Will the insurgents win if they don't lose?
In today's Washington Post, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have a jointly-written article, "Results, Not Timetables, Matter in Iraq." The main thrust of the piece is that those calling for an "exit strategy" of the US military from Iraq are dangerously misguided.

The essential prerequisite for an acceptable exit strategy is a sustainable outcome, not an arbitrary time limit. For the outcome in Iraq will shape the next decade of American foreign policy. A debacle would usher in a series of convulsions in the region as radicals and fundamentalists moved for dominance, with the wind seemingly at their backs. Wherever there are significant Muslim populations, radical elements would be emboldened. As the rest of the world related to this reality, its sense of direction would be impaired by the demonstration of American confusion in Iraq. A precipitate American withdrawal would be almost certain to cause a civil war that would dwarf Yugoslavia's, and it would be compounded as neighbors escalated their current involvement into full-scale intervention.

One thing that caught my eye were these two declarations in the same paragraph:

It is axiomatic that guerrillas win if they do not lose. ...complete security in 70 percent of the country is better than 70 percent security in 100 percent of the country -- because fully secure areas can be models and magnets for those who are suffering in insecure places.

Wretchard disagrees with the first axiom, pointing out,

There are hundreds of guerilla groups throughout the world that will never 'lose' yet we never hear of them, ...

I also do not quite agree with Messrs. Kissinger and Schultz in that one regard (though I tremble before their credentials and authority, to be sure). Consider again their second proposition - that 100 percent security in 70 percent of the country is better than 70 percent security in 100 percent of the country. Iraqi and American forces are close now to that 100/70 level. The insurgency may not be crushed for some time to come, but its continuation in roughly a third of the country does not really qualify as success for them.

The reason is that what is happening in Iraq almost qualifies as a civil war. A civil war is one in which contending combatants fight over which of them will control the central government. One side or the other will achieve that objective, and that side is the winner. The other side may well continue fighting, but as long as it does not control the central government, it loses.

The American unpleasantness of 1861-1865 was not literally a civil war. It was a war not for control of a central government, but over whether there would be two governments where there had been only one. The South was not interested in taking over the federal government, nor was the North oriented toward taking over the South's national-political apparatus. The North's objective was to destroy the South's government, the South's objective was nothing more than preventing it.

Hence, for the War of Southern Succession it was true that the South would win if it didn't lose. But the North would lose if it didn't win.

Such is not the case for the Iraqi insurgency. The near-future, democratically-elected government of Iraq can win even if the insurgents don't lose. Yet the insurgents cannot win merely by continuing to blow things up and assassinations, as harmful as those things are. The reason is that their own concepts of victory do not allow for even a minimally functioning democracy in Iraq. And a 100/70 Iraqi democracy spells defeat for Islamist terrorists and unregenerate Baathists alike.

None of this is to claim that the insurgency is no very serious matter. It must be contained and then crushed. But its continuation, by itself, does not constitute victory by the insurgents nor loss for democratic Iraq. The question yet to be answered is how energetically the next Iraqi government will move against it.

by Donald Sensing, 1/25/2005 08:33:15 PM. Permalink |