By Gary Brecher for Exiled online
What’s going on in Gaza now is pretty easy to understand if you think a little bit about the way military trends have been going in the past century-but you also have to be willing to take a cold look at how wars work these days, when there’s no such thing as those “purely military” wars you WW II freaks dream about. (There never really was, but that’s another story.)
The Israelis attacked now because of two non-military cycles: the news cycle and the presidential cycle. This was like a war by an astrologer: the stars had to be in exactly the right position before the Apaches could start blasting and the Merkavas could roll.
The most important cycle of all is the news cycle. This war happened during international media dead week, between Christmas and New Year. Ordinary people are drunk or hungover or snowed in, and the people who matter, the media players, are off in Cancun and Phuket, soaking up rum and sun with their blackberries turned off. They’re not going to bum out their call girls watching the news from Gaza.
And the Israelis wanted a time when everybody was distracted for a simple reason: asymmetrical war isn’t pretty. That’s the same reason they won’t let camera crews into Gaza. To do this kind of war, you have to kill a lot of civilians, because the whole civilian/military distinction doesn’t really apply. If your neighbor is a mid-ranking officer in the military wing of Hamas, the best way to kill him is while he sleeps, before he can arm himself, deploy his men and maybe inflict casualties. Thanks to years of excellent intelligence on Gaza, the Israelis know exactly who’s where at pretty much any minute of any day. And they have attack helicopters hovering over it non-stop, ready to send a Hellfire missile down to take out anybody who might help organize a counterattack.
But Gaza is the most crowded slum in the world, so when you send that missile into his tenement apartment at 4 am, it’s going to kill him, but it’s also going to kill his wife, their kids (and Gaza has a huge birthrate) and half the block. That makes cold military sense but it doesn’t look good on the news.
Of course you could send troops in, the idea being they’re cleaner than missiles, but sending troops into a highrise slum full of people who hate your guts is not such a good idea if you’re worried about casualties. And like I’ve said before, the IDF has one big weakness: they don’t like to take casualties.
So naturally they did what they could to decapitate Hamas from the air first, then with artillery. Besides, the idea that raids by infantry are less bloody than air strikes is pretty dicey anyway. Troops get nervous, they start shooting, pretty soon the collateral damage bill is just as big as it would be with an air strike, only this way the raiding party suffers casualties too.
So it made perfect sense for the Israelis to step up their longterm policy of zapping Hamas cadres from the air, and to do it right now, while nobody’s watching TV.
The other cycle is more of a gamble: the presidential cycle. I can’t believe nobody’s saying the obvious here: the Israelis want to do this now, once and for all, while Bush is still in office. They know that Bush will let them do whatever they want. Bush and Cheney are literally more extreme than about half of the Israeli electorate. They’ve never objected to anything Israel wants to do except when the Israelis wanted to talk to the Syrians. As long as it involves blowing stuff up, Bush is guaranteed to be on their side.
So the planets aligned perfectly for Israel, not so much Age of Aquarius way as Zero Hour, last chance to blow up Gaza before Obama comes in.
Will Obama be more hardnosed with the Israelis? I doubt it. Why would he? You’re not supposed to say out loud that there’s a big rich Israeli lobby, but everybody knows there is. And more to the point, what’s their counterweight? Who cares about the Palestinians, even in the Arab world, never mind DC? So there’s a big net gain to any US politician who backs Israel and no reason at all to back their opponents.
So I don’t see why the Israelis are so worried about Obama. Still, a military planner’s job is to be paranoid and the Israeli staff has decided that since Bush is a sure thing and the new guy is an unknown quantity, why not do it now?
I’ll tell you something else: Obama’s people are cheering the IDF too, for the timing at least. “Dear IDF, Thank you for doing this while Bush is still around to take the heat! Signed, Barack.” That’s exactly what Obama meant when somebody asked him about Gaza and he said, “Hey, we only have one president at a time!”
That tells you something else about this operation: it’s likely to end before January 20, 2009. Obama doesn’t want his big inauguration party bummed out with pictures of dead Arab kids, so the IDF has this thing planned to end sometime in early January.
Of course planning is one thing, execution is another. The IDF planned for a quick clean fight against Hezbollah in 2006, but that’s not the way it worked out.
This time the IDF will succeed, at least in the short term, and the campaign will go according to plan. That’s my guess anyway. What we have here is Hamas getting a very hard lesson in why it’s dangerous to pretend you’re Hezbollah when you’re not.
Hezbollah fought so well last time around that everybody started getting uppity, and the Israelis didn’t like it at all. They weren’t getting respect. They couldn’t destroy Hezbollah, though; the Hezzies are too smart, too big, too well integrated with the locals in Lebanon. Hezbollah has all kinds of advantages that Hamas doesn’t have, like great strategic depth, pockets of Shia support all through Lebanon, far from the IDF’s reach (unless they tried another fullscale invasion of Lebanon, a real bad idea).
So for more than two years now Israel has had to put up with Hezbollah sitting just over its northern border with a smug little grin on its hairy face, strutting on the rep it made back in 2006-and there’s not much the IDF can do about it.
But the worst thing you can do is hide behind your big brother, because what if somebody chooses you out alone? That’s what’s happened to Hamas. They’re trying to be Hezbollah South, woofing at the Israelis, shooting off those stupid backyard cherrybomb rockets that couldn’t hit the ground if gravity didn’t help out…and meanwhile the IDF is in a very bad mood, embarrassed about losing to Hezbollah, bummed about Bush leaving office, and getting poked in the ass nonstop by hardcore settler types wanting them to blow something up right now, dammit!
It’s what they call a no-brainer. You may not be able to take out Hezbollah but just look at Gaza: a tiny strip of land, about six miles wide in most places. No strategic depth for Hamas at all. And Egypt hates Hamas like poison, so they’re quietly telling Mossad: “Go for it!”
Then there’s the issue of combat potential, as in Hamas ain’t no Hezbollah. Hamas is tougher than the PLO; they proved that in the skirmishes over the last few years about who runs the PA. But that’s not saying much; one of my grandmothers-not both, just one, I’m trying to be fair here-was tougher than the PLO too. And there’s a huge, huge difference between scaring off fat sleazy Arafat gangsters by firing in the air and actually fighting the IDF. Hezbollah has somebody doing serious strategic planning; Hamas has a bunch of hotheads. Hezbollah has been bunkering up, training in anti-armor operations, learning to deal with air strikes for years. Hamas believes in yelling at the attack helicopters.
They’re going down. Now, that’s not to say they’ll be wiped out, exterminated, whatever. That doesn’t happen any more, for reasons I’ll discuss in my next column. What we’re talking about here, what the IDF has in mind, is more what the Romans called “decimation”: killing enough of the right people to make Hamas weak for five or ten years, which may, just may, be long enough to give Israel’s allies the PLO/Fatah the edge in the Palestinian Civil War. That’s what this is about, getting your guys to win that war.
Will it work? Depends on the time frame. For a few years, yes; in the long run, Hell no. But if you’re the IDF, there are no good options in the long term. Demographics, dude; no way out of that spiral. The short term is all you’ve got, and in the short term Hamas is going to find out why it’s not a good idea to pretend you’re Hezbollah when you can’t back it up.
Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com.
Showing posts with label war nerd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war nerd. Show all posts
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Monday, July 7, 2008
One thing the United States doesn't get about guerrilla warfare: It's not over until the guerrillas win
Bringing Ireland to Baghdad: How the Resistance Will Eventually Kick the Americans Out
By Gary Brecher for AlterNet
It's very easy to see what's up in Iraq right now -- if you're willing to face it. The trouble is, most "experts" aren't willing. That has been the pattern right from the beginning. We didn't want to admit there even was an insurgency, and even now, nobody misses a chance to declare that "the surge worked," as if that translates to "we win, it's over, let's go home."
Fact number one about guerrilla wars: They're not over until the guerrillas win. Mao set out the guerrilla's viewpoint 80 years ago: "The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we simply will not let him." The longer the guerrillas stay in the game, the sicker the occupying army gets. Sooner or later, they'll go home -- because they can. It's that simple, and it works. So anyone who tells you it's over is just plain ignorant. That's one thing you can rule out instantly.
