US May Strike At Ba'athists in Syria

This is a rebellion now and can no longer be called an insurgency, which is spontaneous or loosely organized, to a rebellion where there is a growing political cohesiveness.

Last winter the goals outlined for the insurgency were to be able to engage American forces, engage in operational level coordination, paralyze oil exports, crack the green zone, and establish themselves as a political presence.

The first was met by the First Battle of Fallujah, where the insurgent forces proved that they had both the morale and leadership to remain cohesive against an overwhelmingly large American force, which also had total air superiority and enormous firepower advantage. The ability to stymie the advance of US forces, and inflict unsustainable casualties on them, was a major step upwards. The insurgents had an army.

The second followed soon there afterward, with a bloody ambush at ar-Ramadi, taking advantage of the exposed flanks of the US advance. The consistent ability to ambush exposed areas is a sign of operational capability, and is no small matter. Green troops can often be made to stand up and fight - but as numerous military historians have pointed out - what they cannot do is move from one place to another, or exploit openings on the other side. Operational capability is then, the ability to identify opportunity, and exploit it. When an army must pay for its mistakes, the war becomes more costly.

The disruptions of oil output are becoming increasingly sustained. Rather than days, weeks pass before outages are restored, and the rebels are able to strike again soon afterward. That this is now accepted as "normal" shows how far the bar has been lowered. The original occupation plan had Iraq producing almost 3 million barrels per day at this point, rather than between 1.8 - 2.3 million barrels per day. This difference is significant: it represents an amount equal to the spare capacity of the rest of the world combined.

Cracking the green zone was emphatically accomplished in November. Bush's admission that the attacks are "having an effect" pass the bar for political presence.

So what is next? The progression for an insurgency is "trap, strike, bleed, shatter." The insurgency has made "bleed" standard. They are also forcing the US military into a hardpoints mode of occupation - the tent that was attacked in Mosul was scheduled to be replaced by a bunker shortly. The proliferation of hardpoints has been matched by an increasingly ability to hit those hardpoints, with increasingly larger explosive attacks.

However, even with the progress that they have made, they are still a very long way from victory. For them, the last 6 months have not been the end, nor even the beginning of the end, of American occupation or political success. The rebellion is still politically invisible, unable to bring mainstream figures into open support, unable to directly hold territory, unable to create a counter economy and unable to secure alliances. They have years of work in front of them to attain "victory". However, at this stage of the conflict, their objective is merely to increase membership, and destabliize any competing political order: prevent others from winning.

The core objectives for the next 6 months should be to prepare, and attempt to force, the kind of swirling fall apart conditions which loomed at the worst moments of last spring. To do this requires the destabilization of coalition control over cities, and the further polarization of the conditions on the ground. It will then require that the rebellion attain the ability to immobilize coalition forces - which will include the last item from the spring - the ability to blow bridges.

It is clear that Mosul and Fallujah are the headline targets for the rebellion, and that destabilization will procede there. The most logical approach would be isolation of the US firebases in those cities, by systematically ambushing the supplies in and out of them. When the entire military energy of the occupiers is spent protecting their own supply line, the rebellion will have a free hand to establish effective political control. Mao's lesson of finding some means of showing that a city is under rebel control or influence - in the case of China, tearing down city walls - should be followed. The simplest road would be to begin constructing minarets and new mosques, even if by simple masonry. There is a large body of unemployed labor, and if the occupation forces, under the name of security, begin to object, it will send a loud signal of anti-islamism, if they attempt to set conditions, it will show a fear of islamism.

However, the core political objective of the rebellion should be to build a link to the underclass of the shia, and create, back or amplify an anti-American sentiment among them. Al-Sadr's being coöpted leaves the field free, particularly if the rebellion is willing to work with Iranian hardliners on this issue. The best means of achieving this would be to begin assassinating ministers of the new government who are overtly sympathetic to the occupation, and who are perceived of as well off. The corner the rebellion must turn is to drive a wedge between rich, semi-westernized shia, and their poorer brethern, and then to create an alliance with disaffected shia.

The springing of this alliance on the occupation would have a devastating effect.

