Man on the news this morning said that, according to the US commanders in Iraq, the attack on Falujah may not have "broken the back" of the insurgency after all. Does this really come as a surprise to anyone? This is one of the most obvious, "Der-hey" remarks to come out of any one's mouth in a long time. The real surprising thing is that the top brass and the administration actually believed that invading Falujah would "break the back" of the insurgency. Apparently, the folks in charge of sending our troops into harm's way have learned absolutely nothing from history.
Now, let me state for the record that I think the American soldiers on the ground have done an incredible job under the harshest conditions. They have fought valiantly, and they have died valiantly. They have done everything that their country has asked of them. Every man and woman serving in Iraq deserves all of our honor and respect. All of my criticisms are aimed at the leadership - specifically the Bush administration and the Pentagon officials - who call the shots; I have no criticism of the soldiers on the ground whatsoever, not even at what some are now calling war crimes. Because "war crimes" are not committed by horrible people; they are committed by regular people forced into horrible situations.
I grew up in the military, and I served in the military, and I know a little something about military history. I studied it. How the military has evolved over the last couple of hundred years, wars that were fought, battles that were fought, arms and armament that were used, tactics that worked as well as those that failed spectcularly, and the lessons that tacticians and historians have learned as a result of all of this - little lessons like never starting a land war in Asia, or never charging your troops into a box canyon. Apparently, however, our current Pentagon apparatchiks failed to study their history; otherwise, they would have seen this coming. Our experience in Viet Nam should have taught us that the hardest thing to do in war is to defeat an insurgency in an occupied country.
Before we invaded Iraq, pundits and historians warned that it would turn into another Viet Nam. Conservatives pooh-poohed these warnings as fear mongering, bleeding-heart liberal weakness, and unpatriotic rhetoric. Iraq is a small country, they told us, with a weak, underpaid, poorly equipped military. The Iraqis will thank us for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, they told us. This thing will be over before you know it, they assured us. And indeed, just a few short weeks after the war began, President Bush made his infamous landing on the carrier deck and reported that "major hostilities are over." Since he uttered those fateful words, however, three times as many US soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines have died as died before major hostilities were over. We defeated one army, but we completely forgot about the "other" army. In fact, the administration seems to have never even considered the fact that the "other" army was even there, despite warnings from some security advisors and Pentagon officials.
The military - I should say the military planners, the people who sit safely in offices and stick pins in maps - made two huge mistakes when they planned the invasion of Iraq. First, they failed to disarm and round up the Iraqi soldiers, many of whom simply faded into the local population along with their weapons and amunition. Second, they failed to seal Iraq's borders, which allowed thousands of heavily armed Muslim zealots to flood into Iraq. These are the people we are now fighting in Falujah and Samarra and Mosel and Bagdhad; this is the core of the Iraqi insurgency. And this core has been greatly expanded by radical Muslims - mostly unemployed, disenfranchised young men whose anger and frustration have been whipped up against the US by hard line Muslim clerics like al Sadr. This is the "other" army the US military planners forgot about, and defeating this army will truly be an Herculean labor. Then again, we should have learned that from Viet Nam.
In Viet Nam, we sent the entire might of the US military against a poorly equipped, ragtag guerilla force and lost. At the height of the war, we had half a million US troops fighting in Viet Nam - a country about the size of California - and we lost. We dropped more tons of bombs on North Viet Nam than were dropped by all of the armies during all of the battles of World War II in an effort to - as President Johnson put it - "bomb them into the stone age," and we lost! We fought for ten long years in Viet Nam, at the cost of the lives of more than 55,000 US troops and untold numbers of Viet Namese, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars, and we lost that war! And the lesson we should have learned? It is nearly impossible to defeat an entrenched insurgency in an occupied country.
Now switch to Iraq, where we are fighting another entrenched insurgency in another occupied country. Add to this the fact that the Iraqi insurgents are more than happy to die for the cause. In their eyes, they are fighting a jihad - a holy war - against an infidel nation. If they die in a jihad, they believe they are guaranteed a place in heaven. Ergo, they will gladly fight to the death. And every one of them that dies becomes a martyr and a symbol of the cause, a ready-made tool for recruiting still more insurgents. How do you defeat a fanatic who has absolutely no qualms about dieing for the cause? You'd better be just as willing to die for your cause. If you're not, they win. Period.
Our troops fighting in Falujah are finding that as soon as they clear the insurgents out of one area of the city, they pop back up in an area that had previously been cleared out. How can the military ensure that they cleared all of the insurgents out of Falujah? By levelling the city. By reducing every single building to rubble and buldozing the whole thing flat. That is the only way to ensure they have not only killed every insurgent, but also removed every possible hiding place. Of course, that only takes care of Falujah; there are still a dozen or so other cities filled with insurgents, all of which will also have to be levelled as well. Unless we have the cajones to do this, we will never defeat the insurgents. Period.
And I'm not sure even George Dub-yah Bush wants to go down in history as the president who levelled Iraq.
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