But people keep saying it. The most recent and ridiculous take is that "Moqtada al Sadr is renouncing violence." Talk about naive! What led these geniuses to that conclusion is that on June 13, Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the biggest and toughest Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, sent out a big announcement: "From now on, the resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. ... The weapons will be held exclusively by this group." In other words, he's switching from a big, sloppy, amateur force to a select group of professional guerrillas.
Also, there'll be a non-military role for the civilian supporter, working on local politics to "liberate the minds from domination and globalization."
The glass-half-full school of thought took Sadr's announcement to mean that he's getting out of the violence business, trying to marginalize the "special groups," which is U.S. Army talk for hardcore Shia militias, and move his party to the good ol' middle of the road. See, that's classic misreading of Iraqi reality as if it were U.S. politics. It's like we keep trying to pretend that Iraq under occupation is just a dusty version of Iowa. Sorry, but a country under enemy occupation doesn't think or act like Des Moines. If you want a good analogy to what Sadr is actually doing, it's easy to find one, but you can't look at American politics. You need to go to research other countries occupied by enemy armies, where urban insurgencies started off like Sadr's Mahdi Army did -- as neighborhood defense groups protecting the locals against mobs from across the ethnic divide. And when you start thinking on those lines, there's a really close, clear parallel between what Sadr is doing now and another insurgency that shifted from neighborhood-gang/paramilitary organization to small armed cells, with civilian support channeled into an above-ground political wing: the IRA back in the 1970s.
The basic parallels between Shia Iraqis and the IRA are clear enough: They're both minorities that got stomped on by the dominant tribe -- in Northern Ireland, Protestant mobs used to burn and stomp at will when they were in the mood; and in Shia Iraq, Sunni goons went on regular murder runs in Shia neighborhoods. So both places, Catholic Belfast and Shia Baghdad, got used to defending their own neighborhoods because nobody else was going to defend them. Then they were "saved" by foreign troops from countries that had always been their biggest enemy: The Ulster Catholics were occupied by the British Army, and Shia Iraq by the Americans. Of course, it was all supposed to be gratitude and happiness, the way the occupiers saw it. They expected the slum people to be grateful. Well, there haven't been too many people in history who've been glad to be occupied by foreign troops. Even when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to root out the Khmer Rouge, a lot of Khmer were more angry at the foreigners than pleased to be rid of Pol Pot. And of course, in both of these cases the troops who arrived were hated alien types: British paratroopers in Belfast, American "crusaders" in Baghdad. A few trigger-happy troops firing on local crowds and boom! Gratitude season was over, and the insurgency was in da house. In both places, the local rebel groups were ready: The IRA in Belfast dated back to 1916, and Sadr City had the same tradition of organizing neighborhood defensive gangs.
The trouble is, when po' folks organize, they have this fatal addiction to big, fancy titles and military fol-der-ol. It's easy to understand: It helps stomped-on people feel braver, have a little pride. So these groups always go for show, a lot of pomp and uniforms, and a traditional military organizational chart. Pretty soon the guy next door is a colonel, the clerk in the corner store is a four-star general, and they're strutting around in homemade uniforms feeling ready to take on Genghis Khan. Good for morale, but fatal to real urban guerrilla war. There are two reasons for that. First, these amateur armies get slaughtered when they go up against professional troops; and second, the traditional open organizational chart makes it very easy for the occupiers to identify everyone who's anyone in the insurgency. When an organization starts out fighting mobs from the enemy tribe, that's fine. So when the IRA tried to fight the British Army head to head in the 1970s, it got stomped; so did Sadr's militia when it went up against U.S. troops in April 2004.
See, when you start a guerrilla movement you can be absolutely sure that some of your members are spies. If you use your imagination a little, really try to imagine what it's like in an insurgent neighborhood, you'll soon see why.
Imagine you're a Sadr City homeboy, cheering the local "brigade" of the Mahdi Army. They march down the street, and everybody feels proud. They're guys you grew up with, know and like. So far so good. Then you get word that U.S. troops, or Iraqi troops, or somebody even scarier, have thrown your little brother in the back of a Humvee. People who get taken like that don't come back, or they come back really messed up. If that isn't scary enough, the troops can crush your family "legally"; after a few hours in an interrogation center, your little brother will sign anything, and next thing you know the Humvees are back to arrest your whole family.
Suddenly you're ready to name names, if they'll just let him out. And you know the names, because you know exactly who's who in the local "Mahdi Army," thanks to all that foolhardy paramilitary organization and open parading. And the guerrillas know you know, and they understand what kind of pressure you're under, which gives them a nasty choice: Kill you, threaten you or risk letting you trade your brother's life for theirs. If they kill you, the neighborhood turns against them; and besides, these guys aren't monsters, no matter what the TV tells you. If you lived in Sadr City, and if you had an ounce of guts, you'd join the Mahdi Army too. They're ordinary people, just like suicide bombers are ordinary people. You'll never understand them if you fall for thinking that they're all monster lunatics.
But the guerrillas have a nasty choice to make when they hear that your brother has been picked up by the army: If they let you live, you'll give them up, and they'll die slowly, under torture. And before they die they're going to name names too -- everybody does, under torture, no matter what the movies say -- bigger names, weapons caches, guerrilla agents inside the occupation government, the really big stuff.
That's basically what happened to the IRA in the 1970s. The IRA had done a good job fighting off Protestant mobs who tried to burn Catholics out of their neighborhood; for that sort of job, their large-unit organization into "Belfast Brigade" and "Derry Brigade" worked well enough. But after the British Army's best units occupied the province in 1969, they were up against "the professionals," as the army liked to call itself. And when you're fighting a first-world army with unlimited funds, manpower, technology and spy services, that sort of wide-open style is hopeless. Rounding up the IRA was as simple as photocopying its organizational charts: "Let's see, today we'll grab so-and-so, the local commander, and tomorrow his next-in-command, then a spot of tea." And if they didn't feel like arresting somebody themselves, they'd just hand his dossier, with photo, to one of the Protestant hit squads that were in bed with the intel services.
It was a wipeout. Within a few years, the IRA's best people ended up dead or in prison because they'd tried to straddle an impossible divide between guerrilla warfare and populist politics. They had plenty of time, sitting in internment camps like Long Kesh, to think over their mistakes, and it was in those cells that the brains of the outfit, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, came up with the exact same move that Sadr's making now.
Like Sadr just did, the IRA divided the "movement" into two parts. One would be a much smaller, more professional urban guerrilla armed wing divided into cells, not "brigades." Each cell would have maybe a half-dozen members, and if possible the members would be from different parts of Northern Ireland, so they wouldn't be obviously connected. Only the leader of the cell would know all the members, and that leader would only have contact with one guy from the main organization. That meant, to put it bluntly, that even under torture he couldn't tell enough to destroy the whole guerrilla movement.
Not only was this a safer way to fight, it was actually more effective than bigger paramilitary units in urban guerrilla fighting. The IRA had already found out the hard way that big, amateur "brigades" couldn't defend their neighborhoods against professional military attacks in the summer of 1972, during "Operation Motorman," when the British Army used Centurion tanks and other heavy equipment to smash through the pathetic barricades around "Free Derry" and the other "No-Go Zones" the IRA had tried to set up. Trivia point: As far as I know, this is still the only time MBTs have been used in military action within the U.K.
Sadr's "Mahdi Army" learned the same hard lesson when it tried to barricade Sadr City against the U.S. Army. The first blow came in April 2004, when Sadr ordered his amateur troops into the streets to fight the U.S. occupiers. They died like a Stallone comedy. Sheer massacre. That was lesson number one: Urban combat should be left to a few trained people, not amateurs with guns.
Then, after the surge, when we finally started applying commonsense counterinsurgency tactics, came hard lesson number two, the same one the IRA had learned: If you're running an open "army," it's very easy for the occupier to know who to snatch. In the past few months, U.S.-Iraqi forces have smashed their way into Sadr City and grabbed most of the Mahdi Army leadership.
That's the situation Sadr is facing, and it's incredibly similar to the one the IRA faced back in the days of disco, with one big, big difference: The level of violence in Iraq is, oh, about a zillion times higher than it was in Northern Ireland. In more than 30 years of "war" up there, only about 3,100 people died. Nobody knows how high the toll's running in Iraq, but you can add a couple of zeros to that 3,100 and not be too far off. U.S. troop losses alone are already higher than the total number of dead in 30 years of Northern Ireland fighting, after only five years of war.
