How NOT to win in Iraq

The NYT magazine has a longish piece by Peter Maass today that demonstrates extremely convincingly why the US is NOT destined to win the counter-insurgency/pacification campaign in Iraq.
(You’ll have to take my word on this, since for now my browser won’t bring the article up.)
The piece is called “Professor Nagls’s war”. In it, Maass provides a generally sympathetic, even laudatory, description of the life, thinking, and current work of a U.S. Army major called John Nagl. Nagl’s “normal” job is as a professor of strategy at West Point. But currently, he’s deployed as the operations officer with an 800-soldier battalion near Fallujah in the infamous “Sunni Triangle” of Iraq.
I guess Maass (or the Army?) picked Nagl to be profiled because he has some credentials as an expert in the theory of counter-insurgency warfare. He did a Ph.D. at Oxford University on the subject, no less. The book that resulted from his thesis studies “Counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.”
Nagl himself is presented as having an engaging humility about those credentials:

    “The ‘expert’ thing just kills me,” he said. “I thought I understood something about counter-insurgency, until I started doing it.”

So Maass describes Nagl as having learned, really “learned” from his book studies and his experience so far, that it is very important for any “foreign” force, such as the US force is in Iraq, to have local allies who can do most of the real intel work and fighting for them… “Foreign troops don’t know the terrain and its people as well as locals, and besides, foreign forces cannot remain forever”: that’s the way Maass paraphrases Nagl’s view on the subject.
So then, Maass describes a time that he and Nagl were “sitting on cots in the room where I was staying with the battalion’s [presumably Iraqi] translators… A few feet away, [a] translator was on his kneews, praying.” As they talk, Nagl starts telling about some of the probelms he typically faces when an informer comes in… He gives the example of a “local” who comes in with some apparently useful intel about the activities of a “bad guy” in his neighborhood, say, an arms dealer who had fired mortars at the American base….
“So,” Nagl says he would say to the informer, “tell me where he lives.”
Let Maass continue the story:

    He [Nagl] paused for effect.
    “There aren’t any addresses in this country. The streets don’t have names, there are no street signs, there aren’t numbers on houses; all the houses look the same.”
    Nagl said he would next offer a map or satellite image to the local and ask him to point out the house. The Iraqi, in most cases, would scratch his head.
    “These clowns don’t know how to read maps,” he continued…

We can assume the translator is still there a few feet away, quietly ‘saying his prayers’ and listening as Major Nagl refers to his countrymen dismissively as “clowns” who don’t read maps…
[Or let’s say, to be generous, that maybe the translator in question is an Arabic-speaking US soldier… Still, it’s quite the wrong thing for him to hear Major Nagl referring to Iraqi citizens as “clowns”.]
Plus, Major Nagl should surely know if he spent even half as much time around Oxford University as I did, that questions of epistemology are always crucial. (“How do we know what we think we know?” Those kinds of questions… Questions that compare different ways of “knowing” something.)
So here’s this putative Iraqi person who maybe has good, solid intel. Or maybe not. Maybe giving the ‘tip-off’ to the Americans is just a grudge-match against a neighbor…. How would Major Nagl know the difference??
But assuming there is some intel out there, and that Nagl needs at the very least to check it out… Whose form of knowledge is more useful for the task? Nagl’s form, including the ability to read maps and satellite images from a distance– or the putative Iraqi’s form of knowledge, which is based on such things as knowing how to tell the local houses apart from each other; or who lives inside which house; or how those many individuals are related to each other or to others through family or other ties?
So who is the knowledge-deprived “clown” in this whole interaction? Who is it who needs to learn a bit of real humility and start figuring out that maybe he needs to learn a lot more about a completely different form of knowledge? Who is it whose totally appalling lack of people-skills– referring dismissively to Iraqis as “clowns” in front of (possibly Iraqi) third parties, or indeed, at all– means he seems ill positioned to win any competition for “hearts and minds”?
Hint: it ain’t the Iraqi.

15 thoughts on “How NOT to win in Iraq”

  1. Thanks so much for this analysis. Nowhere have I seen any emphasis on how our prejudices affect what Americans think knowledge is/should be/consists of.
    I’ve seen only praise for this article, yet the jarring comment he makes regarding how stupid the Iraqis are because they have a different way of knowing than he does tells me he hasn’t learned a thing. He’s been unable to overcome his culture-centric prejudices and if he can’t, with all his expert knowledge, how can we hope the average GI will.

