Kadija_Man said:
The Communists won in COIN by killing everyone. Hardly a way to "win friends and influence people". We are seeing the Russian experience in Grozny being repeated on a smaller scale in Aleppo at the moment.
I would also suggest that Creveld did not look at the experiences of the European imperialists or the ANZAC post-imperialists in how to win in COIN, without pissing everybody off to the point where it all springs back in a decade.
In the case of your continual dismissal of the Iraqis, I'd suggest that what has been rebuilt in the new Iraqi Army is somewhat more substantive than the old one was. More and better training and better equipment, not with Monkey Models means that Daesh is being pushed back much more firmly.
1) "If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid," comes to mind. "Win friends and influence the people" has won exactly zero insurgency campaigns, unless you conflate "winning" with "leaving and surrendering all control to the rebellious elements" or something. Algeria. Kenya. Malaya. Indonesia. Vietnam. It seems that Western democracies are doomed to failure in counter-insurgency, were it not for Israel's successes in Palestine.
2) The European imperialists lost every counter-insurgency campaign they fought post-WW2. Likewise the US and Britain didn't win the Philippines Insurrection and Boer War by playing nice.
3) ISIS is being pushed back so firmly that in the time it took the New Iraqi Army to recapture one city, the Republican Guard had recaptured the entire country from a similarly "well armed" opponent of Shiite militias and crushed Shiite and Kurdish rebellion for three years. I don't believe that's a very firm hand at all. Maybe a petite shove.
kaiserd said:
Kat Tsun said:
The same Iraqi Army that took two and a half years to inch back territory it lost to a few Toyotas and a complete rout. Saddam would have had Mosul back in a month. Say what you will about it, but one area that communism vastly succeeded over Western civilization was in handling insurgents and uprisings. The whole Kurdish Uprising was suppressed in the same amount of time it took the modern Iraqi Army to capture Fallujah.
It's getting a bit off topic, but the gist is a handful of Republican Guard divisions with some T-55s, T-72s, BTR-60s, and D-30s did more work than the New Iraqi Army brigades or whatever with M1A1s, M113s, and M109s (cue "M109 is worse than D-30 huehue"), and all the training the US Army can muster, in a much shorter period of time. It really can't be explained except that the Republican Guard were simply more motivated and more aggressive than their modern counterparts in the New Iraqi Army, who are quite timid and effete. Not coincidentally, the biggest contributors of training to the Iraqi Army were the Americans, who are also quite timid, albeit their individual effeteness is balanced out by their ability to produce massive quantities of radios, howitzers, and ammunition.
For the Iraqis, this just means they have a small amount of expensive, second-hand kit and training that doesn't match their economic reality in the slightest. They are not the United States, they cannot mass produce high tech weapons and millions of tons of ammunition a year to feed a gigantic war machine that survives by turning everything into a moonscape (figuratively since smart weapons try to hit the enemy or close enough that it doesn't matter, but it was very literal in WW2 for both the USA and UK).
Hama is the Syrian example of a successful counter-insurgency campaign/battle. van Creveld was right when he said that victory in COIN is a "crime" while losing in COIN is "stupidity", though, so if the Iraqis suddenly started winning in their fight against ISIS by applying massive quantities of firepower and mechanized combined arms (which is how the Ba'athists and communism in general did it), they would be called murderers or something. Mostly because lots of ordinary people would get caught in the crossfire and die.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt re: some wording chosen ("effete", "timid" etc.) on the assumption that English isn't your first language.
The combination of leadership, training, equipment and motivation is key to the effectiveness of a fighting force and the Iraqi army was lacking in many of these in its early engagements with ISIS and while since improved Rome wasn't built in a day and many aspects require a collective will that can't be built or trained by foreign advisors.
The comparison in perceived performance versus Sadam's Republican Guard is rather facile, very different context and versus a very different enemy.
And if these more recent events prove anything it's that Tyrannical dictatorships don't "solve" these type of conflicts, they just store up the issue while the underlying issues and hatred fester and deepen for more extreme versions down the road.
"Timid" is exactly the word the Germans described the Americans in WW2. It's played out in every major war the Americans have fought to this day.
The Iraqi Army can't collectively will itself out of a wet paper bag, Ba'athism or not. The Republican Guard worked mostly because it was politically reliable and therefore relatively unencumbered, and had decades of experience in fighting insurgents. Iraq still functions on the tribal model beneath the veneer of modern democracy, so it still needs a Republican Guard. In almost every way, the 'Iraqi Army' is in a worse position than it was in 1991. Saying otherwise is ignoring reality.
The comparison is hardly facile when the context is the same and the enemy is actually worse in all relevant qualities, from training to equipment to motivation to morals. The enemy is even the same, from the perspective of the (former) Republican Guard: Kurds and Shiites rising against Ba'athism. Or Shiites and Kurds "united" against a common foe, i.e. Sunnis. Except this time, Ba'athism/Sunni Islam is losing because it doesn't have several tank divisions to prop itself up on. It doesn't change the fact that the most substantial difference is that Sunnis didn't flinch when men with AKs shoot at them, they shoot back with tank shells and howitzers, while Shiites rout the instant a car bomb goes off (is suicide bombing a viable form of political protest now?) anywhere in a thirty block radius.
Basically an aesthetic difference, it's 1991 in reverse. The same solution would work for both. The RG solution would work faster though, which means less people die in a campaign that's lasted two and a half years.
Recent conflicts show that government doesn't matter. Sectarian conflict will emerge regardless of government form, and democracy is simply an aesthetic that hides wounds rather than repairs them. Let's not pretend the Americans did anything more than throw gasoline on smouldering embers in 2003.