The Insurgency: Neighborhood Watch

By Gary Brecher, AlterNet. Posted August 3, 2005.

"Gen. George Casey, the U.S. commander of the multinational coalition in Iraq, told reporters on [June 27] that the worst-case estimate of the size of the Iraqi insurgency is less than one-10th of 1 percent of the country's population -- that is, a top end of 26,000 people supporting the insurgency." -- The Guardian

If you've been following guerrilla wars as long as I have, you have to laugh when you hear Army PR guys say that the Iraqi insurgents are just a teeny-tiny bad apple in a big barrel of shiny Red Delicious Iraqis. One bad apple -- that little beady-eyed Al Qaeda operative Zarqawi -- is supposedly responsible for the whole mess. Sorry, folks, but insurgencies just don't work that way.

Of course, you can't blame US Army guys for doing their job -- lying to the press. But you sure can blame the press for buying it. I can't believe how pig-ignorant reporters are about the basics of guerrilla warfare. This planet has been bursting with guerrilla wars for the past century, but the perky, smiley guys 'n' gals reporting from Iraq still know more about hair spray and "Dating Do's & Don'ts" than they do about urban warfare.

I'm just the opposite. Ever since I flunked puberty, I've dedicated my life to studying war. While the kids who grew up to be TV correspondents were fixing their hair, I was in the library memorizing Jane's Armored Vehicles and reading every issue of Armed Forces Journal and Aviation Week. And the more I read, the more I realized war these days isn't about hi-tech hardware, it's about urban guerrilla tactics. That's my specialty.

So for me, Iraq has been like a bad re-run. I knew it was going to be a disaster, and said so way back in 2002. And sure enough, the situation has gone to Hell strictly by the book, right on schedule.

Guerrilla war depends on two "obvious" facts -- so "obvious" nobody in the press even mentions them:

1. The people who live in a place care more about it than the foreign occupiers, and so they'll outlast them in a long guerrilla war.

2. So the only way to defeat the guerrillas is to wipe out or displace the population.

It's been done. The Brits did it in the Boer War a century ago. They were stuck in a losing war against an insurgency by the Boers, so they dragged the Boers' women and kids into the concentration camps to die of every horrible disease in Africa. It worked. A quarter of the civilian population was wiped out, and the Boers lost heart and surrendered, giving the Brits access to the gold and diamond mines. Even now the Boers still burn with hatred over what the Brits did to them, and you can't blame the poor bastards.

Stalin combined displacement and extermination when he decided the Chechens were troublemakers. He shipped them all to camps in Central Asia on 15 minutes notice. A third of the Chechen population died in the locked cattle cars before they even reached Kazakhstan. It must have been a terrible way to die, passing out from thirst as the trains rumbled across the Steppes to the GULAG.

But times have changed. America isn't as blunt about killing anybody in the way of our Empire as the Brits were. We can't wipe out the Sunni Iraqis; we can't even admit that they're "the enemy."

So to account for the fact that our Iraqi friends keep trying to blow up our convoys, the Pentagon's tame press tells us there's some kind of Mister Big seducing the Iraqis into evil, insurgent ways.

Saddam was the original nominee. As long as he was still on the loose, Bush's PR guys were swearing that the insurgency was nothing but "deadenders" from Saddam's regime. Once we grabbed him, Iraq would be more peaceful than South Dakota. Then we got him in December 2003, and the attacks on our troops went up. In April 2004, four months after we yanked Saddam out of his backyard spider hole, we had our worst month yet, with 140 GIs killed.

It was obvious that Saddam had never been in charge of the insurgency. I knew that as soon as I saw where he'd been hiding: a pathetic hole in somebody's backyard, with a concrete plug over it and no way to communicate with the outside world. You can't run an insurgency from a place like that. You have to be on the street non-stop, checking things out. You need to know who's doing what, who can be trusted, who's going soft, whose cousin just got arrested -- you have to know everything.

Gary Brecher writes a War Nerd column for the Moscow alt-weekly paper, The eXile.

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