View From The Moon, Guest Post: Is It Clear To All What Is Happening Here?

The spear of destiny is in Palestine, and so is the keystone of peace. Thanks to Fleming Lee at View From The Moon, a blogger worth visiting with any questions on "Zio-cons," we get a factual brief which he has graciously allowed me to cross-post here. He also took significant time to find the map above, the only example I've ever seen of it. He intends these, together, as an antidote to the extreme disinformation about the power relationship between Israel and Palestine. The real story is simple: Israelis are Cowboys. Palestinians are Indians. If you're comfy with that notion, and don't wish to comprehend what's happening in the Mid-East and its adverse effects, don't read this:

"1. Bush/Israel push for free elections in Palestine, thinking their pet Palestinians (Abbas/Fatah) will be elected.

2. Oops . . . Palestinians elect wrong group to run their government. They elect candidates of honest and efficient Hamas instead of corrupt Fatah. (What is “wrong” with Hamas is that it represents Palestinian interests rather than the interests of Israel and refuses to accept the Israeli occupation as legitimate.)

3. Despite the free and fair elections and formation of a stable, popular government under Hamas, Bush/Israel move to cut off funds from the Palestinian government and people in order to undermine the elected government.

4. Bush/Israel aid an effort by Abbas/Fatah to overthrow the legitimate government by force, but Hamas beats back Fatah and continues to control Gaza, leaving Abbas/Fatah forming a Bush/Israel backed illegitimate “government’’ in the West Bank, contrary to the election results. (The US press reports this in reverse, indicating that Hamas “seized” control of Gaza.)

5. Bush/Israel seek to bolster the unpopular and illegitimate West Bank faction by resuming some funding, freeing some unlawfully withheld funds which were due to the Palestinians long ago, and making a show of cooperation and generosity . . . all directed exclusively at the phony West Bank “government” instead of the elected government.

(Latest bulletin on Israeli good will: ‘CAIRO, July 17 (RIA Novosti) - Israeli authorities have stopped a convoy of trucks carrying UN humanitarian aid to Gaza at Israel's Kerem Shalom crossing near Egypt. Under the United Nations World Food Program, vital humanitarian aid has been entering Gaza through the Karem Shalom crossing under an agreement between Israel, the Palestinian National Authority and Hamas to facilitate the movement of supplies. The small, crowded Gaza Strip is heavily dependent on outside aid, and has been increasingly isolated. Over 15 trucks carrying sacks with wheat flour destined for Gaza were diverted earlier Tuesday to a warehouse in Egypt.’)

6. Suddenly Israel is ready to release some of its 10,000 plus Palestinian political prisoners to the obedient Fatah. ‘A committee of Israeli Cabinet ministers has Tuesday approved a list of 250 Palestinian prisoners to be released this week as a gesture in support of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.’ (Voice of America)

7. Recently booted British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- a loyal pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian, Bush lapdog – becomes European “envoy” to aid the mythical “peace process”.

8. Bush now announces a grand Mideast Conference in which Abbas/Fatah will negotiate the future of the Palestinian people who refused to elect them and are still loyal to Hamas. Of course all of the Palestinian representatives to the conference will be hailed as “respected”, while the uninvited elected officials will be styled “terrorists”. US media -- even habitual critics of Bush -- hail Bush’s announcement as a sign that Bush is finally going to do something about the “peace process”.

‘BUSH ANNOUNCES MIDEAST PEACE CONFERENCE
U.S. pledges $190 million in direct aid to Fatah government’

‘AP WASHINGTON - President Bush on Monday announced an international conference this fall to include Israel, the Palestinian Authority and some of their Arab neighbors to help restart Mideast peace talks and review progress in building democratic institutions. . .

‘Bush said the conference would include representatives from Israel, the Palestinians "and their neighbors in the region" and said participants would include just those governments that support creation of a Palestinian state. [Read: “those governments that support creation of a docile Palestinian entity conforming to Israel’s wishes”.]

‘He said Abbas and his new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, "are striving to build the institutions of a modern democracy."’
[That is probably the most outrageously hypocritical lie VIEW FROM THE MOON has ever quoted.

‘Bush also pledged increased U.S. aid to the Palestinian government of President Mahmoud Abbas and called for the convening of a meeting of "donor" nations to consider more international aid, including the Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.’

