Unwilling to listen

July 23, 2006

The Washington Post headline reads: “In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/22/AR2006072201004.html. But it doesn’t sound like the military forgot. The military has institutional memory. The civilian leadership, on the other hand…

bq. [R]etired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency. He met with Bremer in early July. “Mr. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam,” Anderson said.
It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. “Vietnam?” Bremer exploded, according to Anderson. “Vietnam! I don’t want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!”
This was one of the early indications that U.S. officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq. [ "In Iraq, Military forgot...":http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/22/AR2006072201004_3.html?nav=rss_email/components ]

Back during the 2004 elections, people used to say that the problem with Kerry — and liberals in general — was that they approached the terrorism issue as a police action, not war. In September of 2004 I wrote:

bq. To my way of thinking, you’d have to have both—police action here at home and in sympathetic countries (if there are any left), and military action in places where military action would do some good. The right tool for the right job, etc. Which seems to me to be what Kerry is suggesting. Bush, on the other hand, strikes me as someone who eats his peas with a knife because a spoon won’t cut steak. [ "Police Action":http://www.thudfactor.com/wordpress/2004/04/06/false-specificity/ ]

The article in the Washington Post specifically blames the current difficulties in Iraq on a tendency to look upon the mission there as conventional warfare, not counterinsurgency. To my total not-surprise, a counterinsurgency effort looks an awful lot like police action. The Post quotes a 1964 manual *just now* being used in counterinsurgency training:

bq. A soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty…the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire.

And:

bq. Since antagonizing the population will not help, it is imperative that hardships for it and rash actions on the part of the forces be kept to a minimum.

And here’s what we’ve been doing:

bq. Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. commanders to round up Iraqis. The key to actionable intelligence was seen by many as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American [ ... ] Senior U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq later estimated that about 85 percent of the tens of thousands rounded up were of no intelligence value. But as they were delivered to the Abu Ghraib prison, they overwhelmed the system and often waited for weeks to be interrogated, during which time they could be recruited by hard-core insurgents, who weren’t isolated from the general prison population. [ "In Iraq, Military forgot...":http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/22/AR2006072201004_3.html?nav=rss_email/components ]

So in other words, we swept through neighborhoods, arrested people _en masse_. There, they were first given *reason* to hate the US occupying forces, *then* kept in close proximity with people who could recruit them to the cause. So we caught them innocent, then released them radicalized and recruited. That’s what treating a law-enforcement task as a military operation will earn you.

Posted in Politics