I recently read a very astute essay in Harper's magazine by Edward Luttwak (no link available) regarding the history of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, and what an effective counterinsurgency must do to succeed. It's heady, depressing stuff, and penetratingly instructive. Luttwak's ultimate thesis: that the U.S. can't win in Iraq, that it never could, and that what it would take to "win" would be unpalatable in the extreme to American citizens. (Except for, oh, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, say.)
Why won't the U.S. ever know victory in Iraq? Why is victory the submerged, taunting Moby-Dick to America's Captain Ahab? Luttwak offers two distinct reasons, and they go like this: 1 - America's military is structured to fight a definable enemy wearing uniforms and deploying tanks, planes, land-based troops, etc., and insurgencies (Iraq's in particular) render multimillion-dollar hardware and point-men leading battalions through the field worse than irrelevant; 2 - the political reality attached to any insurgency throughout history is the reality at hand, period. The second reason explains why Iraq's citizens seem so ungrateful for their "liberation," and the first describes America's continuing failure to once-and-for-all subdue and conquer, for you can't force a populace to love even the most benignly motivated liberator, and you sure can't subdue an enemy that regularly melts into that populace like desert camoflauge in the Mojave. Some things in this life, you see, really do defy Tinkerbell's handclaps.
Luttwak offers up, as an example from the past of American-style troubles in Iraq, King Joseph of Spain's attempt, in 1808, to rewrite that country's constitution and make free speech, freedom of the press and a generally fairer, more democratic system Spain's governmental bedrock. At that time, illiterate peasants beholden to a corrupt Catholic church comprised the vast majority of Spain's citizenry; they lived in stinking, abject squalor, and King Joseph wanted to change that. Ah, but King Joseph was Napoleon's brother - or, untrustworthy in the people's eyes, minds and hearts. And then there was the Catholic church, faced with a certain liquidation of power; they weren't going to meekly or contritely surrender a largesse that'd taken years upon years to build. So the priests led the people in a revolt against the king's life-bettering policies, quite literally beating back reforms that would've injected a serious dose of justice and dignity into everyday life. Does all of this sound familiar? Of course it does. The Spanish in 1808 who wanted nothing to do with the brother of a world-conquering emperor - gold-plated prescriptions be damned - are precisely analogous to the Iraqis in 2007 who are deflecting a white Christian president's like prescriptions. Though there may be one key difference muddying that gulf of 200 years, which is, King Joseph's ideals were unquestionably purer than President (King?) Bush's. Democracy, that ultra-panacea, wasn't exactly the first reason on the list when Bush attacked Iraq, after all.
That's a hell of a shattering historical comparison, right there, redolent with despair, but that's nothing compared to the end of Luttwak's essay, where he graphically illustrates what it would take to mount an effective counterinsurgency against an insurgent-protecting populace. Question: why does the populace protect insurgents in Iraq? Answer: because if they don't - if they tell the Americans where weapons caches are, or IED-makers hide out, or where the next attack's going to take place - they and their families will be killed. Attendant question: what would it take to counter that level of insurgent-sponsored terror among a village's/town's/city's citizens? Answer: insurgent-surpassing terror, leveled against ordinary citizens, by Americans. Here's where Luttwak's word "unpalatable" comes into play, for I ask you, if you read in the New York Times or saw on CNN a story about a new method of crippling the insurgency, and that method entailed rounding up all males 18 and older in a given village/town/city and executing every tenth one, do you suppose the American people or Congress would respond with "Ho hum, big deal, it's all good"? Sure, the average person out there (not to mention member of Congress) has already shown that torture and suspension of habeas corpus and endless Kafka-style detention doesn't really turn the stomach so much, but wholesale slaughter, actual murder, that ain't gonna fly. But it worked great for the Nazis during WWII. In Poland and France, during the height of the German occupation, very little resistance against the occupiers went down, because mass slaughter everywhere in a 25-mile radius has a fabulously clarifying effect on most working brains. The Romans - who had 300,000 troops stretched across the vastness of their empire - realized early on that the fabulous benefits of Roman citizenship, which surely every sentient being desired (even if they didn't know it), sometimes took the threat of slavery and/or murder to fasten its hooks in the minds of the conquered. That's how you mount a good counterinsurgency; that's how you fashion, from rebel's cloth, good 'n subservient red-white-and-blue blanket-wearers. Luttwak describes some other ways that America could effectively fight the insurgency, gather intelligence, etc., beyond the Nazi or the Roman, but they just aren't built to last. Instilling terror? Oh yeah. Works wonders.
America cannot win in Iraq, therefore, because what it would take to win would make all the little babies cry. In fact, the words "win" and "victory" can't be used, although "pacification," "temporary" and "open-ended" can, if the current ideological template is going to persist, but since those words are implicitly tethered to other words - "drain the treasury," "break the military" and "trample civil liberties" - well, no, even they can't be used.
I say, try these words. "Apology." "Prosecution." "Withdrawal." "Humility."