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[tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

tvoivozhd---The basic problem is that the for the Sunnis and Baathists 
who openly or covertly provide food, shelter and intelligence to 
guerrillas in Fallujah, the price is not high enough. In WWII we would 
have erased it from the earth---in a few hours eliminating a safe haven
for guerrilla operations and the guerrillas---we would have ringed 
Fallujah with thousands, not a few hundred troops in the classic 
hammer-and-anvil, and gone on to the next target, if any. There is a 
huge advantage in fighting a war to win it---which we are not now doing.




Worldpress.org


Why Iraq Is Not the West Bank

Erik Schechter
Worldpress.org contributing editor
Tel Aviv, Israel
January 20, 2005

Urban warfare training at Mitkan Adam. Photo courtesy of

Erik Schechter.

Keeping a cautious eye on his flanks, a baby-faced Israel

Defense Forces (I.D.F.) infantryman negotiates his way

down a rocky slope to a pair of drab, concrete structures.

He reaches the outer wall of the first building and,

preparing for a Palestinian ambush, pushes his Colt M4A1

marksman rifle around the right-hand corner. Only

afterwards does he ease into the turn.

But no gunman is lying in wait on the other side. The

soldier reels back, and signals the all clear to his

section member, who is waiting behind an outcropping. The

young private then vets another corner as his friend

scrambles downhill; together, the pair inch toward the

door — the man in the rear training his gun upward at

potential snipers. A grenade toss later, the two are

inside, goggles on, raking a living room with semi-

automatic fire.

The bullets are real enough, but the “grenade” is just a

rock. As for the one-story home, it is as bare and gray on

the inside as it is on the outside. That’s because it is

part of a mock Palestinian village located on the Mitkan

Adam military base, north of the Israeli town of Modi’in.

Here, I.D.F. — and in the past, American — infantry units

brush up on their close quarters combat skills.

For two years now, I.D.F. units trained in urban warfare

have operated with moderate success in West Bank cities,

killing or capturing thousands of terrorists and thwarting

their objectives. However, the Americans in Iraq — though

skilled in these same tactics — are far from home, facing

a tougher opponent, a more porous border, and the

challenge of nation building. The results so far have been

mixed.
Intifada as Insurgency

In late September 2000, then opposition leader Ariel

Sharon made his fateful decision to ascend the Temple

Mount in the old city of Jerusalem. The visit was intended

to demonstrate Israeli sovereignty over Judaism’s holiest

site — which is also venerated by Muslims, right after the

cities of Mecca and Medina. The Palestinians, already

frustrated by the failed peace summit in July, reacted

with fury to the controversial visit and the Aqsa Intifada

was born.

Unlike the popular uprising of 1987-92, which was marked

by stone throwing, this intifada immediately spiraled into

a full-blown insurgency. “The same hatred and frustration

was there during the first intifada,” says Amos Harel, Ha

’aretz military correspondent and co-author, with Avi

Isacharoff, of the authoritative The Seventh War. “But

this time, the Palestinian Authority had 30,000-40,000

weapons allowed by Israel, plus others held illegally.”

Faced with roadside ambushes, suicide bombings, and

nightly sniping on Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood, Israel

preferred the long reach of massive firepower to the

close-in fighting that it feared would have resulted from

sending the army into the heart of Palestinian cities. “

The generals were worried,” notes Harel, “They had

memories of Beirut, and thought an operation would cost

hundreds of casualties.”

But the events of March 2002 — “Bloody March,” which saw

22 suicide bombings and 133 deaths — forced the army to

re-think its approach. In April, as part of Operation

Defensive Shield, the I.D.F. surrounded West Bank cities

with checkpoints, an arrangement called a keter (“crown”),

and sent in infantry backed up by tanks and armored

bulldozers.

In Nablus’s Balata refugee camp, paratroopers came up with

the idea, quickly adopted elsewhere, of avoiding snipers

and booby-trapped doors by moving through holes made in

the walls of homes. The tactic was a lifesaver. A

reservist battalion not trained in urban warfare had lost

13 soldiers — over half of all Israeli casualties in the

operation — in just one alleyway ambush in Jenin.