So Sadr has had a big slap in the face, and he's got to go into relaunch mode. Luckily for him, he has outside help in the brains department, with advisers from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the very best guerrilla movement in the world right now, and Iranian intelligence, the MVPs of this whole war. I'd take that lineup over hick boneheads like Cheney any day.
Sadr's answer was clear, from that announcement he made in mid-June: He's going to divide the movement into two parts, just like the IRA did. There'll be a big-tent political party for the ordinary civilian supporter, backed by a small, well-trained urban guerrilla movement. And there'll be a firewall between the two groups, so Sadr can deny any armed operation that gets messy, just like Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein used to do when an IRA attack went wrong. The IRA provides Sadr with a perfect blueprint on how to do it. (It even had a slogan to describe its new tactics, saying it would win "with an Armalite in one hand and a ballot in the other.")
After its reorganization, the IRA fought much smarter, pushing its political party, Sinn Fein, and working to set up top-secret guerrilla cells in London to hurt the Brits where they lived and take the war away from the Northern Ireland slums. Over the long term, it worked: After it blasted London a couple of times, it cut a deal just in time to be out of the terrorism business before 9/11. As of now, not a single IRA fighter is in prison and Sinn Fein is the fastest-growing party in Ireland.
My guess is that Sadr is planning to make exactly that kind of move: dividing his forces into a big-tent, peaceful political party for the ordinary Shia civilian and forming a cell-based, small, deniable, professional urban guerrilla force with his best fighters.
Some of the recent hits on U.S. targets in Baghdad show that the Shia are shifting from open rebellion to smart, well-planned hits on the targets that hurt the occupier most: U.S. troops and civilian staff in Baghdad.
On June 24, two weeks after Sadr announced his reorganization, "Shiite extremists" in Sadr City carried out one of the most effective bombings of the war, blasting a district council meeting and killing two U.S. soldiers, two State Department officials and six Iraqis who'd been working with the Americans. That's exactly the kind of operation Sadr's new force wants to specialize in: fast, secret, aimed at the Americans, with no civilian casualties. Compare that attack to the standard Sunni car-bomber who blows up a whole street full of kids to get a couple of cops, and you can see that somebody in Sadr City is playing smarter than the average Iraqi insurgent. You can't do something that slick with the sort of amateur, open paramilitary group Sadr used to have. That's Hezbollah-style professionals at work.
Meanwhile, on the political front, Sadr is setting up the new political wing to "liberate minds," meaning "control the new Shia Baghdad." You see, what the U.S. press isn't telling us, but I know from my top-secret military moles in Iraq, is that there are no more Sunni districts in Baghdad. Baghdad is becoming a Shia city fast. Formerly Sunni districts like Karkh are now majority-Shia. There are a few holdout Sunni neighborhoods ("nahias") and little slices of neighborhoods ("malhallas.")
But they're crumbling, too. Baghdad is a Shia city and getting Shia-er by the day. So Sadr is in position to be mayor and warlord at the same time. Lord, he must laugh his Orson Welles beard off when he reads these ignorant U.S. military "analysts" saying he's renouncing violence.
-------
Commentary: I like Gary Brecher. He reminds me of the kind of unconventional analysis Ed Luttwak used to do in the late eighties which would drive the uniformed people at the Pentagon up the wall with indignation and disgust. See, Luttwak often managed to oversimplify a situation, use shortcuts, make the wrong analogies, but still get it right in the end. I think that this is exactly what Brecher is doing here.
The parallel that Brecher is making between the IRA in Ulster and the Sadrists in Iraq is not very credible, to say the least, and the differences between the two movements and the two situations are, I think, far more numerous than the similarities (for starters, I am not at all convinced that the IRA and Sinn Fein "won"). Still, his basic point is correct: a resistance movement facing an superior force needs to split up into a political wing and a military wing and it should never try to impersonate a regular army. Furthermore, I believe that Brecher is correct in his claim that Sadr is doing exactly that - reorganizing his resistance movement into two branches.
There is one parallel which Brecher, amazingly, is *not* making. There is on power which played a crucial role for years in the conflict and which ended up brokering the Good Friday Agreement which eventually lead to the end of the war: the USA. It is rather clear that in the case of Iraq there is only one possible candidate for that role: Iran.
By Gary Brecher for AlterNet
It's very easy to see what's up in Iraq right now -- if you're willing to face it. The trouble is, most "experts" aren't willing. That has been the pattern right from the beginning. We didn't want to admit there even was an insurgency, and even now, nobody misses a chance to declare that "the surge worked," as if that translates to "we win, it's over, let's go home."
Fact number one about guerrilla wars: They're not over until the guerrillas win. Mao set out the guerrilla's viewpoint 80 years ago: "The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we simply will not let him." The longer the guerrillas stay in the game, the sicker the occupying army gets. Sooner or later, they'll go home -- because they can. It's that simple, and it works. So anyone who tells you it's over is just plain ignorant. That's one thing you can rule out instantly.
But people keep saying it. The most recent and ridiculous take is that "Moqtada al Sadr is renouncing violence." Talk about naive! What led these geniuses to that conclusion is that on June 13, Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the biggest and toughest Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, sent out a big announcement: "From now on, the resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. ... The weapons will be held exclusively by this group." In other words, he's switching from a big, sloppy, amateur force to a select group of professional guerrillas.
Also, there'll be a non-military role for the civilian supporter, working on local politics to "liberate the minds from domination and globalization."
The glass-half-full school of thought took Sadr's announcement to mean that he's getting out of the violence business, trying to marginalize the "special groups," which is U.S. Army talk for hardcore Shia militias, and move his party to the good ol' middle of the road. See, that's classic misreading of Iraqi reality as if it were U.S. politics. It's like we keep trying to pretend that Iraq under occupation is just a dusty version of Iowa. Sorry, but a country under enemy occupation doesn't think or act like Des Moines. If you want a good analogy to what Sadr is actually doing, it's easy to find one, but you can't look at American politics. You need to go to research other countries occupied by enemy armies, where urban insurgencies started off like Sadr's Mahdi Army did -- as neighborhood defense groups protecting the locals against mobs from across the ethnic divide. And when you start thinking on those lines, there's a really close, clear parallel between what Sadr is doing now and another insurgency that shifted from neighborhood-gang/paramilitary organization to small armed cells, with civilian support channeled into an above-ground political wing: the IRA back in the 1970s.
The basic parallels between Shia Iraqis and the IRA are clear enough: They're both minorities that got stomped on by the dominant tribe -- in Northern Ireland, Protestant mobs used to burn and stomp at will when they were in the mood; and in Shia Iraq, Sunni goons went on regular murder runs in Shia neighborhoods. So both places, Catholic Belfast and Shia Baghdad, got used to defending their own neighborhoods because nobody else was going to defend them. Then they were "saved" by foreign troops from countries that had always been their biggest enemy: The Ulster Catholics were occupied by the British Army, and Shia Iraq by the Americans. Of course, it was all supposed to be gratitude and happiness, the way the occupiers saw it. They expected the slum people to be grateful. Well, there haven't been too many people in history who've been glad to be occupied by foreign troops. Even when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to root out the Khmer Rouge, a lot of Khmer were more angry at the foreigners than pleased to be rid of Pol Pot. And of course, in both of these cases the troops who arrived were hated alien types: British paratroopers in Belfast, American "crusaders" in Baghdad. A few trigger-happy troops firing on local crowds and boom! Gratitude season was over, and the insurgency was in da house. In both places, the local rebel groups were ready: The IRA in Belfast dated back to 1916, and Sadr City had the same tradition of organizing neighborhood defensive gangs.
The trouble is, when po' folks organize, they have this fatal addiction to big, fancy titles and military fol-der-ol. It's easy to understand: It helps stomped-on people feel braver, have a little pride. So these groups always go for show, a lot of pomp and uniforms, and a traditional military organizational chart. Pretty soon the guy next door is a colonel, the clerk in the corner store is a four-star general, and they're strutting around in homemade uniforms feeling ready to take on Genghis Khan. Good for morale, but fatal to real urban guerrilla war. There are two reasons for that. First, these amateur armies get slaughtered when they go up against professional troops; and second, the traditional open organizational chart makes it very easy for the occupiers to identify everyone who's anyone in the insurgency. When an organization starts out fighting mobs from the enemy tribe, that's fine. So when the IRA tried to fight the British Army head to head in the 1970s, it got stomped; so did Sadr's militia when it went up against U.S. troops in April 2004.
