URL: http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/farmer111703.html
November 17, 2003 The Newark Star-Ledger
COMMENTARY
Is Iraq America's Northern Ireland?
BY JOHN FARMER
c.2003 Newhouse News Service
The increase of violence in Iraq and dissent at home has prompted
comparisons with Vietnam. The dreaded term "quagmire" is heard again
in the land. And the sudden rush to turn the fighting and policing
over to Iraqis recalls the Nixon administration's frantic rush toward
"Vietnamization" as that conflict turned sour.
The analogy is understandable. But it's off the mark if examined
closely.
North Vietnam enjoyed the financial and military support of two giant
world powers, the old Soviet Union and Communist China. The opposition
in Iraq enjoys nothing comparable. North Vietnamese troops were
supported by masses of heavy artillery and even some armor. Not so the
Ba'athist diehards and their foreign Islamist allies in Iraq.
There's no precise analogy to the struggle in Iraq. But there is one
that offers a rough approximation, a better one than Vietnam. It's the
long British struggle with the Irish Republican Army in Northern
Ireland, and it offers no comfort to George W. Bush and American hopes
in Iraq.
Consider the similarities.
Both are guerrilla wars, waged by the IRA and Saddam Hussein's
loyalists and their allies with small arms, explosives and mortars
cached around the country and employing sudden strikes by forces that
quickly melt into the surrounding population undetected.
Although neither enjoys big-power backing, both have access to outside
financial help through phony front organizations. At the height of the
fighting in Ulster, the IRA received millions of dollars from
Irish-Americans, much of it funneled through Noraid, an IRA prop
posing as a charity for Northern Irish Catholics. Similarly, the
Islamist terrorists slipping into Iraq to harass U.S. units have
benefited from millions in aid, much of it from Saudi Arabia,
channeled through bogus Arab charities.
The Americans in Iraq, like the British in Northern Ireland, are
viewed by their opponents as foreign occupiers and colonial
imperialists. Then there's the religion factor as an ever-present
irritant: the mostly Catholic IRA vs. the mostly Protestant British;
the overwhelmingly Muslim Iraqi guerrillas vs. the mostly Christian
U.S.-led coalition.
If the IRA analogy is valid, it's bad news for the United States and
its coalition allies. Compared with Iraq, Northern Ireland is small,
not even the size of New England. Yet the British army, one of the
best small-unit forces in the world, lightning-quick conqueror of
Argentina in the Falklands War, was unable to beat the small band of
determined IRA fighters, never more than a couple thousand strong,
despite 30 years of trying.
It's no reflection on the quality of the British army. All the
advantages in such a contest lie with the guerrillas. They choose the
time and target. They know the ground they fight on _ the back alleys
and escape routes _ better than their foes ever can. For morale
purposes, British units in Northern Ireland were rotated home, often
just when they were learning the back alleys of Belfast. Rotation is
the policy among U.S. units, also for morale reasons.
While reporting on the IRA war in the early 1980s, it was made clear
to me by British sources that they were unlikely ever to defeat the
IRA. For one thing, the IRA was highly compartmentalized. Its active
service units functioned as cells, with limited knowledge of larger
IRA plans or of other cells and members. You couldn't roll it up by
nailing one or even more of these units.
An ambush I witnessed on Crocus Street in West Belfast on March 25,
1982, in which four British soldiers were killed, was found to be the
work of three separate cells _ an intelligence team that picked the
target, a team that supplied the weapons, and the actual shooters. No
one team knew the others.
The Iraqi dissidents may not be quite so strictly compartmentalized,
but they appear to enjoy the same relationship with the public that
the IRA did in Ulster. Many in Ulster backed the IRA, as many now in
Iraq back the guerrilla terrorists; equally important, those in Iraq
who want no more violence are cowed by fear of reprisals from turning
the guerrillas over to the Americans, as many Irish were in Ulster
during the fighting there.
It's not a happy analogy, the IRA one. Peace finally has come to
Ulster, but in a political deal, not a military triumph. That kind of
solution is probably not available in Iraq, not to Bush and the
Americans in any case. But you can't tell. Maybe the Iraqis can pull
it off.
(John Farmer is national political correspondent for The Star-Ledger
of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at jfarmer at starledger.com.)