Groundless

IN THE NEWS
It's a cardinal rule of both counterinsurgency and counterterrorism that the value of holding territory is practically nil. In conventional warfare, geography is destiny: who holds the high ground, how dug-in the enemy is in a city, or where the front lines might weaken enough to allow an enemy breakthrough are critical questions. In counterinsurgency, as the Vietnam War illustrated, terrain matters very little: after a Marine or Army patrol swept through a town, NLF guerrillas would quietly infiltrate back in. Terrorists care even less about territory, since even an apartment is always expendable as a headquarters. Terrorists learn to plan and operate on the move, as the Chechen radicals have shown time and again.

Therefore, the phrase "the battle for Fallujah" is meaningless, with one possible caveat. If there had been a plan to put in place an effective local government, backed by native Iraqi security forces, in cities taken from the insurgents; if the US was ready to help the Iraqi interim government quickly apply this template in Fallujah, as soon as US and Iraqi forces had seized it; and if US forces were supporting the Iraqis in the attack, and not the other way around, there might have been a chance for a real "battle for Fallujah." This model, sometimes called the "spreading stain" approach (think of the spread of this seize-and-secure operation across the map of a country), is at least as old as Sir Robert Thompson's famous strategy for fighting the guerrillas in Malaya. Instead, what we had, as the Bard once said, was something "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Unfortunately, the sound and fury cost American and Iraqi lives. Instead of strengthening whatever fragile legitimacy the interim government might have had, the Fallujah operation undermined it.

If you're not convinced, you should read the acid comments made by the commander of that operation, Lt. General James Conway, upon relinquishing command of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. Conway thought the attack was a bad idea from the start. "We felt like we had a method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah: that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge," Conway said. However, he followed his orders, assaulted the town for three days with lower than expected casualties, and the received the order to stop. Rather than completing the mission for which Marines and Iraqi civilians died, Conway was ordered to hand over responsibility for Fallujah to Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, a former Baathist general and head of the hastily-formed "Fallujah Brigade." Shahwani's force has since disintegrated, opening the door for the insurgents to retake control of Fallujah and impose a Taliban-esque regime.

In the "battle for Fallujah," many things didn't matter, and too few things did. Seizing or demolishing buildings didn't matter. The combined firepower of infantry, armor, and helicopters didn't matter. (The moment you saw US forces relying on heavy units, you knew something was amiss.) The elan and skill of the US Marines didn't matter. However many insurgents died didn't matter. (There was little hope of a Tet-like crippling of the Iraqi insurgency, particularly since that movement consists of several insurgent groups.)

The deaths of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians didn't matter. The tragedy of their deaths, however, does mean quite a lot. It has widened the gap between the Administration and the professional military. Conway, like General Anthony Zinni earlier this year, is speaking for a sizeable portion of the officer corps that does not believe in either the war in Iraq or the way they are being ordered to fight. This article in Salon depicts this rift in the most vivid way imaginable. (Read here for another excellent Salon article on the view from Fallujah.) The military shares its pessimism with the intelligence community, who in July provided the White House with an extremely bleak prognosis for the Iraq war. And again, we're left with now familiar questions: What happened? And why exactly were we fighitng there to begin with?

The "battle for Fallujah" was, in more than one way, groundless. Unless, of course, you're willing to take the word of Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith against hundreds of seasoned military professionals, Iraq experts inside and outside the government, and the US intelligence community. The "battle for Fallujah," however, continues as we speak.

Comments

[Oscar]

Note that Zinni and Conway speak for SOME of the military, and that SOME of the intelligence community agree. Given the poor record of the latter since the post 89 draw-down, I am unimpressed. As to the former, there have always been disagreements about wars and how and why they are fought within our military. Unfortunately, those who oppose the war can cherry pick their military viewpoints, as can those who favor it.