There is no Iraqi insurgency, military experts say

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein at 7:30 AM on June 17, 2008.

The good news is that there's no insurgency in Iraq. The bad news is that there's something much worse...

According to the conventional wisdom, the United States is fighting an insurgency in Iraq. In a classic insurgency, a group of guerrillas is trying to overthrow an otherwise-viable government. For an occupying power, the goal of counterinsurgency is to tip the balance in favor of the state and against the insurgents.

A group of military thinkers and Iraq war veterans disputes the claim that the U.S. is waging counterinsurgency in Iraq. They argue that the insurgency has degenerated into a much more complex and chaotic conflict:

[I]n Iraq, "the bulk" of what used to be the insurgents have "now realign[ed] themselves with the American forces" against "the nihilistic-Islamist terrorist Al Qaeda in Iraq," Lt. Col. Douglass Ollivant notes in the latest edition of Perspectives on Politics, which is devoted to a critique of the now-famous counterinsurgency manual. "With the Sunni nationalists at least temporarily allied and AQI deprived of its sanctuary among the Sunni population, just who are the insurgents in Iraq against whom a counterinsurgency might be conducted?"

Instead, what seems to be going on in Iraq is a “competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources,” as General David Petraeus put it. Shi'ites are fighting Shi'ites; Sunnis are battling Sunnis; splinter groups from both sects are waging a low-level religious war; AQI and other jihadists are stirring chaos; and criminal gangs trying to profit from the mayhem. It's an "extremely difficult and lethal problem," observes Lt. Col. Ollivant, who, until recently, was the chief of planning for U.S. military operations in Baghdad. "But it "is not exactly an insurgency." [Wired, Danger Room]

Tagged as: war, iraq, counterinsurgency

Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.