Does Anyone Remember the Maginot Line?
Gary Blecher’s new blog (http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/81147/?page=entire) is about as insightful a piece as I’ve read on what is happening in Iraq. You know we are all becoming inured to the pain and tragedy of this war as it drags on, and it’s hard to track it daily in the press. Depressing doesn’t describe it. It’s kind of like having your face assaulted by repeated pies. The stupidity of the decision to start it, the unbelievable arrogance and lack of planning once we achieved “mission accomplished”, and now the repeated failure to understand the place, its history, and, now, the dynamics of this failed state that we have created. How could it get worse?
Blecher accurately depicts what’s happened over this recent period: the Kurds have withdrawn north and are arming themselves for the uncertain times ahead. (Whether the Turks like it or not, we have delivered their worst nightmare: a virtually independent Kurdish homeland. As a result, eastern Turkey will become increasingly violent and unstable, something Chalmers Johnson would call “blowback” – the unpredictable consequences of our interventions….but I digress.) The Sunnis have also withdrawn from their initial support of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, fueled as it was by foreign fighters, and are now relatively pacified with the “awakening” councils and a return to tribal authority. US financing of our former insurgent opponents has made this work relatively well. But the Shia, that is another story.
Blecher argues, accurately I think, that the complex game that Muqtada al Sadr is playing is more analogous to the way Mao managed a guerrilla insurgency than anything else. Pitted against one another are two Shia militias. The first, we have heard a great deal about – the Mahdi Army of the rebellious, nationalist mullah Muqtada al Sadr whose operatives control large portions of Baghdad, Basra, and other key urban centers. What we don’t hear much about are the Badr Brigade – those fighters who were closely associated with the revered Mullah Al Sistani, a more established religious leaders considered closer to the middle class and educated Shia. His history, though, is interesting. He lived in exile in Iran during the Saddam period and his fighters fought alongside the Iranian Army against the Iraqi Army in the lengthy and brutal war between the two between 1980 and 1988.
Blecher suggests that the Badr Brigade is now largely what constitutes the Iraqi Army, so what we were hearing about this past week, termed by President Bush as “a decisive moment”, was really a sectarian conflict between the Sistani / Malaki faction and the Sadrists’ Mahdi Army. As we have learned, the Iraqi Army showed itself unable to prevail and suffered massive abandonment. The Mahdi Army fought classically urban tactics in their neighborhoods until the US decided it needed to enter the fray to prop up the failing initiative. This is when Sadr did his Mao thing – he withdrew his fighters unilaterally. Mao, after all, pioneered the notion that fighters are more important than territory, thus rewriting the rules of armed conflict. Land can be recaptured later, he reasoned, and outside elements cannot survive long engagements. In Blecher’s eyes, this is all a very long term conflict, often orchestrated by the Iranians who play both sides with money and weapons inputs. The only player who won’t be around in the long term is the US, just as Mao predicted.
The question, we all know, is “how can we get out?” When in the region not long ago speaking with refugees, I came to the conclusion that we progressives have to come up with an exit strategy that somehow results a sustainable security for the civilian population, for without that, there is another time bomb waiting for an unstable region: how to absorb the 10% plus of the Iraqi population that has fled the country. This dilemma: how to leave a conflict that we can have no real impact on resolving while ensuring that innocent civilians aren’t slaughtered in the ensuing vacuum is the most challenging question a new administration will face. To do this, we will have to come to grips with the failure of our traditional defense approach that is the world’s best at conventional warfare. It’s just not a conventional time.
Doesn’t anyone in the Pentagon remember the Maginot Line? This one is going to be a lot more difficult than learning that tanks and mobile forces can drive around fixed fortifications. We’ve been avoiding this lesson since Vietnam, but if we fail to learn it this time, we better start learning to fail. It’s already being repeated in more places than any of us want to think about. Somalia, anyone? Congo? Sudan? Southern Phillipines? Afghanistan? Columbia?
Great blog. I read it from Africa, a continent with a reputation for eruptions of internal conflicts. While some of these are resource grabs in the name of one cause or another, many of them have the same roots as Iraq: colonial powers took 10,000 regional tribes, chiefdoms, and territories and organized them into four dozen or so colonies. Most of these are now countries, but they were not created out of any unity except that imposed by European armies. No wonder they explode. Many of the peoples in them have been enemies and/or rivals forever. I think we should look seriously at what brought almost-stability to the former Yugoslavia. The savagery unleashed there with the downfall of Tito reminds me a great deal of Iraq post-Saddam. I think Joe Biden’s closer to the right idea: define a set of new borders that make sense instead of trying to enforce a British-defined state. Madr vs Sadr still needs to be sorted out, and I don’t know enough to propose how, but I am certain that the current path won’t work. Nor will just washing our hands and walking away. Why don’t we think that would turn into Bosnia, or Rwanda - both places we now are ashamed we didn’t intervene in earlier?
Comment by Mike McConnell — April 10, 2008 @ 10:19 am