Counterinsurgency, Denial, and Iraq

[wm]

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

I'm not sure where you derive this definition, but I think it expresses something that is contrary to fact. Maybe I just need you cash out what would count as "fundamental shortcomings." An insurgency can form in a perfectly functional state. All that is required is for an "out group" to develop enough guts to try to supplant the current the "in group." Arguably this is what happened in the period of the French Revolution when the Paris Commune was replaced by the Insurrectionist Commune--I know this is a poor example because the whole mess in France at the end of the Eighteenth Century was dysfunctional. Anyway, as a more modern example, the whole purpose behind the COMINTERN was to seduce people into rising into insurrection against any non-Communist regime, regardless of how functional that regime might be--some successes, some failures, some very near things.

I meant to suggest that the "flaws" which allow the formation of an insurgency can be ones of omission or commission, so I don't think we disagree. Allowing a violent, alternative narrative or ideology the "space" to propagate is a sin of ommission.

Not allowing an alternative an opportunity to exist is a sin of commission in a free speech community. Such a policy is just as dysfunctional and leads to an alternative plate of grievances that can yield another cause for an insurrection to form.

I think people like me are using the term "insurgent" incorrectly. I think the debate is: should we limit our objective to defeating AQI (which people are incorrectly calling the insurgency) or should we try to keep Iraq a single functional state (which people are incorrectly calling preventing a civil war.)

I suspect that AQI is more of an agent provacateur in the mold of the COMINTERN I mentioned above. I further suspect that a better role for the US would be to try to keep the agents provacateur out of the fracas as best we can while simultaneously doing what we can to allow the civil war to work itself out as non-violently as possible. I view this, by the way, as an alternative somewhere between Steve Metz' two choices. It is one that I think even Ed Luttwak might sanction. I say this because Luttwak has been known to say: "Just let them duke it out and to the winner goes the spoils" (my gisting, not his words).