What to expect after Fallujah -Nov 12, 2004

A lifetime in peace negotiations has given me considerable exposure to insurgency movements.

Experience elsewhere can never fully predict the future, but it often offers useful pointers. Here is what we know about those fighting in Fallujah and what patterns of the past suggest we can expect as the result:

1) The majority of those fighting the American forces see themselves as patriots and lovers of their homeland, fighting for the future of their sons and daughters. They are not career soldiers calculating gains against costs, rather they consider their deepest dignity and pride to be under attack. Foreigners, by all accounts, are a minority.

2) Their method is guerrilla warfare, whose aim is never to engage and defeat a standing army. Rather the goal is to exhaust the enemy in a protracted war that cannot be won by conventional means.

Guerillas seek just enough engagement with the enemy to attract heavy investment
of soldiers and equipment. Then they fade, for a repeat in other times and locations.

3)Guerrilla warfare succeeds not by defeating an enemy militarily but rather by turning the broad population against the enemy. Thus a
constant goal of guerrilla warriors is to goad the enemy into heavy-handed action that alienate local populations.

"We spent a lot of time carefully selecting locations where we felt we could get the army to engage in major action that would really anger local people", a veteran of years of a modern insurgency in Asia once told me.

"We wanted a situation where people were really upset at the army, and then we would work hard to build trust with local people afterwards."

If these patterns hold true in Fallujah, the outcome is likely to look like this:

1) Just enough insurgents will stay in Fallujah to attract serious damage by the attacking Americans. American troops will take the city, with heavy losses to civilians, to homes and public structures. The US perception will be, “we won!”

2) It will be discovered in coming weeks that most of the insurgents fled the city prior to or during battle and are continuing their struggle from multiple other locations.

3) Enormous attention will be given among civilians in Fallujah and other cities in Iraq to the damage caused by the Americans and the suffering imposed by them on the people of Fallujah. The stories told will be a mixture of significant truth with additional elements of exaggeration and fabrication mixed in.

It will be impossible for the US to defend itself against these stories
because there will be no denying the core truth of vast destruction and
suffering.

4) Fighting will end in Fallujah for a number of months and gradually normal life will return. But six months or a year from now, after civilians have returned, guerrilla attacks will be renewed in Fallujah and the cycle will begin again.

5) In the meantime, a new wave of recruits, incensed at the barbarity of the foreigners, will have joined the insurgents and the conflict throughout the country will continue to spiral upward.

With few exceptions, this has been the pattern so far and there is little reason to believe it will not be repeated. The frightening truth is that America is now trapped, having played repeatedly the role most desired for us by guerrilla warriors, heavy-handed, weapon-toting foreigner with guns blazing. They could not succeed in demonising us
in the eyes of average Iraqis without our assistance and so far we have
cooperated nicely.

The only way out is to remove all doubt that this is "our" invasion and
that our own selfish purposes are what motivate us. We have to face
the truth - we pretended to have global support but in fact had little all along, and we worsened that by insisting on controlling almost everything about the invasion. The price of getting out will be
bearing the continued costs of economic and military support to stabilizing Iraq, while giving up American control over events and
structures there: administrative, economic, political, and to some extent military.

The sooner we do so, the more likely it is that others in the world will step in and give meaningful assistance, and the longer we wait, the harder it will be to ever recover from the global perception that
beneath our talk of liberation it is arrogance and rank self-interest
that drive us.

Relinquishing the ability to call the shots in Iraq may seem to some Americans a bitter price to pay, but the alternative, a decade of war and permanent alienation from most of the world, is far worse.

Ron Kraybill 12/11/04

Dr. Ron Kraybill is an associate professor of conflict studies in the Conflict Transformation Programme at Eastern Mennonite University in the USA

He has lived in South Africa and India, and served as advisor and trainer in peace processes throughout the world.

To get on a free listserve posting occasional essays by Ron Kraybill, send a note to: kraybilr@emu.edu