LET'S JUST PASS OVER THAT INCONVENIENT FACT...:

Counterpunch: Revisionists argue that counterinsurgency won the battle against guerrillas in Vietnam, but lost the larger war. Can it do better in Iraq? (Jeet Heer, 1/4/2004, Boston Globe)

Although guerrilla warfare doesn't enjoy the chic it had in the 1960s, when leftist radicals and American military strategists alike poured over the writings of Chairman Mao and Che Guevara, many still believe that small but highly motivated irregular forces have the ability to defeat large and lumbering military organizations. Indeed, throughout the 20th century, many wars of national liberation and communist revolutions were in fact won by irregular forces: T.E. Lawrence in Arabia (who aided Arab tribes against the Ottomans), Mao in China, Castro in Cuba, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, the mujahideen of Afghanistan.

Yet some military experts believe the whole idea of guerrilla warfare has been oversold. In his 1973 book, "Autopsy on People's War," political scientist Chalmers Johnson made the startling argument that "none of the people's wars of the Sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam." More recently, a diverse school of revisionists -- including military analyst Lewis Sorley, former CIA director William Colby, and maverick liberal journalist Michael Lind -- have picked up on the idea that the Viet Cong were in fact defeated as a popular insurrection, although their North Vietnamese ally won a conventional war against exhausted South Vietnamese and American forces.

"The US military has defeated most guerrilla movements it has faced," argues Max Boot, author of "Savage Wars of Peace" (2002), which chronicles US victories in "small wars" against forces ranging from the American Indians ("the best irregular warriors in the world") to the first Sandinista movement in Nicaragua in the 1930s.

With the unfurling of Operation Iron Hammer, which has seen the United States take the offensive on the guerrilla war by bulldozing homes and bombing areas that supposedly house insurgent forces, the US military seems to have adopted the hardline counterinsurgency tactics that emerged in Vietnam in the late 1960s. After the spectacular failure there, can America get it right now?

Might be helpful to refute the argument that we won the guerilla phase of the war in Vietnam--which even the North Vietnamese have conceded in recent years--rather than just skip over it. Meanwhile, the most impressive proof that guerilla war can be effective is the two that the United States waged in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. We tend to win regardless of whether we're fighting against or supporting the insurgency.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 11, 2004 8:08 AM