Convincing the Insurgents

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“Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.” -The Duke of Wellington.


The press is taking Wellington’s dictum to heart. It seems positively despondent over the battle of Fallujah. It is right and proper to mourn the death of 71 Americans and the wounding of hundreds more.


As Wellington realized, martial glory rings hollow when weighed against the cost in blood. But it is wrong to rush to the opposite extreme by assuming, as so much of the current commentary implicitly does, that war solves nothing and that all casualties are meaningless.


In fact, many of the turning points of history have been battles, such as Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, which ended for all time the threat of French expansionism in Europe.


Obviously the battle of Fallujah was not as decisive as Waterloo; few battles are. But that shouldn’t blind us to the accomplishments of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which led the offensive along with American Army and Iraqi soldiers.


Coalition troops killed nearly 2,000 guerrillas and captured more than 1,000. They uncovered 26 bomb factories, 350 arms caches (containing thousands of weapons), several chemical weapons laboratories and eight houses where hostages were held and probably tortured and killed. And they accomplished all this with less than half the number of casualties suffered in Hue, Vietnam, in 1968,the last major urban assault mounted by the Marine Corps.


As significant as what happened is what didn’t happen. The second battle of Fallujah did not turn into a public relations debacle, as did the previous attack in April. The Marines cleverly began this campaign by occupying the main hospital in Fallujah, which, in the spring, had been the source of inflated claims about civilian casualties. There was no uprising in the streets of Najaf or Karbala – or Cairo or Amman – to protest the second assault on Fallujah. The Iraqi interim government held together behind the fierce determination of Prime Minister Allawi to fight the terrorists.


The only major public relations snafu came when a journalist filmed a Marine shooting a wounded insurgent. Though endlessly replayed on Al Jazeera, which refused to show the video of terrorists apparently slaughtering aid worker Margaret Hassan, there is no sign that this action has cost America any public support in Iraq. On the contrary, many Iraqis, fed up with terrorist attacks, no doubt applauded the Marine’s ruthlessness.


This is not meant to suggest that everything went perfectly. Many terrorists were able to escape Fallujah before the assault and create mayhem in Mosul, where the local police folded with dismaying speed. But American and Iraqi forces quickly shifted their focus to the north and snuffed out the uprising in Mosul. Now they are pressing their offensive in the “triangle of death” south of Baghdad.


The best news of recent days is the growing competence of Iraqi security forces. Two thousand Iraqis fought alongside 10,000 Americans in Fallujah and, by all reports, they performed reasonably well. In the operations south of Baghdad, Iraqis are said to outnumber British and American troops.


Skeptics are right to point out that no insurgency can be defeated by force alone, but it’s also true that effective military action is usually a prerequisite for a political settlement. Only if the insurgents are convinced they cannot shoot their way to power will they give up their guns.


The clashes with Muqtada Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia this summer proves the point: After being whipped by American forces, the Shiite rabble-rouser decided to join the electoral process. Sadr City, once among the most dangerous areas of Iraq for American troops, has become relatively quiet. The hope now is that the fall of Fallujah will convince more Sunnis of the futility of armed resistance, while upcoming elections on Jan. 30 will convince them that their grievances can be addressed through peaceful means.


Even in a best-case scenario, however, the bombings and beheadings won’t end the day after the vote. It can take a decade or more to defeat an insurgency – Colombia has been fighting Marxist guerrillas since 1966 – and even a small number of determined fighters can wreak mayhem. In the 1970s, fewer than 100 members of the Baader-Meinhof gang terrorized West Germany, a country that is considerably more populous and more stable than Iraq, which is estimated to have at least 10,000 insurgents.


Thus, for all their success in Fallujah, we should not expect American troops to completely pacify Iraq anytime soon. What they can do – what they are doing – is to keep the insurgents from derailing a political process that, one hopes, will soon result in the creation of a legitimate government that can field indigenous security forces and defend itself.



Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where this first appeared.


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