[lbo-talk] Iraq & Northern Ireland

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Dec 29 09:56:35 PST 2003


[Thanks to Grant for the pointer]

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.)



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