Can the Iraqi insurgents succeed in defeating and driving the United States forces out of Iraq?
Probably not, according to an article in Foreign Policy magazine
The cold, hard truth about the Bush administration’s strategy of "surging" additional U.S. forces into Iraq is that it could work. Insurgencies are rarely as strong or successful as the public has come to believe. Iraq’s various insurgent groups have succeeded in creating a lot of chaos. But they’re likely not strong enough to succeed in the long term. Sending more American troops into Iraq with the aim of pacifying Baghdad could provide a foundation for their ultimate defeat, but only if the United States does not repeat its previous mistakes.
The article tackles the issue of whether the 'surge' of new troops that George W. Bush has decided upon can succeed and cites the 'facts' from the American involvement in Vietnam and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
- Vietnam - Myths about invincible guerrillas and insurgents are a direct result of America’s collective misunderstanding of its defeat in South Vietnam. This loss is generally credited to the brilliance and military virtues of the pajama-clad Vietcong... When the Vietcong went toe-to-toe with U.S. forces in the 1968 Tet Offensive, they were decimated... The Vietcong insurgency contributed greatly to the erosion of the American public’s will to fight, but so did the way that President Lyndon Johnson and the American military waged the war. It was North Vietnam’s will and American failure, not skillful use of an insurgency, that were the keys to Hanoi’s victory.
- Afghanistan - Similar misunderstandings persist over the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan, the other supposed example of guerrilla invincibility. But it was not the mujahidin’s strength that forced the Soviets to leave; it was the Soviet Union’s own economic and political weakness at home. In fact, the regime the Soviets established in Afghanistan was so formidable that it managed to survive for three years after the Red Army left.
What the author conveniently forgets is that both were humiliating defeats. Although several other factors contributed to it, one can safely assert that this display of imperial overreach led directly to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
We have in recent years and will continue to hear such lame arguments from 'deadenders' like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and John McCain, particularly as the 2008 Presidential Campaign heats up in the coming months. They need to be be forcefully countered and their arguments refuted at every available opportunity. Unlike the Vietnam War, pinning this possible 'defeat' on the Democratic Party should not be allowed to take hold.
They continue to adhere to the delusional notion that if American forces are allowed to display their superior technological prowess, no force - regular or irregular - has the capability to defeat it. And only if the naive American public would understand it, surely victory would be within our grasp. But military geniuses like this general have always failed to take the domestic political environment and dimension into account. Egged on by political leaders who think they can manufacture political consent from an ill-informed public, they cling to the belief that killing more of the enemy and destroying its infrastructure would constitute 'victory.'
The author takes a look at various insurgency movements in history and details the following successes and failures.
Among the successes were
- Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba.
- The IRA’s partial triumph in Ireland in 1922.
- Algeria’s defeat of the French between 1954 and 1962.
The above list is eclipsed by notable failures involving
- Malayan Communists.
- Greek Communists.
- Filipino Huks.
- Nicaraguan Contras.
- Communists in El Salvador.
- Che Guevara in Bolivia.
- Boers in South Africa (twice).
- Jonas Savimbi in Angola.
- Sindero Luminoso in Peru.
The author concedes that the Iraq War/Occupation has been badly mismanaged and that the surge in American troops may well have come too late in restoring stability and order in Iraq. He fails to note that if 'stability' is indeed the goal - rather than discredited ideas such as finding weapons of mass destruction, spreading democracy in the Middle East, significantly reducing the number of terrorists, and other such excuses offered by neoconservative hawks - Iraq had a degree of stability under Saddam Hussein, however brutal and oppressive his regime may have been. This is what this adventure, arguably the greatest foreign policy mistake in the history of this country - has come down to.
The larger issue of legitimacy and justification for the Iraq Invasion eludes these apologists for this administration. An article in the New York Review of Books analyzes the assumptions upon which this administration embarked upon this adventure in Iraq and questions the role the United States ought to play in conducting its foreign policy
The Bush administration defends its pursuit of this unlikely goal by means of internationally illegal, unilateralist, and preemptive attacks on other countries, accompanied by arbitrary imprisonments and the practice of torture, and by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.
This is where the problem lies. Other American leaders before George Bush have made the same claim in matters of less moment. It is something like a national heresy to suggest that the United States does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations, and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not.
Throughout our history, progressives and liberals have always argued that foreign wars retard domestic progress. Imperial hubris and the never-ending quest to shape other nations and cultures in our image continue to bedevil our leaders. Rather than a healthy respect for the national interest of others, we continue to drain our precious resources in foreign interventions that have little or no chance of succeeding.
Will we ever learn from our past mistakes?