An Islamic Jihad militant, interviewed by CNN in April

2002, said that Jenin’s refugee camp was laced with “1,000

to 2,000” booby traps. But neither bombs nor rocket

propelled grenades could match the two-story D9 armored

bulldozer, which plowed through Palestinian firing

positions, clearing an urban area the Israeli foreign

ministry puts at 2.5 acres but others say is 6 acres.

By operation’s end, thousands of militants surrendered,

and the refugee camps lost their aura of formidability. On

Dec. 13, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, chief of staff, told a

crowd at Herzliya’s Interdisciplinary Center, “In Judea

and Samaria, there have been ongoing military actions ever

since Operation Defensive Shield. We have created, we have

acquired, a freedom of operation.”

In addition to armor, Israel has also used its air force

during the Intifada.

In early October 2000, two I.D.F. reservists took a wrong

turn in the road and drove into the West Bank city of

Ramallah, where they were lynched at a Palestinian

Authority police station. The frenzied murders were caught

on film by an Italian TV crew. Seeking revenge, Israel

unleashed its helicopter gunships on the Palestinian

Authority. The Ramallah police station, a government radio

station, a Force-17 paramilitary base, and another police

station in the Gaza Strip were all destroyed.

Pique became policy three weeks later as gunships started

hunting down individual terrorists. Often aided by

remotely piloted spy drones, these high-tech extrajudicial

killings were justified on the grounds of self-defense:

The militants were always said to be slain on their way to

an attack. But by July 2002, senior Hamas leaders were

added to the hit list, and on March 22, 2004, Israel

struck down Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the quadriplegic leader of

the Islamist movement.

“As the risk of suicide bombings grew, we worked from

individual terrorists all the way back to the

masterminds,” says Israel Air Force Brig. Gen. (res.)

Nehemia Dagan. Though an opponent of targeted killings,

Dagan has “no doubt” that they hurt Palestinian groups.

Indeed, following the assassination of Yassin and, soon

afterwards, that of his successor Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi,

almost five months passed without a single suicide

bombing.
Tallying up the Intifada

By the end of 2004, a little over 990 Israelis — mostly

civilians — had been killed in the Intifada, says Don

Radlauer, an associate at Herzliya’s International Policy

Institute for Counter-Terrorism. By contrast, there have

been some 3,500 Palestinian deaths during the same period,

according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (P.R.C.S

.).

How successful has Israel been at killing militants?

Unfortunately, terrorists do not generally wear uniforms,

but the P.R.C.S. says that 74 percent of Palestinian

casualties are ages 16-40 and almost exclusively male. “I

would say that 58 percent of the Palestinians killed are

combatants, and that’s being very conservative,” says

Radlauer.

But body counts tell only part of the story. No one is

shooting on the Gilo neighborhood anymore. Suicide

bombings have declined from 39 in 2002, to 11 in 2004.

Terrorism continues, albeit at a reduced level, and the

question is, to what end?

“Even military victory has to serve a political goal,”

says Maj. Gen. (res.) Yoram Yair, who led the paratroopers

into Beirut in 1982. “If a terrorist commits an attack but

doesn’t achieve his goal, what did he do — kill a few

soldiers, kill a few civilians? The situation of the

Palestinians was a lot better before the intifada.”

And some in the Palestinian leadership admit as much.

On Sept. 27, 2004, Jordanian daily al-Ra’i published an

interview with Mahmoud Abbas, now chairman of the

Palestinian Authority. In the piece, which was translated

by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Abbas argues

that the insurgency failed to deliver on any concrete

goal.

Some predicted, says Abbas, “that after the killing of 1,

000 Israelis in the Intifada, Israel would collapse, as

would Sharon; the second opinion is that the armed

Intifada would liberate the homeland; the third opinion is

that the Intifada would bring the settlements to a halt” —

none of which happened.
The United States in Iraq

In late March 2004, four American private contractors were

ambushed and killed by insurgents in Fallujah, on the east

bank of the Euphrates River. A Sunni Arab mob then dragged

the burned bodies through the streets and hanged at least

two of the slain Americans from the girders of a bridge —

provoking an assault on the city by U.S.-led Coalition

forces that ended prematurely in early April with a

unilateral truce. From then on, the Americans made do with

sporadic air strikes against foreign terrorists in the

city.

