Max Boot on Counterinsurgency

Believe it or not, the French got it right. David Galula wrote the original (1964) counterinsurgency manual. Max Boot applies Galula's dicta to our current conundrum in Iraq:

"If insurgents, though identified and arrested by the police, take advantage of the many normal safeguards built into the judicial system and are released, the police can do little."

Captured Iraqi insurgents know they can remain silent and that most likely they will never be convicted because witnesses and judges can be bought or intimidated.

"Eight of 10 detainees are set free," write military analysts Bing West and Eliot Cohen. "One in 75 American males is in jail, compared to one in 450 Iraqi males." Since, as they note, "Iraq is not six times safer than the U.S.," the disparity is because of faults with the legal system that need to be fixed — perhaps by imposing martial law. Iraq will not become safer until more militants are behind bars, but they will never be convicted under peacetime rules of evidence.

The French also got it wrong, of course. In David Petraeus' updated manual for destroying and delegitimizing an insurgency, he similarly makes use of a military historian's long-term memory:

During Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in 1808, little thought was given to the potential challenges of subduing the Spanish populace. Conditioned by the decisive victories at Austerlitz and Jena, Napoleon believed the conquest of Spain would be little more than a “military promenade.” Napoleon’s campaign included a rapid conventional military victory over Spanish armies but ignored the immediate requirement to provide a stable and secure environment for the people and the countryside.

The French should have expected ferocious resistance. The Spanish people were accustomed to hardship, suspicious of foreigners, and constantly involved in skirmishes with security forces. The French failed to analyze the history, culture, and motivations of the Spanish people, or to seriously consider their potential to support or hinder the achievement of French political objectives. Napoleon’s cultural miscalculation resulted in a protracted struggle that lasted nearly six years and ultimately required approximately three-fifths of the French Empire’s total armed strength, almost four times the force of 80,000 Napoleon originally had designated for this theater. The Spanish resistance drained the Empire’s resources and was the beginning of the end of Napoleon’s reign. Despite his reputation for brilliant campaign planning, in this instance Napoleon had failed to grasp the real situation in the theater, and his forces were not capable of learning and adapting for the unexpected demands of counterinsurgency.

In other words, it's not just an "Arab problem." Byron, in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," spoke of how death-averse and passionate the Spanish rebels he'd encountered were during Napoleon's siege. The great Romantic poet was rather a fan of the short Corsican general, but he couldn't refrain from extolling the truculence of a peaceable people when their land was invaded. This went double for the women. The maid of Saragossa is a figure of ovaries-of-steel, olive-skinned legend, sort of the Artemis of the Iberian peninsula:

Is it for this the Spanish maid, arous'd, Hangs on the willow her unstrung guitar, And, all unsex'd, the Anlace hath espous'd, Sun the loud song, and dar'd the deed of war? And she, whom once the semblance of a scar Appall'd, an owlet's 'larum chill'd with dread, Now views the column-scattering bay'net jar, The falchion flash, and o'er the yet warm dead Stalks with Minerva's step where Mars might quake to tread.

Now had Napoleon got the water turned back on and had his Gaullic battalions left a more delicate "footsprint," Minerva's step might have been toward that neglected guitar and not toward a cannon…