"President Bush is wrong, the war is not over. Secretary of Defense is wrong, the attackers are not criminals. It is a guerrilla war. Guerrillas do not need a jungle to operate, only somewhere to hide, somewhere to pounce from and somewhere to retreat into. Urban environments can be ideal, the sprawing, maze-like Iraqi cities certainly are. "
Here are some questions to ask over and over again, of those who fell asleep in the yellow poppies, until November 2004: what are these GIs dying for? what are the realizable goals of this mission (if any)? what is the exit strategy? and most importantly, what did you expect? certainly, you did not choose to become involved in a guerrila war, so who is responsible for blundering into one on fabricated evidence?
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=435
According to Confused Rummy & Chickenhawk George, the Iraq War is over, there are only small pockets of criminals; according to this Vietnam veteran, the war has not ended but changed, changed to a guerrilla war the U.S. will lose.
By Stewart Nusbaumer
Nearly two months after President Bush declared an end to the war in Iraq, with great fanfare and total self-confidence, 61 U.S. soldiers have died and the Iraqi attacks are escalating on our troops. Clearly the fighting is not over, some say it’s only beginning. But what kind of fighting?
The New York Times wrote that U.S. troops in Iraq are facing “an organized campaign of guerrilla warfare.” Yet, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked whether the recent assailants of U.S. troops were guerrillas, he replied, “I don't know that I would use that word.” The word Rumsfeld did use was “criminals.” The problem is not guerrilla war, according to Rummy, but criminal activity.
As for the public, it seems to be perplexed, which is risky for Republicans since being perplexed has been known to lead to serious thinking. Americans witnessed our troops being warmly embraced as liberators, the hugs, the kissed and all of that, after a quick victory spin in their SUVs, they returned to the “fair and balanced” to hear our troops were being angrily killed as occupiers. The typical American is beginning to think something isn’t kosher about this peace.
President Bush is wrong, the war is not over. Secretary of Defense is wrong, the attackers are not criminals. It is a guerrilla war. Guerrillas do not need a jungle to operate, only somewhere to hide, somewhere to pounce from and somewhere to retreat into. Urban environments can be ideal, the sprawing, maze-like Iraqi cities certainly are.
Guerrilla Warfare Recognition Course For Chickenhawks
The initial stage of a guerrilla war normally includes small groups of fighters, such as those small groups now shooting at and harassing the U.S. troops in Iraq. Yet, Rummy uses the prevalence of small attack groups as a sign that they’re not guerrillas but criminals. A little background, especially for our Confused Rummy: criminals kill for money, guerrillas kill for politics. American GIs in combat zones do not carry diamonds and stock certificates and rolls of 100 dollar bills, Iraqis are killing Americans to take back their country!
When Confused Rummy and Chickenhawk George look at the armed resistance in Iraq, what they see is disorganization, uncoordinated rag-tag gangs with little military know-how. Yet, what these finely destroyed minds consider disorganization of the rag-tag is actually another trait of guerrilla warfare: decentralization. In the early stage of a guerrilla war it is not uncommon for centralized coordination to be inconsistent, spotty, since the infrastructure of command remains underdeveloped. On the other hand, decentralization makes guerrillas unpredictable and difficult to defend against, limited coordination guards against a sudden decapitation of the movement’s leadership.
If Confused Rummy can locate Iraq on a map, that beautiful cluster of oil wells that he dreams about, he will notice that the attacks on our soldiers are consistent with another characteristic of guerrilla warfare: strike your enemy over a wide geographical space. This extends the occupiers -- Rummy, that’s us -- supply lines and thins out their defenses, which makes the troops vulnerable to small unit guerrilla attacks. The French know all about this, but I don’t think Confused Rummy is talking to the French.
Finally, the lengthening series and the greater frequency of the attacks is raising our causalities. There have been six U.S. soldiers’ killed and many more wounded in just the past week, and this is merely the official figure, plus six British soldiers killed. The increasing number of dead in this so-called post-war period of criminal activity is catching the stupefied eye of the media. This is another tactic of those sneaky guerrillas, “bleed” the occupying forces onto the evening news and into the newspaper headlines to make the political cost of the war greater than the economic benefits to the oil companies. Chickenhawk George should talk to his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson, he has the skinny on this guerrilla tactic.
It is unfortunate Confused Rummy or Chickenhawk George did not make it to Vietnam, which was an excellent training school for recognizing guerrilla wars. Something else Vietnam taught very well: knowing when your butt is sinking fast into a hopeless quagmire.
