The war in Iraq, like the Vietnam War, faces American policymakers with the infuriating difficulty of engaging in asymmetric warfare against a shadowy enemy. Once again, U.S. forces that venture far from their bases meet ambushes and booby traps set up by a mysterious army whose fighters show little regard for their own lives and melt easily into the civilian population.
In Vietnam, U.S. forces staged attacks along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to cut off the Viet Cong's military supply lines. In Iraq, semi-automatic rifles left behind by Saddam's army are so plentiful that they sell on the street for about the cost of a pack of cigarettes.
Yet the stakes of the present battle may be even higher. Domino theory was a sham, but failure in Iraq could destabilize the region, dealing a victory to terrorist groups. After all, it was the triumph of the jihad against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan that inspired the modern monster that is al-Qaida.
Guerrilla warfare dates back to 1808, when the newly installed King Joseph of Spain, a foreign Bonaparte, sought unsuccessfully to liberate the country's peasantry from their ecclesiastical overlords. The peasants rallied behind their oppressors. "That was all that mattered for the Spaniards," writes Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "not what was proposed, but who proposed it."
The same appears to be true in Iraq, where a reported 83 percent of Sunnis want U.S. forces to leave the country immediately. Iraq's insurgents have found plenty of new recruits eager to kill coalition forces. Iraq's intelligence chief estimates that the insurgency now numbers over 200,000 fighters.
U.S. policy assumes that a participatory Iraqi government will quell the insurgency by offering representation to disparate Iraqi interests groups, but the continued presence of U.S. troops threatens to de-legitimize the new government and prevent it from providing a locus for national unity.
Are we repeating the mistake we made in Vietnam? Should America cut its losses and pull out? Certainly not.
When President Nixon pulled out of Vietnam, the government of South Vietnam was left helpless against the North Vietnamese onslaught. Iraq would be defenseless against the internal strife that would ensue if America left. U.S. occupation is divisive, but anarchy is explosive.
It is too soon to leave Iraq, but we must prepare the government for our withdrawal. The scandal over U.S. body armor has overshadowed a glaring difficulty for the Iraqi government: it wasn't until almost two years after the coalition invasion that a single Iraqi battalion equipped with appropriate armor was deployed. The new government has only 10,000 deployable troops.
We should not have waited to get serious about training Iraqi security forces. Iraq's government must convince its people that it has a monopoly on violence, so that the payoffs of participation outweigh the payoffs of rebellion. A government that remains perpetually dependent on U.S. assistance cannot inspire that confidence.
Last month, the world witnessed the bravery of Iraq's voters on Election Day. Even Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army helped maintain order during the vote, and afterwards Sadr and other Shia leaders made unprecedented attempts to reach out to Sunnis in a bid for national unity.
We first made the promise of freedom for Iraq years ago. In the coming months, we must finally deliver.
Nate Goralnik '06 shouts out to Club Sex Spiros.
