'Going To War With The Army You Have'

The Latest American Theory about the Iraqi Resistance

In early February, a Newsweekteam led by Rod Nordland produced a detailed account of current theorizingamong American and Iraqi officials about the structure of the Iraqi resistance.

Here, in brief, is what these officials told Newsweek: The initialAmerican assault on Iraq was so successful that Saddam Hussein's plan forsystematic resistance fell apart almost immediately, leaving a dispersed, unrulyguerrilla movement with little or no coherent leadership. In the two subsequentyears, however, the Saddamists formed a wealthy and savvy leadership group inSyria. In the meantime Abu Massab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist with tiesto Al Qaeda, asserted his domination over the on-the-ground resistance. Pressurefrom recent American offensives drove the two groupings into an increasinglycomfortable alliance. Here is how Newsweek described developments sincelast summer, based on an interview with Barham Salih, the Iraqi Deputy PrimeMinister:

"According to Salih, ‘The Baathists regrouped and, in the last six or seven months, reorganized. Plus they had significant amounts of money, in Iraq and in Syria.' Those contacts and networks that Saddam's key cronies began developing months before the invasion now paid off. An understanding was found with the Islamic fanatics, and the well-funded Baathists appear to have made Syria a protected base of operations. ‘The Iraqi resistance is a monster with its head in Syria and its body in Iraq' is the colorful description given by a top Iraqi police official…. Zarqawi's people supply the bombers, the Baathists provide the money and strategy."

The current situation was succinctly summarized for Newsweek by Brig.Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, the Deputy Minister of the Interior: "Now betweenthe Zarqawi group and the Baathists there is full cooperation andcoordination."

This portrait has been further fleshed out inother accounts, including a NewYork Times report in which U.S. Commanding General George W. Casey declaredthat the Baath Party in Syria was "providing direction and financing forthe insurgency in Iraq."

This new theory about the nature of the Iraqi resistance helps to illuminatethe renewed saber-rattling against the Syrians, which began even before theassassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister. On January 25, for example,former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, writing togetherfor the first time, made the connection explicit ina Washington Post op-ed. They asserted that the Bush administration musthave a "strategy for eliminating the sanctuaries in Syria and Iran fromwhich the enemy can be instructed, supplied, and given refuge in time toregroup." The new theory may also help to explain why (according to suchdiverse sources as Newsweekand formerU.S. weapons inspector Scott Ritter) the U.S. is considering usingassassination squads to eliminate enemies. One whole category of targets forthese squads (if formed) would certainly be the Syrian-based leadership of theresistance.

And then, at the end of February, came news of the first fruits of Americanoperations based on this new insight, the capture in Syria of Sabawi IbrahimHassan, a half brother and political lieutenant of Saddam, and one of only 11 ofthe original "deck of cards" Saddamist leaders who still remained atlarge. The capture vindicated the saber-rattling as well, since high level Iraqiofficials toldreporters on February 28 that the "capture was a goodwill gesture bythe Syrians to show that they are cooperating" with the new Americancampaign to decapitate the insurgency by removing its Syrian-based leadership.

The New Theory Is Probably Not Accurate

This new portrait of the Iraqi resistance may be an accurate description ofone aspect of the ongoing war; and its key new element -- a working alliancebetween Saddamist exiles and Zarqawi's fighters inside Iraq -- may be animportant new development. But the foundation upon which these descriptions arebuilt -- that these forces now dominate the resistance, supply its leadership,or provide the bulk of its resources -- is likely to prove profoundlyinaccurate.

This is most easily seen by consulting -- of all sources -- theCIA, which issued a contrary report about the time the Newsweekarticle appeared. According to the CIA, the Zarqawi faction and his Saddamistallies were "lesser elements" in the resistance, which wasincreasingly dominated by "newly radicalized Sunni Iraqis, nationalistsoffended by the occupying force, and others disenchanted by the economic turmoiland destruction caused by the fighting." There is, in fact, a vast body ofpublicly available evidence in support of the CIA's perspective, including, forexample, most first-hand accounts of the resistance in Falluja and other citiesin the Sunni triangle.

In the short, dreary history of America's Iraq war, our leaders haverepeatedly acted on gross misconceptions about whom they were fighting --sometimes based on faulty intelligence, but sometimes in the face of perfectlyaccurate intelligence. This is, in all likelihood, another instance where theybelieve their own distortions, and it is worthwhile attempting to understand theunderlying pattern that produces this almost predictable error.