What Is Obvious Should Not Be Surprising
It certainly is not surprising that the United States is facing a guerrilla war in Iraq. In fact, for the three million Americans schooled in Vietnam -- I was in the class of 1967 -- and the millions more who studied that bloody fiasco, we would have been shocked if our “victory” was not followed by a guerrilla war.
Here is something from CNN’s Crossfire. Question: how do you spell Vietnam in Arabic? Answer: Vietnam.
Remnants of the Baath Party and elements of the military are waging an organized guerrilla war, and foreign Islamists are joining the fight, just as they have done in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Iraqi patriots, infuriated a foreign power is running (or attempting to run) their country, are climbing aboard the mushrooming oppositional movement.
In Baghdad the temperature is topping 107, yet four-fifths of the city is without or has pitifully little electricity. (The U.S. military does an admirable job in destroying, but as repairmen and –women they fail miserably.) When the thermometer crests triple digits and there is no fan, then forget sleeping, forget eating, and forget patience! All of which is pushing millions of ordinary yet outraged Iraqis into supporting the guerrillas.
The social and logistical framework for the Iraqi quagmire is taking hold, shopkeepers are being persuaded to look the other way, mothers are agreeing to supply food to the guerrillas, old men are offering their spare bedrooms for hiding, and tough young men want to join the freedom fighters. Some have relatives killed by the Americans, while others have no jobs but plenty of complaints against the U.S. troops. The cement of national resistance is hardening.
Excluding Fox News and political numskulls unable to recognize a guerrilla war, is anyone really surprised there are people in Iraq who are willing to risk their lives to throw out a foreign occupier? Would American nationalists take up arms against, say, French troops occupying America? After freeing us from a John Ascroft-type dictator, would Americans tolerate the French military stealing our California grapes? The delusional in literature can make for interesting reading, but in politics it is mostly deadly.
This twisted delusion that the war is over and only small pockets of criminals are resisting the liberation is reminiscent of another Chickenhawk President and his Confused Secretary of Defense. During our downward spiral in Southwest Asia (instead of Southeast Asia), both insisted they saw “light at the end of the tunnel.” This light, it turned out, was from the muzzle blast of a gun, fired not by a Vietnamese criminal, but by a Vietnamese guerrilla. It is this same mistaken light that Confused Rummy and Chickenhawk George see today, and the same guerrilla will outlast our leaders’ fantasy that we almost have everything under control.
With National Butt In Sling, What Next?
To extricate ourselves -- with “honor,” of course -- from this quickly developing quagmire, the Administration has two options. Why only two? Because once a guerrilla war has been successfully launched, once the guerrillas’ support mechanism has established solid roots in the civilian population, and once the young identity resistance with patriotism, then, in the vernacular of U.S. Marine grunts, “you can’t squeeze that fat pig back into a square bottle.”
This is especially true when guerrillas are fighting a United States blinded by superpower hubris and distracted by an unquenchable thirst for profit, like in the 1960s in Vietnam and today in Iraq. Whereas in the Vietnam the motive was to defend an economic system against a competitor, the quagmire in Iraq is built upon pure greed for oil profits. The results will be equally ugly for the United States, in the end we will be forced to acknowledge the limits of military force.
Option one is for the Bush Administration to declare total, unequivocal victory and yank our troops out of Iraq, then quickly invade Pago Pago to distract the press (a press already distracted), followed by a vicious polemical attack on the Democrats for losing Iraq -- an Iraq War we supposedly just won. Note, the first causality of Chickenhawk spin is logic.
Option two is for the Bush Administration to declare total, unequivocal victory and keep our troops in Iraq. (It’s not their kids that will bleed.) Then quickly invade Pago Pago to distract the press (a press already distracted), followed by a vicious polemical attack on the Democrats for losing Iraq -- an Iraq War we are supposedly winning. Note, the second causality of Chickenhawk spin is logic.
What these two choices boil down to this, hightail out of Iraq now or hightail out of Iraq later. Since the purpose of the Iraq War and the bloody peace is oil, money extracted from extracted oil, I assume we will run later. After the oil companies have fattened their profits and their top executives have raked in stock options roughly equal to the world’s combined wealth. Otherwise, all those Americans would have died for nothing.
Stewart Nusbaumer is editor of Intervention Magazine. He attended Guerrilla Recognition School in Vietnam, in El Salvador, on the Honduras/Nicaragua border, in the boondocks of Cambodia, in an endless number of pubs in Northern Ireland, in southern Lebanon in 1973 -- certainly a ripe year for southern Lebanon education -- in the guerrilla mountains of the Philippines, and in a few other locations that post-recall deficiency (PRD) insure Stewart will never remember.
Posted by richard at July 2, 2003 08:07 AM