Counterinsurgency, Denial, and Iraq

[marct]

Hi Steve,

Yet another half-baked idea ripped from the draft of my book. This one popped up last night while laying in bed waiting for the Lunesta to knock me out.

I see you use Lunesta like I've been using codein !

When conventional war looms, a state can convince itself that it was the victim of unjustified or unprovoked aggression, thus engaging in armed conflict with a clean conscious (whether truly warranted or not).

Agreed; at least to the extent that the conflict can be justified using whatever socio-cultural logics for a just war prevail in that society. I wouldn't limit it to the "causes/justifications" you mention.

Counterinsurgency is different. By definition, an insurgency cannot form, consolidate, and continue unless the state has fundamental shortcomings.

While this may be definitional, I think it is a mistake. I would argue that some socio-cultural logics allow and encourage insurgency as a general purpose form of political discourse. This would mean that the source of the insurgency is not the fundamental shortcomings of the state but, rather, the acceptance of insurgency as a valid political "talking point". While you could argue that this is a state failing, I would place the causal impetus more in the socio-cultural realm.

Taking that point a little further, I would sub-divide it into two main versions:

1. States where military force is monopolized by the state and there is no "right of revolt" such as exists in the Anglo Culture complex; and
2. States where military force is dispersed through multiple groups and institutions operating in a dynamic tension.

To cloud the issue further, I would point to the extensive use of ideological warfare as a form of socio-cultural subversion that creates a perception of state shortcomings. In that case, it would not be internally perceived shortcomings of the state, but externally constructed and marketed shortcomings.

That having been said, I would suspect that a large majority of insurgencies do fall under the form you list - just not all.

When the United States provides counterinsurgency support to a friendly regime, Washington must convince its partner that it has serious political, economic, social, and security sector problems that have to be addressed. This is hard enough. But in Iraq, the United States itself was the regime so to be successful at counterinsurgency, it had to admit that it (or, at least, its policies and approaches) were flawed.

Now that is a really good point. The corollary is that Washington will have to admit the failings in its own governance structures within the US itself, otherwise it will lack any moral authority in the international arena including the "partners" it is trying to influence.

During the vital first year of the insurgency, the 2004 American presidential election loomed. This made it almost impossible for the Bush administration to make the sort of admission of guilt that would have allowed it to implement an effective counterinsurgency strategy. And this would have been used as political ammunition against it. So all it could do was downplay the challenge, deny policy failure and, to an extent, lay the blame on the military, at least until after the election.

I think this is spot on, and it shows off one of the glaring errors with your political system (BTW, I assume that all systems have flaws ). This error wouldn't be a problem in the early days of broadcast communications, since the raucousness of CONUS political exchanges rarely were available to the general population of the "partner" country.

However, when you change the communications technology to the highly interactive ones prevalent today, you have a completely different situation where the lines between domestic political propaganda (party based) and external political propaganda are pretty much erased. This is a point that Matt (Mountainruner) and I have been talking about for a while now.