Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

News Analysis: Iraqi rebels breaking all the insurgent rules

By James Bennet The New York Times

MONDAY, MAY 16, 2005


WASHINGTON U.S. forces in Iraq have often been accused of being slow to apply hard lessons from Vietnam and elsewhere about how to fight an insurgency. Yet it seems from the outside that no one has shrugged off the lessons of history more decisively than the insurgents themselves.


The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans.


They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, and have displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.


Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves - in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government.


Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks. This surge in the killing of civilians reflects how mysterious the long-term strategy remains - and how the rebels' seeming indifference to the past patterns of insurgency is not necessarily good news for anyone.

It is not surprising that reporters, and evidently U.S. intelligence agents, have had great difficulty penetrating this insurgency. What is surprising is that the fighters have made so little effort to advertise unified goals.


Counterinsurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency; if, as in China in the 1930s or Vietnam in the 1940s, it is taking insurgents a few years to organize themselves; or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation.


"Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare.


The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he said. "The insurgents are doing everything wrong now," he added. "Or, anyway, I don't understand why they're doing what they're doing."


Steven Metz, of the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, said the insurgency could still be sorting itself out. "It really is significant that even two years in there hasn't been anything like any kind of political ideology or political spokesman or political wing emerging," he said. "It really is a nihilistic insurgency."

He warned that this hydra-headed quality could make the insurgency hard to crush, even as the lack of unity makes it unlikely its members will rule Iraq.


A clear cause - one with broad support - is usually taken for granted by experts as a prerequisite for successful insurgency. But insurgents in Iraq appear to be fighting for varying causes: Baath Party members are fighting for some sort of restoration of the old regime; Sunni Muslims are presumably fighting to prevent domination by the Shiite majority; nationalists are fighting to drive out the Americans; and foreign fighters want to turn Iraq into a battlefield of a global religious struggle.


Some men are said to fight for money; organized crime may play a role. This incoherence is something new. "If you look at 20th-century insurgencies, they all tend to be fairly coherent in terms of their ideology," Metz said. "Most of the serious insurgencies, you could sit down and say, 'Here's what they want."'


In Iraq, insurgent groups appear to share a common immediate goal of ridding Iraq of an American presence, an objective that may find sympathy among Iraqis angry about poor electricity and water service and high unemployment.


Average Iraqis may distinguish among the groups within the insurgency and their tactics. Still, the insurgents have not publicly proposed a governmental alternative, and their anti-American message has been muddied by their attacks on civilians and by the election of an Iraqi government that has not asked the Americans to leave.


If the insurgency is trying to overthrow this regime, it is contending with a formidable obstacle that successful rebels of the 20th century generally did not face: A democratically elected government. One of the last century's most celebrated theorists and practitioners of revolution, Che Guevara, called that obstacle insurmountable.



The insurgents' choice of adversary is unusual. But the recent surge in violence, at least, follows a time-tested pattern. The insurgents are apparently trying to swamp any progress toward stability with evidence and images of chaos.


The killing in that time of at least 250 police officers, soldiers and recruits also fits a pattern, since insurgents have customarily targeted accused collaborators to isolate a regime. Less obvious is the goal in the killing of about 150 civilians.



What is curious about the Iraqi tactic is that it appears aimed at creating active opposition. The insurgency is powered by Sunnis; the civilians they have killed have been overwhelmingly Shiites and Kurds.

The goal appears to be to split apart the fragile governing coalition and foment sectarian strife. Yet if the insurgents achieve all-out civil conflict, the likely losers are the Sunnis themselves, since they are a minority.




Among Iraq's insurgents, the jihadists are one group that has suggested a sweeping goal. They want to establish a new religious caliphate with expansive boundaries. For them, the destruction and chaos in Iraq may represent creative forces, means of heightening the contrasts among sects, religions and whole civilizations.


Yet it may prove to be one of history's humbling lessons that history itself fails to illuminate the conflict under way in Iraq. No one really knows what the insurgents are up to.


"It clearly makes sense to the people who are doing it," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. "And that, more than anything else, tells us how little we understand the region."


http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/15/news/insurgents.php