"Stay Behind" strategies in Iraq

[Tim May]

On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 10:56  AM, Elyn Wollensky wrote:
>
> Tim nailed it. This just broke on Dow Jones ...
> ;~/.
> e
>
> Rumsfeld to order Syria invasion plan
>
> NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--An intelligence source says U.S. Defense 
> Secretary
> Donald Rumsfeld last week ordered the drawing up of contingency plans
> for a possible invasion of Syria, Newsday reported Thursday. According 
> to
>


I'll make another prediction/analysis: the widespread looting and chaos 
now being seen in Baghdad, Basra, and other large cities is completely 
understandable.

Not just because people (peasants, unemployed, Shiia, etc.) see the 
chance to grab some television sets and microwave ovens. This component 
is understandable in the way the Rodney King riots were understandable.

No, the more interesting reasons are these, the second being the more 
interesting:

1. Iraq has been a welfare state for essentially its entire lifetime. 
 From the 1920s to the 1960s, a typical backwater royalist welfare 
state. Since the 1960s, a socialist/central planning/fascist state.

(Much like Israel, actually, but that's another discussion.)

Much of the population was dependent on stuff distributed by the 
central government, using oil revenue. Since the U.N. sanctions, this 
has been called "food for oil." The mechanics are well-known: oil is 
pumped, money goes to buying food and stuff, government distributes the 
stuff, with a limited amount of U.N. supervision. This has now stopped, 
of course. And since much of the population has no independent source 
of income, no factories producing stuff that the rest of the world 
wants to buy, the effects are obvious.

(Germany and Japan were in different situations: each had substantial 
armaments, vehicle, steel, etc. facilities. After being repaired, and 
perhaps after shifting for a while to making motorcycles and lawnmowers 
and such, these industries re-emerged and aided in the rebuilding. We 
all know their names: BMW, VW, Mitsubishi, Toyota, etc. Iraq has far 
fewer such industries, per capita. Offhand, even with their 30 million 
population, I cannot think of a single "Made in Iraq" item, from even 
before the 1990 events.)

They will be a handout state for the next 20 years, perhaps longer. 
There is little chance that investors will pay to rebuild their 
infrastructure, given the lack of ability of the peasants to pay.

And here's the more interesting, from our perspective, reason:

2. "Stay Behind" strategy. First some background.

A key component of U.S. and NATO plans to deal with a Soviet invasion 
of Western Europe was to absorb an initial military defeat, if such was 
inevitable, and then to have commandoes and sappers "melt into the 
population." Mao had used such a strategy many times in the 1940s and 
NATO planners were well aware of the effectiveness. The Vietnam 
experience added more support.

The French Resistance was notably less successful, but also had not 
been prepared in advance. (Still, were I a professional military 
analyst writing detailed reports on such resistance movements, this 
would be part of my "compare and contrast" set of cases. It's possible 
the Iraqi/Baathist resistance will be no more effective than the French 
Resistance was.)

There were various names for the "Stay Behind" plans, several of which 
emerged during the cases in Italy of right wing bombings and political 
scandals. (P2, Gladio, etc.) One URL is:

<http://www.citinv.it/info/ustica/staybeh.htm>

The Stay Behind strategy involved the obvious things: pre-positioning 
of armaments (RPGs, bazookas, C4, rifles, terrorist supplies) at hidden 
locations, false identity papers prepared by the best forgers (indeed, 
by governments themselves!), and training for just such "stay behind" 
exigencies.

The plan would be to let the Soviet invaders take control...then make 
it essentially impossible for them to keep control. Sabotage, both 
major (power plants, factories) and minor (snipping power lines when 
possible, sabotaging water pumps, all things a single person can do 
easily). Propaganda. Assassinations. Snipings. Etc.

(A friend of mine was actively involved in doing this in an Eastern 
European nation occupied by the Soviets. In modern parlance, he was a 
terrorist. But the Soviets eventually gave up and left.)

OK, what's the relevance to Iraq?

Saddam and his associates surely knew well of these strategies. If 
viewed over the long term, the cheering today as his statues are 
toppled is relatively minor if the U.S. is ultimately forced to 
withdraw  (for whatever reason) and the heirs to Saddam get back in 
power.

Knowing a military defeat in open combat was inevitable (I said as much 
many weeks ago, that the military outcome was inevitable, though one 
could hope for an unfolding train wreck to dull American citizen-unit 
enthusiasm), and knowing that even the "fedayeen" commandoes would 
likely eventually fail, the "stay behind" strategy was probably a topic 
of much debate, and funding.

* Pre-positioned supplies. Not hard in a desert, where thousands of 
bunkers were built, where thousands of desert sites covered with sand 
and only knowable through GPS coordinates--the new treasure maps--are 
trivial to set up)

* Extensive foreign bank accounts, now available to hire suicide 
bombers (money going to their families, of course). They'll be vastly 
better-funded than the Palestinians are.

* Snipings, bombings, sabotage.

* Most importantly, as the infrastructure continues to be in sad shape 
and as 30 million continue to live essentially as beggars, resentment 
of the occupation force can only grow.

Yeah, a lot of Iraqis are waving U.S. flags and photos of Rambo 
(seriously) and saying "We love Bush," this is the enthusiasm of the 
moment. Wait until a few years have passed and they still haven't 
climbed out of the poverty of Liberty City (the slum formerly known as 
Saddam City). (Because a slum of a few million people has essentially 
nowhere in the world ever climbed out of poverty, even in 
well-developed countries with strong free market systems. At least not 
in the past several decades. Reasons left as an exercise.)

Meanwhile, there will be groups with access to the offshore accounts, 
to the buried supplies, who will have a very strong incentive to into 
power. Getting into power means control of the billions of barrels of 
oil.

Neighboring countries will find that it's to their advantage to keep 
the U.S. bogged-down in Iraq. The last thing Iran, Turkey, Syria, or 
even Saudi Arabia wants is a Westernized state in their midst, a base 
to launch other "liberations" from. So though they'll pay lip service 
to the idea of being happy Saddam is gone, they'll be sure to keep a 
trickle or even a river of terrorists and supplies heading into Iraq.

And so there are many reasons for a "stay behind" strategy and almost 
no reasons against it.

The perfection of their papers, and the necessity of the U.S. to deal 
with former Iraqi bureaucrats, means that many of the Iraqis the U.S. 
works with can very easily also be part of the underground, the 
resistance. Expect lots of double and even triple agents. A lot of 
Iraqis may seek to cover their bets by working both sides, just so they 
can later produce documents (encrypted, one assumes) proving their 
longstanding alliance to whichever side is dominant ten years from now.

So, as many analysts have said, the military victory of our Abrams 
tanks over their obsolete tanks was the easy part. A harder part will 
be the police force action of the next several months, and dealing with 
the American public's frustration with mounting costs, longer 
deployments of troops, and periodic bombings and snipings.

And then the really hard part takes over. A year from now, two years 
from now, and Baghdad resembles Beirut or Nablus, and 100,000 troops 
are still patrolling the streets.

And there is no boom in building semiconductor and television 
factories, as the optimists are expecting. And most of the nation is 
getting handouts from their new government, the U.S. puppet.

Yep, grounds for optimism. The poverty of the West Bank, except a 
factor of ten larger.

--Tim May