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| Volume XIII, Winter 2006, Number 4 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq , by Ahmed S. Hashim. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 482 pages. $29.95 hardcover, $14.95 paperback.
Jeffrey Record
Professor of strategy, Air War College (his views are entirely his own)
Ahmed S. Hashim’s Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq is the best book published to date on the Iraqi insurgency’s “origins, motivations, and evolution and the U.S. policy and strategic and operational responses to it.” Completed in November 2005 and released in March 2006, the book presciently anticipated the subsequent sharp escalation of sectarian violence in Iraq that threatens to saddle the United States with its greatest foreign-policy disaster since the Vietnam War.
Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College and an expert on both Middle Eastern strategic issues and irregular warfare, served three tours in Iraq between November 2003 and September 2005 as an advisor to the U.S. command in Baghdad. He is exceptionally well qualified to examine the performance of both sides in a war that will soon enter its fifth year and that constitutes a continuing and dramatic demonstration of the limits of American conventional military supremacy.
Hashim contends that three American “structural defects — ideological rigidity born of certain predispositions, failure to implement reconstruction, and the organizational culture and mindset of the U.S. military — promoted the outbreak and perpetuation of the insurgency.” The neoconservatives, who provided the intellectual rationale for the U.S. preventive war against Iraq giddily, assumed that American forces would be greeted in Iraq as they had been in France in 1944; that the Sunni Arab community that had dominated governance in Mesopotamia for over three centuries would go quietly into the night of political marginalization; and that expert concern over the sectarian fragility of the Iraqi state was overblown. There followed the disastrous decisions to invade Iraq with a force too small to secure the country, to disband the Iraqi army (by not recalling it to paid duty), to deprive the reconstruction effort of sufficient money and essential Baathist professional expertise, and to fight a counterinsurgent war in a manner that benefited the insurgency itself.
Neither the neoconservatives nor the White House anticipated the possibility of an insurgency, much less the unfamiliar insurgency that did arise: a loose, decentralized coalition of some 20 or so resistance organizations (Hashim lists and discusses them in detail), some secular-nationalist, others jihadist, and all of them motivated to fight foreign occupation for reasons of “nationalism, honor, revenge and pride.” The “prime goals of the insurgency are to eject the foreign presence in Iraq…and to overthrow the [political] system put in place by the United States and its Iraq allies.” These negative objectives are unaccompanied by any positive agenda because the Iraqi insurgency, unlike the classic East Asian communist insurgencies of the 1950s and 1960s, “is not a monolithic united movement directed by a leadership with a unitary and disciplined vision or unified goal or set of goals.” Indeed, the Iraqi insurgency, as a Sunni Arab enterprise with no support from Iraqi Kurds or Shiite Arabs, who together constitute 80 percent of Iraq’s population, hardly qualifies as a war of national liberation. Even within the Sunni resistance there are bitter divisions between the “seculars” and the jihadists, especially between “the local Iraqi insurgents…and the foreign Islamists….[M]any mainstream Iraqi nationalist, Islamist and tribal insurgents resent an ideological agenda that has resulted in the killing of Iraqis simply for not adhering to a strict religious line or for being a member of a different sect.”
Intra-insurgency divisions notwithstanding, however, the insurgents’ strategy is the same as that of most other insurgent wars against foreign occupiers: “to make the occupation…so untenable and uneconomical that the [occupier] will have no option but to consider withdrawal.” This strategy has proved particularly effective against democratic states (e.g., France in Indochina and Algeria, Israel in southern Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia — and possibly Iraq); democratic electorates have limited tolerance for protracted, indecisive wars against irregular enemies. Indeed, when insurgencies win, they almost always do so via a combination of stronger political will, superior strategy and external assistance. In the case of the Iraq War, which most Americans now regard as a mistake, the insurgency could politically coerce a U.S. withdrawal by raising the costs in American blood and treasure to unacceptable levels by inciting Iraq’s descent into a civil war that would render a continued U.S. military presence a costly irrelevance. Provocation of civil war has been al-Qaeda’s avowed aim in Iraq, and by the summer of 2006, sectarian violence had displaced insurgent attacks on U.S. forces as the primary threat to the U.S. objective of a unified, democratic and stable Iraq. As each month passes, Iraq looks more and more like a Middle Eastern former Yugoslavia than an Allied-liberated France.
The Iraqi insurgency clearly profited from mistaken neoconservative assumptions and calamitous war-planning and occupation decisions. But it was no less assisted, observes Hashim, by a U.S. Army “mindset peculiarly geared to fighting conventional or regular warfare” and an “organizational culture…highly resistant to change and [to] accepting that insurgency or ‘small war’ is going to be an almost constant future challenge.” While this judgment overlooks the army’s considerable tactical and doctrinal innovation in the face of the Iraqi insurgency during the past two years, it does speak to the army’s profound institutional aversion to counterinsurgency (not uncommon among conventional military establishments) and its politically dim-witted initial performance against the Iraq insurgency. Hashim rightly cites the judgment of retired Colonel Douglas McGregor, one of the ablest and most outspoken army officers of the 1990s:
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Most of the generals and politicians did not think through the consequences of compelling American soldiers with no knowledge of Arabic or Arab culture to implement intrusive measures inside an Islamic society. We arrested people in front of their families, dragging them away in handcuffs with bags over their heads, and then provided no information to the families of those we incarcerated. In the end, our soldiers killed, maimed and incarcerated thousands of Arabs, 90 percent of whom were not the enemy. But they are now.
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In Iraq, the U.S. Army, which for 30 years after the Vietnam War willfully ignored even the study of counterinsurgency, notwithstanding the prevalence of irregular threats to U.S. security in the post-Cold War world, violated virtually every established principle of successful counterinsurgency, including minimal use of force, primacy of political responses, integrated civil-military operations, and separation of insurgents from the local population. The army concentrated on killing insurgents and did not understand the tactical force requirements of counterinsurgency — forbearance, personnel continuity in the field, foreign-language skills, cross-cultural understanding, and sufficient troop strength to clear and hold territory — much less engage in reconstruction. The combination of inadequate force on the ground and a one-year troop rotation policy precluded effective pacification of Sunni Arab Iraq as well as “time to develop and institutionalize knowledge of the particular area.”
Hashim believes that the “insurgency has not only exacerbated ethno-sectarian tensions in the country, but also highlighted and solidified the mutually exclusivist nationalisms of [Iraq’s Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish] communities. As a result, the prospects for U.S. success in Iraq, in bringing about security as a stepping-stone towards reconstruction and political stability, are not good.” In fact, the situation in Iraq has so worsened since Hashim completed Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq in November 2005 that the White House has stopped repeating its mantra of “staying the course” and lowered its once-avowed goal of a democratic Iraq to simply an Iraqi government strong enough to permit a U.S. withdrawal.
Hashim believes that a “managed partition” of Iraq — i.e., “a process…mediated by the Coalition and the international community in negotiations with the major ethno-sectarian communities in Iraq” — is the only option available “that can allow us to leave with honor intact.” In fact, Kurdish Iraq has already effectively partitioned itself, and the Sunni Arab community’s unwillingness to accept Shiite governance bodes ill for effective central government in the rest of the country. The American invasion and occupation of Iraq may have forever destroyed the Iraqi.
Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq is must reading for both students of modern irregular warfare and those who wish to understand a foreign-policy debacle that has revealed the vincibility of American military power.
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