He did it by rhetoric Shep:o)
Mired in a quagmire and not any safer, the aftermath of the Iraq war
By Daniel J. Cragg | Editor-in-Chief | 4 July 2003
Last Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defensively spurned accusations that Iraq was turning into a Vietnam like quagmire. He also denied that Iraq was becoming a guerrilla war, even after one reporter cited the Defense Department's own definition of guerrilla war, "military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular ground indigenous forces," which seems to fit the description of what is occurring in Iraq. W. Patrick Lang, former head of Middle Eastern Affairs at the Defense Intelligence Agency and a former professor at the Virginia Military Institute, told the Washington Post that the situation in Iraq is "exactly" what a guerrilla war looks like in its early stages. So why is the Secretary so defensive about the guerrilla label -- of course, it is because of the last guerrilla conflict the U.S. was involved in, Vietnam.
It goes deeper than this though. Since the end of World War II, nearly three quarters of all military conflicts have been low-intensity conflicts (LIC) (characterized by guerrilla warfare and terrorism, often they involve regular armies fighting guerrillas, terrorists, and even women and children. LICs involve mostly small arms on the part of the insurgent force).
Out of all these LICs, the conventional forces lost all but one time. The one success story is the British suppression of a communist insurgency in Malaysia. This was a special case, though. The communists were part of the Chinese minority in the country, and the British promised to leave immediately after defeating the insurgency, which they did. Every single other example of LIC was a victory for the insurgent forces, from the British in India, Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden, the French in Indochina and Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Syrians in Lebanon, the Cubans in Angola, the Chinese in Vietnam, to the Vietnamese in Cambodia -- the list goes on.
Mr. Rumsfeld has a lot to fear from the guerrilla war label. Indeed, it would reveal the quagmire that this Administration has gotten us into. If these are Iraqis with even a modicum of popular support carrying out attacks on U.S. soldiers, the record does not bode well for the U.S. If LIC caused the U.S. to pull out of Iraq and institute democracy prematurely, the majority Shia country would very democratically elect a theocracy just like that other illiberal democracy, Iran. An Iraqi Islamic theocracy would surely make an authoritarian socialist secular state look attractive as an alternative.
But we had to go in and get Saddam because he would have given WMD to al Qaeda, right? Hardly. "The often postulated scenario of a state sponsor providing unconventional weapons to a terrorist group is unlikely to materialize," former deputy chief of the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA Paul Pillar asserts in his book, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy. "The state would lose control over the material, an uncontrolled use of it by a group would serve no plausible purpose of the state, and sophisticated unconventional agents might be more traceable to their origin than the more mundane forms of assistance that sponsors usually provide to client groups." It is likely that because of the U.S. invasion, Iraqi WMD were perhaps shipped to Syria, or even Libya.
So, the invasion of Iraq has led to a LIC that could at worst turn Iraq into an Islamic fundamentalist state, and at best be a persistent drain on U.S. resources that could be dedicated to the fight against al Qaeda, while it concomitantly sent WMD into who-know's hands. The U.S. may not be any safer because of the invasion, but hey, at least we got the oil, right? |