  2. You might enjoy a book by James Scott called “Seeing Like a State” It specifically deals with that top-down view of the world that seems applicable today more than ever what with all the orphan nations we have under our care now. The satellite photo lines seem particularly apt here.
    Oh, and by the way, I think we can expect a great deal from our G.I’s…or at least as much as we expect from each other. I don’t agree with broad generalizations about the intelligence of anybody, Iraqis or Americans.

  3. Please forgive my bad manners 🙂 Since the previous post was my first, I should congratulate you on a great site. I read it every day.
    Thanks

  4. Dan, hi, no offense taken! I actually agree that we can expect a lot of intelligence at many different levels from US GIs… However, the task they’ve been sent to do is NOT one they’ve been trained for or have much institutional capability to deal with… In the circs, I’m sure that each unit commander, each individual, tries to do what s/he can.
    But it’s the bigger fact and nature of their presence there, as an army running an occupation regime that arose from an unnecessary, immoral war that constrains/configures everything they are able to do. That’s why I say: “Support the troops! Bring them home!” (Or at the very least, for an interim solution, put them under a political regime that has real international legitimacy.)

  5. Helena,
    Also consider me a new convert and thanks for the work you put into this.
    The Maass article is very important on many, many levels. You correctly hit on one of the most important – the low regard our troops have for those they have “liberated.” I can understand the angst among most of them – they have been there a long time, seen too many comrades killed/wounded in a “liberated” environment, many are reserves on extended call-up, and many more have no real reason to be there except to get shot at (or so it seems to them). Hard to be compassionate and mix in with the people when your friends are targets. I can understand that frustration. But it is damn hard to win a counterinsurgency when you don’t genuinely care for the people you are trying to win over (the REAL lesson of Malaya and Phillipines).
    Another level is the complete lack of prior planning done as forces entered into Iraq, despite the warnings from so many (in and out of uniform) that the end point and achieving it are as much a part of the effort as the getting there. Coalition forces did not have a stability and security (phase iv) plan. One was not even approved by the Pentagon until mid-April; that plan then had to promulgated itself down through 3-5 command echelons before it was heard by the troops. Someone else in the blogshpere cited an article that called this a “willful ignorance,” and that is probably the best description of the problem. More likely, it was a result of faulty assumptions (Chalabi as an Iraqi Karzi) and the politics of selling the war to a reluctant public. So, the troops make it up as they go, and, at least while they had easy money, they didn’t do too bad (and still aren’t in some isolated cases).
    But, as I see it, the most important level in this article is the “civil” level; clearly there is neither leadership nor a winning strategy forthcoming from the CPA (the guys in charge on the scene). Maass’ article states clearly that MAJ Nagl hasn’t even seen a CPA rep in his town since September! Most CPA civilians are administration (party) hacks who have gone forward for 90-180 day tours and rarely venture out of the Green Zone. Their disdain for the typical Iraqi is at least as bad as the worst of our troops (don’t believe me, read the blog by “John Galt” at Deeds (http://deeds.blogspot.com/). By now, the whole country should be under strict CPA control, yet, most CPA officials responsible for Iraqi regional/local areas do not even live in them (or among the troops in garrison there). If they do stay, they rotate back to HQ inside of 90 days! How much can be done in that short a period. And now, even the troops are rotating out (with a little overlap) so that the entire country will be starting back at square 1. Just in toime to turn it over to the IGC on 1 July! So much for a “generational” commitment by the Administration (although I fear by commitment they mean the commitment of a generation’s worht of blood to put down the hornet’s nest stirred up by our presence in Iraq). The US right hand fighting the left hand at every level in this civil-military mess made in Mesopatamia, and in the meantime, an ever imaptient, proud Iraqi people, simmering in their own ethnic/sectarian stew stands by watching, plotting, and playing the two hands against each other.
    All points to my personal opinion about this war, and the larger GWOT. We are attempting to achieve the most noble of outcomes, based on the most foolish of assumptions, by using the cheapest means possible, while not engaging in the real sacrifice needed to reach our goals. Overreach is only a small description of the folly we are engaged in. So, increasingly i am with you – “Bring ’em home!” and “Rest ’em up! And put ’em on the ramparts ’cause we gonna need some protectin for the next few decades!”
    SP
    BTW – We are safer now that we have Saddam, right?

  6. Helena, I agree with all the things you say here. I also think you point out the exact reason (institutional capability) why a centralized democratic goverment will be hamstrung right from the beginning…heck, even before the war started. I think everyone agrees the odds are daunting even if we had an internationally recognized transitional regime tomorrow. This is true in at least a political-economic sense for the average iraqi, whoever s/he is. The tools of the state like street addresses, surnames, etc. as leverage for legibility of the society by a centralized state don’t exist in Iraq already, they must be built. We can see evidence in Afghanistan where the population outside the purview of the state are in chaos. The influence of the state are seen in practical ways by the citizen. I only have to point to the recent demostrations for jobs, food, fuel, and electricity for evidence of this. Thankfully these have been mostly peaceful save for some trigger-happy coalition forces.
    I guess my point is that legibility of a society has to come from within the society, and we’ve missed the boat on that one. A modern state can rule either by integrating the knowledge woven into the fabric of a people that tells them where someone lives and their relationship to their neighbors and the best way to create/preserve harmony there or it can rule by autocratic fearmongering much the way Saddam Hussayn did. I’m not sure that any new government will neccessarily succeed, tho I agree that it would be better than a military occupation, resulting from, as you said, an immoral war. What I’m saying is that I’m afraid we’re on a path to failure for the same reasons that Saddam Hussayn had to rule by fear and death.
    I read an analysis (I forget where, sorry) of approaches to ‘nation building (btw, I hated this term from the moment I heard it being used and I’m kind of disgusted it’s become the title of some courses in university) that discussed the ways Germany and Japan were rebuilt. What amuses me about such discussions is that we see a discussion of a completely new paradigm of regime change in the modern world cast in terms of our now outmoded experiences. I love irony. We still, even after experiences in southeast asia, and with terror groups, fight the new series of post-modern wars (poverty, drugs, terrorism) in terms of a cold-war mindset. We put money, bodies, and technology at the fore instead of using metis (i like using the word) that exists in the system anyway. The idea that a government can be installed at all or for that matter, elections simply held, seems like folly to me. It is that post-modern ideal of a centralized government scheme to organize society to fit some predetermined facts or even ideals. Josh Marshall has an article in The Wasington Monthly in which he talks about the current administration’s, in my opinion, dangerous tendency towards this deconstructionist policy making. We’re making mistakes by ignoring the intuition or metis (there it is again) of the local population there by reducing or generalizing the problem. James Scott, in “Seeing Like a State” says that “metis resists simplification into deductive principles which can successfully be transmitted through booklearning, because the environments in which it is exercise are so complex and nonrepeatable that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to apply.” I’m not saying that Iraqis resist democracy, what I’m saying is that our government has poisened the ground, or squandered the opportunity, so to speak, by pursuing a policy of ‘nation building’ that reduces whole societies into broad generalizations so they can fit into the policy instead of the other way around. That’s why I made my original post 🙂
    It’s how they’re treating Americans too, which is more perceptable with an election coming and it’s something I detest. I hate being put in a box, and I’ll be most Iraqis hate being in a box for the last 100+ years. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
    Anyway, I’m not sure if I made any sense here or even if I’ll change my mind when I wake up in the morning. 🙂 Thanks for listening…

  8. SP–
    Nice to have your presence here. Thanks for yr thoughtful contribution. You’re largely right, I think, about one of the fundamental flaws of the occupation management, as revealed in the Maass article, being the total non-prosence/incompetence of the CPA. (Which goes back to the chicken hawks having “planned” for the Phase iv all being “handled” by Chalabi… )
    Thanks for the ref to “John Galt”, the anonymus CPA staffer who writes deeds.blogspot.com. I wonder where he learned his disdain for Arab people? I do note that in a Jan 2 post he breezily shares with us that after getting to his desk in the palace every morning, “I check the computer for the news, usually visiting Google News, Drudge Report, DEBKAfile and BBC.” Debkafile– which is also one of the few links on his blogroll– is a notoriously rightwing Israeli site. (No need to tell y’all about Drudge.)
    Anyway, a quick skim of some of his posts gave a vivid picture of 1,500 members of the CPA staff all sitting there in the palace inside the Green Zone– far from any direct contact with daily Iraqi life… I don’t think I’m going to rush to add it to my blogroll, somehow!

  9. Hi there..I’m preparing for a thesis on why vast majority of foreign news viewed/read/heard in the U.S. ‘appears’ to have an American angle. Some will say the answer is blindly obvious (e.g.’why would americans care about something that has nothing to do with them is say Africa or India), but I ask you to indulge me. There are plenty reasons Americans should care, and shouldn;t be put off by a lack of a clear US connection or interest.
    Anyone know of previous research into this field I would be in your debt..Best regards, Allan. dowmedia@hotmail.com

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