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan are the “moderate” Arab states whose leadership has been bought by the US. They will obediently support Israel’s interests while performing a show of concern for the Palestinians. The idea that “just” those bribed governments support creation of a Palestinian state is a stomach-turning bit of verbal acrobatics meaning just the opposite: The Palestinians want a Palestinian state. Lebanon and Syria and other Muslim states (including Iraq, if the US had not destroyed it) want a Palestinian state. The qualification for attendance at Bush's conference isn’t to want a Palestinian state, but to approve a toothless Palestinian mock-state subservient to Israel."

The map tells the truth. There is no peace process. Arabs know. Muslims know. Israelis know. Eyal Weizman just published a book called Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture Of Occupation which chronicles how an apartheid was enforced through a garrison state of roadblocks, checkpoints, strongpoints, security zones, sterile areas, summit settlements, mobile homes, bridgeheads, walls, and military bases. Here none dare call it Reservation. None dare whisper Concentration. To keep what it has taken, Israel must hold back many peoples, and many nations.

Fort Apaches On The Tigris

Since its announcement, I've been harping on the disastrous end the "Surge" will come to in Iraq. Its strategy hinges on creating secure gated communities, and is a close facsimilie of the more torture-driven, less firepower-dependent French/German "quadrillage" methods of counterinsurgency which served as models for our good General Petraeus.

Here comes the harp again. Hard as it is to believe, the Pentagon's execution of strategy in Iraq is getting worse. First, Petraeus and others now see "the Surge" extending into '08. Next, the whole logic underlying quadrillage as a "pacification network" has already failed, because the US is being forced to construct heavier blast shields and to up-gun garrisons in order to keep them alive. If pacification were making the desired headway, taking that step probably wouldn't be necessary. Garrisons are under frequent attack, even in Baghdad; one fort was breached recently by a truck bomb which reportedly killed 9 and seriously wounded 20 soldiers:

"There's two threats to the combat outpost . . . a huge truck bomb, and indirect fire," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who handles day-to-day military operations in Iraq, said in an interview at his Baghdad headquarters last week. In response, he said, U.S. troops are building more walls to shield themselves from mortars and rockets, while trying to track down insurgents firing on them.

To counter truck bombs, military engineers are gauging the structural soundness of the outposts and making sure they are well removed from traffic, Odierno said. Antitank weapons such as the bazooka-like AT-4 are also now required for soldiers on guard.

The Iraq Command is botching the fortification job itself and, disturbingly, is missing the greatest threat they face. A third threat: direct ground assault. Pat Lang over at Sic Semper Tyrannis points the finger of experience at General Odierno, noting that as forts go, they're generally improvisational, poorly located, and insecure; if the insurgents used truck bombs to breach a fort wall or gate, they could mount a ground assault and overwhelm the garrison. If they did this to a number of forts at once, it would be a nightmare.

Pat's point about breaching the garrison walls is true, and it's sad the general in question seems to have missed that possibility, but ground assaults may not even be needed to reach disaster status. The garrisons could simply be harrassed to death, for a number of reasons.

First, installing mini-garrisons into hostile neighborhoods with so few pacification carrots serves to negate the overwhelming advantage in firepower, and the considerable advantage in manoevre, factors our ground forces and tactics are designed around. Their fields of fire are reduced to the same as that of their enemies, a few hundred yards at best. It's M-16s vs. AK-47s all over again. Not good.

Second, putting professional, highly trained career soldiers into these forts as cannon fodder is nothing short of criminal. They're not even useful for "bait-and-destroy" missions, rather they encourage dispersion and steady forms of nuisance resistance. They are static targets waiting to either run out the clock, get wasted, get rescued, or get extracted. Or, as will be common, to go twitching mad. Can you imagine what it's like being stuck in one of these forts for months on end?

As an insurgent, all you'd have to do to generate wasteful responses from the garrisons and their rescue/reinforcement/air cover elements would be to get a few friends with light weapons, some surgical tubing, a dog food bowl, and catapult some molotov cocktails at it most every night. Or mortars. Or pot-shots. A recreational RPG. Or the occasional suicide bomber. The populace will back these nuisances up in the daytime with unfriendly stares, and anybody who in the gated community who lifts a finger to help the Americans would very quickly be taught not to.

By pressuring this style of occupation steadily, just heavily enough to keep forcing responses out of it, an adversary can provoke the whole logistical structure to grind itself to bits while it runs around trying to defend all the damned forts. An insurgency could win with comparatively little cost in casualties or equipment, knowing that the position of the garrisons are untenable.

