Iraq: The "People's War" is Just Beginning
The death and mutilation of four American private contractors in Falluja suggests the insurgency has taken another step toward people's war. Iraqis indicate the violence was a retaliation for the First Marine Expeditionary Force's, newly arrived from Camp Pendleton to replace the Army's 82nd Airborne, attacks last week on the Fallujans to"put them in their place." While the Marines, fearing an ambush, did not intervene yesterday to halt the carnage, the American high command has indicated"we will pacify that city."
Meanwhile, in another part of Iraq, Shia militia have utterly destroyed the village of Kawali, famed since the 1920s when the British imperialists initiated their rule, for its dancers and prostitutes. No doubt the ladies and their sponsors were looking forward to some rich rewards as the Coalition forces settled in for an extended occupation.
One is reminded of the problems in Iran when that bevy of whores and their pimps known as the"Greater Southeast Asia Floating Crap Game," fled Saigon in 1975, and settled outside of Tehran where the private contractor, Bell Helicopter, had hired many of their old American soldier boyfriends from Vietnam to train the Shah's fledgling pilots. The drinking and carousing offered the mullahs a great opportunity to promote anti-Americanism.
April 1st, on Charlie Rose's television program, the former Secretary of the Navy and currently member of the 9/11 Commission, John Lehman, acknowledged that many of our policy makers, including himself, were still caught in a Cold War mind set, and ill-prepared to deal with the emergence of Al Qaida, or the events in Iraq.
Although only a little over a year ago, it seems a longer time that some of the Neocon intellectuals were assuring the American people that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq would be a piece of cake, and that General Eric Shenseki was sacked from the Army for suggesting otherwise.
One of those was Max Boot, a journalist formerly with The Wall Street Journal and now with the Council on Foreign Relations. That path to policy analyst in itself tells us a great deal about upward mobility among the American elite.
Mr. Boot’s fame rests upon his book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars & the Rise of American Power (2002), which made him, apparently, a kind of instant Neocon guru on these kind of interventionist counter-insurgencies. One chapter in that volume, based very much on secondary sources, recounted America’s defeat of the Filipino Insurgency a century ago. Few seemed to disagree when Boot put that forward as a model to be followed in Iraq. In the early months of the occupation he visited there, returning with glowing accounts of our success.
But the two are very different, indeed. It is evident, for example, that the insurgents in Iraq, while apparently lacking the weapons of mass destruction that we claimed existed, have no shortage of conventional weapons. The Filipinos, on the other hand, were extremely short of them. One might argue that the turning point in the Insurrection came before it had actually begun when American diplomatic pressure was sufficient to dissuade the Japanese from shipping the 5,000 rifles promised to Emilio Aguinaldo by a Captain Yamamoto. Most admirers of the .45 pistol can tell you it was developed with sufficient firepower to stop a drugged up Filipino charging at you with a bolo knife. Why would anyone, with enough guns, resort to knives?
To detail all of the crucial differences between the two interventions, however, would require at least a monograph.
How is it that the United States again finds itself in an incipient insurgency with so little real study of these events? In the case of the Philippines, Captain John R. M. Taylor tried for years to get his 5 volume study published, arguing in the late 1930s that we might need it in case the U.S. was ever involved in another guerrilla war in Asia. In that case it was because William H. Taft and other politicos did not want it revealed that the Filipino leaders in 1898 were on their way to Europe with the monies obtained earlier in the truce with the Spanish, in which they had surrendered their guns, and turned around only when they heard Admiral George Dewey had arrived in Hong Kong. Some committed revolutionists!
That event tells us volumes about the fissures among the Filipinos which the American leaders used to our advantage, helped immeasurably by the fact that the Filipinos chose to fight a more conventional war on the whole, than a real guerrilla insurgency, or a people’s war.
That is what the Iraqis, especially the majority Shia, are now preparing to do in the face of a continued American occupation.
It is amazing that Americans and their historians have so little studied their own Revolution with respect to people’s war. A Yale historian has said that the American Revolution was not a guerrilla war. Well, of course not, except in a few small areas, since the British during the whole period of the war occupied few places for any length of time, outside of New York City. A guerrilla war presupposes the enemy occupies large areas for long periods, as we are attempting to do in Iraq.
It was, however, a people’s war, and the first step, as we see in the destruction of the village of Kiwali, is to make certain that the Iraqi population understands that there will be no “free riders,” and that the population will commit to the side of the insurgents. That process will take a while, as it did in the American colonies. If it succeeds, helped by our counter violence, it will be a very long intervention and occupation.
The insurgents are now also making it clear that Coalition partners and contract companies will not have a cheap ride either. With insurance policies going up by 300%, how many besides V.P. Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, now KBR, will choose to stay the course? And, our grunts, not paid $100,000 to $200,000 salaries as with private companies for enlisting, are becoming increasingly disillusioned as well with Mr. Bush's War.
The US military has announced that it is not waiting until the end of this war to assess its successes and mistakes, but is already involved in a Strategic Study of the intervention in Iraq. Given our propensity to use the term"pacify," and its continuity to earlier imperial counter-insurgencies, it will be interesting to see if we select a variant of that term to characterize our new program in Iraq. In the Philippines, of course, we called it,"Benevolent Pacification," while in Vietnam only"Pacification," but that was the exact same term adopted by the British in America in 1778 after the American leaders had rejected their peace overtures in favor of Empire -- seeking to gain Florida and Canada as well. By far the bloodiest part of the War came after that.