The American
teenager game of chicken involves two immature machos in a battle of
dare. They get into their cars at opposite ends of a long straight road
and drive straight at each other vowing not to swerve. The one who
swerves first, loses. There is nothing gained by winning except
reputation and if a crash occurs the payoff is negative in damage to the
bodies of the car and the occupants. Ego and legacy are important enough
to national leaders that they routinely commit this folly as Truman in
Korea and Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam prove. In the case of Iraq, there
is a positive payoff of massive oil resources but the Iraqi parliament
is neither as stupid nor as susceptible to bribery and arm twisting as
the US administration foolishly believes.
There are
some SCIRI and DAWA leaders who have visited the White House and
endorsed the legal looting of Iraq’s oil wealth by a new oil law, but
the shrewd Sadr followers, the Sunni insurgents, Baathists and now even
the Kurds have publicly opposed the passage of an oil law which allows
Western Multinationals de facto control of the Iraqi oilfields. The
Iraqi Parliament has decided to take a two month recess beginning in
July and has yet to pass any legislation whatsoever. This means that
Bush whose main reason to occupy Iraq was its oil will not get any
result till September 2007, by which time the mounting casualties and
the disenchanted electorate and the Democrats will be clamoring for
withdrawal at any cost.
In the game of chicken, one extreme strategy to intimidate the opponent
is for one contestant is to unscrew his steering wheel and throw it out
of his car window in a manner that is conspicuously noticed by the
spectators and the other contestant. This serves notice to all that he
cannot and will not swerve and if the opponent pursues the same intent,
he had better be prepared to crash. This is what the insurgency has done
by its terror tactics of suicide bombers. At that point it becomes clear
that one of the contestants has gone beyond rationality and the
assumption that the contest is a test of guts between two machos who
wish to survive, goes out of the window.
The standard counterinsurgency manuals prescribe overwhelming firepower,
oil-spot approach of clearing areas of insurgents and holding them and
steadily and gradually enlarging the oil-spot, till the entire territory
is decontaminated. The insurgents are aware of the marked disparity in
firepower and thus resort to asymmetric warfare by IEDs, mortars and
RPGs at the time and place of their choosing. The hit and run tactics,
as expected lead to indiscriminate shooting and bombing by the US troops
with anger, frustration and fear. The resultant collateral damage to
non-combatants, incarceration and abusive treatment of innocent
civilians and suspected detainees sow greater hatred, which counters the
oil-spot strategy and increases recruitment for the terrorists. The
problem is compounded by the US troops inability to speak Arabic and
their ignorance of local culture and insensitivity to it. Add to that,
the mounting garbage and sewage in the country, the inadequate supply of
potable water, electricity, education, healthcare, jobs and basic
security due to the incompetence of the US administration and its
corrupt security and construction contractors, and there is not the
slightest hope of winning the hearts and minds of the occupied Iraqis.
The myriad sins of the US policies in the Middle East and the Horn of
Africa reinforce the impression of hostility to Islam and provide a
fertile soil for seeds of Jihad to flourish. The ability of the
insurgents to follow Mao’s dictum of being fish camouflaged in a school
of indistinguishable fellow creatures leads to indiscriminate and
collective punishment strategy which only feeds the conflagration. It
would seem that the US has learnt no lessons from the French experience
in Algeria and Vietnam and its own debacle in Vietnam, where quarantines
and massive firepower failed. The Israeli failure in Palestine despite
walls is being repeated in Baghdad. India’s stalemate in Kashmir is a
good example of massive troop strength and firepower only leading to a
stalemate when faced with porous borders, fanatic suicidal infiltrating
terrorists and a population where they can mingle without standing out
and which has some sympathy for them and their cause. Russia’s plight in
Chechnya is another example.
The much quoted success of the British in Malaya is a bogus example.
Most of the communist insurgents were ethnic Chinese who could be easily
distinguished apart from the native Malays who had no great sympathy for
the insurgents or their cause. Furthermore the US is fighting in a
distant and foreign land while the insurgents are Arabs in their native
territory. The US has to incur enormous logistics expenditure to supply
and support its troops in the style they are accustomed to and cannot
feed them bread, dates, lentils and lamb. The US population has a low
tolerance for casualties and political leaders are answerable to it,
while the insurgents love death. The inability of the US to capture
major Al Qaeeda leaders despite bounties of millions of dollars offered
for them should alert any thinking intelligence or policy maven to the
remarkably strong loyalty of their followers and adherents who do not
operate on time constraints and are waiting to use their new found
expertise from Iraq in Afghanistan.
Israel has tried blackmail and bribery successfully in recruiting
Palestinian spies. Those tactics have failed the US in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Another policy that Israel has resorted to is sowing
discord by supporting Hezbollah and Hamas in the past. These have led to
worse blowbacks. It was Indira Gandhi’s use of similar tactics that led
to the Khalistan and Kashmir insurgencies. Currently the US is trying to
play the same game in Iraq and Iran by dividing the Sunnis and Shias and
inciting Baluchis, Azerbaijanis, Kurds and Khuzistan Arabs and possibly
the MEK (in Iran) to fragment the country, oblivious to what blowbacks
may occur in Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The reputation and
credibility of the US in the world including its allies has suffered
grievous damage. The consequences are visible and worsening in Latin
America, as well as in Russia and China. The sinking of the Indo-US
civilian nuclear treaty will sour those relations. Bush’s poodle in UK
is being put out to pasture. Spain and Italy have alighted from the
train and Germany is waiting near the exit. The only hope of better
relations are with France if Sarkozy is elected.
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