Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: Failure after Falluja?

Failure after Falluja? 
November 29, 2004
Ivan Eland
The U.S. military “victory” in Falluja is unlikely to change the
dismal course of the guerilla war in Iraq. Military history has
repeatedly shown why the cliché “winning the battle and losing the
war” has crept into popular culture. Moreover, winning back Falluja
the way the U.S. did is likely to be a sure prescription for military
defeat in the wider Iraq war.
To be fair, blunders by the Bush administration politicos have put the
U.S. armed forces in an untenable position. Especially after the
aborted U.S. offensive on Falluja in April, continuing to allow the
Iraqi insurgents a safe haven to attack the U.S. military and Iraqi
security services would make U.S. forces seem weak. Alternatively,
taking the town block-by-block with more lightly armed U.S.
forces—sans the heavy firepower of artillery, armored vehicles, flying
gunships, and jet aircraft—would have eliminated the Falluja safe
haven without destroying the town, but with much heavier U.S.
casualties. (The British allies, with years of experience fighting
urban guerillas in Northern Ireland, have been urging the United
States to take such a more restrained approach). But because a
plurality of the American public has now soured on this war of choice
rather than necessity, such U.S. carnage would undermine support for
continuation of the Iraq conflict. U.S. policymakers remember that in
two other wars of choice—Lebanon in the early 1980s and Somalia in the
early 1990s—U.S. public opinion evaporated for continuation of
military operations after only a small number of casualties.
As a result, the Bush administration allowed the U.S. military to
retake Falluja in its preferred way—with the gloves off using massive
amounts of offensive firepower. Tactically, the use of such firepower
is very effective in winning toe-to-toe battles against both
conventional armies and guerrillas. Yet even in more conventional
wars, winners of battles do not always win the war. George Washington
lost most of the battles of the American Revolution but over time
eventually wore down the British public’s tolerance for war in the
faraway colonies. Robert E. Lee—revered in the American South to this
day for his genius in winning battles using swashbuckling offensive
tactics—was a strategic incompetent who lost the war for the
Confederacy. Although Lee was triumphant in many tactical engagements,
the enormous Confederate casualties caused by his offensive tactics
wore down the smaller gray armies faster than their larger blue Union
counterparts. Instead, Lee should have used a “defense in depth”
strategy that withdrew the gray forces into the vast southern lands
and avoided a battle of attrition that he could only lose.
In counterinsurgency warfare, winning battles while losing the war is
even more common. The French won the Battle of Algiers but were
ultimately worn out by Algerian nationalist guerrillas. In the Vietnam
War, the 1968 Tet Offensive—the invasion of South Vietnam by the North
Vietnamese and the Viet Cong—resulted in a U.S. military victory and
the end of the Viet Cong as an effective fighting force. Yet
politically, the strong communist offensive belied the Johnson
administration’s assertions that the United States was winning the war
and ultimately led to a U.S. defeat, as U.S. public support for the
conflict began draining away. 
Similarly, destroying Falluja with heavy firepower was a military
victory but likely will be a political disaster. Although effective
U.S. deception about the direction of the attack on Falluja probably
surprised, trapped and killed a significant number of guerrillas, many
got away. In this war, the insurgents have shown themselves capable of
learning, and they will probably be less prone in the future to slug
it out with a more powerful enemy. Most guerrilla movements have to
learn this the hard way—for example, the communists had to do so in
Vietnam.
Politically, Falluja came to symbolize Iraqi national resistance to a
foreign occupier (notwithstanding the administration’s propaganda that
the insurgents consist only of foreign terrorists and former Saddam
loyalists). Even a leaked report by the intelligence officers of a
Marine unit fighting in Falluja admitted that leveling the city with
heavy firepower would probably act as a rallying cry for resistance
among Iraqis—much as the loss of the Alamo did for Texans in fighting
the Mexicans in the 1830s. After U.S. forces have devastated Falluja,
the idea that paltry and delayed U.S. assistance for reconstruction
will win Fallujan “hearts and minds” is ludicrous.
Moreover, the insurgency seems to have coordinated attacks in other
Iraqi cities—for example, Mosul—to demonstrate that the loss of
Falluja means little to the larger insurgency. The guerillas realize
something that the Bush administration can’t seem to grasp: The real
battle for “hearts and minds” is being fought not only in Falluja,
Mosul, Samarra, and Baghdad, but in Fargo, Mobile, Seattle, and
Baltimore. And public opinion polls show that the administration seems
to be losing the political battle in both Iraq and at home. If the
guerillas are not decisively defeated, they’ll win by waiting until
the U.S. public is tired of the pointless carnage and demands that
U.S. forces withdraw from the Iraqi war zone. 
Unfortunately, Iraq is then likely to descend into chaos and civil
war. So despite Bush administration boasting of killing 1,200
guerrillas in Falluja, the future of Iraq looks grim indeed. 
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Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace &
Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and
author of the books The Empire Has No Clothes, and Putting “Defense”
Back into U.S. Defense Policy. 
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