Today on Juan Cole's excellent site, Juan posted a guest commentary by William R. Polk -
"What is to Be Done in Iraq?: Polk"
Polk describes himself as - one who has studied Iraqi politics and history... for the last 50 years.
All emphasis (bold) mine.
Among the principles we will have to make completely clear is that
- we will get out;
- we will not so build ourselves into the Iraqi economy that, like the British did from 1932 to 1958, we will run the country behind a native façade;
- that we will not seize or denationalize Iraqi oil;
- that we will, in some transparent fashion, allow a high degree of self-determination.
Among the processes,
- we will get out with all deliberate speed;
- we will begin right away to devolve political power in meaningful ways;
- we will immediately move to dilute our unilateral role by allowing serious political and commercial activities by other powers and political and "security" activities under UN auspices.
I suggest that, despite pronouncements,
a sober view of what is actually happening in Iraq will show that on most of these issues our actions now lead in the opposite direction.
... we must begin implementing an orderly, intelligent and effective policy rather than just trying to beat down opposition, to bolster shams or merely to hang on until after the American election.
Looking back at America's most grievous intelligence failure, Vietnam, we can see an analogy. Bluntly put,
we thought we could shoot or bomb them into doing what we wanted.
We saw what we wanted to see and never managed to ask the fundamental questions about what the people on the other side wanted, how they functioned and how we fit into their world.
During that period, I was a member of the Policy Planning Council. To my dismay, I found that while we had gathered more information on that little country than any government had ever gathered on any nation, we lacked any criteria for separating the merely interesting from the significant.
... I read everything I could find on guerrilla warfare as it has occurred all over the world and constructed from those experiences an analytical "model."
In essence, what I found was that guerrilla warfare is composed of three elements. First, the guerrillas have to establish their credentials, to win legitimacy, because they must demand sacrifices from those they would lead.
They usually accomplish this by casting themselves as nationalists who oppose foreign imperialists -- Yugoslavs against the Germans, Greeks against the Germans and Italians, Irish against the British, Algerians against the French, Zionists against the British, Chinese against the Japanese, Vietnamese first against the French and then against the Americans and so on.
Only after they have established their legitimacy can guerrilla movements make the second step, to supplant the administration of those they would overthrow. In Vietnam, during the 1950s, as police reports I dug up showed, the Vietminh eliminated the French-installed administration everywhere outside the main cities and replaced it with their own ...
By the time they have established their nationalist credentials and assumed at least some attributes of government, the guerrillas have won, by my estimate, about 95% of the campaign.
As the American statesman John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson about the American revolution, our guerrilla war against the British, the real revolution occurred long before the actual fighting which "was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it."
Force is important, admittedly, but usually not in the way those who oppose the guerrillas believe. Foreigners regard the use of force as the means to create "security." But those guerrillas who have won their wars are the ones who have learned how to use the power of their enemies like jujitsu against them.
They goad the foreigners into actions that are painful or frightening to the natives and so further undermine the foreigners' claim to legitimacy.
In Vietnam, for example, Vietminh cadres would fire at American aircraft to provoke them into bombing villages. Then they would return to ask the frightened or wounded villagers rhetorically, "are those your friends who destroyed your houses and killed your relatives?"
Meanwhile, on the ground in Iraq, there is a more pervasive failure of intelligence analysis which may, in the long run, prove even more costly to Americans. Put simply, it is
what is actually happening there. The assumption has been that only a small group of "die-hard Baathists" oppose the Americans and that once they are eliminated by "hunter-killer" squads "security" will be established.
Take first the issue of legitimacy. So far, at least, Iraqis appear deeply divided so there is nothing quite like the single nationalism exhibited in many guerrilla wars. But we would find in most of them, in their early stages, nationalism was divided and weak. ...* We cannot even dream of acquiring legitimacy for ourselves*. Getting the foreigner out is the bottom line of nationalism.
On administration, we have proven unable to recreate the one we destroyed; and so have failed to provide minimal services to the bulk of the Iraqi people.
Finally, we are now disputing, as we did in the Vietnam war, the least significant of the three, military force. And not very successfully: we have suffered more American casualties in the months since the invasion than in the first three years of our involvement in Vietnam. Can anyone really believe it will get better?
So what can we expect? The short answer is defeat.
That is a bitter pill, one no political leader willingly swallows, particularly in an election year. So what are the alternatives?
The first is simply to delay. ... Bargain, negotiate, equivocate, encourage differences. These may indeed buy time. But if the time is not used constructively, the result will be, as it was in Vietnam, the worse for coming later.
The second alternative is to prop up a hand-picked ruling council. ...
In sum, the Iraqis are not an "underdeveloped" people. It should be evident that they cannot be fooled with a façade in place of a government.
The third alternative is not simple and will not be easy, but it is the only one that offers America a chance to get out of Iraq less ignominiously than we got out of Vietnam. This policy can be divided into principles and processes. (see top of diary)
In that talk, Mr. Tenet carefully avoided the central problem. The problem is not that the CIA was wrong but that
it was replaced.
What replaced the CIA was a new office created in the Pentagon to provide a more "supportive" underpinning for the already agreed direction of policy. This "Office of Special Plans" was created under the aegis of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary Douglas Feith.
Reporting to Stephen Cambone, as under-secretary of defense for intelligence and the man who took the lead in the campaign to justify the attack on Iraq, was one of the most important but least known of the small band of "Neoconservatives," Abram Shulsky.
Mr. Shulsky's organization aimed essentially to supplant the entire American intelligence system. Although never admitted, its task, effectively, was to prove the charge, aggressively pushed by Vice President Cheney, that Saddam Hussein, in conjunction with his ally Usama bin Ladin, was poised to attack the United States with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
It is that alternative intelligence analysis to which those who made the decisions listened. And it was that alternative which Tenet carefully avoided discussing.
It is a sad commentary on the current State of America that Polk's type of pragmatism based on deep understanding and knowledge is dismissed as "idealistic dreaming". Especially when the critics are delusional ideologues and imperialists who reflect only incompetence and ignorance on the subjects of diplomacy and Middle East history.
Some in our government hold the attitude that the Iraqis should "submit or die". In Vietnam by some reckonings we killed over 2 million South East Asians. The aftershocks from our cataclysmic undertaking led to the deaths of millions more.
Many Vietnamese did die, but Vietnam never submitted.
They did not win a single battle with U.S. forces, but they did win the war.