“We had the chance in April to take Fallujah,” says Maj.

Gen. Paul Vallely, a military analyst for FOX News Channel

who retired from the Army in 1991, “but we screwed it up

because we let politics interfere. You must first win the

battle. Then you win hearts and minds.”

In early November, the Americans got another crack at the

insurgent stronghold of Fallujah with the still-in-

progress “Operation Phantom Fury.” United States Marines

and Iraqi forces, in what’s called a “dynamic cordon,”

ringed the city with checkpoints in an attempt to fix the

insurgents in place as remotely piloted surveillance

drones circled overhead on the lookout for stockpiled car

bombs.

“They kept watch over every parked vehicle in Fallujah,”

says military historian James Dunnigan, “Any car that

hadn’t moved in three days was hit hours before Coalition

forces went in. In many cases, there were secondary

explosions.”

The Americans led with tanks, which broke through enemy

lines and drew out the rebels, who were overmatched in

terms of firepower. D9 bulldozers plowed through enemy

positions, and infantry bypassed booby traps and snipers

by traveling through holes in breached walls. There are a

few snipers holding out, but so far, over 1500 insurgents

have been killed and a few thousand more captured,

according to the Pentagon.

If some of the tactics used in Fallujah seem reminiscent

of those used in the West Bank, it is because American

military officials studied the Israeli assault on Jenin,

just as the I.D.F. has learned from the experiences of the

United States. In May 2002, Marine Times reported that “

the Marines are looking closely at how the Israelis

employed tanks and helicopters in their fight.”


The Americans have their own mock Arab village with

Arabic-speaking actors playing the locals at the United

States Army’s Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort

Polk, Louisiana. Nevertheless, the Jerusalem Post reported

this past August that “U.S. Army units are undergoing

training in the special anti-terror school located in the

Adam base near Modi’in.”

The Americans clearly did their homework before going into

places like Baghdad, Ramadi and Fallujah.


On Jan. 17, the Bloomberg news agency ran a triumphant

quotation from Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S.-led

forces in Iraq, who said, “In June, there were several

safe havens for terrorists and insurgents. Now Samarra’s

gone as a safe haven. Fallujah’s gone. Najaf is gone.”

However, while Israel walked away from the Intifada a

bruised-up but confident winner, the same cannot be said

for Americans in their war in Iraq. Since June 1, 2003,

which marked the official end of the war against Saddam

Hussein, almost 950 American soldiers have been killed by

ex-Baathists, foreign jihadists and Sunni sectarians.

These mounting casualties have turned the tide of American

public opinion against the war. In July 2003, a Gallup

opinion poll found that only 27 percent of Americans

thought it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq; by

January 2005, the number climbed to 50 percent (as opposed

to 48 percent who still support it).

In his Dec. 22 assessment of the Iraqi insurgency, Anthony

Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International

Studies, wrote, “The U.S. assumed for the first year after

the fall of Saddam Hussein that it was dealing with a

limited number of insurgents that Coalition forces would

defeat well before the election.”

The Iraqi election is scheduled for Jan. 30, yet the

insurgency, in contradiction to the rosy prediction, is

just getting stronger. An estimate in the first half of

2004 put the number of militants at 5,000, but by October,

it had climbed to 12,000. Now, the Iraqi Interim

Government says there might be as many as 20,000-30,000

insurgents.

Speaking to this reporter last year, Col. (res.) Moshe

Marzuk, an Israeli terrorism expert, predicted that “we

will see an increase in violence because the Sunnis in the

Triangle are feeling desperate [because of their lost

position of privilege under the Baathist regime]. There

will be attacks on police stations, governors and anyone

seen as cooperating with the Americans.”

