'Victory' in Iraq leaves scary options on the table

Still think there's a path for victory in Iraq? After years of thinking that there's no chance at all for anything but increasing disaster, I'm a convert after reading a brilliant column on the options left on the table by Gary Brecher in the eXile. I now think we can. And there are two ways to do it: The options remaining on the table are trying to trigger an endless bloodbath between factions or using weapons of mass destruction. Not exactly what you were hoping to hear, was it?

If those are the choices, I'll take losing any day... well, as a believer in non-violence, I'd rather that we lost and surrendered before we invaded, but that's just me. And upfront, since I've made my pacifist disclosure, leave your PC blinders at the door before reading this, because the arguments here only bolster the idea that there's no way to win this. The crazy idea that Democrats like Rahm Emanuel support, such as adding 20,000 troops temporarily, looks only more insane in light of this analysis.

Brecher makes this case because he says that US forces as they are presently organized are essentially obsolete against the kind of war they are facing in Iraq:

[W]e're living through one of those moments in military history where a powerful, successful military model runs into its limitations. The military-industrial steamroller that won WW II for us and the Soviets was a glorious thing, but then so was the phalanx, and the medieval heavy cavalry, and the British square. They all hit a wall eventually, and so have we. ... [W]hat we've got now is a huge gap between the military force a superpower has and what it's actually ready to use. We've got a problem in the Sunni Triangle, and we're fighting it with mid-20th century weapons, armor and cannon and air strikes. Sure, it's much better armor, cannon and air support than we had in 1944, but we're talking little refinements of old weapons. Cannon have been around for 600 years, people! A 25mm chain cannon is just a much smaller, faster, more accurate version of the humongous, sloppy tubes that blasted the walls of Constantinople in 1453.

What is a modern day war-monger to do?Well one one hand there's our monster arsenal of nukes, chemical weapons and biological weapons. But we won't use those of course as a matter of holding on to our shreds of principle.

Then there's this counterinsurgency technique -- backing weaker factions against stronger ones to force a massive endless bloody war. It's the only CI technique left over because that 'hearts and minds' crap we heard about years ago doesn't apply to Iraq:

Other examples of successful CI, like the Brits against Chinese commies in Malaysia in the 1950s, are a lot more like El Salvador than Baghdad: small groups (ethnic Chinese in Malay territory) with nothing but an ideology to keep up their morale. Ideology, compared to tribal loyalties like we're facing in Iraq, is weak stuff, soymilk compared to Jagermeister. Commies didn't strap on suicide vests like the Jihadis do. We're up against a clan, a big old clan that will fight to the last dummy. Taking out the leadership just won't do it.

So that leaves:

Giving the insurgency enough rope to hang itself with an endless civil war. I wish I had time to go into details, but basically what you do is identify the weak element among the insurgent leadership, strengthen it vs. the hardliners (and here's where having a good assassination squad or two can help, by wiping out the most effective hardline commanders) and then force the weak faction to sign a treaty with you.

It's a sure thing that the hardliners won't accept the deal, but it's just as sure the moderates won't give up power, because (a) they like it, and (b) they don't want to be tortured to death along with their entire families. So booya! You've got a nice civil war going between what used to be comrades in insurgency, and you can play one faction against the other, keeping them both weak. You can't stay in open power as the foreign occupier, but you can take a terrible revenge, because this kind of war is one long massacre, neighbor vs. neighbor.

This has been tried before -- by the Brits in Ireland, Brecher explains, and by the Israelis in Palestine:

The Israelis tried to do exactly the same thing by ceding Gaza and bits of the West Bank to the PLO. They had Hamas waiting, way tougher and younger than Fatah, and hoped the Pals would duke it out - the old, weak Arafat cronies vs. the bloods from Hamas. The reason they knew Hamas was in the mood to go to the mattress is that it was the Israeli secret services that created Hamas in the first place, as a "counterweight" to the quasi-commie PLO. Hamas was going to be the dumb Islamic faction that would harass the PLO into ineffectiveness, as if the PLO ever needed any help getting there. Well, it worked a little too well. Two intifadas and one Hamas leadership later, the Israelis would give anything to have a pitiful coward pol like Arafat back in charge, instead of these crazy Hamas guys with 17 children each and a bad case of martyr-envy.

See, that's the problem: you set up two insurgent factions at each other's throats and you're likely to be running a tournament, with the meanest and most determined bastards winning. And that's not who you want for neighbors. The Israelis had some early successes sparking feuds between Palestinian factions. ... The hard part, and the part where the Israelis lost their nerve, is staying out of the way long enough to let the puppet government you've set up get strong enough to take on the hardliners in a really big, bloody civil war. ... The Israelis couldn't stay out of the little Palestinian pockets they'd handed over to the PLO, because some Hamas or Islamic Jihad kid would blow himself up in a Tel Aviv deli and the public would demand that the IAF go blast some Pal refugee camp. It made the public happy, but then the public, any public, is a moron. And in the long run, it meant that the Pals never stopped having some new Israeli raid to be mad about, so they couldn't get around to the next step of hating each other enough to get a decent civil war going.

But in the final conclusion, Brecher doubts that this could even apply in Iraq because you need centralized leadership, and what we have in Iraq is utterly without formal direction:

Nobody runs the insurgency, and nobody really runs the Shia militias either, not at national level. Sadr? He's their poster boy as long as he mouths off the way the hardliners want, but he'll go the way of Sistani if he tries to curb the boys' enthusiasm. They don't need help. They're having the time of their lives. It's not so much fun for the other focus groups, like women and men over 25 but for Iraqi boys from 15-25, these are the Wonder Years. The key measurement for insurgencies in all these strategies is leadership, ranging from the almost Inca-style pyramid structure of the VC/NVA to total chaos. The steeper the pyramid, the more room you have to play with CI options, especially the ones involving negotiation. The more chaotic and localized the insurgents, the more you start thinking about those nice, clean red diameter-circles you get with our old friends the nukes.

And we'd never do that, would we?