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Iraq Exit Could Spell Disaster
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  1. I believe our military is trained and equipped to win a guerilla war. But we don't have enough troops in Iraq and the population is not the kind you want to have to deal with in a guerilla war. Muslims tend to distrust anyone that is not Muslim. That makes it hard to win them over.
  2. How will we win a guerilla war? What's the strategy and tactics?
  3. There are strategies and tactics for fighting a guerilla war. Winning over the population is one. That one, which is more political than anything, is particularly tough when you are dealing with Muslims. And there are military stratagies and tactics, but I am not that familiar with them.
  4. Yep, that is the one favored by our military at this point. You have the French and Saddam method of extreme violence and genocide which has worked in the past, and the Northern Ireland model of negotiated political settlement.

    My concern with trying to win the population is how complex the situation is in Iraq. There is not one pop., there are 3, Sunni, Shia, and Kurd.

    I think the Kurds want their own independence in 'Kurdistan', period. I read they are just setting up to go their own way when the US pulls out, in a year or in 50 years. The Kurds have oil in the north, so they would not be poor.

    The Shia and Sunni split religously in 600 AD, and it has not been good since.

    So we would have to win 3 distinct populations with different goals and objectives.

    Add Al Qaeda, who just wants to aggitate, kill Americans, keep them stuck to the tar baby, spend their resources while not killing AQ fighters (let them kill Sunni's doing the fighting for them). AQ will exploit deep rooted religious differences in and if it dies down, go assasinate somebody popular and blame it on the other faction.

    Then you have Syria and Iran, who do not want a successful democracy on their border, in case their population hears its a good thing. They will help agitate, make the Americans bleed for a long time so they'll leave.

    So, how are we going to win 3 populations that are being inflamed by professional agitators?

    That looks real hard from here.

    It's encouraging that the Sunni tribal leaders killed an AQ leader, maybe they have figured out they are being played. But if they tossed AQ out, they still have problems with the Shia majority.

    It's a real sticky wicket. Suppose we stay in 10 more years (or 20 or 30) to stabilize the deal, and leave. Would the same disaster occur that we are concerned about now? Think about it, it could happen. This is not a homogenous nation where everyone shares the same general aim, like we do. We may argue internally, but at the end of the day, we all share the American dream.
  5. Wipe out 2 of them.
  6. I think you should read up on that little war some more. Right now the Isreali Prime Minister is about to lose his job over it because it was a debacle. LINK= Israeli PM Olmert undone by the militia he promised to destroy

    The rockets stopped because the of the UN negotiation and the Israeli retreat. Israel never stopped the rocket attacks while the fighting was going on, they never captured the rocket hoards, they never forced the return of the captive soldiers and Hezbollah sits there, better armed than ever. Israel took way too many casualties because they made a bunch of wrong assumtions about Hezbollah.

    Israel thought Hezbollah would collapse like the Palestinians did before the tanks and jets, but Hezbollah are more fananatical Shiites and they were prepared with anti-tank rockets, mines, and aiti-aircraft guns. They did not collapse, but they dug in and stopped the Israelis short of all of their objectives.
  7. And if that is impossible, as it has every appearance of being, then it is futile to stay there indefinitely.

    Technically true, but it is as rare as an honest politician. When has any modern army won a guerrilla war? The British didn't in Northern Ireland. The French and the US didn't in Vietnam. Russia didn't in Afghanistan. Germany didn't against Yugoslavia in WWII.

    Guerrillas don't have to win any fights to achieve victory. All they have to do is to survive, bleed the enemy through sabotage, ambushes, suicide atacks, and espionage. They can hide in the local population who help them and hinder their enemy. They hit and run and rarely stand and fight.

    Smart army commanders avoid guerriila wars at all costs. And when they find themselves in one, the way to win is to get out of it and regain mobility and strength for the next fight.

