Asymmetric conflict in Iraq

January 6, 2004

Warbaby says:

Anthony Cordesman's report on the war in Iraq is one of the best overviews of the situation published to date. In a nutshell, the occupation forces and the resistance are in a stalemate neither can win.

Anthony Cordesman released a report on the military situation in Iraq that is a must read. Cordesman is a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a defense think-tank in Washington, D.C. He's one of the grand old men of national securities studies, so he can say what he thinks and call it like he sees it. He doesn't pull many punches.

The report, Iraq and Assymetric Warfare, is dated as "revised December 6, 2003" so it doesn't get caught up in the flurry of nonsense generated by the capture of Saddam. Go read it now. It's 25 pages jammy-packed with useful, commonsense views on the conflict in Iraq.

While most of the report concentrates on military matters, there is enough information to suggest that there is no military solution to the essentially political problems we face in Iraq.

A few of the report's points that caught my eye:

The conflict in Iraq has already devolved to the point that there will be no strategic winner. The US can't enforce its view of a democratized Iraq transforming the region. It can only hope to withdraw under conditions that give the Iraqis a faint hope of avoiding a decade of chaos and civil war. The resistance factions have zero chance of re-establishing a national tyranny. It's going to be all down-hill from here and the best we can hope for is perhaps short-circuiting a lengthy civil war.
The much hyped presence of Al Qaida in Iraq is nonsense. According to Cordesman, only 3-5 people captured in Iraq are suspected of having serious ties to Al Qaida. And there were never more than 25 prisoners so suspected. That's really big news.
Cordesman thinks there might have been a time when the US could have imposed its will on a post-conflict Iraq, but that possibility went away when the lack of planning let everything go to ratshit during the orgy of sabotage, arson and so-called looting after we entered Baghdad. I'm not so sure that any such chance ever existed, given the illegitimate basis for the invasion. Whether or not the possibility existed in the past, it clearly does not exist now.
Things took a serious turn for the worse in October and November. This was when the resistance (Cordesman calls the resistance "FRL" for Former Regime Loyalist / Islamists) shifted from small scale attacks to more organized offensive operations centered around car bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The critical shift was the increased level of organization and supply demonstrated by the resistance.
Equally worrying is the widening of the attacks on Iraqis into what could be the beginning of a civil war. Reading between the lines of Cordesman's statistics, it looks like the scope of the conflict is expanding in Iraq. While US combat fatalities have stayed roughly steady at 35-45 per month (with the clear exception of November, when two helicopter crashes doubled the monthly US rate of fatalities), the overall level of violence appears to have accelerated since October. It is still too early to say if this trend has any momentum or if it is only temporary.

But enough of this paraphrasing. Read the report.

	Asymmetric conflict in Iraq