How to Win in Iraq — And Beyond

 by David Yerushalmi & Tom Snodgrass  

| View comments |  Print This Post

In Algeria the French had a manageable problem in closing a 200-mile stretch of border between the FLN and their source of insurgent re-supply in Tunisia, as compared to the US’ insurmountable problem of sealing the 2,267-mile Iraqi border to isolate the various sectarian groups of Jihadi and Baathists insurgents from their re-supply lines.  A response to Arthur Herman.

Overall, the essay by Arthur Herman and published in Commentary’s April 2007 issue, entitled, “How to Win in Iraq–And How to Lose,” is a good layman's analysis of the problem of fighting a counterinsurgency, notably the one the US is fighting now in Iraq. Drawing upon the lessons learned in the French political defeat snatched from the military jaws of victory, Mr. Herman focuses on many of the obvious lessons we have learned of late in tribal urban warfare. But precisely because the author is a historian and NOT a military man, he misses several primary points in exactly what he describes so well.

When you read this essay, keep in mind a shorthand rendition of the master military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz: WAR = MOVITATION + CAPABILITY. Also, keep in mind that this formula applies to both sides of any given conflict. To prosecute a war, you need both factors. Eliminate one or the other or both components on one side and the war is over.

The French in Algeria are a great example for counterinsurgency analysis. But the problem with this Commentary essay is that it lacks the focus on a key aspect of military operations – logistical re-supply of combat forces in the field. Logistical re-supply is essential regardless of the size of the unit, be it division, platoon, or guerrilla band.  Among knowledgeable military men, the saying is that amateurs talk about strategy and tactics; professionals study logistics.

Examined from the perspective of the Algerian "insurgency" and their effective but not realized military defeat, we see immediately the critical military factors BEFORE the French were defeated at home politically and suffered the Vietnam syndrome (even before there was a Vietnam syndrome).

One, in Algeria, the French did not pretend to set up a civilian democratic government made up of a coalition of friendly Algerians and enemy Algerians as we have done in Iraq. In other words, there was no effort at or pretense of “democracy-building.” And, indeed, the author takes note of that when he compares the Algerian experience on this point to Iraq: "From the Galula perspective, for instance, splitting civil and military functions between the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and CENTCOM was a grave initial error."

Two, and even more importantly militarily, the French lieutenant colonel named David Galula, comparable to our General David Petraeus, instituted a new battle plan. That plan was simple: do whatever it takes to destroy the enemy's CAPABILITY. What did this include?

As our historian tells us, first the French counterinsurgent painstakingly set up static neighborhood or sector military commands run by military officers after pushing the enemy out of areas. In other words, he instituted martial law once he gained control of an area and then set out to establish intel contacts. And, he didn't abandon those areas once secured. This of course is what Petraeus says he wants to do. Whether he has the manpower (US or Iraqi) to accomplish this will be one critical factor.

Second, Galula sought to establish an aura of invincibility and security for the local friendlies so he could enlist them in the battle, at least in intel collection. He accomplished this by changing the rules of engagement (ROE). When the enemy jihadists were hunted down, they were punished on the spot. When tribal or clan leaders were caught helping the jihadists, there was swift and public martial justice dispensed on the spot. And it worked.

But, what our historian misses almost completely, noting it only in passing, is probably THE MOST IMPORTANT fact of turning the war in Algeria around militarily. As our historian writes off-handedly:

Helping to put the guerrillas on the defensive were such tactics as the division of troops into 'static' and 'mobile' units to deal with terrorist outbreaks; the use of helicopters for counterinsurgency operations; and construction of a 200-mile, eight-foot-high electric fence (the so-called Morice Line), which shut down the FLN’s sources of support from neighboring Tunisia. (Emphasis added.)

After this one mention of re-supply lines, our author forgets this crucial fact for the rest of his essay. But it is the essential part of the successful French counterinsurgency strategy. When the insurgency forces no longer had logistical re-supply, they could be effectively choked off. And that is the lesson in Iraq.

All of the local support and intel in the world, all of the ROE necessary to exact immediate retribution on the insurgent forces and their tribal allies will be for naught if the insurgents are free to continually re-arm themselves and augment their forces with replacement personnel. In other words, if you don’t destroy the re-supply lines, you don’t destroy CAPABILITY and the fight will continue. And, as Galula made clear by closing off support from Tunisia, the re-supply lines are just as important in an insurgency as in conventional war.

