January 18, 2007
Guerrillas Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 PM EST An interesting article in Foreign Policy titled “Insurgencies Rarely Win—And Iraq Won’t Be Any Different (Maybe),” takes on the oddly durable historical myth that guerrilla insurgents always win, and thus is worth a look. Donald Stoker, a professor at the Naval War College’s Montery Program, notes that in the last century guerrillas have at different times lost wars in, among other places, Malaya, Greece, the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia, Angola, Peru, and South Africa, in some of these places more than once, while winning in Cuba, part of Ireland, and in Algeria (though I’d add that other guerrillas subsequently lost in Algeria). Most people could quickly come up with various additions to the list of guerrilla losses—Stoker himself parenthetically adds Vietnam, won by North Vietnamese regulars—and most people would also add a few more guerrilla victories, for example Afghanistan. Stoker, however, refuses to list Afghanistan as a guerrilla victory, noting that the regime left behind by the Soviets lasted for three years, and that the Soviets pulled out as a result of economic and political weakness at home rather than as a result of military defeat. A reply to this would be that in wars of occupation, simply outlasting a regular army is much of what guerrillas need to do to win; that is what Hezbollah has twice done in Lebanon. Still, Stoker’s case is more right than wrong. The mystique of the guerrilla has a lot of sources, but a grasp of military history isn’t one of them. Stoker does make the point that what are often termed guerrilla “victories” were wars finally won by regular armies, to which guerrilla forces were useful adjuncts. He notes that Mao won the Chinese Civil War with regular forces, and I’d add that in another famous and generally miscategorized case, Tito’s Axis enemies withdrew when their main regular armies were destroyed elsewhere, by other regular armies (and a Soviet army ended the war in Yugoslavia, part of one of the better regular armies the world has ever seen). Going back to the early nineteenth century, the two most celebrated guerrilla campaigns were successful only because guerrillas were adjuncts to regular armies—this was the case in both Spain and Russia, and was the case for guerrilla forces in the American revolution too. Later in the nineteenth century, guerillas lost pretty decisively, both in innumerable colonial campaigns and in the Franco-Prussian War. As for Iraq, Stoker points out that defeating guerrilla insurgencies normally takes, on his count, eight to eleven years, and he thinks that the administration’s mismanagement has been so gross that we may see “a rare, decisive insurgent victory.” That last seems improbable. If Sunni Arab Iraqi insurgents outlast the U.S. Army, which seems quite possible, it is not clear how they can possibly defeat either Iraq’s Shiites or Iraq’s Kurds. A regular Iraqi Shiite army, probably equipped by Iranians, looks like a much better bet as the eventual victor in most of Iraq. If anyone destroys the Kurdish militias, it will be one or more regular armies—maybe a Turkish one, maybe an Iranian one, maybe both—but it will not be Sunni Arab guerrillas, and probably not Shiite militias. It is very hard to imagine how Sunni guerrillas could possibly defeat whatever sort of army Iraqi Shiites eventually produce. The mystique of the guerrilla insurgent—the conviction that history is on his side—is almost always a mistake and is often a catastrophic mistake. In this war, the greatest casualty of the guerrilla mystique is likely to be the Sunni Arab population of Iraq, who were persuaded by a myth, and some of whom believed such tactics made them invincible. One tragedy of those tactics is already unfolding in Iraq: People employing them can kill a few soldiers and many civilians, but those tactics cannot defend civilians; guerrillas can provoke an enemy to terrible brutality, but they cannot rescue the most probable victims of their provocation, those in whose name they fight, vast numbers of whom who will die in reprisals. Most historical myths are pretty harmless. Some are not.
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