Watching Donald Rumsfeld give a press briefing the other day on the Fallujah assault I was reminded of the middle days of the Vietnam War ('67-'69) where the rhetoric was very, very similar. This attempt at "Iraqification" (as I think they are calling it) is yet another attempt of the US Army to fight the last war (in this case, Vietnam). The general strategy seems to be, as it was then, to try and bring the "enemy" out to fight a major, decisive battle.
It's a constant litany, and one which has been shown to be in error by historians recently, that the US "never lost a battle" in the Vietnam War. They did, however, lose the war. Why? In part because they believed that it was possible to fight an extended guerilla war using conventional tactics and arms. Because they believed that if they just killed "enough" of the enemy he would lose heart.
For a while there was "winning the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people, then the "hamlets" strategy, then the "fortified hamlets". We seem to be seeing damn little of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and a lot of trying to fight a conventional war in an urban environment.
The Germans learned to their sorrow at both Stalingrad and the battle of Moscow that when you reduce a modern city to rubble you just give the defenders a better position from which to defend.
Parenthetically, it's not as if there aren't some thinkers in the US Army who recognize this. It's just that they either aren't at a high enough level to make a difference or if they are they have not been listened to by our administration.
Very few times has an insurgency been defeated and I'm not sure one has ever been defeated with this much popular support. We need to listen to history.
I still say the best strategy is to pull back and form and independent Kurdistan, fortify the sh*t out of it, and make a deal with the Turks to move oil north to the Med through Turkey for a cut.
Iraqis just don't want us there and the insurgency seems to be growing daily. More to the point, we're losing decent young American men and women every day and killing God knows how many innocents in the process.
Posted by artandscience at November 13, 2004 12:16 AM | TrackBack