As the US consolidates its uneasy occupation of Iraq, Col E. D. Doylereflects on the lessons of history for troops handling disgruntled civilians
The invasion of Iraq was rapid and well-planned. Some Iraqi troops resisted bravely in hopeless stands without air support, but whole formations (brigades and divisions) just melted away.
The "shock and awe" weapons and tactics, lineal descendants of the relatively puny German Schrecklichkeit (frightfulness or horror) concept much denounced in the 1940s, were effective in inflicting material damage. The human cost has not yet emerged. The attacks were avowedly intended to have extreme effects.
Were some Iraqi generals bribed to avoid fighting? This may be another "psyops" effort to damage Iraqi morale and confidence in their generals. But commanders with the status of Gen Franks, the US commander, do not normally get involved in statements that may be proven untrue.
The coalition hopes for a short occupation, to set up democracy in Iraq, as successful occupations did in Germany and Japan after the second World War. Both countries had been thoroughly defeated. Their ideologies and hierarchies had failed. The effective educational systems and highly organised, if damaged, local and national administrative machinery in both countries facilitated the transformation.
Somewhat reluctantly, it is now admitted that Iraq too has the bones of good educational and administrative systems.
The UN World Food Programme will use an Iraqi computerised food distribution network, set up by Iraq in 1990, when punitive sanctions were first imposed. The American programme head says the system "worked superbly" , dealing with about 14.5 million people and 11 types of food. There have been many cases of large-scale computer systems failing in Western business, stock exchanges, banking, etc.
Our gardaí have problems. Iraq's system is said to be flexible enough to have issued a six-month supply before the war began in March.
Occupations have their ironies. The French Revolution was attacked at birth by neighbouring monarchies. Its armies showed an early consideration for "legality and humanity".
Prof Geoffrey Best in his Humanity in Warfare, traces how things deteriorated. A French proclamation in a foreign city was parodied as: "We have arrived and you are free. Anyone found on the streets after six o'clock will be shot on sight." At the other end of the absurdity scale was the short-lived 1945 rule against fraternisation with Germans.
Compulsory billeting and feeding of troops, common in the past, created multiple interfaces for potential trouble. In modern times, billeting troops on civilian families is avoided. Civilian accommodation (apartment or office blocks) may be used. Occupation is expensive, as "host" countries often find. By 1947, occupation costs absorbed a third of the Japanese budget.
The civil side of the Iraq occupation will, it seems, be paid for by Iraqi oil. The military arrangements are unclear.
Discipline, physical fitness, morale and training suffer in occupation conditions, as US troops from occupied Japan, showed in Korea. Disbanding the huge Iraqi army (announced last week) will make barracks available, facilitating maintenance of military standards and control of abuses. Occupation troops in barracks, will be less readily targeted for drugs and currency fiddling or petty abuses like private work in military workshops. Characteristically, such abuses don't remain petty.
The US knows that it has succeeded in the past. Democratic institutions, such as local and general elections, transparent budgeting and full accounting for taxes received and expended, will take time to set up. The makings of an honest, efficient judiciary and police, and a civil service commission, may exist.
Defence forces responsible to the civil power, with a civilian minister of defence, will be essential. Purging competent Baath Party administrators may leave gaps. Readers may have seen references to the superiority of British relaxed relations with the public. Experience in using minimum force in Northern Ireland and elsewhere has been praised, usually, one must admit, by British writers.
They claim that this accounts for British success in UN peacekeeping and in defeating insurgencies. The Derry shootings, the killings in the British UN area of Ayios Theodorus/Kophinou in Cyprus in 1967, and Sarajevo in the 1990s, are not mentioned.
British Counterinsurgency, 1919-60 (1990) by the American Thomas R. Mokaitis, is quoted (rather selectively). His preface states that he chose "to recreate each emergency from the British perspective" - something not quoted. Within this self-imposed limitation, Mokaitis shows the difficulties of developing intelligent British policies about the use of force since 1870. He says that "three events in the early 20th century" changed British attitudes.
"The deaths of thousands of Boer women and children . . . in concentration camps" in 1901 (actually 16-20,000 children in about 12 months. Despite ingenious special pleading, it was another case of "military necessity" - a cause of crimes throughout history). Were Irish troops involved?
The "British defeat in Ireland. . . which stemmed in a large measure from a failure to exercise restraint in a conflict that occurred in a window front".
The killings at Amritsar (India, 1919) - 379 deaths and 1,000 injuries in ten minutes of sustained fire into a packed mass of people.
The concept of "minimum force" arose, as much from the unease of decent British people about the above events, as from the ferocious mindsets displayed by the justifiers. Mokaitis's book was timely, with a worked out doctrine and historical examples showing how British forces had applied the principle.
Telling the British what they want to hear is welcomed and Mokaitis is much quoted. But he gives cases where minimum force was not applied.
"Official reprisals" in Ireland, such as house burning, were disastrous. A man was decapitated and the head displayed by a Royal Marine in Malaya. Pictures of severed hands in mock salute beside severed heads also appeared.
Scots Guards murdered 24 Chinese peasants in Malaya. The government invented a "shot while attempting to escape" story. Twenty two years later the truth emerged. No one was tried.
Nevertheless, he says that in Malaya "the British avoided the French mistake of tacitly sanctioned brutality and the American error of over reliance on indiscriminate firepower".
Let us hope minimum force is applied in Iraq.