See, when you start a guerrilla movement you can be absolutely sure that some of your members are spies. If you use your imagination a little, really try to imagine what it's like in an insurgent neighborhood, you'll soon see why.
Imagine you're a Sadr City homeboy, cheering the local "brigade" of the Mahdi Army. They march down the street, and everybody feels proud. They're guys you grew up with, know and like. So far so good. Then you get word that U.S. troops, or Iraqi troops, or somebody even scarier, have thrown your little brother in the back of a Humvee. People who get taken like that don't come back, or they come back really messed up. If that isn't scary enough, the troops can crush your family "legally"; after a few hours in an interrogation center, your little brother will sign anything, and next thing you know the Humvees are back to arrest your whole family.
Suddenly you're ready to name names, if they'll just let him out. And you know the names, because you know exactly who's who in the local "Mahdi Army," thanks to all that foolhardy paramilitary organization and open parading. And the guerrillas know you know, and they understand what kind of pressure you're under, which gives them a nasty choice: Kill you, threaten you or risk letting you trade your brother's life for theirs. If they kill you, the neighborhood turns against them; and besides, these guys aren't monsters, no matter what the TV tells you. If you lived in Sadr City, and if you had an ounce of guts, you'd join the Mahdi Army too. They're ordinary people, just like suicide bombers are ordinary people. You'll never understand them if you fall for thinking that they're all monster lunatics.
But the guerrillas have a nasty choice to make when they hear that your brother has been picked up by the army: If they let you live, you'll give them up, and they'll die slowly, under torture. And before they die they're going to name names too -- everybody does, under torture, no matter what the movies say -- bigger names, weapons caches, guerrilla agents inside the occupation government, the really big stuff.
That's basically what happened to the IRA in the 1970s. The IRA had done a good job fighting off Protestant mobs who tried to burn Catholics out of their neighborhood; for that sort of job, their large-unit organization into "Belfast Brigade" and "Derry Brigade" worked well enough. But after the British Army's best units occupied the province in 1969, they were up against "the professionals," as the army liked to call itself. And when you're fighting a first-world army with unlimited funds, manpower, technology and spy services, that sort of wide-open style is hopeless. Rounding up the IRA was as simple as photocopying its organizational charts: "Let's see, today we'll grab so-and-so, the local commander, and tomorrow his next-in-command, then a spot of tea." And if they didn't feel like arresting somebody themselves, they'd just hand his dossier, with photo, to one of the Protestant hit squads that were in bed with the intel services.
It was a wipeout. Within a few years, the IRA's best people ended up dead or in prison because they'd tried to straddle an impossible divide between guerrilla warfare and populist politics. They had plenty of time, sitting in internment camps like Long Kesh, to think over their mistakes, and it was in those cells that the brains of the outfit, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, came up with the exact same move that Sadr's making now.
Like Sadr just did, the IRA divided the "movement" into two parts. One would be a much smaller, more professional urban guerrilla armed wing divided into cells, not "brigades." Each cell would have maybe a half-dozen members, and if possible the members would be from different parts of Northern Ireland, so they wouldn't be obviously connected. Only the leader of the cell would know all the members, and that leader would only have contact with one guy from the main organization. That meant, to put it bluntly, that even under torture he couldn't tell enough to destroy the whole guerrilla movement.
Not only was this a safer way to fight, it was actually more effective than bigger paramilitary units in urban guerrilla fighting. The IRA had already found out the hard way that big, amateur "brigades" couldn't defend their neighborhoods against professional military attacks in the summer of 1972, during "Operation Motorman," when the British Army used Centurion tanks and other heavy equipment to smash through the pathetic barricades around "Free Derry" and the other "No-Go Zones" the IRA had tried to set up. Trivia point: As far as I know, this is still the only time MBTs have been used in military action within the U.K.
Sadr's "Mahdi Army" learned the same hard lesson when it tried to barricade Sadr City against the U.S. Army. The first blow came in April 2004, when Sadr ordered his amateur troops into the streets to fight the U.S. occupiers. They died like a Stallone comedy. Sheer massacre. That was lesson number one: Urban combat should be left to a few trained people, not amateurs with guns.
Then, after the surge, when we finally started applying commonsense counterinsurgency tactics, came hard lesson number two, the same one the IRA had learned: If you're running an open "army," it's very easy for the occupier to know who to snatch. In the past few months, U.S.-Iraqi forces have smashed their way into Sadr City and grabbed most of the Mahdi Army leadership.
That's the situation Sadr is facing, and it's incredibly similar to the one the IRA faced back in the days of disco, with one big, big difference: The level of violence in Iraq is, oh, about a zillion times higher than it was in Northern Ireland. In more than 30 years of "war" up there, only about 3,100 people died. Nobody knows how high the toll's running in Iraq, but you can add a couple of zeros to that 3,100 and not be too far off. U.S. troop losses alone are already higher than the total number of dead in 30 years of Northern Ireland fighting, after only five years of war.
So Sadr has had a big slap in the face, and he's got to go into relaunch mode. Luckily for him, he has outside help in the brains department, with advisers from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the very best guerrilla movement in the world right now, and Iranian intelligence, the MVPs of this whole war. I'd take that lineup over hick boneheads like Cheney any day.
Sadr's answer was clear, from that announcement he made in mid-June: He's going to divide the movement into two parts, just like the IRA did. There'll be a big-tent political party for the ordinary civilian supporter, backed by a small, well-trained urban guerrilla movement. And there'll be a firewall between the two groups, so Sadr can deny any armed operation that gets messy, just like Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein used to do when an IRA attack went wrong. The IRA provides Sadr with a perfect blueprint on how to do it. (It even had a slogan to describe its new tactics, saying it would win "with an Armalite in one hand and a ballot in the other.")
After its reorganization, the IRA fought much smarter, pushing its political party, Sinn Fein, and working to set up top-secret guerrilla cells in London to hurt the Brits where they lived and take the war away from the Northern Ireland slums. Over the long term, it worked: After it blasted London a couple of times, it cut a deal just in time to be out of the terrorism business before 9/11. As of now, not a single IRA fighter is in prison and Sinn Fein is the fastest-growing party in Ireland.
My guess is that Sadr is planning to make exactly that kind of move: dividing his forces into a big-tent, peaceful political party for the ordinary Shia civilian and forming a cell-based, small, deniable, professional urban guerrilla force with his best fighters.
Some of the recent hits on U.S. targets in Baghdad show that the Shia are shifting from open rebellion to smart, well-planned hits on the targets that hurt the occupier most: U.S. troops and civilian staff in Baghdad.
On June 24, two weeks after Sadr announced his reorganization, "Shiite extremists" in Sadr City carried out one of the most effective bombings of the war, blasting a district council meeting and killing two U.S. soldiers, two State Department officials and six Iraqis who'd been working with the Americans. That's exactly the kind of operation Sadr's new force wants to specialize in: fast, secret, aimed at the Americans, with no civilian casualties. Compare that attack to the standard Sunni car-bomber who blows up a whole street full of kids to get a couple of cops, and you can see that somebody in Sadr City is playing smarter than the average Iraqi insurgent. You can't do something that slick with the sort of amateur, open paramilitary group Sadr used to have. That's Hezbollah-style professionals at work.
Meanwhile, on the political front, Sadr is setting up the new political wing to "liberate minds," meaning "control the new Shia Baghdad." You see, what the U.S. press isn't telling us, but I know from my top-secret military moles in Iraq, is that there are no more Sunni districts in Baghdad. Baghdad is becoming a Shia city fast. Formerly Sunni districts like Karkh are now majority-Shia. There are a few holdout Sunni neighborhoods ("nahias") and little slices of neighborhoods ("malhallas.")
But they're crumbling, too. Baghdad is a Shia city and getting Shia-er by the day. So Sadr is in position to be mayor and warlord at the same time. Lord, he must laugh his Orson Welles beard off when he reads these ignorant U.S. military "analysts" saying he's renouncing violence.
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Commentary: I like Gary Brecher. He reminds me of the kind of unconventional analysis Ed Luttwak used to do in the late eighties which would drive the uniformed people at the Pentagon up the wall with indignation and disgust. See, Luttwak often managed to oversimplify a situation, use shortcuts, make the wrong analogies, but still get it right in the end. I think that this is exactly what Brecher is doing here.
The parallel that Brecher is making between the IRA in Ulster and the Sadrists in Iraq is not very credible, to say the least, and the differences between the two movements and the two situations are, I think, far more numerous than the similarities (for starters, I am not at all convinced that the IRA and Sinn Fein "won"). Still, his basic point is correct: a resistance movement facing an superior force needs to split up into a political wing and a military wing and it should never try to impersonate a regular army. Furthermore, I believe that Brecher is correct in his claim that Sadr is doing exactly that - reorganizing his resistance movement into two branches.
There is one parallel which Brecher, amazingly, is *not* making. There is on power which played a crucial role for years in the conflict and which ended up brokering the Good Friday Agreement which eventually lead to the end of the war: the USA. It is rather clear that in the case of Iraq there is only one possible candidate for that role: Iran.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Gary Brecher, a.k.a. the "War Nerd" on recent developments in the Middle-East
One can love or hate Gary Brecher, a.k.a. the "War Nerd" for his style or the the magazine he usually writes for (the eXile in Russia). But I would argue that he has far more common sense that most of the talking heads on the TV, including the generals and so-called "specialists" of the Middle-East. Funny that a magazine like the eXile would have a better military analyst than, say, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, isn't it?
For all his rather crude delivery, Brecher makes a lot of good points, basic common sense stuff which the western corporate media avoids like the plague, like pointing out the huge difference between the Hezbollah operators and the hired militias for the Lebanese millionaires. There is really nothing new in what Brecher writes, but his article is interesting as an illustration that it is possible to "get it" for an American journalist, provided he/she wants to.
The Saker
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From Lebanon To Iraq: We’re In Deep Shia Now
By Gary Brecher
FRESNO, CA — OK, we’ve just gone through a really exciting time in world military moves, so let’s test your strategic IQ. What’s the relation between these three recent developments:
1. On May 9, Hezbollah took over West Beirut against feeble resistance.
2. The Iraqi Army, such as it is, is now moving into Mosul in a major anti-al Qaeda operation.
3. At the end of March, the Iraqi Army attacked Sadr strongholds in Basra and East Baghdad, and got its ass kicked.
If you want some clues, you can read my account of event #3 in detail from my April 2nd column:
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=18297&IBLOCK_ID=35
The other clue that might help is that Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq is totally based on Nasrallah’s Lebanese Hezbollah, so—to kinda give it away a little—in just over a month’s time, you’ve got two Shia militias stomping the better-armed and -funded old-style powers in Arab countries a thousand miles apart. Kind of a trend.
Item #2, the move on Mosul, is the trick question here, because there are no Shia to speak of up there; the Iraqi Army is moving against Al Qaeda in Iraq up there. What’s the connection?
As you chew on that food fer thought, let’s fill in the details on what happened and why in this week’s sudden Shia-ization of what the media always call "fashionable West Beirut." "Fashionable"—I love imagining these Shia puritans with Kalashnikovs and RPGs stalking through rubble filled with confused airhead supermodels: "Like…hel-LO? What are you…I mean…doing here anyway? In that ugly Kevlar vest which doesn’t match your beard at all, I mean YUCK, and that so-eighties gun accessory…don’t you realize I’ve got a SHOOT today?" The Hezzies don’t get her babble, but they hear the word "shoot" and it all goes to pieces very fast. That’s one of the first thing a supermodel’s got to learn: don’t say "shoot" around a nervous militiaman who thinks women should wear black hefty bags, head to foot, even when showering. Or "if" showering; for these boys, Sharia tops hygiene every time.
South Beirut or Sadr City: Can You Tell The Difference?
Hezbollah took their beach trip on May 9, but it wasn’t announced to anybody in the media. The Lebanese elite was stunned. This was not supposed to happen. It would be like West LA being overrun by Baptist gangs from Bakersfield. And there was nothing the cool Lebanese could do about it but sneer and whine and blog. Boy, did they blog. In the blog-o-sphere battle, the West Beirut coolsters won hands down. Out on the streets, though, it was all Hezbollah. They came, they saw, they burned down a TV station that had been broadcasting anti-Hezbollah stories…and a couple of days later, they left. It wasn’t like your classical military maneuver; these are commuter troops, and what they did was pack their weapons—mostly rifles and RPGs, some of the rifles looking surprisingly new and expensive—in the trunks of their little fuel-efficient sedans, and head back to the slums of South Beirut. No word on whether traffic was snarled by the sudden withdrawal: "KBRT’s traffic helicopter, Beirut’s only traffic reporter with look-down-shoot-down capability, brings you this update: avoid the Shia-town expressway, which is jammed with weekend Hezbollah visitors evacuating the capital…."
Like I said, this wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s part of a pattern that isn’t supposed to be happening all across the Middle East: the Shia militias are kicking serious ass. In the past few weeks we’ve seen weirdly identical moves by weak central governments in Iraq and Lebanon to push back against Shia militias: in Iraq, al-Maliki’s government, acting as a front for al-Hakimi and the Badr Brigades, tried to "assert itself" against Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra and in Sadr City; and now the weak interfaith committee trying to run Lebanon moved against Hezbollah, firing their security chief at the airport and cracking down on Hezbollah’s private communication network, which apparently has 100,000 private telephone lines running.
Nasrallah, the mullah who runs Hezbollah, called that crackdown a "declaration of war" against his boys and sent them out onto the streets of West Beirut, where the rich Sunni Muslims live.
Militarily, it was over pretty fast. There’s no armed Sunni group in Lebanon that can stand against Hezbollah. The BBC is now calling Hezbollah "by far the strongest force in Lebanon," which may seem pretty obvious now but is a huge surprise to all the so-called experts. You see, the Shia aren’t supposed to count at all in Lebanon. The Lebanese constitution lays down that the President has to be a Maronite Christian, because they were the big players in 1943 when the thing was written. The Prime Minister has to be a Sunni Muslim, because they were next. Nobody else counted for much, except maybe the Druze. But the Shia weren’t consulted at all, because they were nothing—a bunch of hicks down in the southern and eastern boonies.
Since then a lot of those hicks have moved into Beirut, and the ones who stayed home made a name for themselves by having a lot of babies who grew up to be the best guerrilla fighters in the country. They forced Israel out of Southern Lebanon in 2000 and took on the Israeli armed forces one-on-one in 2006, and came out of it looking like heroes.
Since then, the Hezbollah leader, Nasrallah, who’s pretty obviously a smart dude, has parlayed his victory into national popularity. He didn’t let his people gloat too openly--instead of the yellow Hezbollah flag, he told them to wave the Lebanese red-white-and-green (the one with the tree, even though there ain’t hardly any of those trees left in the place any more, just like the California Grizzly on our flag).
What really pisses off the "government" in both Iraq and Lebanon is that the Shia leaders—Nasrallah in Lebanon and Sadr in Iraq—are starting to break into the crossover market: after Hezbollah scored the first respectable showing against Israel by any Arab guerrilla army, you’d see Druze and Sunni and even a few Maronite kids saying "Go Hezzies!"—usually in a safe quiet voice, where nobody’d hear, but they were saying it. And that spelled death for the old godfathers who run these places, especially Lebanon. Lebanon is like NYC without the money: it’s all sleazy politicos and gangs profiting from ethnic grandstanding politics. They call the system "zuama," godfather-ism. And the key there is, you’ve got to be able to control your ethnic group, your gang. So guys like Walid Jumblatt, the chieftan of the Druze, go psycho when they see rival Druze politicos deserting to Hezbollah. Jumblatt’s business is using his people as a bargaining chip; if they’re going to start shopping around for better deals, he’s as doomed as a smalltown hardware store watching the new WalMart go up.
