There are more signs that the administration and top military brass continue to misunderstand the nature of what is going on in Iraq. The NYT has two conflicting reports today. One details in breathlessly optimistic tones the capture of what's alleged to be Zarqawi HQ:
The senior U.S. Marine commander in Iraq said the U.S.-led offensive launched last week in Fallujah has ``broken the back of the insurgency'' by seizing their main base of operations.``We feel right now that we have, as I mentioned, broken the back of the insurgency. We've taken away this safe haven,'' Lt. Gen. John Sattler told reporters at the Pentagon in a video teleconference from Fallujah.
The other important story presents a very different view of the situation in Fallujah. The story quotes Marine intelligence officers from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force as warning that
Insurgents in the region will rebound from their defeat ... despite taking heavy casualties in the weeklong battle, the insurgents will continue to grow in number, wage guerrilla attacks and try to foment unrest among Falluja's returning residents.
The most telling quote in this article comes from the brass:
"The view from the tactical level has been generally more pessimistic," said one senior Marine officer in Washington, referring to the view from the ground. "They may well be right, but I would also say that tactical intel is almost always more dour than that done at the strategic level."
Which is a curious way of spinning the truth: the senior officer is implying that the people with their boots on the ground really don't know what they're talking about. Perhaps they can't see the forest for the trees, and are blinded by their proximity to events.
Sattler and the unnamed senior officer both imply a view of the insurgency as just another conventional military force: a hierarchical group which withers if you can just kill the leader, as if the battle were a bad science fiction movie. But the insurgents aren't playing by those rules. They are fighting a fourth-generation war, in which the hierarchical chain of command gives way to decentralized webs of fighters. Traditional lines between civilian and soldier get blurred, as do the expectations that the enemy will show up on the battlefield to face you.
That's why it's odd and misleading to characterize our takeover of Fallujah as a "defeat" for the insurgency. On their terms, it wasn't a defeat: they just melted away. On our terms, it was a victory of sorts, because we didn't have to fight them (yet). But to view it as such is a myopic enterprise, because they're bound to turn up again in other cities. And if we move to invade those cities, they'll return to Fallujah. The comparisons to the game of "whack-a-mole" are very apt here, as the 1MEF report indicates.
The inability to grasp the nature of this decentralized fighting force appears to stem from ideological blinkers. Specifically, the Bush administration is ideologically committed to top-down models of the world. Some of them model this in a corporate framework (the CEO's orders direct the whole company), others theistically (God is the supreme authority over all). This is an outgrowth of the administration's odd alliance of fundamentalism and corporate capitalism. Neither group can even acknowledge the existence of weblike organizations that lack a single true leader who commands everything. To do so would invalidate their whole philosophy of how the world is structured.
The administration conceives of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations as corporations: cohesive units under the direction of a single charismatic leader. But the reality is they operate more like franchises, or software. You don't have to swear fealty to Osama to become an Al Qaeda cell; all you have to do is download his handbook, invoke his name, and mouth the appropriate propaganda.
The administration seems to think we're facing a wolf, and can just cut its head off to kill it. In reality, Islamicist terrorism is more like a mold. To kill a mold, you must either (a) flood the room with toxins, and repeat regularly or (b) remove the mold's habitat by drying out the room and bringing in sunlight. Current policy falls far short of (a), since there are nowhere near enough soldiers (fungicide) in the country. And option (b), which would involve a reconsideration of broad swaths of US policy in the Middle East and elsewhere, is completely invisible. Outside of the leftist press, it isn't even possible to raise it as a question.
Posted by Chris at November 18, 2004 11:32 AM