Fragilecologies Archives
9 January 2004
By Dr. Michael H. Glantz and Dr. Igor Zonn
I would think that President Bush would like to take back some the words he spoke in May 2003, that the war in Iraq had successfully ended. From the perspective of December 2003 a more correct statement by the president would seem to have been that the coalition forces had successfully removed Saddam and his government from power. But, it is not possible to roll back the clock in order to take back words spoken, and then to replace them with more carefully chosen comments.
What has been happening in Iraq since the Bush announcement of a military victory (which it clearly was) is the emergence of a political quagmire and urban guerrilla warfare. It is still not clear if the guerrilla actions against the coalition forces are being orchestrated from a central location. They may not be. They do not have to be. From the view of the coalition, it would be better if they were centrally coordinated, because a central command post would be relatively more vulnerable. It appears though to be a mix of actions against the coalition with some activities being carried out under someone’s directives and other actions being unstructured, anomic acts of violence. One sign of orchestration, though, is the fact that there seems to be a guerrilla goal of taking the lives of at least two American troops each day. This has been an apparent modus operandi for the past few months.
Every once in a while we hear someone say that the American operation in Iraq is much like the situation that America faced during the war in Vietnam. For example, the US has backed into a situation without proper forethought and planning for the future, that is, without thinking about the long-term consequences of its military actions. Words like bogged down, protracted and quagmire seem to crop up every once in a while, based on the American experience in Vietnam. That war cost more that 50,000 American lives and perhaps ten times that wounded. I guess one could argue that the Tet Offensive carried out by the Viet Cong in Saigon in the late 1960s could be seen as somewhat analogous to what is now happening in and around Baghdad and around the Sunni triangle. But the Tet Offensive was one quick military action against the American forces as much to demoralize the troops and the will of the American government against carrying on with a protracted costly (in lives and money) war. On Tet Offensive, see www.vwam.com/vets/tet/tet.html
It is a horrible picture to portray for the future of American and other coalition troops in Iraq. The problem with this comparison is that only a few aspects of the situation in Iraq may be like that in Vietnam. For many other aspects, however, that comparison falls short. This is true of most if not all historical comparisons. Obviously, no analogy is one hundred percent accurate.
There is, however, a contemporary conflict situation that has more similarities to the current situation in Iraq. We believe that there are more aspects of the current situation of the coalition forces in Iraq that can be compared to those in the current Russian situation in Chechnya, a situation about which most Americans are unfamiliar.
Chechnya is a Russian republic in the Caucasus region. It is relatively speaking oil rich, landlocked, and made up of mountains, hills and plains. They are fiercely independent people, although they have been deprived of that independence throughout their history. Stalin had the Chechens physically removed and dispersed from their homeland in 1944, because he considered them to be unreliable as Russian allies in World War II. They were sympathetic to invading Nazi forces that might free them by removing Soviet rule from their land. It was in the mid-1950s that Khrushchev allowed them to return to their homeland.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991 the Chechen Republic sought independence from the Russian Federation, after several other republics had successfully gained their political independence. The Russian Federation and especially the Caucasus region are made up of many ethnic groups in addition to Russians.
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The Russian government, however, saw the Chechen Republic in a different light than it viewed other Soviet republics. The Russian fear was that a Chechen demand for and gaining of independence would start a cascade of demands by other ethnic groups in the Russian Federation for separation as well.
As a result of these diametrically opposed views on the political future of the Chechen Republic, a bloody war broke out in the mid-1990s, which was followed by a truce for a few years, and then a restart of a bloody protracted conflict that continues today. Putin was elected president of Russia in part for his pledges to somehow resolve the Russian-Chechen situation. Some years have since passed and there is no resolution to the war is in sight. The guerrilla war in Chechnya continues.
Much of Chechnya’s infrastructure has been destroyed. It has turned into an urban guerrilla war. Chechnya’s capital city of Grozny has been trashed. Russian soldiers are killed or wounded just about every day. Russian patrols are under constant threat of attack; helicopters are shot down from the ground; and landmines are used in ambushes to derail convoys. In fact mines are everywhere. The Russian army, with all its might has become bogged down in a military and political quagmire from which it cannot easily extract itself, even though the original leader of the war for separation, Dudayev, was killed several years ago by Russian troops.
The Chechen guerrillas have taken the conflict to Moscow and to other cities. They have taken as hostages hundreds of people in hospitals and theaters. They have used car bombs, suicide bombers (most recently on a train), and have blown up apartment buildings in the heart of the city inflicting death and destruction with little regard for the people who happened to be living in them.
The following comments from various articles in the Christian Science Monitor, taken from news reports and interviews, might give an idea of what the Russians have been and still are up against in the situation in Chechnya.
“But few political analysts in Moscow believe that planting the Russian flag over Grozny’s ruins [Grozny is Chechnya’s capital city] will bring an end to the war.”
“The taking of Grozny has been expected for some time, and it is the signal for the beginning of a full-scale guerrilla war.”
“In that conflict Russian forces took Grozny after a long and bloody assault. But they never managed to fully control the city…”
“Russian forces officially endure 150 deaths a month to rebel mines and ambushes.”
Russian troops and police regularly carry out sweeps…ostensibly to check identity documents and weed rebels out of the population”.
Back to Iraq.
The American political leaders misperceived the reception that the coalition forces would get from the Iraqis who had been liberated from the rule of Saddam. The American forces are no longer seen by many Iraqis not as their saviors from an oppressive sadistic dictatorship (Saddam and his sons) but as occupiers of Iraq. Only recently and at the urgings of European nations has the US administration begun to set down a timetable for turning the governing of the country back to Iraqis. The timetable for a military presence of the coalition forces remains as yet open-ended.
Like Chechnya, Iraq has ethnic groups or political factions that are in conflict. Like Iraq, Chechens have increasingly been turned away from the seemingly good intentions of the occupiers because of their mistakes, their collateral damage (e.g., friendly fire accidents), and hostility of many Iraqi men to their troops. Oh yes, they both have an involvement in the world’s oil supply. Iraq is a major source of oil. Chechnya has oil but it can also disrupt oil pipelines that are used to transport Caspian oil to the world marketplace.
We do not want to take this analogy too far, lest we tend to draw simple potentially misleading conclusions that might come from a comparison of the current military situation in Iraq with the war in Vietnam a few decades earlier. Nevertheless, we do want to show that there may be more similarities between the current situation in Iraq and that in Chechnya. Such comparisons may help the US when it reviews what it intends to do in the near to mid-term in the Iraqi situation.
It appears today that the US government is not really listening to outsiders (the Russian government also does not accept outside advice about the Chechnya situation). Perhaps it is time for the coalition (and Russian) leaders to start the New Year — 2004 — by stepping out of the proverbial box they find themselves in to gain a glimpse of the real world. Perhaps the time is right to think more objectively and diplomatically about how to extract themselves from the difficult situations they got themselves into, even if the initial reasons for taking their actions were politically above board and honorable.
A useful proverb to consider is as follows: “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”. We would also add to it “and look for a ladder”.
For photos of the situation in Chechnya, please see chechen.8m.com/photos