Don’t start thinking these godfathers are the good guys. You can think of Hezbollah as the bad guys if you want, even though I admire the hell out of them, but just don’t think those old-school godfathers are the good guys here. Jumblatt, for example, is on record saying he cheers when US troops are killed in Iraq and it can’t happen often enough for him. He backed the Syrians when they occupied Lebanon, then broke with them over his cut; he massacred thousands of Christian villagers in Central Lebanon in the 1980s. When he comes into a room you can hear blood sloshing around his ankles, and that goes for every big player in Lebanon.
They’re a lot like the old Italian mafia, in fact: they’ve still got the big government connections, but they don’t have control over the streets any more. But Hezbollah does, for two familiar reasons, the same ones traditional military types don’t like to mention: demographics and civilian aid.
Demographics first: like I’ve said before, the Shia suddenly found themselves as the only ghetto boyz in a rich, spoiled neighborhood. While all the other "Cedar Revolution" (aka "Crock of Shit") Lebanese were partying on the "fashionable" beach, the Shia were living in slums, pumping out lots of kids, hearing about martyrdom and finding out up close and personal what it feels like to get shelled, bombed and sniped. They raised a whole lot of kids who were natural soldier material, with your classic Shia martyr complex and a don’t-give-a-fuck slum attitude that was straight outta Karbala. All they needed was a movement they could actually believe in, and they’d slice through the rich-boy gangs like a scimitar through hummus.
Hezbollah provided the Shia with the cause they were looking for. You can say what you want about the Hezzies, but unlike most other Lebanese movements, including Amal, the other big Shia party, Hezbollah is NOT in it just for the money. They actually believe the stuff they say, and they prove it by getting their hands dirty rebuilding blasted slum neighborhoods, handing out food to the hungry, and trying to bring water and electricity to Shia dumps that never had them before. That kind of actual concern for the poor is just about unheard-of in these places, and it inspires fanatical loyalty when people see it happening for the first time in their lives. Sadr’s people are the only ones who manage to get food, water and electricity to the huge stinking Shia slums in Iraq, and Hezbollah has an even longer record of putting in the money and time, like Mao said a guerrilla army should, on civilian projects. So for example, after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah campaign, there was a lot of grumbling, even among Shiites in Lebanon, that Hezbollah’s glorious fight against the Israelis had left a lot of ordinary Lebanese with bombed-out houses as souvenirs of that divine victory. Instead of dealing with these subversive complainers the usual Arab way—making a gross, gory example of the loudest naysayers and continuing to pocket all that Iranian aid money—Hezbollah actually went out and rented the heavy equipment, cleared the rubble, and put up new apartments.
So it’s not that much of an oversimplification to say that Hezbollah built a movement and an army from the bottom up, and then took it into battle last week against a bunch of traditional top-down gangs whose "gunmen" were in it only for the money. You don’t have to ask who won a fight like that. Just imagine Valmy, where French troops who really believed in the republican revolution went into battle against old-style degenerate European troops. A wipeout. The hired guns who were supposed to protect West Beirut just fled, while the Hezzies popped up all over that expensive beachfront like Bugs Bunny’s instant Martians popping up out of every manhole.
And where was the Lebanese Army that we’re funding, you ask? Keeping very, very quiet. Maybe waving a nervous "Hi!" to the Hezbollah fighters as they got out of their cars and started walking toward the Mediterranean. The Hezzies had no armored vehicles, but they had RPGs which they actually know how to use, and against the Lebanese Army’s Thrift-Store mix of light armored vehicles, RPGs work all too well.
It’s kind of an exciting time, militarily, when a bunch of weekend soldiers can carry a weapon in the trunks of their cars, weapons that will actually intimidate troops in APCs. Morale trumps light armor every time. (Air power and MBTs are another story.)
The Army only intervened when it was time to give Hezbollah everything it wanted: the right to a separate comm network, and the rehiring of their Airport Security dude. As for the latter demand, I’m not saying smuggling was involved or anything but somebody’s got to get those West-Beirut party kids their E and coke, and having your man in charge of airport security sure would make it easier to bring in da stuff, whether it’s Semtex or pure Bolivian. If the guy was worth going to war for, he must be doing something pretty darned important.
Once their demands were met, Hezbollah packed the weapons in the trunks and headed home for supper. That was another very smart move. One thing you can sort of figure out without being Einstein is that this is not a good era for military occupations of other tribes’ territory. What you want is to impose your will militarily, then get out before you become the occupier. That’s exactly what the Hezzies did—wish we could learn a thing or two from them.
So Lebanon right now has a simple box score: Hezzies everything, Old Bosses nothing. Now, let’s zip to the other side of the Middle East and see how the Iraqi game is going. About the same, actually. Weirdly the same. What just happened in Lebanon happened six weeks ago in Iraq: weak central government tries to "assert itself" against rising Shia militia, gets smacked down, then after the smackdown, the Shia militia hands back territory. In the case of Iraq, it was a Shia government, so this was all Shia-on-Shia violence, Maliki’s army vs. Sadr’s militia.
There’s still a lot of argument about whether the US pushed Maliki’s government into this or tried to stop them from attacking. I hear from sources in Iraq that US officers advising Maliki warned him that his "army" (basically Badr Brigade vets wearing Iraqi National uniform) weren’t good enough to take on Sadr’s militia on their home ground, but woke up to find the armored columns already moving south to Basra and east into Sadr City. They should have stayed in bed, as the saying goes, because if they’d had another nap—say an hour or so—they’d have seen the same columns breaking all speed limits coming back to base, stomped to within an inch of their lives.
And now for the odd item out: what’s Mosul got to do with it? There are two things going on. At a tactical level, it’s simple: Mosul and Al Qaeda in Iraq is a target that the Iraqi Army might actually be able to handle. They need a morale-building fight against a softer opponent after getting their asses kicked in Basra and Sadr City, and the Sunni jihadi nutcases are an easy target. There aren’t many of them, they’re foreign imports with no neighborhood base (they’ve alienated just about every Sunni Iraqi alive), and they’re more interested in dying than fighting. A counter-insurgency officer’s dream opponent.
There was a story last week that showed why the Iraqi Army would rather fight Al Q than keep battering its head against the Sadrists in East Baghdad. This Iraqi officer was whining, "The Shia in this neighborhood PROMISED us that they’d let us patrol in our vehicles and tell us where the IEDs were buried, they PROMISED, and then within ten meters of leaving our base three IEDs went off under us! It’s not fair!"
That’s what happens when you fight people who have the neighborhood behind them, and that’s why it’s way, way easier to go to Mosul to track down some nerd-gang of Saudi dweebs who took up Jihad 1A because they flunked Engineering or they’re scared of girls or something. Dying solves a lot of problems for people like that.
But if you really consider the Mosul operation on another level, that’s where it gets a little more interesting. It’s part of a pattern of what Cheney, that strategic genius ("Shit, Iran is RIGHT NEXT to Iraq? Why didn’t you tell me? No wonder we’re having all these problems!") expected to happen: he figured that the Shiite’s military energy would wear itself out in a civil war against Al Qaeda Sunnis, both in Lebanon and in Iraq, rather than making problems for their pro-American governments and us. That was the Cheney Plan, except it didn’t happen. Al Qaeda just doesn’t have the support in the ‘hood to take on these neighborhood militias, either in Iraq or in Lebanon. But there was a funny little footnote: Al Q has officially declared war on Hezbollah in Lebanon and "ordered its operatives to defend the Sunni community in Lebanon" according to this story:
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=54916§ionid=351020203
The trouble with being a James-Bond-y international conspiracy like Al Q is that there’s no way on earth you can compete militarily with local, broad-based militias like Hezbollah. Commuting from the Shia slums to West Beirut is one thing, but the notion that Al Q’s International Brigade can all fly into Lebanon undetected and assemble to march on the Hezzies is too far-fetched and idiotic even for a Bond flick. The notion they’d beat Hezbollah if they could manage to mobilize a force against it is even more ridiculous. The Hezzies even scare the IDF, and the IDF has wet dreams about facing Al Q. The rankings are pretty clear, and getting clearer, and they add up to something simple: in Iraq and in Lebanon, two countries the Western powers have operated on like they were diabetics with Medicaid, the net result of all the slicing and cutting is victory, hands down, for Shiite militias that didn’t even figure in the big plans. They just weren’t supposed to be part of the equation, and now they’re on top.
