Commentaries on Commentary: "How to Win in Iraq - and How to Lose"

Arthur Herman, in "How to Win in Iraq - and How to Lose," Commentary, April 2007, pages 23-28, takes the familiar position that the war in Iraq is being won militarily, but that the politicians may snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As Herman puts it, "if the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis still continues and is showing signs of improvement, the battle for the hearts and minds of Congress, or at least of the Democratic majority, seems to be all but over."

Herman then takes up an extended discussion the war in Algeria (1954-1962), and the work of David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. I have, by the way, just finished reading Alistair Horne's classic history of the Algerian war, A Savage War of Peace, which was first published in 1977, and which was reissued in 2006 with some new notes and material. Many of the details of the incidents to which Herman alludes in this article are described at length in Horne's work.

Herman is quite correct that the French army, with the use of such principles as concentration of force, defeated the FLN (Front de Liberation National), and its military arm again and again. In particular, the Morice line, named after a French Minister of Defense, closed the border with Tunisia, and prevented the ALN from reinforcing the suffering cadres in the wilayas.

Some of these principles are, as Herman says, important in the context of Iraq. Some of the steps taken by General Petraeus have applied some effective measures to the problems of defeating and eliminating certain anti-government or anti-American forces. The fact that Iraq lacks an equivalent of the Morice line to prevent infiltration of personnel and weapons from Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, is the source of many of the problems the American forces face in Iraq.

Herman takes the position that the war in Algeria was, in the end, lost because left-wing politicians in France forced the government to abandon a victorious army just as the war was won. He also mentions the similar example of Vietnam. And so, he concludes, there is a terrible danger that "feckless politicians" may pull the plug on the Army's latest initiative in Iraq before it has had a chance to work.

I have a couple of problems with this sort of article. The "stab in the back" theme has been trotted out ever since the American Revolution. (Cornwallis had the war just about won, but the Ministry wouldn't send any more troops after he suffered a temporary setback at Yorktown.) The most famous "stab in the back" was that administered to the German army in 1918 by the liberal (and Jewish) politicians, who betrayed the soldiers and the Kaiser. The story of the stab in the back gained a certain credibility from the fact that the German army surrendered while still occupying large sections of France and Belgium. The German public did not see how shattered the military was after the ultimate failure of the last great German offensive in March, 1918, and the Allied attacks later that year. Moreover, Germany's allies had gone under, the blockade had driven the German population to near-starvation rations, and the increasing numbers of American soldiers and Marines, who could not be matched by fresh levies of Germans, all meant that the Germans must inevitably lose.

Vietnam is an interesting case. There are many people who feel that political interference caused many problems during the war. Certainly a case can be made that the Tet Offensive of January 1968 was a defeat for the Viet Cong. I would argue that Tet was a terrible defeat for the U.S. military in Vietnam, and its political leadership on the following counts: First, it was obviously a terrible surprise to everyone in Saigon, betraying the failure of military intelligence after seven years of continuous presence in the country. Second, the Vietnamese forces were must stronger than any of the MACV estimates would have led one to believe. This was not only another intelligence failure, but cast doubt on (at least), previous reports of numbers of the enemy killed, of the success of the interdiction of reinforcements and supplies through Laos, and of the reliability of South Vietnamese (ARVN) forces. Third, it demonstrated that the Vietnamese were not going to give up.

It has always been the case in warfare that, under certain circumstances, the winner is the side that refuses to concede defeat. In the days when the winner of a battle was determined by which side controlled the battlefield at the end of the day, the side which was too stubborn to retreat could end up claiming a victory. One can argue, for example, that, had General Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker not retreated after the battle of Chancellorsville, that fight would have been recorded as a Union, rather than a Confederate victory.

Horne makes the point that the FLN never changed its goals, never backed away from its demands, never conceded anything. In the end, the war in Algeria was too expensive. It was preventing the modernization of the French army and economy, it was diverting too much energy and manpower away from Europe, and the game was simply not worth the candle for the French. Certainly, from the time the Algerian war ended, France entered upon a period of rapid economic growth and modernization.

In the end, the dictum of Clausewitz is still with us: War is the continuation of politics by other means. The idea that one can have a military victory and a political defeat is nonsense. The only way to have that appear to occur, is if the military has been misinformed of, or has misunderstood, the political goals. It is the accomplishment of those goals, not military advances and retreats, which denotes victory.