There is, however, an important difference between insurgency and conventional warfare. In a conventional war, according to Clausewitz in his classic On War, the center of gravity is on the main battlefields where the enemy army is attrited and rendered ineffective. These wars need manpower; large amounts of manpower. If you can kill or incapacitate enough of a conventional army’s soldiers, you can defeat it by rendering it combat ineffective. In insurgency, there is no main battlefield and no concentration of soldiers to kill. As we hear from Iraq and Afghanistan, what you get is 23 insurgents killed one day, 5 the next. But, with the borders and re-supply lines open, men and materiel continue to flow in sufficient quantities to cause mayhem in an asymmetrical conflict.

Therefore, it should be apparent to even a novice that the only way to destroy the combat CAPABILITY of insurgent forces is to destroy their source of re-supply.  In Algeria the French had a manageable problem in closing a 200-mile stretch of border between the insurgent National Liberation Front (FLN) and their source of insurgent re-supply in Tunisia, as compared to the US’ insurmountable problem of sealing the 2,267-mile Iraqi border to isolate the various sectarian groups of Jihadi and Baathists insurgents from their re-supply lines.

The French did not have to destroy the source of insurgent re-supply in Tunisia because they could interdict the supply lines at a relatively narrow segment of the Algerian border.  In contrast, the US was never able to interdict North Vietnamese Army/Viet Cong re-supply entering South Vietnam through tens of border crossing points.  In spite of this operational shortfall, the US politico-military leadership decided not to destroy the source of re-supply in North Vietnam.  The historical consequences of that decision speak for themselves.  In Iraq, the US is facing the same problem that we confronted in Vietnam — a border that is impossible to seal against infiltration of men and supplies.  And we face the same choice: destroy the sources of re-supply given the impossibility of interdiction, or resign ourselves to the reality that we will face an unending insurgency.

The latter half of the historian's essay is also quite true. The battle in Algeria was lost by the French because the French people lost their will. The same happened to the US in Vietnam and is happening again in Iraq.

Most of the blame for that loss of will belongs at the doorstep of the commanders, civilian and military, in these failed wars. Why? Because democracies lose the will to fight wars quickly. In spite of this fact, the Western democratic politico-military leadership has repeatedly selected a military strategy that was guaranteed to drag the war out. This is so because counterinsurgency by its very nature takes years to effectively implement.  Consequently, even though counterinsurgent casualties are usually just a fraction of those sustained in conventional warfare, the prolonged nature of the counterinsurgency war magnifies even small weekly casualty tolls that are conveyed by week-in, week-out casualty reports, thus giving the impression that losses are much greater than they actually are.  When you add to that fact the defeatist, cut-and-run, anti-war mentality of the Left prevalent in Western democracies, it was inevitable that the French in Algeria and the US in Vietnam would be defeated, even after the insurgencies they had been fighting were essentially defeated.

It should be noted that the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam destroyed itself by misapplication of the Maoist strategy of revolutionary (insurgent) warfare.  Briefly stated, Mao Tse-Tung’s strategy of insurgent warfare called for three stages wherein the guerrilla insurgents first attack the enemy in small units, second they consolidate their forces and begin to build a conventional army from their guerrilla force, and third they turn their force into a conventional army and attack and defeat the enemy in conventional force battles. 

The Viet Cong escalated to Mao’s third stage before they were ready and their forces were destroyed (between 40,000 and 85,000 killed) in the Tet Offensive of 1968.  After such horrendous losses the Viet Cong was largely rendered combat ineffective and the insurgency period of the war ended as the North Vietnamese were forced to carry on their war of aggression against South Vietnam with regular force units of the North Vietnamese Army. 

Thus ended the fiction of an indigenous revolt against the South Vietnamese government. Unfortunately, after Tet the US public paid no attention to such details as enthusiasm for the war was drained by the misinterpretation of the results of Tet duly promulgated by the US media and leftist anti-war factions. In summary, it was a communist miscalculation of their strength that ended the insurgency, not US counterinsurgent actions.  But make no mistake, the key factor did not change in that the crucial re-supply of the North Vietnamese Army still originated in North Vietnam and was still the deciding factor in keeping the enemy forces in the field until they could triumph.

