Posted on 11/25/2003 7:37:17 AM PST by Ryan Bailey
Will Iraq be like the Philippines? By MORTON KONDRACKE, Newspaper Enterprise Association November 20, 2003
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 (AEI) 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 (1898-1899) 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 later subdued the insurrection 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, which 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.
Until recently, local military commanders were spending funds from the $800 million in cash that Hussein had hoarded, but that money is gone and has not yet been replaced with 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 30 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.
(Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.)
"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 30 years'." Modern Political Scientists must not neglect the obvious conclusion that today's crop of democratic candidates is de facto and de jure hoping that Iraqi Insurgents will affect the outcome of the 2004 election. In this way they are indubitably supporting our enemy and the saddest thing about it is that it is all for political gain. This programme of the DNC based on hoping for American Deaths in Iraq to persist as a thorn in the side of the Bush Administration is not even about Bush himself but about the Christian ethics and moral absolutes that he stands for.
Our enemies, meaning Al-Qaeda and other Iraqi insurgents, are also doing their best to procure a democratic victory in 2004, for by that they know they could again have freedom to propagate World Terror as they did leading up to September 11th. You see after September 11th, our President said essentially that we had had enough and now were compelled to respond to global Terror. Today's Democratic Candidates are intent on telling us that we have not had enough and we should go back to the useless strategy of appeasement. Did appeasement work in the past ? Do American deaths not matter to these traitors ?
most importantly of all, we must recognize the importance of this election, the future of mankind may hinge on whether the United States is willing to lead the world in taking a stand against Terrorism. I have predicted that Al-Qaeda would actively seek to cause mass immigration to the United States for the sole purpose of registering Democratic voters. Given the outcome of the last election, they might be led to believe that every vote could make the difference, even though most actual estimates show Bush winning by a great margin.
Let the Al-Qaeda/DNC Terror Syndicate know that we are on to their programme and that as George Bush, the elder said; "This will not stand"
Historical parallels are difficult because they are never exact...so it's easy to miss crucial differences.
I thought that was a given. Philippines.
It also didn't mention that filipina women are hot.
Good call! Beat me to it.
These groups have been around, in one form or another, for a hundred years now. Does anyone think they are going away?
I'm not certain that great economic hardship would come from an intensive land blockade of any Iraqi border which was a source of trouble. You could never blockade it as well as you perhaps could do the Philipine Islands, but . . .
The Democrats tried to prevent Bush from implementing his economic plan, and hoped that the economy wouldn't be in obvious good health in '04.The Democrats criticized Bush's seizure of Iraq from Saddam & Sons, and are hoping to be able to make Bush's decision look bad with the help of murderous efforts by al Qaeda and the Ba'athist Party.
Their hope lies not in any objective reality but in the possibility that they--journalism included--will be able to fool half of the people on election day. And that George Soros will be able to buy the election for "the party of the little guy."
We may succeed in democratizing Iraq. Wouldn't that be wonderful?
The country may break up into separate states with different problems.
I can see democracy taking hold in the Kurdish north - if it can settle its problems with the Turks.
The Shiite South may go the way of Iran - meaning that, if Iran democratizes, the South will follow its lead.
The Sunni triangle may have to be destroyed.
Basically, the population can decide it likes us and will follow our lead
or
it can decides it fears us and will follow our lead
or
it can decide it hates us and we destroy it
or
it can decide it hates us and will throw us out
We have to be prepared for all contingencies.
Bury the terrorist in pig guts and make a big show of it.
This crap will stop in about a month. Simple.
gee, thanks. I wish you were on the NSC. You could have saved American taxpayers billions of dollars, not to mention several hundred dead soldiers and several thousand injured. Why didn't the Russians think of this in Afghanistan, or Chechyna?
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