Guerrilla War

I think when we look back on this war we will find that one of the things that consistently caused problems was the tendency of certain key words to import fallacious assumptions into out thinking. One of these is “Guerilla” war. We thought that Iraq would be easier than or Vietnam because Guerrilla war would not be a possibility there; Iraq is a desert, guerrillas require dense jungles or amenable terrain to fight in.

I think this is a mistake caused by an incidental association in our minds between tactics and the geography of most of the guerrilla wars we happen to have fought in. Actually, what a guerrilla hides behind is not trees but people. It is his willingness to sacrifice the lives of civilians and the unwillingness of the opponent to do that same that makes guerrilla tactics effective and possible.

We make the same mistake when we compare the house to house fighting of WWII in Europe to the situation in Iraq. The important fact is not the architecture of the places we are fighting in but the moral standards of the enemy we face. German soldiers did not deliberately engineer situations where they put their own civilians’ lives at risk—at least not as a matter of routine. For our enemy in Iraq terrorizing the civilian population and using it for protection is the center piece of their strategy. What is important in both cases is not the physical typography of the place combatants are fighting but the moral standards of the combatants.