One way to characterize this propensity to mis-analyze the resistance is tosee that all the portraits thus far generated of the Iraqi resistance have beenbased on the assumption that it is organized into a familiar hierarchical formin which the leadership exercises strategic and day-to-day control over apyramid shaped organization. Such a structure is described by both militarystrategists and organizational sociologists as a "Command and Control"structure. After the battle of Falluja, AirForce Lt. General Lance Smith even used this phrase to characterizeZarqawi's operation: "Zarqawi… no doubt …is able to maintain some levelof command and control over the disparate operations."

This command-and-control image applies well to a large bureaucracy or aconventional army; but invariably provides a poor picture of a guerrilla army,which helps explain American military failures in Iraq. Whether or not Zarqawimaintains command and control over his forces (who are, as far as we can tell,not guerrillas) no one exercises such control over the forces that foughtagainst the Americans in Falluja or Sadr City andthose that are currently fighting a guerrilla war in Ramadi and other Sunnicities that boycotted the recent elections.

Guerrilla wars violate the command-and-control portrait in two importantways: local units must, by and large, supply themselves (since an occupationarmy would be likely to interdict any regular shipments of supplies); and theyare likely to have substantial autonomy (since hit-and-melt tactics do not lendthemselves well to central decision making).

This lack of command and control is a curse and a blessing. On the negativeside, lack of central coordination means that guerrilla armies are normallydoomed to small, disconnected actions -- a severe limitation if the goal is todrive an enemy out of your country. On the positive side, they are lessvulnerable to attacks on supply lines and to the targeting of commandingofficers -- two key strategies of conventional warfare.

The resistance in Iraq reflects this dialectic of guerrilla war. Themujaheddin in Falluja, for example, seem to have been notoriouslydecentralized; even local clerical leadership reportedly achieved only a tenuousdiscipline over the troops. This same lack of discipline, however, made itimpossible for the U.S. to identify and eliminate key leaders. During the secondbattle for the city in November, their hit-and-run tactics allowed them to holdout for over a month against a force with overwhelming technological andnumerical superiority.

The command and control portrait is not a useful tool when it comes toanalyzing a large component of the Iraqi resistance, and it is of little use ifit is applied to the movement as a whole.

The Drumbeat of Command and Control

Nevertheless, the U.S. military has assumed such a structure at everyjuncture in the war.

In the Fall of 2003, when the resistance first began to trouble theoccupation, U.S. military strategy was based on the conviction that theresistance was led by Saddam Hussein and the "deck of cards"leadership. Here we see command-and-control logic applied for the first time.

By mid-December 2003, the occupation forces had arrested or killed the vastmajority of the men on that deck of cards, while Saddam's sons Uday and QusayHussein had died in a spectacular gun battle, and Saddam himself had just beencaptured in a dirt dugout. Occupation authorities confidently predicted that theBaathist "bitter enders" were done for and the resistance wouldsubside, since without its leaders, local fighters were expected to berudderless and ineffective.

Instead the disparate parts of the resistance became stronger, and in April2004 emerged with a victory in Falluja -- after a siege of the city, the Marinespulled back without taking it -- and a bloody standoff in Najaf. By then,American intelligence had discovered Abu Massab al Zarqawi and declared that hewas actually the linchpin of the resistance.

Once again, a command-and-control portrait of the enemy remained dominant,and the second battle of Falluja was fought in good part on the basis of thattheory: to disrupt or destroy theZarqawi leadership group. But despite the expulsion of the guerrillas (andjust about the entire population of Fallujans) from the city, the rebellionquickly spread to other cities and intensified, refuting the claim that thedecapitation of the movement would be incapacitating.

The command-and-control theory has, in fact, turned out to be as resilient asthe resistance itself. American commander Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, for instance,explained the post-Falluja battle of Mosul tothe New York Times by saying that Zarqawi and/or his leadership team hadmoved to that city and fomented the uprising, ignoring the indigenous character ofthe mujaheddin who were fighting there. Later, it would be announced thatZarqawi had set up a new "nerve center" south of Baghdad and a majornew search-and-destroy operation would be mounted there.

Even after these actions failed to quell the fighting, the occupation forcesclung to command-and-control logic. General Kamal, for example, toldNewsweek, "Even if Zarqawi continues to elude capture, nailing al-Kurdi[one of Zarqawi's lieutenants] was a critical score. It might -- just might ---eventually help change the course of this war." Similar statements weremade a month later when Saddam's half-brother, identified as a key leader andfunder of the insurgency, was captured in Syria.

Evident in all of this is the faith that American military leaders have in astrategy of identifying and targeting the supposed leaders of the insurgency.Despite the direct evidence of an increasingly ferocious movement, the captureof a key leader, it has repeatedly been claimed, could "change the courseof the war."

