November
19, 2003
Iraq Isn't Vietnam - Let's Hope It's Like The Philippines
By Mort
Kondracke
While President Bush's critics persistently liken Iraq to Vietnam,
it's possible that Iraq could resemble the Philippines, where
the United States waged a successful anti-guerrilla war from 1899
to 1902.
Parallels between Iraq and the Philippines are drawn by American
Enterprise Institute military expert Thomas Donnelly, who argues
that counter-insurgency struggles "most assuredly can be won."
Like the latest war in Iraq, the Spanish-American War was waged
by a first-term Republican president, William McKinley, allegedly
using doctored intelligence and at the instigation of jingoistic
ideologues.
It was won swiftly, too, with minimal casualties (379 U.S. troops
lost in the Philippines) and with the president declaring that
the United States was the "liberator" of the Philippine people.
Unfortunately, as Donnelly wrote in an article on AEI's Web site,
U.S. occupying forces soon were attacked by nationalist guerrillas
who killed 4,200 Americans before the United States won in 1902.
Donnelly asserts that in Iraq, the United States has the advantage
of fighting not against nationalists who could legitimately argue
that they were fighting against imperialists, but against Baathists
who offer Iraq only a return to tyranny.
However, to win in Iraq, Donnelly argues, the Bush administration
needs to follow the example set by McKinley: provide enough troops
and allow local commanders enough autonomy to tailor their tactics
to local circumstances.
Another Washington foreign policy scholar, Geoffrey Kemp of the
Nixon Center, agrees that the United States can win in Iraq, but
he draws parallels to the costly British victory in the Boer War
in South Africa that occurred simultaneously with the Philippine
insurgency.
"Britain was at the height of its imperial power and contemptuous
of everyone else," Kemp told me. "The whole world cheered every
time the Boers [Dutch-speaking colonialists] won a victory and
humiliated the British. At the end of it, Britain won, but it
had to abandon its splendid isolation."
The difference is, of course, that the United States is not fighting
to control Iraq or even to stay there. Moreover, while much of
the world may resent U.S. power, it has to quake at the prospect
of a victory by followers of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
So, the question is, how to win? In an interview, Donnelly said
the United States needs more troops in Iraq than it presently
has there - "but they have to be the right kind of troops. They
need to be dismounted, out of their tanks, walking around and
getting to know the locals."
In the article he wrote with AEI researcher Vance Serchuk, Donnelly
argued that "the first lesson of counterinsurgency ... is to encourage
innovative, adaptive military leadership at the local level, rather
than trying to micromanage the conflict from afar."
In the Philippines, the insurgency was concentrated in southwest
Luzon, much as it is concentrated in the Sunni heartland of Iraq
around Baghdad.
"Pacifying" an area, he told me, involves "bringing in overwhelming
force so that the price of striking by the enemy is very high,
then bringing in the Iraqis to help police the area and quickly
slamming in civilian and economic reconstruction to make things
better for the population.
"Once you've thrown a wet blanket onto the fire in one place,
you go on to the next," he said. In the Philippines, the U.S.
cause was aided by the emergence of a nationwide political movement,
the Federalist Party, that favored modernization along American
lines.
In Iraq, no pro-U.S. party has emerged. The Bush administration
hopes to build support by giving more power to the Iraqi Governing
Council.
Former Clinton administration diplomat Marc Ginsberg, just back
from Iraq, says a key to winning political support is simply "buying
it" with more money. Local military commanders until recently
were spending funds from the $800 million in cash that Hussein
had hoarded, but that money is gone and has not yet been replaced
by flows from the $87 billion appropriation just passed by Congress.
According to Donnelly, "the real strategic center of gravity,"
both in the Philippines and Iraq, was and is "U.S. public opinion."
Even though 4,200 Americans were killed in the Philippines and
insurgents stepped up their attacks in 1900 in hopes of affecting
the outcome of the U.S. elections, "the American public rallied
around the flag and returned McKinley to the White House with
the largest electoral majority in nearly thirty years."
Citing other experts, Donnelly contends that Americans are fundamentally
more "defeat-phobic" than "casualty-phobic" - more worried about
losing a war than losing soldiers to win a war.
"It is critical for the Bush administration to continue to articulate
the importance of the U.S. mission in Iraq and explain the nature
of the progress we are making there," he wrote.
In the process, the administration needs to educate the public
that Vietnam is not the only guerrilla war America has ever fought
and that we can win this one because we've done it before.
Mort Kondracke is the Executive
Editor of Roll Call.
