Today’s lead item in the New York Times reports the following:
American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential structure of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified. They say this central characteristic, similar to that of terrorist organizations in Europe and Asia, is what is making the Iraqi insurgency so difficult to destroy. Attack any single part of it, and the rest carries on largely untouched. It cannot be decapitated, because the insurgency, for the most part, has no head. Only recently, American and Iraqi experts say, have they begun to grasp the new organizational structure that, among other things, is making the insurgency so difficult to stop. |
Except for that word “new” — is there any evidence that the Iraqi insurgency was ever any more centralized? — this makes eminent sense. In fact, it has seemed fairly obvious for at least two years. Every time I’d hear the latest report of the capture of some former Baathist honcho or “dead-ender” touted by Rumsfeld or Cheney as the beginning of the end for the rebels, I’d just shake my head: they seemed to imagine that the Iraqi insurgency was like the Prussian Army, when anyone could see it was more of a self-organizing network.
What’s impossible to fathom is why it should have been possible for me — on this subject, an armchair journalist and avid pursuer of information online and off, but not a “member of the intelligence community” or consumer of classified information — to understand this as a fundamental aspect of the conflict in Iraq, and yet for it to be something that the experts shaping our policy could “only recently” begin to grasp.
What is it with our experts, anyway? Are these the same experts who thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Are these the same experts who believed that invading Iraq would hurt rather than help Al-Qaida? Are these the same experts who figured out how to topple the Saddam Hussein regime but didn’t spare a thought for how to build something in its place?
Maybe we need some new experts.
(One excellent source on the topic for a long time — someone you could call an expert without irony — has been John Robb, a former military guy who has not only kept tabs on the news but offered his own analytic framework interpreting the phenomenon of what he calls “global guerrillas.”)
The ultimate irony here is that the U.S. military has always justly prided itself on its independence, flexibility and initiative at the small-unit level. Our people, the self-image was, fight smarter and more opportunistically than the other guys. This was true when we thought the “other guys” were the Soviets; it was obviously true when the other guys were Saddam Hussein’s uniformed troops. But in Iraq, we’re now the top-heavy, hierarchical, leaden-footed forces of central control, and our enemies are the wild-card forces with the initiative and the agility. They may be evil people who blow up civilians in suicide attacks, but to believe that they are not smart or, in their own way, courageous, is to doom ourselves to endless casualties and ultimate defeat.
Did we hear about any of this in President Bush’s recent pep talk? Perhaps his experts have not yet grasped it.
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