Interesting post from the Belmont Club, which references a new article from U.S. News and World Report, on the cause of the insurgency.
As many have claimed, it seems that the combination of the delay in action and the denial of Turkish bases that the original plan had called to use as launching points for forces that were to roll through the Sunni Triangle area were the main culprits in allowing the insurgency crucial time for formation and organization in its initial phase. Very interesting analysis:
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2005/02/insurgency-revisited-dan-darling-links.html
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
The Insurgency Revisited
Dan Darling links to an analytic piece by Newsweek ( MSN ) on the origins of the Iraqi insurgency, some aspects of which resemble an old Belmont Club post ( Belmont Club ), which I have juxtaposed for comparison. Here are some of the similarities with the Newsweek article.
[Note: link to the original post to view the comparison table, which doesn’t come through here]
One of the key things the Newsweek article misses but which War Plan Orange emphasizes was the role played by the delay caused by seeking permission from the United Nations to topple Saddam. It is a factor given far too little emphasis in retrospective analysis, although it did not escape Mark Steyn, who wrote this Iraq is going to be just fine ( http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn30.html ):
The bulk of the military were already in place, sitting in the Kuwaiti desert twiddling their thumbs. But Bush was prevailed upon to go ‘‘the extra mile’’ at the United Nations mainly for the sake of Tony Blair, and thanks to the machinations of Chirac, Schroeder and Co., the extra mile wound up being the scenic route through six months of diplomatic gridlock while Washington gamely auditioned any casus belli that might win the favor of the president of Guinea’s witch doctor. As we know, all that happened during that period was that the hitherto fringe ‘‘peace’’ movement vastly expanded and annexed most of the Democratic Party.
What made the ‘insurgency’ possible was the gift of time. Another important factor was allowing enemy cadres to settle into their new clandestine positions in the Iraqi northwest undisturbed. Newsweek correctly observes that the core of the ‘insurgency’ – which according to their own article is more or less a fancy name for Saddam’s henchmen, augmented by international terror – was struggling to get things together in the early days of the invasion, when they were making the transition from aboveground to underground.
“During the initial period after the invasion, the Baath and its security apparatus was in total disarray, and our security apparatus became more focused on the terrorists and foreigners,” said Barham Salih, the Iraqi government’s deputy prime minister, who is in overall charge of security affairs. This, he said, was a miscalculation.
But Newsweek neglects to identify the key enabler of this maneuver: the diplomatic veto, courtesy of America’s allies at the UN, which ensured that the most powerful unit of OIF was absented from the battlefield in these crucial early days, so that when it finally arrived, it was too late; and in any event in the distant south, far from the Sunni areas it was originally scheduled to assault through. The War Plan Orange post put it thus:
If MacArthur’s delaying actions at the Agno and Pampanga Rivers enabled him to get his forces into Bataan intact, the successful campaign to prevent the US from pushing the 4ID down from Turkey gave Saddam the time and space to move assets into Syria and disperse munitions and men into the Sunni Triangle.
One of the principle differences in the Newsweek analysis and the War Plan Orange post is in the interpretation of the strengths and weaknesses of each side. Newsweek, for example, seems to regard the growing use of untrained attackers as a sign of strength.
The typical profile is much like Ahmed al-Shayea’s, twentysomethings and even teenagers from comfortable middle-class families. “They have got no experience, they are not trained,” a Palestinian jihadi told NEWSWEEK. “They just have to drive the vehicle. But these boys?17, 18 years old?are important.” What motivates them? “I think their religion is better than others’,” he says. “They are rich, they are educated, and they need nothing, but they see that in this fight they will win either victory or heaven. This is their ideology. Either way, they win.”
The War Plan Orange post inferred that this was going to happen, but saw it as a sign of weakness. It predicted that the differential attrition would manifest itself in a growing experience and skill gap.
In essence, Ba’athist-terrorist coalition was unable to inflict the losses necessary to disrupt the organizational learning curve of the American forces. Unlike the conscript Soviet Army, the American Armed Forces were a professional force that retained its core of officers, NCOs and to a large degree, even their enlisted men. Forces were rotated out of Iraq largely intact, where they incorporated lessons learned into the training cycle in CONUS; and relieving forces were improved accordingly. In 1980s, the Al Qaeda and not the Soviet Army had turned Afghanistan into a training ground but in 2003-2004, it was the US Armed Forces and not the terrorists that were coming away with organizational memory. Simply not enough of the enemy survived to pass on their experience and simply too many American lieutenants left Iraq to return as captains. The terrible enemy losses on the battlefield could not be wholly overcome by media plaudits which they received. At least 15,000 enemy cadres have been killed in the 17 months since OIF. Recently, the remains of a French jihadi were identified in Fallujah and his fate is probably a common one. While Afghanistan was once where the young fundamentalist fighter went to get experience, Iraq was now where the fundamentalist fighter went to die.
The ‘fifteen thousand’ figure was reached in October by back of the envelope calculation and was my best guess from various sources at the time. It was off, but thankfully not by much. Reuters reported on Jan 26, 2005 that:
“If you look back over the last year we estimate we have killed or captured about 15,000 people as part of this counter-insurgency,” Casey, the only four-star American general in Iraq, told reporters. “Just in this month we have picked up around 60 key members of the Zarqawi network and key members of the former regime,” he said, referring to the group led by al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But I think the main problem with the Newsweek analysis is that first, it doesn’t fully recognize the significance of the economy of force operation against the Sunnis in April, 2004 as the US dealt with Sadr first in mid-year before returning to crush the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Fallujah by year-end. It was a classic example of using a small force to defeat a numerically superior foe by attacking them in detail. I hope future historians give it its due. Secondly, Newsweek almost ignores American political warfare. The establishment of the Interim Governing Council and the Elections had huge military implications from the start, something which is only being belatedly recognized. The strategic center of gravity of the American thrust into the Middle East was not Iraq the geographical entity, as so many have I believe, mistakenly put it, but the Iraqis. The war aim was access to an alliance with an unlimited pool of Arabic speakers, not a puddle of oil in the ground. The return of Iraqi security and intelligence forces will be a nightmare for regional dictators in the short term; but the advent of even a quasi-democratic Iraqi state will, without exaggeration, be their death-knell.