    We could have fought a guerilla war over Kosovo, that was Serbia's plan and it worked in WWII, but instead we fought our kind of war and simply bombed Serbia until they came around. Result--Milosovic is in prison for war crimes, NATO peacekeeping forces moved into Kosovo, no US casualties were sustained, and there is no hot war going on in Kosovo.

    When a guerrilla absolutely must be fought, the way to do it is with Special Operations Forces and intelligence ops working with indigenous troops, like the Green Berets with the Montagnards in Vietnam and the CIA with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. As sucessful as that has been, that war is not over yet and the Taliban are regaining strength and territory. That important war aganst our 9/11 enemies is sapped of money and troops by the useless Iraqi quagmire.
  8. The French won that one? The war ended with the French holding "secret peace negotiations" with the Algerian nationalists resulting in the independence of Algeria. And the French went home. Their army had kicked a lot of revolutionary ass and committed horrible atrocities on the poplulation. But they had to quit and leave anyway, becaue the population was not with them.

    Just like Vietnam and Iraq, you can win every battle in a guerrilla conflict and still lose the war.
  9. The French didn't win the Algerian War; they lost it. Yes, they "won" the Battle of Algiers "militarily," but the war was lost primarily because of how they won the battle. From your linked article:

    The article also refers to Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers. I highly, highly recommend it. It's available on DVD, however, it's not very cheap ($37 on Amazon). Unless you have access to an art house video store, you probably won't be able to find it. If you're a member of Blockbuster's mail program (Netflix probably has it too), you can get it through them. It's a 3 DVD set; the movie is on one and the rest is special features. I would recommend watching the 3rd DVD before the movies since it provides a lot of historical information and analysis that provides context. For those who care, the majority of the material including the movie is subtitled.

    The movie covers just the Battle of Algiers, not the Algerian War. Pontecorvo was an Italian resistance fighter during WWII. He was what I would call an idealistic communist (he renounced communism after the Soviets invaded Hungary). He was against colonialism and his sympathies were with the nationalistic ambitions of the Algerians, but the movie is not anti-French and is well-balanced considering. The movie really does not take sides.

    It was filmed in a grainy documentary style. In fact is was the first to do so and was a big influence on movies like Traffic and others. I can't say that this is a movie that just had me on the edge of my seat or anything, but it does have powerful sequences. For example, the FLN (the insurgents) used women to plant bombs in public places. You see them pick women who most resemble Europeans and watch them prepare to blend in. You follow them to the bombmaker, who gives them the bombs; follow them to the public places where they place the bomb; watch them survey the people who are targets of the bombs; and then you see the results. It's really an intense sequence.

    Since I gave this example, I should point out that, at least in terms of the Battle of Algiers, that the FLN wasn't the first to use bombs against civilians; the French set off bombs in the Casbah, killing mostly civilians before they did. Up to this point the FLN pretty much followed the rules of war in the sense that had only attached the police and militia. It was these events that triggered the Battle of Algiers and they are portrayed in the movie. Pontecorvo treated the loss of innocent life on both sides equally by using the same sad music during both incidents.

    What made this movie truly remarkable for me was how it essentially dealt with all the issues regarding insurgency/counter insurgency. This movie has been studied and analyzed by those on both sides and it's well worth seeing.
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  10. They won militarily, and they lost politically. World opinion was turning against the French, more and more. Word was leaking out of Algeria and the international press was there and began publishing stories on French brutality. They decided to give Algeria its independence, because the costs to France were getting higher than the objective was worth. As I've said before, its not just about winning, the objective has a value, and a cost. Not all of the costs are measured directly in war costs, some are in international opinion.

    One could say that is the strategy of the terrorists, to win politically, since they cannot win militarily, and there is a lot of truth to it. I think the French gave better than they got, but in the end, they had to ask themselves, "why are we here, and is what we are doing worse than the alternative of leaving?", and apparently the answer they came up with was "yes", so they left. But they were not forced to leave militarily, it was there decision based on political assessment.
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