans born there, who were opposed to independence. Many of them could speak Arabic as well as the Arabs, knew their ways, and were able effectively to gather intelligence. There were also native Arabs who did not approve of the methods and goals of the insurgents. These circumstances were important. They allowed Trinquier’s methods to get results in short order. Moreover, following a French victory in Algeria, a new government would have been easy to devise and to install, given the history of the country and the prospect of a long-lasting French presence, however unrealistic. We did not benefit from any such favourable conditions in Iraq, where it would take at least years, if not decades, to build an environment where the principles of COIN warfare distilled from the French experience could fully apply.

While a draft allowed the French to maintain a force of more than a half million soldiers to control a population of nine million Arabs, no US deployment of comparable size was possible in Iraq, a country of twenty-five million people, where the population of Baghdad alone is seven million, about ten times the size of 1956 Algiers. So, an initial strategy using a relatively modest level of troops had to be implemented. It was based mostly on nimble elite combat units and the use of advanced technology. The goal was not to occupy terrain, which our numbers could not afford, but to inflict as much damage as possible to the enemy while offering him as few targets as feasible. Recommendations for a level of troops at least twice as large posed problems of mobility, logistics, and vulnerability, while still not providing the capability to control enough territory. The initial strategy had the main purpose of buying the time necessary to build and train Iraqi police and military forces so that they could secure the areas conquered from the enemy and protect the population from terrorist activity, thereby isolating the insurgents. This required time, and it is only recently that the Iraqis could start taking on that mission, which has been a key component of the “surge.” Contrary to some politicians’ claims that they had practically invented the surge by recommending higher numbers of US troops, it is not our modest increase in numbers alone that has produced promising results; it is both the numbers and the ability of the Iraqis to provide effective help. In any case, all along, the president relied on the advice of military leaders, including field commanders. In their all-out effort to discredit at any cost the president and the Republicans for the next presidential election, the Democrats do not want any positive news about the situation in Iraq. In senate hearings, they questioned the veracity of Gen. Petraeus’s report, practically implying that the general lied by not saying what they wanted to hear.

Which brings us to Mrs Clinton’s statement that a “willing suspension of disbelief” was necessary for her to lend any credence to the general’s detailed testimony. Impugning the honour of a smart, dedicated leader who is carrying out a difficult wartime mission is a fine posture for someone who aspires to becoming our next Commander-in-Chief. In truth, the Clintons and many of their friends in Washington politics despise the military, and one must hope that voters will remember it, come November 2008.