The Iraqi insurgency need not scale up into squad or platoon-level concentrations to win by overwhelming specific garrisons in ground assaults. While losing forts like that would be a tremendously visible loss of prestige, the insurgency can also win by keeping its operations on the micro-logistical scale. By focusing on territorial coordination rather than direct ground assaults, they can overwhelm the support structure for the entire fort system. Possibly in the same amount of time. I would guess the probing, steadily escalating approach is what they'll stick with. If necessary, when the support system has tired and there's been plenty of time to probe, map, and measure weaknesses in response, then will come the breaches and the assaults.

Either way, the sheer asymmetry of expenditure by the two sides and results obtained for them eventually guarantees total US force exhaustion. And it's bigger than just Iraq. When you declare war on everybody, you've got to worry about everybody, and this is the role calling for a "Global War on Terror" has trapped our armed forces into. As for Surges, gated communities, quadrillage or GWOT, once we get kicked out of one fort, of one region, or one country, we've demonstrated our own defeat. Either some of those insecure forts must be abandoned, or they'll fall.

How The Iraq Occupation Will End

Quadrillage. It means sectioning, quartering, setting up troops in fortified village posts and in neighborhoods to observe and direct counter-insurgency operations. The idea is to have Gary Cooper holed up in the sherrif's office, like he was in 'High Noon.' Only better armed. To keep the Sherriffs from being overwhelmed, it takes a heavy network of intelligence, firepower, quick-reaction cavalry, air and ground asset support. And to provoke its hair-trigger response doesn't take much.

As a way to quell insurgency, quadrillage's main disadvantage is that its outposts are static and in the very midst of the populations they aim to control. In Iraq, our soldiers lack the vital advantage of intelligence, so as sectioneurs they are constantly observed for weakness. Every coming and going is noted. Every order for food is seen. Near Baqubah yesterday, an outpost was rammed by a suicide bomber driving a truck packed with explosives. The entire garrison of US troops was blown up, with a reported 9 dead and 20 wounded. The same Baqubah which T.E. Lawrence stormed with a bunch of Arabs on camels to sound the death knell of the Ottoman Empire.

Iraq is like the movie 'Fort Apache, The Bronx,' only worse: unless there is a political path to a viable treaty, quadrillage does nothing but turn troopers into vulnerable targets. Meanwhile, the only path to treaty BushCo is pushing is "Stay the Course." This is not a course. It's an exercise in futility. It places our troops within reach of angry people who regrettably but understandably want to kill them. And until we pull back, that's what's going to happen. If our troops are exposed, they will be attacked, and by spreading them around into smaller, less defendable forts, quadrillage makes them more vulnerable.

Quadrillage & The New "Gated Communities," Pt. III

By announcing Baghdad as the focus of the surge, Bush has given the insurgents ample time to prepare fixed defenses which feature ambush, fluid withdrawal to the next prepared defenses, and then full withdrawal to the countryside. These insurgents also happened to run army units, and their commanders fought the third-bloodiest war in the twentieth century (against Iran, which had about three times the population of Iraq). Their largely Sunni insurgency has demonstrated ongoing cohesion, with the ability to recruit and strike all over central Iraq. Here is all they need to do to defeat the Surge:

1) maintain communication links
2) avoid annihilation or capture
3) inflict casualties on US and Iraqi patrols within "gated communities"
4) sabotage or otherwise disrupt government services financed by the US
5) maintain safe havens outside Baghdad, and continue ambushes there.

One angle on the Surge which might work would be to say to the insurgents, "We don't care about your weapons. Take them. We'll give you safe passage, and find you new housing that's better. But we need you to move out of this area to where your support is." This would be a non-violent ethnic cleansing approach applied to Baghdad with a "Blood Borders" logic behind it (see Ralph Peters, Armed Forces Journal, June 2006 at link) to speed the inevitable partition along. But I doubt such an approach is politically palatable, and thus it's as good as impossible.

The Surge will probably make things look better in the press for a few months. There may well be talk of milestones met and progress made in Baghdad. Meanwhile the insurgency in the country as a whole will likely gather even more centrifugal force, and the atrocities on all sides will become more unforgivable. The Bush Administration's goal is to create a Western-friendly region. (Bush no longer drinks. Notice how he avoids all mention of nitrous oxide?) The Army's goal is to be able to say, "We followed sound strategy, but were saddled with flawed rules of engagement." The MIC's (military-industrial complex) goal is to keep the whole thing going. Two out of three ain't bad.

