Sometimes the Guerrillas Win
Max Boot (“Forget Vietnam -- History Deflates Guerrilla Mystique,” Opinion, April 6) deprecates guerrilla warfare with references to unsuccessful campaigns, but conveniently neglects some successes that are highly relevant to the current situation. Revolutionary partisan leaders like Francis Marion (the “Swamp Fox”) helped win independence for the United States. The Spanish revolt against Napoleon’s occupation, which gave the world the word “guerrilla” and Goya’s magnificent antiwar art, helped bring down an empire. The French thought they were bestowing the liberating values of the Enlightenment on a benighted people, but the Spaniards didn’t see it that way.
That guerrillas can be triumphant even in a desert environment is exemplified by the Arab revolt against Turkish occupation led by Lawrence of Arabia. Another cautionary tale for Americans is the tragic fate of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge, a marginal gang of fanatical partisans, were vaulted into power when U.S. bombing alienated the population. When the Khmer Rouge exterminated the Vietnamese minority (among others), Vietnam invaded and scored a rapid regime change. Despite the ghastly provocation and the grotesqueness of the Khmer Rouge regime, the invasion was denounced by the U.S. and the U.N. The Khmer Rouge then reverted to vicious guerrilla tactics, this time with the complicity of U.S. policymakers.
Nation-building and global policing make for treacherous political ground, where the sandstorms of expediency have a nasty way of eroding morality.
Gilbert Dewart
Pasadena
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I agree to some degree with Boot: Iraq is not another Vietnam. When we intervened in Vietnam, we intervened in support of a well-established faction. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan, it was in support of an existing Afghan faction. The appeals of the intervenor made some kind of sense in terms of local politics, whether you agreed with them or not.
In Afghanistan and particularly Iraq it is clear that support for the U.S. is very low. The Afghan government we established rules over the city of Kabul only. The president’s bodyguards are American soldiers, because we can’t find Afghans to protect him. If anything, we have been less successful in Iraq than in Afghanistan in obtaining local support.
The administration’s rationale for war has always been 100% oriented to American public opinion; in terms of Arab or Iraqi interests, it makes no sense at all. Basically, their interests, history and traditions don’t matter. What I see more likely than a guerrilla war is a war like the one in Lebanon, an indefinite urban struggle between dual structures of authority. In my opinion, the Iraqis waged a war not to avoid American occupation but to set in place the preconditions for this political and military struggle. How this will play out is impossible to predict.
John Yard
Sunland/Tujunga
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Boot’s commentary fails to take into account a major determinant of the success of guerrilla forces. The anti-French resistance in Algeria, the Red Army in occupied and postwar China, the Viet Cong in Indochina, the ineradicable pockets of resistance in Central and South America, Nepal and the South Pacific today: All of these were or are “people’s armies,” following the principles that Mao devised to bring him victory in Earth’s most-populous country.
The resistance to an Anglo-American occupation in Iraq or any part of the Middle East will not represent “Baathism” but a more general tendency to anti-Americanism that is apparent throughout the region. For better or worse, the forces of this sentiment are led by elitist cadres inspired by religion, which ensures that they will never amount to a people’s army. So the outcome is really in the hands of President Bush’s “coalition”: Will the occupation be so baldly exploitative as to create a people’s army, or will we be able to maintain the “liberator” image well enough that we will only face the expected outbursts of fanaticism?
Jason MacCannell
Davis