Op ed piece from the NYTimes. For a historian some interesting omissions.
He contrasts what he calls the successful British suppression of Iraqi
insurgency in 1920 to our own floundering, pointing out the much higher
British troop concentration relative to population and the 30 years of
troop presence, into the 1950s, which together kept the country from
desecending into chaos. He neglects to mention that final British
withdrawal was almost immediately followed by the overthrow of the
British-imposed monarchy and the beginning of the first of the horrific
dictatorships that held sway until the US invasion.
The second big omission is an understanding of how we got to the present
situation: we lopped off not only the head of an existing order, we
destroyed most of the bureaucracy, creating an administrative and power
vacuum. How stupid can you get.
Then there's that third paragraph, which tells us what we need to know
about this guy's bias: "
As many of the war's opponents seem to have forgotten, civil war and chaos
tend to break out when American military interventions have been aborted.
Think not only of Vietnam and Cambodia, but also of Lebanon in 1983 and
Haiti in 1996." Wait a minute--some of his apples and oranges are rotten:
there was no chaos in Vietnam after the US pulled out, we destabilized the
government in Cambodia but didn't in fact occupy the place, and when we
went into Lebanon and Haiti those countries had already begun to descend
into chaos. And our presence in Lebanon was extremely brief and very small.
I think his point is well-taken that if the US withdrew at this point there
would be a lot more bloodshed than there is now, but the level of bloodshed
if we stay is likely to remain as it is now, and there are no guarantees
that when we eventually leave the country will remain stable under a regime
acceptable to our strategic interests (as seen by whoever) and our
consciences. We've created a problem with no adequate solution.
Mark
Cowboys and Indians
"I think that this could still fail." Those words - uttered by a senior
American officer in Baghdad last week - probably gave opponents of the war
in Iraq, particularly those clamoring for a hasty exit, a bit of a kick.
They should be careful what they wish for.
For history strongly suggests that a hasty American withdrawal from Iraq
would be a disaster. "If we let go of the insurgency," said another of the
officers quoted anonymously last week, "then this country could fail and go
back into civil war and chaos."
As many of the war's opponents seem to have forgotten, civil war and chaos
tend to break out when American military interventions have been aborted.
Think not only of Vietnam and Cambodia, but also of Lebanon in 1983 and
Haiti in 1996. To talk glibly of "finding a way out of Iraq," as if it were
just a matter of hailing a cab and heading for the Baghdad airport, is to
underestimate the danger of a bloody internecine conflict among Kurds,
Sunni Arabs and Shiites.
Instead of throwing up our hands in an irresponsible fit of despair, we
need to learn not just from past disasters but also from historical
victories over insurgencies. Indeed, of all the attempts in the past
century by irregular indigenous forces to expel regular foreign forces,
around a third have failed.
In 1917 British forces invaded Mesopotamia, got to Baghdad, overthrew its
Ottoman rulers and sought - in the words of the general who led them, Sir
Stanley Maude - to be its people's "liberators." The British presence in
Iraq was legitimized by international law (it was designated a League of
Nations mandate) and by a modicum of democracy (a referendum was held among
local sheiks to confirm the creation of a British-style constitutional
monarchy). Despite all this, in 1920 there was a full-scale insurgency
against the continuing British military presence.
Some may object that warfare today is a very different matter from warfare
85 years ago. Yet the striking thing about the events of 1920 is how very
like the events of our own time they were. The reality of what is sometimes
called "asymmetric warfare" is how very symmetrical it really is: an
insurgency is about leveling the military playing field, and exploiting the
advantages of local knowledge to stage hit-and-run attacks against the
occupiers, as well as anybody thought to be collaborating with them.
Indeed, if there is asymmetry it lies in the advantages enjoyed by the
insurgents. The cost of training and equipping an American soldier is high;
by contrast, life is tragically cheap among the young men of Baghdad and
Falluja. Even if the insurgents lose 10 men for every 1 they kill, they are
still winning, not least because the American side takes its losses so much
harder.
How, then, did the British crush the insurgency of 1920? Three lessons
stand out.
