Still Marching into Hell?

By Ron Kraybill

January, 2006

"Yes, yes, and the sky is falling, the sky is falling," taunted my conservative pastor friend in Minnesota for a full year, responding to essays I sent him about why the US invasion of Iraq would fail and make America more insecure than ever.    Sadly, Joel, unlike in the folk story, the sky is falling for the people of Iraq and the hapless American soldiers sent to fight there.

Below is a piece written in November, 2004, as the US was launching a major assault on Fallujah.   Fifteen months later, and several vicious turns farther in the terrible cycle of escalation of violence, the analysis continues to be the same, with one major change.  The wielding of violence is finally diminishing the power at home of those American leaders who on falsified premises led our nation into a trap that attention to history would have helped us avoid. 

In the last year I've had opportunity to speak senior US military officers.   I was astonished at their anger at the Iraq situation.   One used an obscenity to refer to Donald Rumsfeld.  Several others spoke eloquently about the limits of force to resolve the situation in Iraq.  "As long as people in Iraq don't have water and jobs," said one, "we're wasting our time." 

"Marching into Hell", is the title I used in 2004.  Today I alter the title with a question mark.   Is America perhaps ready at last to look seriously at alternatives to force as a way of building a just and secure world?

A lifetime in peace negotiations has given me considerable exposure to insurgency movements. The past never fully predicts the future, but it often offers useful pointers. Here is what we can say about those fighting against the United States in Iraq and what patterns of the past suggest we can expect:

1. The majority of those fighting the American forces see themselves as patriots and lovers of their homeland, fighting for the future of their sons and daughters. They are not carefully calculating gains against costs, rather they fight with the passion of those who consider dignity and home to be under attack. Foreigners, by all accounts, are a minority, less than one in five.
2. Their doctrine of resistance is guerilla warfare, whose aim is not to defeat but rather to exhaust the enemy in a protracted war that cannot be won by conventional means. Guerillas seek just enough engagement with the enemy to attract heavy investment of soldiers and equipment. Then they fade, for a repeat in other times and locations.
3. Guerilla warfare advances not through military success but by turning the broad population against the enemy. “We spent a lot of time carefully selecting locations where we felt we could get the army to engage in major action that would really anger local people,” a veteran of a modern insurgency in Asia once told me. “Then we would work hard to build trust with local people afterwards.”

If these patterns hold true in Fallujah and other locations of pitched battle in Iraq , the outcome is likely to look like this:

1. Just enough resistance will be invested in a given hotspot to attract heavy attack and serious damage from the Americans. American troops will always “win”, at the cost of high losses to civilians, homes and public structures.
2. It will be discovered in the days following “victory” that most of the insurgents fled prior to or during battle and are continuing their struggle from multiple other locations.
3. Enormous attention will be given in Iraq and abroad to the damage caused by the Americans and the suffering imposed by them at the site of battle. The stories told will be a mixture of significant truth and fabrication. It will be impossible for the U.S. to defend itself against these stories because there will be no denying the core truth of vast destruction and suffering.
4. The extremist wing of the resistance will retaliate against any persons thought to have cooperated with the invading Americans. Average Iraqis will face the exhausting dilemma of navigating between widely despised foreigner occupiers and ruthless “you're either for us or against us” extremists who have risen to power trying to drive them out. Conventional powers commonly assume that all resistance is alike, deserving to be crushed. “Deadenders,” was the word Rumsfeld used for months to describe a broad range of opponents to the American invasion. This black/white approach strengthens extremists by driving even more moderate resistance into their arms.
5. Voices of moderation will fall silent. The influence of thoughtful people that exists in every society and whose strengthening is critical to any hope for sustainable peace will grow weaker due to intimidation, elimination, and exhaustion. Polarization will deepen; violence as a way of life will become more deeply entrenched in Iraqi society.
6. Following American “victory”, fighting will end in Fallujah or subsequent sites of battle for a number of months. Normal life will gradually return. But after a lull, and after civilians have returned, guerilla attacks will be renewed and the cycle will begin again.
7. In the meantime, a new wave of recruits, incensed at the barbarity of the foreigners, will have joined the insurgents. Conflict throughout the country will continue to spiral upward.
8. Internal conflict among Iraqis will increasingly become a major factor. One reason is the disappearance of Iraqi moderates who might build bridges within. Another is the inescapable dynamics of armed resistance: autonomy and issuing orders becomes a way of life for insurgent leaders. Protracted armed struggle brings money and power and rewards intransigence. Those whose power has arisen in violence rarely yield their resources readily to anyone, including their fellow countrymen.
9. It will be deemed necessary by American leaders - whose internal power has also risen vastly from the threat and wielding of violence - to throw yet more soldiers, weapons, and money into the fray as the violence and chaos increase.
10. Return to step one, at a more murderous and destructive level than ever.

With few exceptions, this has been the pattern so far in Iraq and there is little reason to believe it will not be repeated. The frightening truth is that America is now trapped, having played repeatedly the role most desired for it by guerilla strategists. They could not succeed in demonizing the U.S. in the eyes of average Iraqis without active help and so far American leadership has assisted at every step.

The only way out is to remove all doubt that this is an invasion motivated primarily by American imperial purposes. America must face the truth – our leaders pretended to have global support but in fact had little all along, and made things worse by insisting on controlling everything about the invasion and reconstruction. The price of getting out with any credibility left at all will be bearing the continued costs of stabilizing Iraq, while giving up American control over events and structures there: administrative, economic, political, and military.

The history of conventional military powers directly involved in guerilla warfare abroad suggests loss of control is likely. In the present situation, things are already far beyond American control and are in fact, moving rapidly towards loss of constructive influence . The big question is how much more pain Americans will bear – and tragically that suffered by ordinary Iraqis will be exponentially higher - before admitting the folly of thinly veiled unilateralism and narrow reliance on force as a tool for change.

Stark choices are at hand: America will either choose a path of genuine multilateralism with the accountabilities political and ethical that come with it, or bleed itself into degradation. The sooner the true sharing of control happens, the more likely it is that others will step in and give meaningful assistance in addressing a problem that threatens a vast region. The longer it takes, the harder it will be to ever recover from the now globally held perception that beneath smooth talk of liberation it is arrogance and selfishness that motivate America . Relinquishing the ability to call the shots in Iraq may seem to some a bitter price to pay.   The alternative? In the best case scenario, a decade of war and enduring alienation from most of the world.

Click here for a quick overview of ideas for true security.

By Ron Kraybill
Professor, Conflict Transformation Program
Eastern Mennonite University
email: kraybilr at emu.edu

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