It is also possible that the Sunnis keenly sense a "Tigris Offensive" in their grasp, with all intentional reference to the Tet Offensive. The insurgents have amply demonstrated their effectiveness and determination, and if they're willing to strap bombs on their bellies, you can guess they're probably willing to blow up an entire building in Baghdad to take out a squad or two of soldiers inside. If they are able to inflict heavy casualties on either the Iraqi Army or US forces, they can break the will not only of Congress, but the Generals running this grisly horror show and the soldiers unlucky enough to act it out. Vietnam wasn't lost because of a sudden realism or humility on the part of US leadership. It was lost because soldiers and their commanders saw no more point to what they were doing. They just started going through the motions. When asked to drive around in Humvees to search the same roads and houses over and over, all the while waiting for an IED to explode next to them, they must be nearing that epiphany in Iraq. Booby-trapping apartment buildings would be technically much easier than booby-trapping roads. It's the sharpening of a decision already made.

The movie "The Battle of Algiers" is the story of quadrillage, and how the French used brutality to quell a stubborn insurgency in the Casbah for a few years. It ends with the insurgent youth Ali La Pointe huddling in the crawlspace of a house with three younger children who trust him. Having learned not to trust the French, they refuse to heed a French colonel's appeals to come out, and soldiers blow the building to the ground. The movie was considered required viewing among the officer elite, presumably for the harsh measures which must be taken to win. They seem to have overlooked a few things: a few years after the events depicted, the insurgents had won and France was putting down a military coup by the officers who ran the counterinsurgency, which claimed upwards of 10% of the population. Decades later, many of the muslim kids burning cars in Paris suburbs were quite literally the children of counterinsurgency, with parents who came from North Africa. They were shouting "Vive Algiers," and writing "Ali La Pointe" on walls. A main street in Algiers is named for a 19-year old girl, Hasiba ben Bouali, who died in the crawlspace with him. A university is also named after her.

Who will the streets and universities in tomorrow's Iraq be named for? My bet is there won't be a David Petraeus Avenue. Quadrillage isn't a model of what to do in Iraq. Based upon many, many outcomes of history, it's a powerfully proven model of what NOT to do.

Quadrillage & The New "Gated Communities," Pt. II

Remember the Vietnam euphemism "Strategic Hamlet?" It's funny how ideas are recycled in different market-ese. Strategic Hamlets refer to counterinsurgency efforts in South Vietnam which relied on massive population transfers. Peasants were relocated into self-constructed walled forts in order to identify, isolate, and kill Viet Minh insurgents. The program enjoyed considerable initial advantages, including almost unlimited funding and expert leadership under Robert Ker Thompson, who had a record of success against communists in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. 8.5 million peasants were re-housed into more than 7,000 hamlets in 28 months, with CIA-trained death squads killing untold numbers of Viet Minh sympathizers. Except the tried-and-true method didn't work, and Vietnam's President Diem was assassinated in 1963.

So now it's called "Gated Communities." This is a big gamble. If the game were Texas Hold 'Em, it's a bet on drawing an inside straight flush on the last card. Long odds. To recap, the idea behind the "Surge" follows classic counterinsurgency doctrine as re-hashed by the new ground commander in Iraq, the intellectually inclined General David Petraeus, whose name oddly befits a Roman prelate. The idea is to cleanse Baghdad of insurgents by sectioning off its neighborhoods, putting gates around them, then going through them house by house to identify insurgent families. Quadrillage is the term the French used for it in Algiers and early South Vietnam. Insurgents will be isolated, then neutralized by shipping them and their supporters to camps, prisons, or graveyards. A mixed local command is set up of mixed Iraqi troops and police backed by a central core of US forces with responsibility over their gated section. The local command begins to employ people to pick up garbage, make repairs, and put snitches on payroll, in this way winning over the populace, who in turn make the insurgents unwelcome. If anything gets out of control, overwhelming firepower will be called down on the trouble.

