Getting up in the morning and turning to the media is becoming a surreal experience. I stop chewing on my bagel because my mouth is agape. I learn that the Bush Administration’s new plan for Iraq involves creating nine “military districts” in Baghdad and sprinkling them with setting up 30 or 40 “joint security sites.” Some of them will be in existing police stations but where that is not feasible, the occupation forces will commander large houses, fortify them with 15-foot concrete blast walls, inside of which there will be machinegun towers and the whole place will be ringed with barbed wire. That’s the way John Burns of the New York Times described the scenario, part of the effort to put “boots on the ground” in the Iraqi capital.

Sound familiar? The pacification of Native American lands in the U.S perhaps?

One report this week said 30 or 40 “miniforts” will be built within the nine districts.

The idea for this operation is being credited to what UPI Senior News Analyst Martin Sieff describes as Gen. Dave Petraeus' new "surge" strategy to tame Baghdad.  Actually, it is reminiscent of the building of forts during the subjugation of the territory of the U.S. and nearly all “counterinsurgency” efforts across the globe since then. It should be pointed out that while North America was conquered nearly all the modern counterinsurgency efforts failed in the end.

Soon after the war in Iraq got underway, there were persistent reports about how military planners were calculating the average length of time that had in the past been required to put down “insurgencies.” That’s when the surreal feeling hit me first. What they were trying to figure out was how long it took foreign invading armies to put down popular uprisings. The assumption obviously was that the insurgencies are bad things which deserve to be crushed. None of the media commentaries I read seemed to question that. If there is any question that that’s what the military theorists had in mind, recall that they started watching the movie “The Battle of Algiers” and note that today President Bush is said to be reading – on the recommendation of Henry Kissinger – “The Savage War of Peace” by historian Alistair Horne. Times columnist Maureen Dowd was right on time to note that the subject of the book was “why the French suffered a colonial disaster in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algiers from 1954 to 1962.”

It’s as if the Bush Administration is saying to the world: we can’t let that happen again.

But the French experience was hardly unique. The British, the Dutch, and the Belgians – to name three – also tried to put down colonial rebellions, also known of as insurgencies, throughout the world. Again, while they may have temporarily prevailed with superior firepower, ultimately, they were lost causes. Kenya, then-Rhodesia, Burma, Malaysia and Vietnam – to name only five – are today independent nations. All the high walls, gun towers and razor wire produced nothing aside from a lot of dead colonials and colonialists, wrecked economies and still simmering regional conflicts.

The problem for military strategists orchestrating foreign war is not the tactics of counterinsurgency. It is that counterinsurgency itself doesn’t work.  People don't like foreign occupying armies and will fight to get them out.  “In the long run,” says military historian Jack Radey. “There will be more natives of the country ready to die for it than foreigners.” It’s a lesson that should have been absorbed long ago but some people have trouble learning anything. The people of Iraq don’t want the occupation forces there and sooner or later the invaders will have to leave.

I’m sure I needn’t point out that when the strategists were working out the time line for crushing insurgencies they had to notice that it was nearly always Europeans (and North Americans) who were carrying out such operations against colored peoples. (One notable exception is Ireland, location of one of the world’s longest lasting insurgencies. But, alas, the Emerald Isle will someday be truly free and united.) It’s the imperial mindset and, of course, racism is involved. The war in Iraq is being fought for geostrategic objectives centering on natural resources, in this case petroleum. But its planners still harbor the notion that the Asians, Arabs and Africans will not inevitably prevail. 

One of the Administration’s strongest supporters, commentator Max Boot says that a plan worked out by military historian Frederick Kagan (who detailed the new approach before the President in a speech to the rightwing, hawkish American Enterprise Institute) involves “a classic counterinsurgency approach focused on securing the populace and it has never really been tried before in the capital. It could work, especially if the surge is long lasting and if it's coupled with other vital steps — such as increasing the number of American advisors in the Iraqi security forces, instituting a biometric identity card to make it easier to detain terrorism suspects and enhancing the capacity of the Iraqi legal system to incarcerate more violent offenders.”

“If everything goes right, large swathes of Baghdad could gradually be brought under control. Then American and Iraqi units could pursue a "spreading inkblot" strategy — another classic counterinsurgency concept — to increase the pacified zone outward.”

“Classic” these approaches might be but they’ve been tried before and they didn’t work. Thank heaven. If they had Kenya, Zimbabwe, Burma, Malaysia and Vietnam would still be under foreign domination.

One could hope that some of this was on the mind of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as she winged her way over Baghdad last week from Kuwait City to London. But don’t bother; she’s at home in the clouds. The Baker-Hamilton Study Group report recommended discussing with the governments of Syria and Iran the idea of stabilizing the situation in Iraq in order for the “coalition” occupation troops to go home. There’s been a lot of overestimating of the support she picked up from Arab governments on her tour of the region; it was tepid at best. The Emir of Kuwait told her she should talk to Damascus and Tehran but she turned a deaf ear.

"You aren't going to be successful as a diplomat if you don't understand the strategic context in which you are actually negotiating," she told reporters. "It is not deal-making. It's not. There are a set of underlying relationships, underlying balance of power, leverage on different sides, and you have to recognize when you are in a position to then, on top of that, find a solution given the underlying balance." It hard to see how she can be recorded by history as a successful diplomat with such gobblygook. Diplomacy is indeed about making deals and negotiating would be a far better course than the doomed “surge” she is trying to sell the world.

Richard Beeston, diplomatic editor at the conservative London Times wrote Monday, “The Arabs and the Europeans are adamant that no progress is likely in Iraq unless other issues in the region are tackled, principally the Palestinian-Israel conflict.”

And:

“There are suspicions that America’s diplomatic initiative is little more than window dressing to show the world, particularly Arab public opinion, that it is doing something.”

Oh, and I had another surreal moment one morning last week. Evidently Wall Street has reason to worry about peace breaking out. According to the Financial Times, global aerospace and defense industry has, since 911 returned profits of about 15 percent larger than the general stock market but, “investors should be getting nervous” because ‘profit levels are becoming punchy.” There is, said the paper, an increased risk “if the US, which accounts for half the world's total defense budget, becomes more isolationist after the Bush presidency.”  “In the absence of a big, new conflict involving the US, defense stocks look vulnerable,” the report said. No, that’s not surreal. Given the saber-rattling now underway around the Persian Gulf and the growing crisis in East Africa, that’s scary.

Your comments are always welcome.