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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (204899)	10/1/2006 8:19:01 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I'm sure you've heard of la politique du pire. No, actually I had not, and it took me a while to find a defintion of it. Here's one, from Gwynne Dyer, in The Age, see if this seems right to you: >>Literally, it is the strategy of (making things) worse. The idea is that the guerillas, who lack the military strength to beat their opponents in open battle, should concentrate instead on destroying the structures and services on which the population depends. If their attacks and sabotage make the lives of ordinary people awful, the people will not blame the guerillas. They will blame the authorities whose duty it is to provide those structures and services - in this case, the occupation authorities. This is already happening in Iraq, where the failure of the US forces to restore power and water four months after the fall of Baghdad contrasts sharply with Saddam Hussein's rapid restoration of essential services after the heavy bombing of the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqis who watched their once-comfortable living standards collapse over the past 12 years under the impact of UN sanctions have a rather different perspective on that organisation from the rest of the world. Saddam's regime brought those sanctions upon itself by its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, but since Iraqis never "chose" Saddam they feel no blame for that crime - and they certainly bore the punishment. The Iraqi resistance does not discredit itself at home by attacking the UN. On the contrary, it furthers its principal strategic goal, which is to demonstrate that the US cannot bring even security and prosperity to Iraq, let alone democracy. For all the rhetoric that ricochets around Washington about building democracy in Iraq like the US and its allies built German and Japanese democracy after World War II, this is an administration that does everything on the cheap, and there is no Marshall Plan in the offing. On the contrary, the Bush Administration was hoping to pay much of the cost of the occupation out of Iraqi oil exports (which is why pipelines are being attacked), and to unload a lot more onto the UN and the alphabet soup of humanitarian aid organisations that generally follow. It was never likely that the UN would let itself be used in that way: the mistrust of US motives and tactics goes too deep in a lot of the members. But Iraqi guerillas are not up on the latest intrigues in the Security Council, so to them it makes sense to bomb the UN's headquarters in Baghdad. And the bombing is also meant to tell all the international aid organisations that they are vulnerable to attack and to scare them off: exactly what the "politique du pire" is all about. The US-backed "contras" in Nicaragua followed this strategy, as did the Vietcong in Vietnam and the FLN in Algeria, and it worked for all of them. It did not work, on the other hand, for the Montoneros in Argentina, the IRA in Northern Ireland, or the New People's Army in the Philippines. There are no foolproof, one-size-fits-all strategies in guerilla/terrorist campaigns; the specific context always makes a difference. But at the moment, the Iraqi resistance is on a roll.<< theage.com.au Whatever. The people who are suffering are the Iraqi people, and they are the ones who have to decide whether they want to make these buzzards unwelcome, or keep giving them cover. If they are sick of it, they will end it. I am sure you are familiar with the "hearts and minds" doctrine, both the standard version, and the "grab them by the balls and the hearts and minds will follow" version, both of which seem ineffectual to me. I can't think of a guerrilla war where the regular army succeeded in gaining the hearts and minds of "the people" using either version. Maybe you can.