Christopher Dickey: Winning in Iraq Would Require Cruel Tactics Americans Wouldn't Tolerate

Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek (May 18, 2004):

I’ve been covering guerrilla wars for almost 25 years, and in every case I’ve been convinced that the only way to defeat committed insurgents fighting on their home ground, in the short and medium term, is with ferocious, unrelenting repression. Afterward, compromise with the insurgents can help finish the job for good, and the democratic process can be part of that. But first: force.

This is one of the points the best-selling military historian John Keegan makes in his new book, “Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al Qaeda” (Knopf) His argument is that intelligence is helpful in any battle, but rarely decisive. “War ultimately is about doing, not thinking,” he concludes. And what you do in war can never be called democratic.

The first insurgency I covered in detail was El Salvador in the early 1980s. Back then, it was conventional wisdom among liberals that the activities of right-wing death squads were not only morally repellent, they were counterproductive in the fight against communists. They supposedly drove people into the arms of the rebels. In fact, the death squads were morally repellent. The slaughter they carried out, murdering and torturing many more of the innocent than the guilty, was nauseating. But it was effective. The urban infrastructure of the Salvadoran rebels was virtually obliterated, preventing them from launching any effective uprising for years to come. Salvadoran democracy, such as it is, was built on the corpses of those killed by the death squads. The party that has held the presidency ever since that war ended was founded by the leader of the death squads.

Much is made of guerrilla ideologies—communist, or Islamist, or Baathist. But the driving force in most guerrilla movements is simply dignity. Throughout history, long before any “-isms” were known, men fought against conquerors and occupiers because they found the presence of the foreigners humiliating. They used any means at their disposal to strike back, and as often as not they were denounced by the occupiers as bandits, savages and, yes, terrorists for doing so.

You discover the same pattern repeated over and over again, literally for thousands of years, in Robert Asprey’s “War in the Shadows,” a two-volume history of guerrilla warfare that came out in 1975 and really ought to be reissued now.

You read about a general in an occupation force saying, “There is but one way of inducing the violent rebels to become our friends, and that is by convincing them it is in their best interest to do so”—a none-too-veiled threat. Another complains that “the violence and passions of these people are beyond every curb of religion, and Humanity, they are unbounded and every hour exhibit dreadful wanton mischiefs, murders and violence of every kind, unheard of before.”

The sentiments are familiar enough in Iraq right now even if the syntax is not. But the officers quoted by Asprey were British—Lord Cornwallis and Brig. Gen. Charles O’Hara—writing about Francis Marion, “The Swamp Fox,” and other guerrillas in the Carolinas during the American Revolution. Cornwallis shattered the conventional American Army in the South in less than an hour at the Battle of Camden, but he couldn’t get rid of those guys in the South Carolina Low Country, who just wouldn’t play by the rules. The political leadership back in London was balking at the cost. The local allies Cornwallis picked up started to desert him. He couldn’t get the boots on the ground to do the job. And he just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t win.

Some readers will call this moral relativism (and they’re welcome to expound on the subject at Shadowland@newsweek.com). But it’s really just a matter of learning from the past experience of guerrilla fighting, and of terrorism. There are few mysteries here, unless we refuse to read the history at all.

Asprey calls the trap into which many conquerors, occupiers and colonizers fell “an arrogance of ignorance compounded by arrogance of power,” and he puts in historical perspective what he calls “the paradox of terror”: “By devious mental exercises conducted in the spiritual gymnasium of Christianity, colonizing powers defended the double standard: force used by themselves became benevolence; counterforce used by natives became terror. The conceit is clearly expressed in Cornwallis’s denunciation of Marion and his guerrillas during the American Revolution.”

Some 120 years later, the Americans themselves became an imperial power, when they defeated Spain in 1898 and took over all its restive colonies. Much more than any other conflict the United States ever entered, the pacification of the Philippines holds lessons for the war we’re fighting now. The good news: we won. The bad news: it took many years, wholesale slaughter helped us get the job done, and if the masses of Americans had any idea how gruesome it could get—if they’d had 24/7 news coverage, for instance—they probably would have turned away from the whole bloody enterprise.

At the battle of Mount Dajo in 1906, four years after Teddy Roosevelt declared major combat operations over, some “outlaws” in the Muslim south of the Philippines were attacked by U.S. forces: “The position was first shelled by a naval gunboat and then assaulted by the troops and constabulary,” according to a report issued by the U.S. secretary of Commerce and police. “The Moro women fought alongside the men and held their children before them, having sworn to die rather than yield. In this way a number of women and children were among the killed—an unfortunate but necessary evil.” About 1,600 died. “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brave feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag,” Roosevelt wrote to the commanding general after what became known as the Jolo Massacre.

A lot of “anti-Imperialist” Americans had seen this sort of thing coming, among them William Graham Sumner at Yale, who was one of his generation’s most influential political scientists. His long address, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” given in January 1899, may be the best thing written yet about the fight we’re in now. “The original and prime cause of the war was that it was a move of partisan tactics in the strife of parties at Washington,” he said. But there was no popular support. So “appeals were found in sensational assertions which we had no means to verify, in phrases of alleged patriotism, in statements about Cuba and the Cubans [read Iraq and the Iraqis] which we now know to have been entirely untrue.”

Sumner argued, as did Mark Twain and many others at the time, that imperialism undermined American democracy, not only in the conquered countries, but in ours. One of the most elegant critiques was made by a poet, Katharine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful.” She also wrote an anthem to those slaughtered by Americans in the Philippines: “The flag that dreamed of delivering / Shudders and droops like a broken wing.”