And that’s assuming it’s all being decided by Washington. Suppose we entertain, as they say, another idea: suppose it’s true that the Lebanese Hezzies are just "puppets" of Iran the way Cheney keeps saying they are. Well, if that’s true, then…lessee here: Cheney woofs on and on about attacking Iran and just coincidentally these Iranian puppets just casually take over Lebanon, one of the few supposedly pro-Western Arab states. And they do it without even breaking a sweat. Like saying, "Hello Meester Cheney, joost a leetle reminder, we know zee game about a t’ousand times better dan yoooo, sir!"
There are two possibilities: Cheney is an Iranian mole, and he’s laughing his head off chewing pistachios, kicking back on his prayer mat in front of the flatscreen, something I’ve been arguing for awhile now—or he’s the stupidest human being ever to step out of his league—which would be Wyoming, Little League. Girls’ Softball to be exact.
For all his rather crude delivery, Brecher makes a lot of good points, basic common sense stuff which the western corporate media avoids like the plague, like pointing out the huge difference between the Hezbollah operators and the hired militias for the Lebanese millionaires. There is really nothing new in what Brecher writes, but his article is interesting as an illustration that it is possible to "get it" for an American journalist, provided he/she wants to.
The Saker
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From Lebanon To Iraq: We’re In Deep Shia Now
By Gary BrecherFRESNO, CA — OK, we’ve just gone through a really exciting time in world military moves, so let’s test your strategic IQ. What’s the relation between these three recent developments:
1. On May 9, Hezbollah took over West Beirut against feeble resistance.
2. The Iraqi Army, such as it is, is now moving into Mosul in a major anti-al Qaeda operation.
3. At the end of March, the Iraqi Army attacked Sadr strongholds in Basra and East Baghdad, and got its ass kicked.
If you want some clues, you can read my account of event #3 in detail from my April 2nd column:
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=18297&IBLOCK_ID=35
The other clue that might help is that Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq is totally based on Nasrallah’s Lebanese Hezbollah, so—to kinda give it away a little—in just over a month’s time, you’ve got two Shia militias stomping the better-armed and -funded old-style powers in Arab countries a thousand miles apart. Kind of a trend.
Item #2, the move on Mosul, is the trick question here, because there are no Shia to speak of up there; the Iraqi Army is moving against Al Qaeda in Iraq up there. What’s the connection?
As you chew on that food fer thought, let’s fill in the details on what happened and why in this week’s sudden Shia-ization of what the media always call "fashionable West Beirut." "Fashionable"—I love imagining these Shia puritans with Kalashnikovs and RPGs stalking through rubble filled with confused airhead supermodels: "Like…hel-LO? What are you…I mean…doing here anyway? In that ugly Kevlar vest which doesn’t match your beard at all, I mean YUCK, and that so-eighties gun accessory…don’t you realize I’ve got a SHOOT today?" The Hezzies don’t get her babble, but they hear the word "shoot" and it all goes to pieces very fast. That’s one of the first thing a supermodel’s got to learn: don’t say "shoot" around a nervous militiaman who thinks women should wear black hefty bags, head to foot, even when showering. Or "if" showering; for these boys, Sharia tops hygiene every time.
South Beirut or Sadr City: Can You Tell The Difference?
Hezbollah took their beach trip on May 9, but it wasn’t announced to anybody in the media. The Lebanese elite was stunned. This was not supposed to happen. It would be like West LA being overrun by Baptist gangs from Bakersfield. And there was nothing the cool Lebanese could do about it but sneer and whine and blog. Boy, did they blog. In the blog-o-sphere battle, the West Beirut coolsters won hands down. Out on the streets, though, it was all Hezbollah. They came, they saw, they burned down a TV station that had been broadcasting anti-Hezbollah stories…and a couple of days later, they left. It wasn’t like your classical military maneuver; these are commuter troops, and what they did was pack their weapons—mostly rifles and RPGs, some of the rifles looking surprisingly new and expensive—in the trunks of their little fuel-efficient sedans, and head back to the slums of South Beirut. No word on whether traffic was snarled by the sudden withdrawal: "KBRT’s traffic helicopter, Beirut’s only traffic reporter with look-down-shoot-down capability, brings you this update: avoid the Shia-town expressway, which is jammed with weekend Hezbollah visitors evacuating the capital…."
Like I said, this wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s part of a pattern that isn’t supposed to be happening all across the Middle East: the Shia militias are kicking serious ass. In the past few weeks we’ve seen weirdly identical moves by weak central governments in Iraq and Lebanon to push back against Shia militias: in Iraq, al-Maliki’s government, acting as a front for al-Hakimi and the Badr Brigades, tried to "assert itself" against Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra and in Sadr City; and now the weak interfaith committee trying to run Lebanon moved against Hezbollah, firing their security chief at the airport and cracking down on Hezbollah’s private communication network, which apparently has 100,000 private telephone lines running.
Nasrallah, the mullah who runs Hezbollah, called that crackdown a "declaration of war" against his boys and sent them out onto the streets of West Beirut, where the rich Sunni Muslims live.
Militarily, it was over pretty fast. There’s no armed Sunni group in Lebanon that can stand against Hezbollah. The BBC is now calling Hezbollah "by far the strongest force in Lebanon," which may seem pretty obvious now but is a huge surprise to all the so-called experts. You see, the Shia aren’t supposed to count at all in Lebanon. The Lebanese constitution lays down that the President has to be a Maronite Christian, because they were the big players in 1943 when the thing was written. The Prime Minister has to be a Sunni Muslim, because they were next. Nobody else counted for much, except maybe the Druze. But the Shia weren’t consulted at all, because they were nothing—a bunch of hicks down in the southern and eastern boonies.
Since then a lot of those hicks have moved into Beirut, and the ones who stayed home made a name for themselves by having a lot of babies who grew up to be the best guerrilla fighters in the country. They forced Israel out of Southern Lebanon in 2000 and took on the Israeli armed forces one-on-one in 2006, and came out of it looking like heroes.
Since then, the Hezbollah leader, Nasrallah, who’s pretty obviously a smart dude, has parlayed his victory into national popularity. He didn’t let his people gloat too openly--instead of the yellow Hezbollah flag, he told them to wave the Lebanese red-white-and-green (the one with the tree, even though there ain’t hardly any of those trees left in the place any more, just like the California Grizzly on our flag).
What really pisses off the "government" in both Iraq and Lebanon is that the Shia leaders—Nasrallah in Lebanon and Sadr in Iraq—are starting to break into the crossover market: after Hezbollah scored the first respectable showing against Israel by any Arab guerrilla army, you’d see Druze and Sunni and even a few Maronite kids saying "Go Hezzies!"—usually in a safe quiet voice, where nobody’d hear, but they were saying it. And that spelled death for the old godfathers who run these places, especially Lebanon. Lebanon is like NYC without the money: it’s all sleazy politicos and gangs profiting from ethnic grandstanding politics. They call the system "zuama," godfather-ism. And the key there is, you’ve got to be able to control your ethnic group, your gang. So guys like Walid Jumblatt, the chieftan of the Druze, go psycho when they see rival Druze politicos deserting to Hezbollah. Jumblatt’s business is using his people as a bargaining chip; if they’re going to start shopping around for better deals, he’s as doomed as a smalltown hardware store watching the new WalMart go up.
Don’t start thinking these godfathers are the good guys. You can think of Hezbollah as the bad guys if you want, even though I admire the hell out of them, but just don’t think those old-school godfathers are the good guys here. Jumblatt, for example, is on record saying he cheers when US troops are killed in Iraq and it can’t happen often enough for him. He backed the Syrians when they occupied Lebanon, then broke with them over his cut; he massacred thousands of Christian villagers in Central Lebanon in the 1980s. When he comes into a room you can hear blood sloshing around his ankles, and that goes for every big player in Lebanon.
They’re a lot like the old Italian mafia, in fact: they’ve still got the big government connections, but they don’t have control over the streets any more. But Hezbollah does, for two familiar reasons, the same ones traditional military types don’t like to mention: demographics and civilian aid.