The question in Iraq is still open but the door is closing rapidly. As we can see from this analysis alone, if General Petraeus cannot convince himself and his civilian commanders to go after the re-supply lines originating in Iran and Syria, this war will never be won. At present, it appears that the US approach to Iran is PSYOPS. We have witnessed the results of a clandestine program in the past several weeks that has either lured into our hands or captured, among others, a former Iranian minister of defense. This defection or snatch does seem to be causing a bit of chaos in the Iranian ranks. Arguably it has even led to a tit-for-tat with the Iranian abduction of the British soldiers during a routine coalition marine patrol and search mission in Iraqi territorial waters. But whether these high level PSYOPS will be enough to motivate Iran to cease its efforts to defeat the US in Iraq is doubtful. And, every day we don't cut off the re-supply lines, we are a day closer to defeat.

However, at this point we would like to raise a larger question that needs to be addressed by the US body politic. Given that the Islamic jihad will continue irrespective of the outcome in Iraq, can the US ever sustain the public will long enough to effectively fight and win a counterinsurgency war against Jihadists throughout the Middle East and South Asia? Or, should the US abandon attempting to fight the Jihadi insurgents on their asymmetrical battlefield where they will always retain the advantage? Put slightly differently, should the US employ a form of warfare where the US has the advantage – putting steel on the target?  First, we discuss this alternative from a purely military point of view before considering the political implications. 

Obviously Islamic jihad does not materialize out of thin air. Ideologically it is driven by the political theology of Islam and nurtured by the dysfunctional regimes now claiming the mantle of dar al-Islam. Islamic jihad is sponsored and given safe haven by nation states where training and planning can take place within reach of modern communications and international finance. As fractured and widely distributed as al Qaeda and other terrorist cells now appear, without some centralized hierarchy or networked leadership, the effort to gain access to weapons and logistical opportunities are severely limited. Even the traditional money transfer and exchange system of Hawala requires international communications and travel. As we see from the post-9-11 period, forcing the al Qaeda leadership underground limits its reach to countries like Iraq, where war has destroyed any real security infrastructure, or even in Europe where until just recently Muslims have had very few restrictions placed upon their travel, financial networks or ability to congregate and plan attacks. (Much of this freedom of movement in Europe has now changed after the July 7, 2005, bombings in London and the March 11, 2004, bombings in Madrid.)

Failure to recognize and confront this essential requirement of regime- or state-sponsorship, dooms our efforts to combat the worldwide Jihad against the West. To again draw on historical lessons, surrogate-“false flag” warfare was effectively used by the communists in Vietnam in the mid-20th century.  The US public was deceived by the communist claim that the war in South Vietnam arose from an indigenous revolt of South Vietnamese, known as the Viet Cong, against their West-leaning Vietnamese government.  The US government essentially allowed this fiction to stand unchallenged because the US political leadership did not want to confront the Soviet Union and Communist China who were fueling the conflict through their communist client state of North Vietnam. 

The result of this political cowardice was that Lyndon Johnson forbade serious bombing of North Vietnam that could have ended the war in weeks or months essentially at will through targeting the Red River dikes, the destruction of which would have flooded the war-making and supporting CAPABILITY of North Vietnam.  Instead, President Johnson chose to spare thousands of North Vietnamese communist lives from death by flood by sacrificing tens of thousands of US military lives, thereby permitting North Vietnam to prolong the war in South Vietnam until they won.

Today in Iraq the US is again facing surrogate-“false flag” warfare sponsored and nurtured from Iran, Syria, and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia.  So far President Bush has followed in the footsteps of Lyndon Johnson in refusing to attack and destroy the true center of gravity of the Iraq insurgency, re-supply from Iran and Syria. While General Petraeus’ troop increase and new counterinsurgency tactics appear to be gaining ground, if the bases of insurgency re-supply are untouched, the insurgency will never end until it succeeds.  Consequently, we return to our question: Can the US ever sustain the public will long enough to effectively fight and win a counterinsurgency war, or should we stop fighting the Jihadi insurgents on their asymmetrical terms and conduct warfare employing our strength – strategic bombing? 

What would be the concept of operations for strategic bombing instead of continuing with counterinsurgent asymmetrical warfare?  To begin with, there can no longer be any doubt that Iran is one of the central sponsors of the worldwide Jihad.  Since the MOTIVATION of the Iranian Ayatollahs and their technocratic mullocracy is apocalyptic “Twelverism,” any notion of eliminating their MOTIVATION through “a war of ideas” or diplomacy is dead on arrival. 