In Part I of this post, I promised to explain why quadrillage probably won't work now. It probably would've worked if employed immediately after the invasion, especially if it relied on the Baathists who had run the country for 40 years. At this point, however, it's going up a steep hill, and alerting the insurgents to the strategy 3 months in advance doesn't help. And I said General Petraeus isn't the genius people think he is; for example, he is fond of holding up Tal Afar as a shining example of successful counterinsurgency. Tal Afar was the patrol area of one of the military's leading lights, Colonel H.R. McMaster, who wrote the provocative book "Dereliction of Duty," and is credited for coming up with the template for taming the bad guys. While Petraeus and McMaster are letting people give them attaboys and manly pats on the toosh, here's what Matt Taibbi quotes the mayor of Tal Afar as saying last summer, in his Rolling Stone article, "Waiter, There's A Surge In My Soup" (hat tip to Bruce of The River Blog for surfacing it):

I was in Tal Afar's "genuine success" story over the summer. It was such a success story that the city's neurotic, hand-wringing mayor, Najim Abdullah al-Jubori, actually asked American officials during a meeting I attended if they could tell President Bush to stop calling it a success story. "It just makes the terrorists angry," he said. At the meeting he pointed to a map and indicated the areas where the insurgents held strong positions.

"Here," he said. "Oh, and here. And here. Here also...."

Due to length, I'll follow up with a Part III. Graphic above is of Afrikaner commandos in the Boer War, just as a reminder that not all insurgents are brown-skinned communists.

Mythbusting, Pt. VI: The Urge To Surge

Whom the Gods would destroy
They first make mad.
Euripides, ca. 440 BC

The White House is desperate enough to employ ignorant, pie-in-the-sky think tank pukes to go around the Pentagon in order to seek politically palatable options, and it is once again violating the very fundamentals of sound military operational planning by advocating a "surge" in occupation troop levels.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff apparently resent having their advice ignored, and are publicly NOT on board with the think-tankers' hare-brained scheme to pacify Baghdad. The Chiefs of Staff have stated the obvious points, i.e., the insurgents will simply go make trouble elsewhere, because that's what insurgents do, and that sending in another 30,000 combat personnel will definitively break the army. They didn't mention that the plan to disarm and disband the Mahdi Army (the 50,000-strong militia in Sadr City) might hit a few snags, such as heavy casualties in house-to-house fighting, a general uprising in Baghdad, a truce of co-belligerent convenience between the Sunni insurgency and the Shia Iraqi defense forces currently waging a civil war, and probably a direct assault on the Green Zone.

The Troop Surge Plan will make even more Coalition troops more vulnerable. It's downright crazy. Above left is the map of the US military bases along the Iraqi road networks as of 3-4 months ago. The 7 major supply depots are circled in black. Look at the base in the southeast just over the Kuwaiti border and the next depot just south of Baghdad. That's a long way between major bases, over 200 kilometers, and there are only two major routes connecting Baghdad to Kuwait. Most supplies are trucked in not by the military, but by private military contractors. Any significant action against Al Sadr's forces in Baghdad will result in those supply lines being cut, re-opened, and re-cut, and the battle will quickly devolve from "disarming terrorists to secure Baghdad" to a desperate fight to preserve the US army's carotid artories carrying its life's blood into the heart of Iraq. Oh, and disarming the Shia militias puts the permanent kibosh on the Death Squad Option (translation: attaching US advisors to Shia units which then seize and murder suspected Sunni insurgents) currently being followed as the path to Iraqi sovereignty.

Halliburton and KBR, the army's main suppliers, do not have significant facilities in Turkey; their supplies come by sea into Kuwait, and are carried north from there. Neither private companies nor the Army are ready to conduct supply from the opposite direction. Recently an entire convoy was lost when "men wearing Iraqi Defence Forces uniforms" put up a roadblock on the road northwest of Kuwait and seized drivers and trucks. It was that simple. If the Shia majority determines to get rid of US forces in Iraq, they have the ability to do so, and so far they have stopped short of active resistance, preferring to use our troops as tools to settle old grievances with the Sunnis. Far from securing anything, the urge to surge will precipitate a multi-level disaster and put an end to Shia cooperation. To put it mildly, control over the Southeast Shia rump of Iraq would be lost in short order. We'll see how incoming Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, an old Washington hand, referees this debate, or if he can bring some measure of sanity to the rats running this shit-house. Right now no one seems capable of dealing with a raging, delusional Rat King; at stake is the choice between a stinging defeat in Iraq and a decisive defeat in the world. Good luck, Bob.