Demographics first: like I’ve said before, the Shia suddenly found themselves as the only ghetto boyz in a rich, spoiled neighborhood. While all the other "Cedar Revolution" (aka "Crock of Shit") Lebanese were partying on the "fashionable" beach, the Shia were living in slums, pumping out lots of kids, hearing about martyrdom and finding out up close and personal what it feels like to get shelled, bombed and sniped. They raised a whole lot of kids who were natural soldier material, with your classic Shia martyr complex and a don’t-give-a-fuck slum attitude that was straight outta Karbala. All they needed was a movement they could actually believe in, and they’d slice through the rich-boy gangs like a scimitar through hummus.
Hezbollah provided the Shia with the cause they were looking for. You can say what you want about the Hezzies, but unlike most other Lebanese movements, including Amal, the other big Shia party, Hezbollah is NOT in it just for the money. They actually believe the stuff they say, and they prove it by getting their hands dirty rebuilding blasted slum neighborhoods, handing out food to the hungry, and trying to bring water and electricity to Shia dumps that never had them before. That kind of actual concern for the poor is just about unheard-of in these places, and it inspires fanatical loyalty when people see it happening for the first time in their lives. Sadr’s people are the only ones who manage to get food, water and electricity to the huge stinking Shia slums in Iraq, and Hezbollah has an even longer record of putting in the money and time, like Mao said a guerrilla army should, on civilian projects. So for example, after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah campaign, there was a lot of grumbling, even among Shiites in Lebanon, that Hezbollah’s glorious fight against the Israelis had left a lot of ordinary Lebanese with bombed-out houses as souvenirs of that divine victory. Instead of dealing with these subversive complainers the usual Arab way—making a gross, gory example of the loudest naysayers and continuing to pocket all that Iranian aid money—Hezbollah actually went out and rented the heavy equipment, cleared the rubble, and put up new apartments.
So it’s not that much of an oversimplification to say that Hezbollah built a movement and an army from the bottom up, and then took it into battle last week against a bunch of traditional top-down gangs whose "gunmen" were in it only for the money. You don’t have to ask who won a fight like that. Just imagine Valmy, where French troops who really believed in the republican revolution went into battle against old-style degenerate European troops. A wipeout. The hired guns who were supposed to protect West Beirut just fled, while the Hezzies popped up all over that expensive beachfront like Bugs Bunny’s instant Martians popping up out of every manhole.
And where was the Lebanese Army that we’re funding, you ask? Keeping very, very quiet. Maybe waving a nervous "Hi!" to the Hezbollah fighters as they got out of their cars and started walking toward the Mediterranean. The Hezzies had no armored vehicles, but they had RPGs which they actually know how to use, and against the Lebanese Army’s Thrift-Store mix of light armored vehicles, RPGs work all too well.
It’s kind of an exciting time, militarily, when a bunch of weekend soldiers can carry a weapon in the trunks of their cars, weapons that will actually intimidate troops in APCs. Morale trumps light armor every time. (Air power and MBTs are another story.)
The Army only intervened when it was time to give Hezbollah everything it wanted: the right to a separate comm network, and the rehiring of their Airport Security dude. As for the latter demand, I’m not saying smuggling was involved or anything but somebody’s got to get those West-Beirut party kids their E and coke, and having your man in charge of airport security sure would make it easier to bring in da stuff, whether it’s Semtex or pure Bolivian. If the guy was worth going to war for, he must be doing something pretty darned important.
Once their demands were met, Hezbollah packed the weapons in the trunks and headed home for supper. That was another very smart move. One thing you can sort of figure out without being Einstein is that this is not a good era for military occupations of other tribes’ territory. What you want is to impose your will militarily, then get out before you become the occupier. That’s exactly what the Hezzies did—wish we could learn a thing or two from them.
So Lebanon right now has a simple box score: Hezzies everything, Old Bosses nothing. Now, let’s zip to the other side of the Middle East and see how the Iraqi game is going. About the same, actually. Weirdly the same. What just happened in Lebanon happened six weeks ago in Iraq: weak central government tries to "assert itself" against rising Shia militia, gets smacked down, then after the smackdown, the Shia militia hands back territory. In the case of Iraq, it was a Shia government, so this was all Shia-on-Shia violence, Maliki’s army vs. Sadr’s militia.
There’s still a lot of argument about whether the US pushed Maliki’s government into this or tried to stop them from attacking. I hear from sources in Iraq that US officers advising Maliki warned him that his "army" (basically Badr Brigade vets wearing Iraqi National uniform) weren’t good enough to take on Sadr’s militia on their home ground, but woke up to find the armored columns already moving south to Basra and east into Sadr City. They should have stayed in bed, as the saying goes, because if they’d had another nap—say an hour or so—they’d have seen the same columns breaking all speed limits coming back to base, stomped to within an inch of their lives.
And now for the odd item out: what’s Mosul got to do with it? There are two things going on. At a tactical level, it’s simple: Mosul and Al Qaeda in Iraq is a target that the Iraqi Army might actually be able to handle. They need a morale-building fight against a softer opponent after getting their asses kicked in Basra and Sadr City, and the Sunni jihadi nutcases are an easy target. There aren’t many of them, they’re foreign imports with no neighborhood base (they’ve alienated just about every Sunni Iraqi alive), and they’re more interested in dying than fighting. A counter-insurgency officer’s dream opponent.
There was a story last week that showed why the Iraqi Army would rather fight Al Q than keep battering its head against the Sadrists in East Baghdad. This Iraqi officer was whining, "The Shia in this neighborhood PROMISED us that they’d let us patrol in our vehicles and tell us where the IEDs were buried, they PROMISED, and then within ten meters of leaving our base three IEDs went off under us! It’s not fair!"
That’s what happens when you fight people who have the neighborhood behind them, and that’s why it’s way, way easier to go to Mosul to track down some nerd-gang of Saudi dweebs who took up Jihad 1A because they flunked Engineering or they’re scared of girls or something. Dying solves a lot of problems for people like that.
But if you really consider the Mosul operation on another level, that’s where it gets a little more interesting. It’s part of a pattern of what Cheney, that strategic genius ("Shit, Iran is RIGHT NEXT to Iraq? Why didn’t you tell me? No wonder we’re having all these problems!") expected to happen: he figured that the Shiite’s military energy would wear itself out in a civil war against Al Qaeda Sunnis, both in Lebanon and in Iraq, rather than making problems for their pro-American governments and us. That was the Cheney Plan, except it didn’t happen. Al Qaeda just doesn’t have the support in the ‘hood to take on these neighborhood militias, either in Iraq or in Lebanon. But there was a funny little footnote: Al Q has officially declared war on Hezbollah in Lebanon and "ordered its operatives to defend the Sunni community in Lebanon" according to this story:
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=54916§ionid=351020203
The trouble with being a James-Bond-y international conspiracy like Al Q is that there’s no way on earth you can compete militarily with local, broad-based militias like Hezbollah. Commuting from the Shia slums to West Beirut is one thing, but the notion that Al Q’s International Brigade can all fly into Lebanon undetected and assemble to march on the Hezzies is too far-fetched and idiotic even for a Bond flick. The notion they’d beat Hezbollah if they could manage to mobilize a force against it is even more ridiculous. The Hezzies even scare the IDF, and the IDF has wet dreams about facing Al Q. The rankings are pretty clear, and getting clearer, and they add up to something simple: in Iraq and in Lebanon, two countries the Western powers have operated on like they were diabetics with Medicaid, the net result of all the slicing and cutting is victory, hands down, for Shiite militias that didn’t even figure in the big plans. They just weren’t supposed to be part of the equation, and now they’re on top.
And that’s assuming it’s all being decided by Washington. Suppose we entertain, as they say, another idea: suppose it’s true that the Lebanese Hezzies are just "puppets" of Iran the way Cheney keeps saying they are. Well, if that’s true, then…lessee here: Cheney woofs on and on about attacking Iran and just coincidentally these Iranian puppets just casually take over Lebanon, one of the few supposedly pro-Western Arab states. And they do it without even breaking a sweat. Like saying, "Hello Meester Cheney, joost a leetle reminder, we know zee game about a t’ousand times better dan yoooo, sir!"
There are two possibilities: Cheney is an Iranian mole, and he’s laughing his head off chewing pistachios, kicking back on his prayer mat in front of the flatscreen, something I’ve been arguing for awhile now—or he’s the stupidest human being ever to step out of his league—which would be Wyoming, Little League. Girls’ Softball to be exact.
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