There seems to be some kind of fear that President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy has regarding using the actual word Civil War regarding Iraq. By any sane definition Iraq is in a civil war. The insurgency attacks at will, American soldiers, Iraqi security services, local cops, even recruits, just for the sheer terror of being able to hit back. The results are grisly.
The insurgents know the ground. They know every corner, rock, car, garden shed and crawl space. Using either old-school terror or active support from the local population, the insurgents can amble around looking for the right place and time to strike, blending in with the neighborhood.
To fight that kind of war, conventional military movement in depth and force does not work. It was tried for a decade in Viet Nam and the US never learned the lesson: You can’t fight an insurgency without resorting to terror just as heinous as the insurgents.
The Viet Cong in the south of the country used some fairly simple tactics: Kill the village elder in the square then ask if anyone has any objections to helping the Viet Cong. Drafting all the young men at the point of gun helped adjust local attitudes. So did inviting all the locals to provide food, shelter and work for the insurgents, with the implication being your shack will burn to the ground if you don’t help.
This is an extension of "If you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow" and worked very well for the Viet Cong. It also worked nicely for the Afghans fighting the Russians and works well for the Chechyn rebels today.
Subsistence farmers and peasants don’t give a flying fig about liberation politics, return of the homeland, a Constitution, global geopolitics or the War on Terror: They just want to be left alone to raise enough crops to remain alive, raise their children and hopefully not die of starvation next winter. They are politically inert, but they can be swayed via terror, depending on who is nearby.
This has shown up in Afghanistan more than once. Militias that were ostensibly on the side of the coalition, changed sides in mid battle when the insurgents offered more money, or offered to not slaughter their families. Loyalty does have its price.
To defeat an insurgency you have two choices: Become even more feared beasts than the insurgents or give up and go home to let the insurgents devolve into their tiny little pockets of insane tribal warlords. This is what happened in Somalia: The whole country collapsed by every measure you care to mention and devolved to armed tribal cliques whose individual territory was measured by city blocks or double digit acres.
How do you fix it? The fast answer is you can’t until a ‘country’ decides it wants help. If the US were to pull out now and offer a post-WWII Marshall Plan kind of massive financial support to Iraq, the results would be very predictable: Massive theft by warlords, enrichment of a very few and no help whatsoever for the average citizen.
This would be followed by mass starvation, refugees everywhere and the rise of another Saddam-like charismatic figure promising everything and delivering terror from a loyal, well-fed secret police.
In recent history, that is exactly what happened in post-WW I Germany. The only reason the National Socialist Party succeeded was because average folks couldn’t afford to live in an economy that was crushed and the onerous conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. It took about 14 years to get rocking full-bore, 1919 to 1935, more or less. Go read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shier if you want the backstory.
In Iraq we have the added complication of religious infighting, the general weirdness of the Middle East, plus Big Oil and Big Money. My guess? If the US pulls out tomorrow afternoon, Iraq will collapse into another Darfur or Somalia in less than a year. Iran and Saudi Arabia will come in to try and keep the lid on, at least a bit. They will fail miserably with half-measures because Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t want to get too involved and wind up importing all kinds of madness from the remains of Iraq.
Things will devolve into local and regional warlords, as their focus will have to be local, rather than national or international. Big Money and Big Oil will piss and moan but won’t be able to do anything about it. After five years and a half-dozen UN resolutions full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, some kind of Charismatic Leader will appear, firmly in the pocket of Big Money and Big Oil. I give it until 2012 more or less.
The summation? Iraq is done for already. The mistakes happened in 2003 because President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy wanted a ride on a plane and to stand in front of a banner on an aircraft carrier. His plane ride has cost nearly 3,000 lives so far, plus the two or three million other lives that will be lost in the next five years.
Which explains why the term Civil War is never used by Jo Jo The Idiot Boy. It is an admission of guilt. He knows that "Mission Accomplished" banner is dripping a lot of blood.
RoadDave 