Americans tend to see the war in Iraq through the lens of Vietnam, or perhaps Russian involvement in Afghanistan. A better lens is the series of post-colonial conflicts in the 1945-1970 period, culminating with the Algerian War, but also including the Malaysian conflict, the Kenyan conflict and so on. This form of war stretches back to the Boer War before the turn of the century, and includes American involvement in the Phillipies from 1898-1902.

In such conflicts, the colonial power has three endgames:

The first is using massive force and colonization to end the rebellion and then put in place a colonial economic structure which binds the populace to the occupation economically. The US is not willing or able to resettle the number of Americans that would be required to Iraq. Therefore this "total victory" endgame is impossible.

The second is the "carrot and stick" approach, where greater autonomy, or even independence, is granted to moderate forces while the rebellion is "turned". This process involves forcing the rebellion to begin eroding its own base of support. It is accomplished by large concessions that win over discontented people, and which present the rebellion with a clear choice of facing political extinction or warring on their own people. It was this process which broke "Mau-Mau": the British offered the land reform and autonomy concessions that had been demanded before the rebellion, which made Mau-Mau openly attack islands of prosperity. To accomplish this, however, those islands of prosperity must be created. The "fortified hamlet" strategy which worked for the British in Malaysia, and which failed for the Americans in Vietnam is one way to attempt this, another is to work through groups in place on the ground.

The problem here is that first, the security situation has deteriorated in Iraq to the point where companies are pulling out or failing to bid on contracts in Iraq, because the private security costs have quadrupled in the last 6 months. There are no on the ground organizations to work through that have this expertise, since many had been compromised by the US over the course of attempting to remove Saddam. These assets are sufficiently degraded as to be of little value in the present.

Without the ability to begin a massive construction boom, it makes this road towards stability increasingly improbable. The lack of a building boom creates more unemployment and discontent, which leads to more recruiting by the rebellion, which leads to more instability, which makes building harder - a vicious cycle.

The last endgame is the strong man endgame, anyone see the irony here? This road supports the rise of an individual whose primary ability is the ability to run a corrupt security apparatus. He builds the apparatus, and produces stability, and takes money to begin construction and other forms of pumping money into the economy. This sets up a growing cycle - areas that are secure prosper, which means that there is less reason to side with the rebellion, which creates a larger pool of people willing to support security, which creates more areas ready for construction.

This road is the only viable one left to American policy at this point, it was always the most likely: a "reboot of the dictator software" to get a despot that the US could buy oil from without worrying about his larger ambitions.

Unfortunately, even this road is rapidly closing: as Iran begins to push its influence into Iraq, the ultimate ability of any Iraqi state, however constituted, to acquire atomic weapons and the means to deliver them, has reached near certainty. The question is when, not if, there will be a series of atomic armed gulf states.

Thus the rebellion fulfilled almost all of their strategic objectives from the spring. They have suffered only on strategic setback: namely the removal of a focus of radical shia activity, and this still has long term possibilities for them. They must in the next 6 months survive and prepare for a series of shatter attacks on the occupation, while increasing their ability to hit big targets, particularly the continued pressure on the oil sector. Going forward their keys to victory are to cleave the Western connected upper-class (the "Eagles") from the nationalist aspirations that exist among the Kurds and Shia as well as Sunni (the "Lions"). They are still a very long way from final political victory, because they are not yet a visible political force. Their medium term objective must be to begin creating political visibility, and with it political solidity.

Failure to do this will mean that the rebellion, while it may drive the Americans out, will also fail in its political objective of controlling a large slice of the oil revenues and the central governmental mechanisms of a post-occupation Iraq. To defeat the rebellion requires driving a wedge between their road to ultimate victory, and their immediate tactical needs for survival. The United States has shown neither willingness, nor ability, to even conceive of what must be done to do this, so if the rebellion is to be defeated, it will have to be under the auspices of another power - namely Iran. This end game leads to an "Islamic Republic of Iraq", which is controlled by radical Shia.

This is a double disaster, first it will create another anti-American state, second it will shore up the creaky structure of the Islamic Republic in Iran. The outcome that was feared in the 1980's - namely control over the oil reserves of Iran and Iraq by one power - will have occured.