The Unbeatable Weapon
Why Washington And It’s Allies Are Doomed To Loose In Iraq
Since the beginning of the Iraq war, the Washington’s rhetoric has set public expectations of a winnable conflict. Washington has launched America head first into an invasion, not just of Iraq but also the Middle East where it believes America will ultimately be victorious. Unfortunately, both Washington and the majority of the American people have yet to realize that we are facing an unbeatable weapon in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world.
Historically our armed forces have always been geared towards conventional warfare between conventional armed forces. To win wars like these, one only needed bigger weapons and more solders. The side that can kill most of their enemy is declared the winner. This was case in both WWI and WWII.
Over the last two hundred years however, there has been a gradual and subtle change in the type of wars that are fought. It is a new type of war which has become Al Qaeda’s chief weapon and which Washington has yet to understand and appreciate. This very same weapon has defeated the worlds most powerful armies and is likely to change the face of the Middle East as we know it.
This devastating and unbeatable weapon is guerilla warfare. It is the use of unconventional ‘civilians’ to strike with lethal effect before melting back into the population. Guerillas are cheap to arm, easy to recruit, train and hide. Guerillas may operate individually or in small teams with loose disjointed chains of command. They can be cab-drivers, waiters and even police officers (as in Iraq) by day. However at night, they can shoot, bomb and sabotage at will before melting back into the population. They do not wear uniforms and do not march in large parades. They could greet you one minute and shoot you the next. Typically, guerillas can not stop an invasion, but they can make occupation unbearable for any occupying force.
Defeating this weapon is not easy. You cannot shoot people you can’t find. No technology exists to identify which civilians are on your side and which are not. In order to win, you must murder all of them, without exception. Hundreds of years ago, before the advent of mass media, this may have been a viable option. In fact when faced with a growing guerilla insurgency in the Philippines during the Spanish-American war, US Army General Jacob Smith told his men, “I want no prisoners. I wish you to burn and kill; the more you burn and kill, the better it will please me.”. The result was the massacre of Filipino 220,000 men, women and children… and the end of the insurgency.
In this day and age, most militaries are unwilling to massacre entire populations. As such, guerilla warfare has become unbeatable. History gives us many examples of how devastatingly effective this weapon can be, against even the largest militaries the world has ever seen.
The Swiss have the misfortune of being located in the middle of one of the most bloody and violent regions of the planet. For hundreds of years their part of Europe has been steeped in conflicts, wars, revolutions and general chaos. In the last hundred years alone, this country has managed to avoid two world wars and a cold war. How did a small nation the size of Ohio avoid being overrun by military giants on both sides?
In Switzerland, virtually every adult is a trained rifleman and is issued an assault rifle. This results in a militia of approximately 500,000 potential snipers who would be able to pick off invaders from the relative safety of the mountains. A well skilled sniper can pin down an entire company of soldiers for days. Even Hitler, who went on to attack both Russia and America, was not crazy enough to invade the Swiss. Military experts in WWII decided that guerillas were so potent, one must outnumber them by at least 6-to-1 to beat them with conventional forces. Using the 6-to-1 ratio, Hitler would have needed 3,000,000 soldiers to invade Switzerland. When he invaded France, he had only 2,500,000 soldiers in total. Whilst he could have mounted a heavily armored Blitzkrieg invasion of Switzerland overnight, trying to hold on to a captured Switzerland would have tied up his entire army in a quagmire.
In Vietnam, it was America’s turn to confront the unbeatable weapon. Vietnam veterans will tell of 5-year olds handing soldiers Coke cans with grenades inside, or of rice-farmers who greeted you by day and shot at you by night. Despite having the largest and most technologically advanced military in the world, Washington was beaten by low-tech guerillas who merged seamlessly into the civilian population. The US dropped nearly four times as many bombs on Vietnam, than were dropped in WWII by all sides. To look at it another way, Washington dropped 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam. Yet such enormous firepower failed to quell the insurgency. Hanoi calculated that it only needed to send 20 trucks of supplies over the Ho Chi Minh trail every day to keep it’s guerillas supplied with enough weapons to keep Washington in check. For all their technological advances, Americans could not kill what they could not see. The only alternative was to kill every civilian in sight. Americans did not have the will to do this. As such, Washington lost.
The Soviet experience in Afghanistan is another example of guerilla war. The Soviets had the second most powerful military in the world, but yet they could not defeat small bands of low-tech guerillas. I recall that on nine separate occasions in the Panjshir valley, the Soviets threw at least 15,000 troops with tanks and air support against no more than 3,000 lightly armed guerillas led by Ahmad Shah Masoud. Each of these nine times, the Soviets were defeated. In one operation alone, the Soviets suffered 3,000 dead and 1,000 deserters. The Soviets, as we all know, finally withdrew from Afghanistan.
It is not beyond the realm of plausibility that having seen the American and Russian defeats against vastly smaller and technologically inferior guerillas, Muslims around the world began to see what a potent weapon guerilla warfare is. Consider that for the last 500 years, there has not been a single 5 year period where Christian boots have not occupied Islamic soil. For those seeking to ‘liberate’ their lands from foreign occupation, Guerilla warfare must have seemed like the perfect weapon.
One man who became a legend by helping the Mujahadeen to victory over the Soviets, is now the very same man we are fighting, Osama Bin Laden. In a 1996 interview with Robert Fisk of The Independent, Osama Bin Ladin said, “our country has become an American colony” and that “Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries”.
One of these countries was Chechnya. The fact that many Mujahadeen from Afghanistan went to aid the Chechens, should have sounded alarm bells in the Kremlin. However, the Soviets failed to realize the nature of the weapon they faced.
Together with their Afghani brothers, the Chechens found a particularly effective style of guerilla warfare. Many operated in 3-man teams with two riflemen and one man with anti-tank rockets. The riflemen ambushed groups of Russians but didn’t kill them. The Russians typically radioed for help. When it arrived the man with the rockets would hit the armored personnel carriers and tanks. Leaving a blazing inferno behind, the three would quickly disappear to another area where would they do it all over again. Totally unable to deal with these tiny, fast moving ambush teams, the Russians often struck back with overwhelming force. They once resorted to taking the capital, Groznyy, by shelling and bombing the whole city into rubble. This failed to quell the insurgency simply because they failed to wipe out all Chechens. The Russians are still struggling to bring the Chechen guerillas under control.