I don’t know whether this comes too late to do any good, but David Axe’s profile of a British commander patrolling a district on the Iranian border has a refreshing dose of positive news.
Labouchere relies on speed and agility. He travels light in just a dozen vehicles per squadron, mostly trucks and speedy Land Rovers but including a handful of Scimitar light tanks armed with 30-millimeter cannons. At night he bivouacs in depressions or nestled between hills to shield him from prying eyes. By day he sorties to patrol the border, show the flag in remote towns and hold court with Iraqi cops, local army troops and the tribal leaders who are his eyes and ears and his allies in the fight against smugglers and foreign fighters. He and his troops shit in ditches, shave with bottled water and eat foil-packed rations. They sleep under the stars on collapsing cots. They live simply and waste little, all in an effort to stay light and to ween themselves from slow, vulnerable ground convoys.
[…] Accustomed as I am to heavy, bristling, techy American methods in Iraq, I was shocked and little bit unnerved by Labouchere’s “keep it simple” philosophy. But when I saw it working … when I saw the way locals had warmed to his presence … when I saw how much ground he covered and how quickly … I declared his methods “revolutionary”. “This is actually quite an old way of doing things,” Labouchere countered. I saw his point: overlooking for a moment the vital presence of the sophisticated Merlins, there’s no new technology in the battlegroup. We’re talking diesel engines, machine guns, radios, maps and canvas cots. What’s novel, in the context of this war, is Labouchere’s confidence in tradition and basic principles. But he’s right. Delicate communications networks can’t replace a friendly local populace. Billion-dollar support contracts to firms such as Halliburton don’t boost Iraqi confidence in their government and armed forces — and they certainly don’t kill foreign fighters sneaking across the border.
Worth reading in full. It might be a bit fanciful to imagine that our adventure in Iraq ever could have worked. Too many tribal undercurrents ran against our neverland fantasies about democracy, freedoms and free-market conservatism and too few boots ever stood in country to provide a realistic sense of security. But you have to wonder how much our present disaster could have been mitigated by smart, creative thinking at the outset.
Instead we have a Defense hierarchy who refused to plan for an insurgency because doing so might contradict earlier rhetoric about candy, flowers and a cakewalk. Rumsfeld damned our troops to escape the indignity of being wrong.
craigie
Maybe.
But before you get too teary-eyed over what might have been, it’s worth remembering that these same British got turfed out of Iraq before. More than once.
There may have been a way to diagram this play so that, on paper, we score a touchdown and everyone gets a pony. But in real life, I doubt it.
Jay
Egads. Conducting operations in response to the actual conditions (guerilla warfare/civil war) who’da thunk it? Any bets that not a few of our own soldiers quietly follow this example even if it isn’t exactly what they’ve been told to do? I sure as hell hope so.
I suggest grabbing a copy of Blink and reading about the simulated war games conducted in 2001-2002. The US pitted all of its might and technology against a “Middle Eastern Dictator” (hmmmm) and lost. Once everyone recovered from the shock they ran the games again first saddling the Vietnam vet playing “The Dictator” with all sorts of handicaps – this time the US won, everyone had a drink and went home. This tells me there is a huge kink in the Military hierarchy. A certain failure to even think of what might happen if things go all pear shaped perhaps?
I also wonder if our soldiers are the victims of a techno-fetish. The US military has all of this money, so many neat gadgets, better use them, right? Compared to some electronic object that looks like it was snagged from the set of Star Wars, body armor is so boring. Better to give the guys a multi-million dollar computer system, right? So what if it seizes up at temperatures much above 70 degrees, dies if it isn’t coddled night and day and won’t stop a bullet. It looked so good when it came out of the box!
Zifnab
Has Iraq worked? No, of course not. It’s a disaster.
Could it have? Could we have swept through Bagdad, toppled Saddam, laid the groundwork for a democracy, and grown a rose in the desert?
I think with competant, intelligent, non-Rumsfeldian leadership we could have made Iraq into more than just a hotbed of sectarian strife. But it would have required the US to think smart, guarding police stations and weapons depos and museums and government buildings over oil ministries during the political collapse. NOT firing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops and condemning them to years of unemployment for their connections to the Bathist party. Moving quickly to see peaceful political dissidents released from prison while isolating and containing actual threats to US occupation. NOT using the guy who gave the best blowjobs in the Senate to take command of a fledgling nation’s judical, executive, and legislative branches.
Few in Iraq wanted this degree of rampant anarchy. No one invited car bombings and rogue militias to visit their towns. The vast majority of Iraqis were peaceful and civilized even under Saddam’s iron rule. I believe a benevolent force who’s objectives involved actual nation building and not just resource raping would have had a hard, but managable time in Iraq. But for those at the top our intentions were not pure, our hands were not clean, and we did not put the Iraqis first even once in our long occupation. So we reaped the madness that we sowed.
In the end, I still believe we could have turned Iraq into a Kosovo or an East/West Germany at the least. Maybe not a paradise, but better than a civil war.
craigie
This is everything. To the extent that there was a point to going in to Iraq, it was to impress and intimidate Iran and Syria. Actually governing, or doing anything other than getting a bunch of cheap oil as an extra bonus – forget it.
And as we’ve seen, democracy to these guys is just a word, like healthy forests or clear skies are words. They don’t actually mean anything.
scarshapedstar
Zifnab, mistakes are made and sometimes to make an omelet you have to break every egg on earth and y do u h8 freedom so much?
RSA
I agree with Jay: Shades of Van Riper. Simple, robust, human-centered tactics seem to be the way to go.
mac
There is one piece of missing equipment in the photo that says it all: no “failure to communicate” sunglasses. Those glasses turn the American troops into an alien life form. I don’t know how they started wearing them; they’d be better of in kevlar lined stetson hats.
Rudi
The American example is the large logistics and airbase Camp Anaconda. It has all the comforts of home while Balad burns. From the NYT:
The base is home to over 20,000 US soldiers and contractors. The locals are killing each other while the Concord Monitor report:
Anyone wonder why there is an insurgency.
Jay
Thanks, I could not think of his name. A name, by the way, that would pretty damn good followed by the title Secretary of Defense.
Here by the way is an article on Millennium Challenge 02 from the Army Times (16, Aug. 02).
Jim Henley
There are tens of thousands of British and American troops and, what? dozens of colonels in Iraq? Hundreds? By pure random chance things are going to be going reasonably well for somebody somewhere. Remember when the lesson of the relative calm in Tall Afar meant that the US knew how to beat the insurgency?
A local success somewhere does not indicate generalizable success everywhere. The language barrier alone guarantees that the American military writ large is not going to be able to successfully forge the kind of constructive and relationship at the street level that could start to pacify Iraq. Add to that the problems of propagating standards through a bureaucracy, the fact that conditions vary from region to region so that the “right” approach here could be the “wrong” approach there, and above all the fact that there is no basal concord of visions among Iraq’s demographic groups and LTC Labouchere is doomed to curiousity status.
TenguPhule
People who think there’s still a pony to be found in Iraq need to shipped off to go look for it.
Jay
It must be for the ponies!
Tsulagi
The pony died due to incompetence. Time to get over it and leave.
Bob In Pacifica
Yeah, but how are things going in Afghanistan? I hear Vic Bout is flying metal in, flying powder out. Why does this remind me of some other war?