America's Occupation Trumps the "Surge" and Petraeus' Counterinsurgency Manual

British politicians had already betrayed Faisal, son of the sharif of Mecca, but, after the French threw him out of Syria, found a job for him as King of Iraq, a highly unstable collection of diverse ethnic, social and religious groups. The monarchy ended in 1958 with the execution of Faisal's grandson. Saddam Hussein emerged as co-tyrant of Iraq for the next ten years and by 1979 military dictator through murder, intrigue, bribery, public violence-all the usual methods that were and are necessary to maintain state power over people with severely different cultural/ethnic identities. Iraq was never a nation, and it is no longer possible to restore it as a state. [To my knowledge, the best single volume study of Iraq is Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (3rd edition, Cambridge, UK, 2007). This book is difficult because it follows intriguing but convoluted political/military history, a descriptive chronology that is short on analysis. Nevertheless, it is worth the strenuous effort.] This brief excursion into the history of Iraq, one of the last artificial states created by departing colonial powers, illuminates the basic flaw in COIN doctrine: it is impossible to devise a general theory that fits ever changing historical/geographical facts.

How much of the history of Iraq does General Petraeus know? Or, to put this question more sharply: should soldiers find ways, including self-delusion through jargon, to fight a hopeless war just because some neocons and an ignorant President want one? Where is the heroism in that? Or the courage? How many Senators or Representatives (or staff) actually slogged through the famous Manual? It is a truly unbearable task: one could make prisoners read this field manual and test them on memory, but Americans do not torture. In an improbable case of unconscious irony, there is a blurb on the back of the Manual by General Petraeus himself: '"Surely a manual that's on the bedside table of the president, vice president, secretary of defense, 21 of 25 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and many others deserves a place at your bedside too."" One can agree. It probably is better than strong drugs. It is certainly not addictive.

The Manual exposes, as noted above, that the highest-ranking officers in the American armed forces think that it is impossible to win a "conventional" war against the United States. Whether that is true, no one can know until such a war occurs. But, true or not, it is a foolish and disastrous assumption that the government of the United States should learn how to fight anti-colonial wars against peoples who will keep fighting until the Americans and all other foreigners are gone--and then get down to the business of fighting for whatever territory is up for grabs.

The ancient Greek concepts of hubris and nemesis-prideful arrogance and retribution-apply, written in blood, to the end of the modern version of commercial and political imperialism. The Europeans who conquered and colonized North America came to the imperial game late: US troops fought and tortured Filipinos in the name of liberation. We tried to establish puppet governments in China, the so-called Nationalists, and in Vietnam under a series of corrupt and incompetent military dictators. We lost because we created opponents who were better at fighting their kind of war on their ground than we could ever be, and should not want to be. All the sincerity, all the dedicated work, all the starched fatigues and snappy salutes will not change the brute facts of the modern post-colonial world. And we should, as an ancient Chinese saying has it, at least call things by their right names.

So this Counterinsurgency Field Manual is a waste of time, money, and sincerity. It was obsolete a century before it was written, but I agree with its author. One should read this sad monument to folly grasped. As the winning poker players say: read it and weep.

Truman B. Cross is a Russia scholar who toiled as a Lecturer in History at Portland State, Drake, UC Santa Barbara and Foothill College until his retirement in June 2000. He can be reached at: irinacross@ sbcglobal.net

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