Much has been said about the future of U.S. policy in Iraq. President Bush made a televised national address on January 10th calling for an increase of 21,500 U.S. troops in Iraq, focusing on securing Baghdad and Anbar Province, and increasing U.S. cooperation with Iraqi security units. Besides emphasizing micro-investing to increase the number of jobs to employ Iraqis, the new Administration line at this point shows little improvement over “the war of frenzy and attrition” pursued by the U.S. in Iraq. The U.S. and coalition troops are nowhere near numerous enough to adequately suppress the Iraqi insurgency with presence operations.
As T.E. Lawrence spoke in his memoirs about the moment he hit on a strategy for the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. He reasoned the Turks had nowhere near enough troops to secure all the land in Arabia against mobile, marauding, mounted Arab guerillas. The Turks would be stuck at defending fixed vulnerable locations, facilities, and lines of communication against attack. The Turks would never have enough soldiers to pursue and destroy the Arab insurgents. They could not go far from their bases for fear of being cut off. They could not retreat from their empire because they would never get back into Arabia. The Arab forces, accustomed to a nomadic existence, could travel to the weakest parts of the Turkish defenses, isolate them, and inflict casualties at will. The Arabs would use the Turkish lifeline to their empire, the Hejaz Railroad, as a hostage. They would bleed the Ottoman Army using its railway to sustain itself because using and protecting that line of communication was an absolute strategic requirement for their military campaign. To protect everything, the Turks would be dispersed and nowhere strong enough to cause a decisive defeat on the Arab Army. Being weak everywhere, the Arabs would use their skill in small attacks, ambush, and raids to sop the Turks of their morale. Once morally defeated, material defeat of the Turks in all of the Middle East would be imminent. Then, the British would strike a crippling blow at the Turks, and that would end the Ottoman Empire that had lasted for over 700 years.
This is instructive to another era of America’s history, when one second-tier official in the U.S. Department of State repeatedly warned of the growing escalation in Vietnam. The diplomat, George Ball, wrote numerous memorandums on his own concerning U.S. involvement in Vietnam (his official duties in the State Department concerned Europe). Ball in 1965 saw that American escalation and the introduction of ground combat units would suck the U.S. military into a bloody, demoralizing hole, fighting a war of national liberation it was not prepared to fight. The U.S. military was neither doctrinally forewarned nor materially equipped to fight against indigenous guerillas supported by the communist world. And those guerillas had the further benefit of near-immune sanctuaries in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Ball was concerned that the self-limiting political restrictions forced the United States to fight at a disadvantage for limited aims using unlimited military commitments. Ball knew that the enemy was fighting a total war, mobilizing all its resources, and that the Vietnamese communist, north and south, had high political goals. Ball knew a quagmire was brewing
George Ball did have some recommendations which might have been a more effective use of military force when considering the political restrictions. Ball suggested that the political viability, the institutional strength, and the military competence of South Vietnam’s government and armed forces would decide victory or defeat in the war in Vietnam. In the long term, he was exactly right. The South Vietnamese Government relied completely on the United States to sustain them. When America’s patience with casualties and policy drift wore out, the American public forced disengagement. By then, South Vietnam’s government was woefully unprepared to do what they should have had to do in the first place: win the war against communism on their own merits.
Ball’s most appealing solution was to use limited U.S. forces to secure cantonments in strategic locations in South Vietnam, mostly along the coast. These areas would be easily supplied by sea- and airlift. Behind this wall of impenetrable security, South Vietnam could have built the political, economic, social and cultural conditions that would have strengthened both their ability to govern and fight, and to fight the insurgency’s ideas with better developed ideas. From these strategic, secure cantonments, South Vietnamese forces could have operated further and further out, solidifying their control over their control in a “seize, hold, and develop” strategy. The South Vietnamese armed forces would have been supported by U.S. advisors, air and sea power, and possibly even a limited commitment of combat units. Ball’s solution was a brilliant approach that emphasized a long-term solution, doing it right, and relying on the Vietnamese people to do the hard work themselves. One of the problems that policy-makers might have seen in Ball’s plan was that it would take so long to become a success, but it most likely would have been successful.
Instead of the U.S. using George Ball’s strategy of strategic cantonments and the “revolutionary social development” weapon to fight a brutal, murderous insurgency, the U.S. found itself engaged with the full might and weight of communist North Vietnam. And the communist were backed up by near unlimited supplies of quality weapons by the rest of the communist world. Ironically, the Viet Cong guerillas and the North Vietnamese general staff used the basic precepts of Lawrence’s strategy for the Arab Revolt in 1916-1918 in order to defeat a modern, efficient killing machine that was the U.S. Armed Forces.
Now the U.S. faces a similar challenge in Iraq. The United States is escalating its military presence in Iraq because of frustration. The frustration has all been the cause of having no viable political policy for either Iraq or the broader Middle East. The only stated aim is “defeat of the insurgents and a democratic Iraq.” Apparently, the Bush Administration policy makers suffer some delusion that this will translate to victory over Islamists warriors and a democratic transformation of the entire Middle East in the broader, longer war. In an upside-down approach from Vietnam, the U.S. in Iraq is using limited military means to achieve an unlimited political objective. Like the inverted Vietnam problem of unlimited military force pursuing limited aims, the Iraq paradox of power and policy might not be all that much more effective now than in the 1960s and early 1970s, let alone 2003 to 2006.
Frankly, using the strategic cantonment in Iraq is a better way of matching means and ends in the Iraq war. Using sea and air power as a source of strength, the U.S. can use fewer troops than now deployed in the whole of Iraq to secure the Shi’a south and the Kurdish north. Maritime and air supremacy, and the high mobility of our expeditionary land forces, could use these secure bases areas to strike deep into Iraq at insurgents without the vulnerabilities and liabilities of an occupying power, the problems foreshadowed by Lawrence. The middle and west of Iraq would be the place where Iraq’s legal government would have to perform effectively at governance and counter-guerilla warfare. They would have the strategic cantonments where they could build their capability for governing and fighting. They would have the protection of a much-reduced U.S. combat capability and full access to air and sea support. The reduced numbers of U.S. troops needed for this strategy would save the American military. Also, the U.S. would still be in Iraq, and the Persian Gulf, and be in a central position in which to exercise military control over political events, like intervention by Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel, or Turkey in Iraq’s civil war.
T.E. Lawrence strategic genius was predictive of the U.S. challenges both in Vietnam and Iraq. George Ball’s alternative to escalation in Vietnam in 1965 was an equally brilliant political policy. The U.S. needs to learn its lessons and the lessons learned by others in order to be smarter than its problems and better than the challenges presented.
