Wistful and bewildered in Washington

James Bennett is worried. The veteran New York Times reporter can’t figure out what Iraq’s insurgents want, and no one will sell him a clue. Counterinsurgency experts, says Bennett, are equally baffled.

“Instead of saying, ‘What’s the logic here, we don’t see it,’ you could speculate, there is no logic here,” said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare. The attacks now look like “wanton violence,” he continued. “And there’s a name for these guys: Losers.”

“The insurgents are doing everything wrong now,” he said. “Or, anyway, I don’t understand why they’re doing what they’re doing.”

To the untrained eye, one not connected to the brain of a counterinsurgency scholar, it looks like the insurgents are doing this: killing off members of the government; killing off officers of the security services; killing off recruits to the security services; killing US soldiers; blowing up Iraq’s infrastructure; and, demonstrating convincingly that neither the US nor the Iraqi government, such as it is, can protect Iraq’s civilians or their property.

Bennett invokes Che Guevara to explain why this particular insurgency cannot logically exist. Guevara, says Bennett, warned of the folly inherent in fighting against an elected government.

If the insurgency is trying to overthrow this regime, it is contending with a formidable obstacle that successful rebels of the 20th century generally did not face: A democratically elected government. One of the last century’s most celebrated theorists and practitioners of revolution, Che Guevara, called that obstacle insurmountable.

“Where a government has come to power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality,” he wrote, “the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.”

Even in a story foundering under the weight of its own stupidity, that’s a stupid parallel. Bennett has apparently forgotten that the election took place amid a war, under such intense security that the entire country was shut down for three days, that nearly 20% of the electorate — the part from which most of the insurgents are drawn — boycotted the election and that the government is hunkered down in a few fortified square miles of Baghdad while the rest of the country remains out of control. The possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted because they haven’t yet been explored. If Bolivia in 1967 had been in the same shape Iraq is today, Guevara would probably be planning the fortieth anniversary of his presidency now.

Bennett is mystified too by the lack of a charismatic leader and announced political goals, but it isn’t clear why. The people who used to run the country want to run it again; because they’re a minority, the most practical route to regaining control is to make it impossible for anyone else to take control. Zarqawi and other imported insurgents probably have a variety of goals, but they’ve articulated the one involving cleansing the country of infidels and apostates, and the one about creating a permanent live-fire training exercise for murderous religious zealots seems self-evident (again, to the untrained eye).

Presumably the people running the war are a bit better plugged in than Bennett. It’s far from clear that knowing what’s going on makes much of a difference in combatting the insurgency, but it has to make for a less querulous life.

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Update: Arthur Silber has a more comprehensive and educated explication of Bennett’s, and America’s, struggles here.