Guerilla warfare...

An email from an author (Bank's Bandits) and former Green Beret:

Yesterday I received the story and picture again about the marine in Iraq holding the child and rocking her to sleep--a child who had been shot in the head and whose whole family had been executed by insurgents. It was a great picture and story, but it prompted this response from me to the writer (edited and developed in more detail here). I thought I would share these thoughts with you for what they are worth.

Great story and picture.

The bottom line is that this is what it is all about in the long run. Will the fundamental "humanity" of the majority of our troops eventually override, in the minds of the people directly affected, the horrors of war that have been visited upon that region (largely, or at least most recently, by us). When the shooting war for us is finally over and all the dust settles, how will we and our troops be viewed after we leave. If this kind of humanitarian action by our individual troops is not one of the paramount things that "most" of the people of that region think about when they think about us--then we have been whistling in the dark in trying to bring democracy to that area by imposing it at the point of a gun.

We might well ask, aside from the killings and maimings that inevitably characterize our continuing and deadly running war with the insurgents (a war that clearly has grown worse rather than better), what kind of lasting impression will we actually have made upon the people of that region by the collective kindnesses and humanitarian acts of our troops and by those working for us in that region? What acts, performed by our men and women while the heat of battle continued to rage all around them, will the Iraqui people note and remember, share with their children, and talk about in the years to come?

This is what Mao meant when he said that to wage successful guerilla warfare you have to learn "to swim in the water with the fishes." To do this, the great mass of the common people of the country, not just the "currently in power" political or economic leaders, must come to understand and accept what it is you are in their country fighting for. If they do, and if they accept and share your goals, only then can you "swim among them" in safety even if you are "foreigners." If you do not gain that essential support of the mass of the people over time, you are doomed to failure and no amount of modern airpower and weaponry will sustain you. Indeed, that is precisely what happened to us in Vietnam. The mass of the common people of that country rallied to the aims and goals of Ho Chi Min--and so the Viet Cong could "swim safely" among the people. With a few exceptions, we failed miserably to win "the hearts and minds" of the people to our side of that conflict. (One exception were the fiercely independent Montagnard tribesman, who were won over to our side by the teams of Special Forces men who lived and 'swam among them" and obtained their loyal support to the bitter end--and beyond.) A recognition of all the reasons why we failed to gain the support of the Vietnam people in general, despite the millions we spent there for their defense, is still a matter too bitter for most Americans to deal with rationally, but those reasons would have to begin with our indefensible support of the wretchedly venal and corrupt regimes in the South that had always victimized the people for the benefit of the very few.

In sum, if the goals that this President insists are the reasons we invaded Iraq in the first place are ever to be realized, then some real and recognizeable change will have to take place in the attitude toward us as presently held by the great mass of the Iraqi people. Furthermore, if this were going to happen at all, it would have to begin to happen very soon. Any fair evaluation of where we now stand in Iraq would have to recognize that the chances of this happening are diminishing daily rather than gaining in probablility as the factional and religious "civil war" worsens.

At present, the simple fact is that there is no persuasive evidence that a large portion of the Iraqi people, much less the majority, welcomes our presence there and accepts our role in Iraq as an essential tool for bridging the gap between the dictatorship of Sadaam and the establishment of a real democracy. Indeed, many of those who will share in the resolution of these questions, do not want a real democracy at all; they want a country which will advance their own religous and economic priorities. If, when we finally leave Iraq we are viewed primarily as a despised "occupying army," if most of the people there actually view us with nothing but hate and contempt, if they feel that collectively we have "raped and ruined" their country, then everything we have done will avail us naught in terms of the so-called goals of our invasion. If that is the way we are viewed when we leave Iraq, we will have effected no fundamental changes for the better in that region. Indeed, the brutal and deadly internecine strife and warfare which is already underway--the "civil war," if you will--will burst out full-blown when we leave and how the partisan religous and secular leaders of Iraq eventually resolve those differences is the thing that will determine the political and social character of the country for many years to come.

The truth is that we don't know the end to that story yet. We don't yet know how the majority of people in that country (and in that region) view our presence there, although we have every reason to believe the great majority resents our presence and wants us out. History, after we leave, will have the final say on whether our "invasion" of Iraq accomplished anything of real and lasting benefit to that country, and--just as important--to the real and lasting benefit of our country. Only time and the perspective of history will tell whether our terrible sacrifices in terms of human lives, and of the suffering of our military people, and of the total costs to our nation, can ever be justified.

Ed