Why the U.S. Military Can't Abandon "Command and Control" Logic

So why does the U.S. military relentlessly build its anti-insurgency strategyaround the idea of decapitating the leadership of the Iraqi resistance? Theanswer lies just beneath the surface of Donald Rumsfeld's nowinfamous statement, "You go to war with the Army you have."

This is a comment pregnant with meaning for organizational sociologists,because it illustrates a familiar pattern of organizational problem-solving. Ifa product is not selling well, for example, an engineering organization mightconclude that better engineering of the product was in order; a manufacturingfirm, that more efficient production technology was needed; and a marketingcompany, that better advertising would do the trick. This sort of organizationalidée fixe has led to some truly horrendous failures in business -- andmilitary -- history. For example, when a flood of automobile buyers began todemand fuel-efficient cars during the first oil crisis in the early 1970s, theAmerican automobile industry did not have the capacity to produce such vehicles.Instead of investing vast resources in developing that capacity, it tried to useits superior marketing skills to win Americans back to luxurious gas guzzlers.That is, the Big Three "went to war with the army they had" andconvinced themselves that they were facing a marketing problem. The results: apermanent crisis at General Motors (during which it lost world leadership in theindustry), a fundamental restructuring of Ford, and the demise of Chrysler.

Or take the French in World War II. They knew about the new German tanks thathad made World War I trench warfare obsolete, but the French army was onlyequipped to fight in the trenches. So they "went to war with the army theyhad," devising a trench-war strategy that they managed to convincethemselves would contain the German Panzer divisions. They lost the war in threeweeks.

The American army is also fighting with the army it has. This army is thebest equipped in the world for advanced conventional warfare -- with tanks,artillery, air power, missile power, battlefield surveillance power, andsatellite imaging to support highly mobile, well equipped, and superbly trainedsoldiers. No supply route is safe from its firepower, and no conventional armywould be likely to hold its ground long against an American assault. But themost intractable part of the resistance in Iraq is fighting a guerrilla war:they do not have long supply lines and they rarely try to hold their ground.

Guerrilla armies hide by melting into the local population. (Everyone knowsthis, including, of course, American military men.) To defeat them, an occupyingforce must have the intelligence to identify guerrillas who can disappear intothe civilian world; and it must station troops throughout resistance strongholdsin order to pounce upon guerrillas when they emerge from hiding to mount anattack. American military strategists know this, too. But these lessons --painfully drawn from Vietnam -- can't be implemented by the army that DonaldRumsfeld sent to war.

The Americans, in fact, have neither of these resources. Anti-guerrillaintelligence, after all, requires the cooperation of the local population,which, at least in the Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq, the U.S. has definitivelyalienated, largely through its use of blunt-edged conventional army attacks oncommunities that harbor guerrillas. And it cannot station enough troops in keylocations because too small an occupation force is spread far too thinly overcontested parts of the country. Estimates for the size of an army needed topacify Iraq range upward from GeneralEric Shinseki's prewar call for "several hundred thousand" troops.

The American military simply lacks the tools it needs to fight theguerrillas, just as in the 1970s the Big Three automakers lacked the productionsystem needed to produced fuel-efficient automobiles, and the French army lackedthe technology it needed to defeat German tanks in 1940. In response, militaryleaders are doing exactly what their organizational forbears did: They continueto develop theories about how to win the war "with the army theyhave." This backward logic leads inevitably to imagining an enemy thatmight be far more susceptible to defeat with the tools at hand; that is, anopponent with long supply lines (from Syria, for example) and acommand-and-control leadership (Zarqawi and his Saddamist allies, for example)capable of being "decapitated." This portrait of the enemy thenjustifies a military strategy that seeks, above all, to kill or capture thetheorized leaders. Such tactics almost always fail (even when leaders arecaptured); and in the process of failing, only alienates further the Iraqipopulation, producing an ever larger, more resourceful enemy.

The newest portrait of the resistance as a Zarqawi-Saddamist led amalgam willsooner or later die a lonely death -- in all likelihood to be replaced by yetanother command-and-control portrait of the insurgency whose features are as yetunknown. As long as the U.S. continues to fight "with the army ithas," it will also continue to generate -- and act on -- distorted(sometimes ludicrous) descriptions of the nature of the rebellion it faces.

Michael Schwartz,Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, haswritten extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American businessand government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the internet atnumerous sites including TomDispatch, Asia Times, MotherJones, and ZNet; and inprint at Contexts and Z magazine. His books include Radical Politics andSocial Structure, ThePower Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social Policyand the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo).