“I think that this could still fail.” Those words—uttered by a senior American officer in Baghdad in May—probably gave opponents of the war in Iraq, particularly those clamoring for a hasty exit, a bit of a kick. They should be careful what they wish for.
For history strongly suggests that a hasty American withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster. “If we let go of the insurgency,” said another of the officers quoted anonymously last spring, “then this country could fail and go back into civil war and chaos.”
As many of the war’s opponents seem to have forgotten, civil war and chaos tend to break out when American military interventions have been aborted. Think not only of Vietnam and Cambodia but also of Lebanon in 1983 and Haiti in 1996. To talk glibly of “finding a way out of Iraq,” as if it were just a matter of hailing a cab and heading for the Baghdad airport, is to underestimate the danger of a bloody, internecine conflict among Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiites.
Instead of throwing up our hands in an irresponsible fit of despair, we need to learn not just from past disasters but also from historical victories over insurgencies. Indeed, of all the attempts in the past century by irregular indigenous forces to expel regular foreign forces, around a third have failed.
In 1917 British forces invaded Mesopotamia, got to Baghdad, overthrew its Ottoman rulers, and sought—in the words of the general who led them, Sir Stanley Maude—to be its people’s “liberators.” The British presence in Iraq was legitimized by international law (it was designated a League of Nations mandate) and by a modicum of democracy (a referendum was held among local sheiks to confirm the creation of a British-style constitutional monarchy). Despite all this, in 1920 there was a full-scale insurgency against the continuing British military presence.
Some may object that warfare today is a very different matter from warfare 85 years ago. Yet the striking thing about the events of 1920 is how very like the events of our own time they were. The reality of what is sometimes called “asymmetric warfare” is how very symmetrical it really is: An insurgency is about leveling the military playing field and exploiting the advantages of local knowledge to stage hit-and-run attacks against the occupiers, as well as anybody thought to be collaborating with them. Indeed, if there is asymmetry it lies in the advantages enjoyed by the insurgents. The cost of training and equipping an American soldier is high; by contrast, life is tragically cheap among the young men of Baghdad and Falluja. Even if the insurgents lose 10 men for every 1 they kill, they may still be winning.
How, then, did the British crush the insurgency of 1920? Three lessons stand out.
The first is that, unlike the American enterprise in Iraq today, they had enough men. In 1920, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000, of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting. During the insurgency, a further 15,000 men arrived as reinforcements.
Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military personnel now in Iraq (around 138,000 at the time of writing). The trouble is that the population of Iraq was just over 3 million in 1920, whereas today it is around 24 million. Thus, back then the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was, at most, 23 to 1. Today it is around 174 to 1. To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1 today, about one million American troops would be needed.
The United States also faces two other problems that the United Kingdom did not have to worry about 85 years ago. The British were able to be ruthless: They used air raids and punitive expeditions to inflict harsh collective punishments on villages that supported the insurgents. The United States has not been above brutal methods on occasion in Iraq, yet humiliation and torture of prisoners have not yielded any significant benefits compared with what they have cost the country’s reputation.
Today’s other problem has to do with timing and expectations. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that American forces should aim to work to a “10-30-30” timetable: 10 days should suffice to topple a rogue regime, 30 days to establish order in its wake, and 30 more days to prepare for the next military undertaking. I am all in favor of a 10-30-30 timetable—provided the measurement is years, not days. For it may well take around 10 years to establish order in Iraq, 30 more to establish the rule of law, and quite possibly another 30 to create a stable democracy.
Those American officers who say that it could take years to succeed in Iraq are therefore right. But the Bush administration has just three years left. Is it credible that American troops will still be in Iraq for even another four years after that?
The insurgents don’t think so. They know that American democracy puts time on their side. Once again, the contrast with the British experience is instructive. Although Iraq was formally granted its independence in 1932, there was still some form of British presence in the country until the late 1950s.
So, if we acknowledge that the United States simply does not have the luxury of time that the British enjoyed and cannot be similarly ruthless, can it at least increase the manpower at its disposal in Iraq?
The official answer from Washington is that Iraqi security forces will soon be ready to play an effective role in policing. Few who have seen those forces on the ground find this strategy realistic. Some fear that the training that Iraqi soldiers are receiving may prove useful only when they fight one another in an Iraqi civil war.
What, then, of America’s own resources? Almost no one (least of all the Pentagon) wants to go back to the draft. So could today’s all-volunteer force somehow be expanded to double (at least) the troops available? That too seems unlikely. Indeed, the current system is already showing alarming signs of stress and strain as more and more is asked of the “weekend warriors” of the reserves and National Guard, who together account for roughly two-fifths of the force in Iraq. In December last year, the Army National Guard acknowledged that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the preceding two months. Many members of the Individual Ready Reserve have been contesting the Army’s right to call them up.
How did the British address the manpower problem in 1920? The answer is by bringing in soldiers from India, who accounted for more than 87 percent of troops in the counterinsurgency campaign. Perhaps, then, the greatest problem faced by the Anglophone empire of our own time is very simple: The United Kingdom had the Indian Army; the United States does not. Indeed, by a rich irony, the only significant auxiliary forces available to the Pentagon today are none other than . . . the British Army. But those troops are far too few to be analogous to the Sikhs, Mahrattas, and Baluchis who fought so effectively in 1920.
No one should wish for an overhasty American withdrawal from Iraq. It would be the prelude to a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence, with inevitable spillovers into and interventions from neighboring countries. Rather, it is time to acknowledge just how thinly stretched American forces in Iraq are and to address the problem: whether by finding new allies (send Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi?); radically expanding the accelerated citizenship program for immigrants who join the army; or lowering the (historically high) educational requirements demanded by military recruiters.
Yes, as that anonymous officer said, the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq could indeed still fail. But too few American liberals seem to grasp how high the price will be if it does. That is a point, unfortunately, that also eludes most of this country’s allies. Does it also elude the secretary of defense? If “10-30-30” are the numbers that concern him, I begin to fear that it does. The numbers that matter right now are 174 to 1. That is not only the ratio of Iraqis to American troops. It is starting to look alarmingly like the odds against American success.
