I see (from a Search for Nagl) that you did post the article cited below, but it's a long piece, and an email that was in my box this morning has a succinct take/comment on it that I'm posting for those (like me) who didn't read the very long NYT Mag cover piece:
"The magazine section of The New York Times had a terrific piece on the Iraq War this weekend, January 11, 2004. The article focuses on Major John Nagl, a Rhodes scholar, 38, the eldest of six children from a Roman Catholic house hold in Omaha, who went to West Point, and then studied counterinsurgency at Oxford. He is now in the heart of the Sunni Triangle and one of the world’s leading counterinsurgency experts practicing counterinsurgency. It is a long piece (and well written by Peter Maass) that has great historical information as well as tense “on the street” reporting. I could quote dozen of passages, but I’ll settle for one: Nagl is talking about Lawrence of Arabia (author of, of course, Seven Pillars of Wisdom) and says: “I didn’t realize how right Lawrence of Arabia was.[About the hearts & minds of Arabs.] My first experience of war was the gulf war, which was very clean. We shot the tanks that didn’t look like ours, we shot the enemy wearing a uniform that didn’t look like ours, we destroyed the enemy in 100 hours. That’s kind of what I thought war was. Even when I was writing that insurgency was messy and slow, the full enormity of that did not sink in on me. I am seeing appreciable progress, but I am starting to understand in the pit of my stomach how hard, how long, how slow counterinsurgency really is. There is no prospect it’s going to end anytime soon.”
The author (Peter Maass) makes one closing comment that is chilling for those who believed attacking Iraq would be quick and easy. “The counterinsurgency books that Nagl studied do impart an important lesson--(Books on counterinsurgency going back to Caesar, books by Carl von Clausewitz in the 1800s, Mao Zedong, and Vietnam)....The goal the United States hopes to reach in Iraq—a successful counterinsurgency that does not drag on for years and does not involve a large amount of killing—has never been achieved by any army.” ..." |
