Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings

Learning from History

Commentary by Niall Ferguson. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR. Beirut, Lebanon. "I think that this could still fail." Those words - uttered by a senior American officer in Baghdad last month - probably gave opponents of the war in Iraq a bit of a kick. Judging by the polls, a majority of Americans probably now share that view. According to Gallup, 57 percent of Americans say it was not worth going to war in the first place. Around the same percentage say things are going badly today. Yet history strongly suggests that an American withdrawal from Iraq in the near future would be a disaster. As another U.S. officer told The New York Times recently: "If we let go of the insurgency ... then this country could fail and go back into civil war and chaos." People in Lebanon need no reminder that failed American interventions can leave "civil war and chaos" in their wake. But what happened in Beirut in 1983 is part of a pattern going back to Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s, and forward to Haiti in the 1990s. To talk glibly of "finding a way out of Iraq," as if it were just a matter of hailing a cab and heading for Baghdad airport, is to underestimate the danger of a bloody internecine war after the American exit. Already, a substantial section of the Sunni minority in Iraq is engaged in a campaign of violence designed to prevent a stable majoritarian regime from emerging. The Shiites are preparing to defend their newfound political power by force of arms. Meanwhile, many young Kurds are preparing to fight a war of independence. Indeed, it is not too much to say that civil war in Iraq has already begun, since the majority of people killed in this year's bombings have been Iraqis, not Americans. Instead of throwing up their hands in an irresponsible fit of despair, Americans need to learn from the past: not just from their other premature departures, but also from earlier victories over insurgencies. For not all insurgencies are successful. Indeed, of all the attempts in the past century by irregular indigenous forces to expel regular foreign forces, around a third have failed. In 1917 British forces successfully invaded Mesopotamia, got to Baghdad, overthrew its Ottoman rulers and sought - in the words of the general who led them - to "liberate" its people. The British presence in Iraq was legitimized by both international law (it was designated a League of Nations mandate) and by a modicum of democracy (a referendum was held among local sheikhs to confirm the creation of a British-style constitutional monarchy). Despite all this, in 1920 there was a full-scale insurgency - the official term at the time - against the continuing British military presence. Some may object that warfare today is a very different matter from warfare 85 years ago. Yet the striking thing about the events of 1920 is how very like the events of our own time they were. No doubt, both the United States and Britain had greater firepower than their rivals. But the advantages tend to cancel one another out. The reality of what is sometimes called "asymmetric warfare" is how very symmetrical it really is. When highly trained professional soldiers are pitted against indigenous insurgents, much of the high-end weaponry possessed by the former is rendered useless. In practice, insurgency is about leveling the military playing field, exploiting the advantages of local knowledge to stage hit-and-run attacks against the foreign occupiers, as well as anybody thought to be collaborating with them. Indeed, if there is asymmetry, it lies in the advantages enjoyed by the insurgents. The cost of training and equipping an American soldier is relatively high; by contrast, life is tragically cheap among the young men of Baghdad and Fallujah. Even if the insurgents lose 10 men for every one that they kill, they are still winning. Why, then, was it that the British were able to crush the insurgency of 1920? Three lessons stand out. The first is that the American enterprise in Iraq today is dangerously undermanned. When General Eric Shinseki, then army chief of staff, estimated in February 2003 that "something of the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" might be needed to stabilize Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, he was dismissed by then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as "wildly off the mark." I think he was indeed off the mark - but only because he almost certainly underestimated how many troops were needed. In 1920, when the first Iraqi insurgency began, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000, of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting. During the insurgency, a further 15,000 or so troops arrived as reinforcements, bringing the total force to around 135,000. Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military personnel currently in Iraq (around 138,000). The trouble is that the population of Iraq was probably just over 3 million in 1920, whereas today it is in the region of 24 million. That means that the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was then, at most, 23 to 1. Today, by contrast, the ratio of Iraqis to American service personnel is around 179 to 1. To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1 today, the number of American troops would need to be in the region of one million. Two other problems besides the manpower problem currently beset the American presence in Iraq. In 1920 the British quelled the insurgency with great ruthlessness. They relied on air power and punitive expeditions to inflict harsh collective punishments on villages believed to have supported the insurgents. The United States has not been above using brutal methods in Iraq. Yet it is impossible to believe that the now notorious practice of humiliating and indeed torturing captives has yielded any significant benefits when compared with what it has cost America's reputation. What the Germans used to call schrecklichkeit, or "frightfulness," may have its place in warfare; the British certainly believed so. But the American brand of schrecklichkeit has been almost entirely counter-productive. The third problem has to do with timing and expectations. It was revealing that last month The Wall Street Journal reported Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's recent pronouncement that American forces should aim to work to a "10-30-30" timetable: 10 days should suffice to topple a rogue regime; 30 to establish order in its wake; and 30 to prepare for the next military undertaking. I am all in favor of the 10-30-30 timetable - so long as the metric is years, not days. For it may well take around 10 years to establish order in Iraq; another 30 to establish the rule of law; and quite possibly another 30 years to create a stable democracy. Those American officers who say that it could take "years, many years" to succeed in Iraq are therefore right. But the Bush administration has just three and a half years left. Is it credible that American troops will still be in Iraq for even another four years after that? The insurgents are confident they will not be. They know that American democracy puts time on their side. Once again, the contrast with the British experience is instructive. Although Iraq was formally granted its independence in 1932, there was still some form of British presence in the country until the later 1950s, around 40 years after the original occupation. If we acknowledge that the United States simply does not have the luxury of time that the British enjoyed and cannot be similarly ruthless, can it at least increase the manpower at its disposal in Iraq? The official answer is that Iraqi security forces will soon be ready to play an effective role in policing. Past experience suggests that this may be unrealistic. It is just as probable that the training Iraqi soldiers are currently receiving will prove useful to them only when they fight one another in the coming Iraqi civil war. What, then, of unused American resources? Almost no one (least of all the military) wants to go back to the draft. So could the existing system of an all volunteer force somehow be expanded to double (at least) the forces available? It seems unlikely. Indeed, the current system is already showing alarming signs of stress and strain as more and more is asked of the supposed "weekend soldiers" of the Reserve and the National Guard, who account for roughly two-fifths of the force in Iraq. In December, the Army National Guard admitted that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the preceding two months. Many members of the Individual Ready Reserve have been contesting the army's right to call them up. How did the British address the manpower problem in 1920? The answer is that they depended heavily on soldiers from India, who accounted for more than 87 percent of combatant troops in the counter-insurgency campaign. Perhaps, then, the greatest problem faced by the Anglophone empire of our own time is very simple: The United Kingdom had the Indian Army; the United States does not. Indeed, by a rich irony, the only significant auxiliary forces available to the Pentagon today are none other than ... the British Army. Unfortunately, British troops are far too few to be analogous to the Sikhs, Mahrattas and Baluchis who fought so effectively in Iraq in 1920. No one should wish for an over-hasty American withdrawal from Iraq. It would be the prelude to a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence, with inevitable spillovers into and interventions from neighboring countries. Rather, it is time for all concerned to acknowledge just how thinly stretched American forces in Iraq currently are. There is a desperate need to address this problem, and soon, whether by finding new allies (is it time to send U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi?), radically expanding the accelerated citizenship program for immigrants, or lowering the (historically high) educational requirements currently demanded by military recruiters. Yes, as that anonymous officer admitted, the Bush administration's policy in Iraq could indeed still fail. The point too few American liberals seem to grasp is how high the price will be if it does fail. It is a point, unfortunately, that also eludes most of America's allies. Does it also elude Rumsfeld? If "10-30-30" are the numbers that concern him, I begin to fear that it does. The numbers that matter right now are 179 to 1. That is not only the ratio of Iraqis to American. It is starting to look alarmingly like the odds against American success. 16th June 2005 Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His latest book, "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire," has just been published in paperback by Penguin.

posted by Tony @ Saturday, July 16, 2005