The complexities of Iraq make Marine commanders inadvertent masters of Zen.
"The only truth is what you observe at any given point in time," Tucker said. "And when what you are observing changes, that's the new truth."
This insurgency, uprising or enemy, is not organized by Western definitions. As best the Marines can tell, the enemy fighters have no meetings, no single central command authority, or overarching direction. They appear to be united by happenstance, periodically by operations, and always by the same goal: lawlessness and chaos, and making the Americans go home.
"Don't think of them as groups (of people.) Think of them as motivations," said an intelligence officer over lunch in the clean and bright cafeteria at Camp Blue Diamond...
> ... One commander compared the intransigence of Iraqi organized crime
> networks to that of the mafia in Sicily before World War II. It has the
> same stranglehold on whole local economies and populations, and is
> protected by family and tribal loyalties.
Individual "insurgents" organize themselves into cells, some of which are connected and some of which are independent. Like the criminal networks, all are enriched and supported by family and tribal alliances.
The groups vary in size and composition from day to day. One may be led by a man on a street of five families where U.S. troops mistakenly shot a civilian car. A former fedayeen member may hire a rotating cast of men to wire old artillery shells to motorcycle batteries and Nokia cell phones and set them on the highway. Another man may be led by a foreign jihadist who, with a core group of 10 or 15 men loyal to him, will recruit 50 or 200 other young men with guns, but not jobs, to launch an assault.
Each person in a cell may share some or all of the motivations, and their involvement may wax and wane depending on their economic circumstances, the amount of pressure put on them by U.S. troops, and the recruiting and organizing skills of the cell leaders, some of whom certainly know each other and may work together from time to time.
* * * The cells are funded from various sources if not directly from its members. Cash is derived from local sheiks who bristle at their loss of authority, smugglers whose livelihoods are threatened, and foreign sources, particularly in Syria, according to the Marines. There is substantial support in the literature for what Ms. Hess is seeing on the ground in Iraq. The advocates of 4th Generation Warfare theory have long written about potential and actual convergence between terror groups like Al Qaeda and organized crime syndicates like the Columbian drug cartels. Much of this convergence owes to symbiotic goals and needs. Al Qaeda needs to move men, money and materiel around the world; criminal syndicates can provide the means to do so, at a price.
But there is something much deeper to this convergence too. Over time, terror groups and criminal organizations begin to share tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). They forge long-term alliances that are more than mere transactional relationships. Criminal syndicates begin to use terror tactics in furtherance of their pecuniary goals; terrorist groups begin to use criminal tactics in order to recruit members, intimidate opponents, manage their affairs and fund their operations. Over time, the lines become blurred, to the point where it becomes unclear that the drug cartel is merely a criminal organization, and not a terroristic one too.
One of the defining features of the Iraqi insurgency is its structure — which stands in stark contrast to that of past successful insurgent organizations, most notably Mao's Communist uprising in China and Ho Chi Minh's insurgency in Vietnam. Ms. Hess takes us into the mind of USMC Lt. Col. Joe L'Etoile, and gives us a primer on the nature of the insurgency in Iraq — and why the powers that be in Washington can't seem to figure out how to defeat it.
"The insurgency is not one thing," said Lt. Col Joe L'Etoile, the division's director of operations. "This is a multilayered problem. The layers are not stratified, so they can't be addressed in isolation from each other. They animate and feed each other. Every area is different. It manifests itself in a different balance depending on what part of the country you are in."
L'Etoile believes this is a variation on the "foco" insurgency, by definition one in which military action is the beginning, rather than a political agenda. If it takes hold and rocks the legitimate government sufficiently, it is intended to inspire a mass uprising and from that comes the ultimate political agenda.
"In a Maoist revolution you have the politics and then you build to a guerilla movement and then a conventional war," he said. In a foco insurgency, you start with the violence. It's an anti-doctrine. It goes after something. It doesn't build something." It's a difficult concept to grasp in Washington, which tends to see things through the lens of past experience — in this case, Vietnam, a classic insurgency that began with a political agenda and gathered steam as a guerrilla movement, finally breaking the will of the American people to stay and fight.
According to Marine and Army commanders with experience in Iraq, this elliptical adversary defies the linear expectations the West has for an uprising. To the Western mind, an insurgency requires funding, organization, a leader and a central organization. Each of these exists here in Iraq, but in a fractured, evolving and — according to the Marines — apparently haphazard form.
"You can't look at this like it's a football game, that they have a huddle call. It's fluid, it's continuous, and it veers wildly. We have to have agility and flexibility to deal with it. You have to be proactive and shape it," L'Etoile said.
This is not to say there is no coordination among the groups that comprise the insurgency.
"I think there's a strong argument to be made that the insurgents are unified by a common objective — that is, against the coalition," L'Etoile said. "Each one of these different groups has a command-and-cooperation apparatus, but the linkages between them are much less defined." -- Michael Pugliese