Therefore, attacking and destroying Iran’s CAPABILITY component of warfare by strategic bombing (together with trade, travel, and financial embargoes) is the only realistic option available, if we wish true “peace.”  This strategy would entail using aerial platforms like B-2’s, F-22’s, and F-17’s to lead strikes by less stealthy aircraft and submarine- and surface-launched cruise missiles to destroy every facility from nuclear reactors to military and terrorist bases and camps to communication, electric generation, and water pumping stations. A key focus on the infrastructure of military assets of the Republican Guards would effectively rattle every important cage in Tehran.

In other words, the objective of the US strategic air campaign would be to render Iran’s reach beyond its borders to zero.  By such an attack we would finally be communicating with the Islamic societies of the Middle East in a manner they would understand perfectly and without ambiguity, since the ruthless exercise of power is the sole grammar of Islamic politics.  In the Islamic world, politics are a zero sum game; compassion and compromise are only understood as weakness to be exploited.  Visiting an apocalyptic strike on Iran’s Islamic regime would serve notice to Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan that they have the choice of reining in the Jihadists who use their territory to stage attacks on US interests or experiencing a similar fate.  While this strategic proposal will seem outrageously blood-thirsty to the political castrati who presently dominate US society, it is no more extreme that what Sherman did in Georgia and the Carolinas during the US Civil War, or what the US Army Air Forces did at Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe during World War II.

Now let us consider briefly the political implications of adopting such a strategy. 

The argument against employing such a sound military strategy for victory in the Global War Against Islamic Jihad is that it is politically impractical. But this response begs the question because it ignores two salient facts. One, there is no sustained or institutional reform movement among the world’s 1.3+ billion Muslims. The reason for this is clear for those willing to examine the Islamic world for what it is. As the annual Pew Surveys have documented, while one-third to one-half of Muslims the world over might prefer to live peacefully like Westerners, their other half is committed to Shari’a and traditional, authoritative Islam, even if they themselves are not particularly observant and even if they themselves have no desire to martyr themselves for the cause. Moreover, even among the “moderates,” as opposed to the brave few individuals who speak out about the need to reform Islam and thereby put their lives at risk, there is no widespread recognition among these Muslims that violence and Jihad against the infidels is endemic and intrinsic to historical, traditional, and authoritative Islam.

The result of this intransigence and resistance to any real worldwide reform of Islam by Muslims leads us to the second salient fact missing from the argument of impracticality. That is, the quite obvious fact that unless we confront and undermine the necessary requisite for a worldwide Jihad against the West — regime- or state-sponsored safe havens for the Shari’a-faithful Jihadist leadership — we will be facing an ever-expanding and growing threat from global Jihad without end. And, since we have seen that democracies are simply incapable of fighting long wars in which asymmetrical strategies and tactics are used quite effectively by the enemy to undermine the electorate’s MOTIVATION, the end result will be catastrophic. This is of course clear because sooner or later a fatally unstable country like Pakistan with nuclear weapons will collapse into Jihadists' hands or a country like Iran will develop them or some North Korean, Chinese, or Russian cabal will sell out to a terrorist group and those of us left standing will look back upon 9-11 as just a shot across our bow which we complacently and fatally ignored.

We will concede, however, there is an aspect of the impracticality argument that is persuasive. This might better be expressed in query form. Is it possible in this day and age of mass democracy in a multi-cultural open society to wage such a strategically sound Global War Against Islamic Jihad? Framed this way, the inquiry does not fail like the simple question begging form above. The reason it survives as a serious challenge to an effective military campaign against Islam is directly related to the new telos of modern democracies. What used to be restricted to the halls of the academic professoriate and the political, social, and juridical Elites has now so permeated modern Western civilization that even the grassroots conservatives are hard-pressed to overcome its allure.

This new telos, or the science-democracy reciprocal, demands that all matters not reducible to scientific speech as expressed in symbolic mathematical terms are simply uncertain. Peoplehood, national existence, morality, the dominance of the Judeo-Christian weltanschauung, are no longer a part of our quite certain experience of America but rather tentative opinions and beliefs and even wholly uncertain myths to be deconstructed and reconstructed along purely democratic and universal standards of human and civil rights. This new rights-based order, replacing political order as given to man with the transcendence of Time as History, effectively eliminates the ability of Western men to discriminate. Left with the allure of radical equality nested in Indiscriminacy, the threat from Islam will remain safely ensconced within the new political speak. Thus, we fight a war against "terror" (and not the Islamic faithful) because to define the battle as one against a tactic permits us to ignore the enemy.

Features, Foreign Affairs: Iraq War

Read more articles by David Yerushalmi & Tom Snodgrass