The first is that, unlike the American enterprise in Iraq today, they had
enough men. In 1920, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000,
of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting. During the
insurgency, a further 15,000 men arrived as reinforcements.
Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military
personnel now in Iraq (around 138,000). The trouble is that the population
of Iraq was just over three million in 1920, whereas today it is around 24
million. Thus, back then the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was, at
most, 23 to 1. Today it is around 174 to 1. To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1
today, about one million American troops would be needed.
The United States also faces two other problems that the United Kingdom did
not 85 years ago. The British were able to be ruthless: they used air raids
and punitive expeditions to inflict harsh collective punishments on
villages that supported the insurgents. The United States has not been
above brutal methods on occasion in Iraq, yet humiliation and torture of
prisoners have not yielded any significant benefits compared with what it
has cost the country's reputation.
The Americans' other problem has to do with timing and expectations.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that American forces should
aim to work to a "10-30-30" timetable: 10 days should suffice to topple a
rogue regime, 30 days to establish order in its wake, and 30 more days to
prepare for the next military undertaking. I am all in favor of a 10-30-30
timetable - provided the measurement is years, not days. For it may well
take around 10 years to establish order in Iraq, 30 more to establish the
rule of law, and quite possibly another 30 to create a stable democracy.
Those American officers who say that it could take years to succeed in Iraq
are therefore right. But the Bush administration has just three and a half
years left. Is it credible that American troops will still be in Iraq for
even another four years after that?
The insurgents don't think so. They know that American democracy puts time
on their side. Once again, the contrast with the British experience is
instructive. Although Iraq was formally granted its independence in 1932,
there was still some form of British presence in the country until the late
1950's.
So, if we acknowledge that the United States simply does not have the
luxury of time that the British enjoyed and cannot be similarly ruthless,
can it at least increase the manpower at its disposal in Iraq?
The official answer from Washington is that Iraqi security forces will soon
be ready to play an effective role in policing. Few who have seen those
forces on the ground find this strategy realistic. Some fear that the
training that Iraqi soldiers are receiving may prove useful only when they
fight one another in an Iraqi civil war.
What, then, of America's own resources? Almost no one (least of all the
Pentagon) wants to go back to the draft. So could today's all-volunteer
force somehow be expanded to double (at least) the troops available? That
too seems unlikely. Indeed, the current system is already showing alarming
signs of stress and strain as more and more is asked of the "weekend
warriors" of the reserves and National Guard, who account for roughly
two-fifths of the force in Iraq. In December, the Army National Guard
acknowledged that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in
the preceding two months. Many members of the Individual Ready Reserve have
been contesting the Army's right to call them up.
How did the British address the manpower problem in 1920? By bringing in
soldiers from India who accounted for more than 87 percent of troops in the
counter-insurgency campaign. Perhaps, then, the greatest problem faced by
the Anglophone empire of our own time is very simple: the United Kingdom
had the Indian Army; the United States does not. Indeed, by a rich irony,
the only significant auxiliary forces available to the Pentagon today are
none other than ... the British Army. But those troops are far too few to
be analogous to the Sikhs, Mahrattas and Baluchis who fought so effectively
in 1920.
No one should wish for an overhasty American withdrawal from Iraq. It would
be the prelude to a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence,
with inevitable spillovers into and interventions from neighboring
countries. Rather, it is time to acknowledge just how thinly stretched
American forces in Iraq are and to address the problem: whether by finding
new allies (send Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi?); radically expanding the
accelerated citizenship program for immigrants who join the army; or
lowering the (historically high) educational requirements demanded by
military recruiters.
YES, as that anonymous officer said, the Bush administration's policy in
Iraq could indeed still fail. But too few American liberals seem to grasp
how high the price will be if it does. That is a point, unfortunately, that
also eludes most of this country's allies. Does it also elude the secretary
of defense? If "10-30-30" are the numbers that concern him, I begin to fear
that it does. The numbers that matter right now are 174 to 1. That is not
only the ratio of Iraqis to American troops. It is starting to look
alarmingly like the odds against American success.
Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard and a senior fellowthe
Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of "Colossus: The Rise and
Fall of the American Empire."
|