And indeed, local Coalition allies have been regularly

targeted. In the last four months alone, insurgents have

killed at least 1,300 Iraqi police officers, according to

the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The Iraq Body Count Web site

counts 60 “reported suicide and possible suicide bomb

attacks” for 2004. So far this year, there have been over

a dozen car bombings, suicide or otherwise.
The Difference

Some of the poor performance in Iraq can be attributed to

Coalition mistakes. For instance, General Vallely notes

that thin-skinned Humvees, which have been clobbered by

roadside bombs, never should have been used in urban

warfare: “They are a replacement for the jeep; they were

never supposed to be part of an armored force.”

However, the real reason for the disappointing results is

that Iraq is a vastly different strategic environment than

the West Bank. First off, the Iraqi insurgents are much

tougher an opponent than the Palestinians:

Unlike the self-taught terrorists of Jenin, many of the

Iraqis served in Saddam’s disbanded army, whose heavy,

surplus weapons are easy to come by.

“Before the war, Iraq was an ammo dump with a government,”

says John Pike, an analyst with Globalsecurity.org, “Now

it’s an ammo dump without a government.” In fact, much of

the explosives used in car bombs are not cooked up in

underground laboratories but are taken straight from Iraqi

artillery shells.

Another issue is one of neighbors and borders.

Jordan and Egypt, Israel’s neighbors to the east and

south, have managed to stifle gunrunning and infiltration.

(The few foreign terrorists that have entered Israel

attacked from Lebanon or came legally, such as British

citizens Asif Hanif and Omar Sharif.) Still, in the summer

of 2002, Israel began construction on a security fence,

which is now slated to be 700 kilometers long, to separate

itself from the bulk of the Palestinian population.

“Operation Defensive Shield was a turning point, but it

did not stop suicide bombings,” says Harel. “When Israel

realized that, it had no choice but to build the

separation fence.”

Though the West Bank fence is only 35 percent complete,

nearly half of all suicide bombings in 2004 occurred at

military checkpoints in the territories — not in crowded

cafés and on buses within Israel proper. “Fences work, not

perfectly, but they work — if sometimes for only

psychological reasons,” says Israeli military historian

Martin van Creveld. “They say: You can go this far and no

farther.”

Unfortunately, Iraq is surrounded by Syria, Saudi Arabia

and Iran, which are not interested in seeing a pro-Western

Arab democracy. At best, these states have ignored anti-

Coalition infiltration across Iraq’s 3,600-kilometer-long

border. “And you cannot build a fence around Iraq,” notes

Pike.

The I.D.F. can always withdraw once the terrorists are

killed or captured, and let the Palestinian Authority pick

up the pieces. However, the Americans are engaged in the

hands-on job of building a new state, so they have to

protect themselves and Iraqi society against very

determined, mostly local rebels.

“There’s a government now, but it is a body that is still

be advised how to develop local industry and banking,

health and education ministries,” notes Col. (res.) Benny

Michelsohn, former I.D.F. chief historian. “There’s an

Iraqi police force, but it’s very limited in what it can

do.”

General Yair cites the traditional view that one fights

guerillas by “draining the swamp” — that is, turning the

population against them. But with what can it be bought?

The Sunni minority of Iraq, which backs the insurgency,

enjoyed a privileged position under the former Baathist

regime. A free and democratic Iraq, the stated aim of the

Coalition, would hardly be in their narrow sectarian

interests.

Finally, the Israelis, unlike the Americans, dominate

their enemies in the intelligence arena.

Israeli brigades, such as the Binyamin Brigade in the

northern West Bank, are based on a territorial command

structure, with individual battalions and undercover units

rotating in and out as needed. These brigades are paired

up with police and Shin Bet districts, which deliver a

steady flow of tactical intelligence garnered from

Palestinian prisoners and collaborators, says Colonel

Michelsohn.

In addition, in the last decade, the I.D.F. has created

half a dozen territorial battalions, such as Duchifat and

Haruv, each operating in only one Palestinian city. “The

units serve as the town sheriff so that we’re able to tell

who are the baddies and who are the goodies,” explains

General Yair.

The Americans have very few Arabic-speaking troops and

nothing akin to the Shin Bet in Iraq. But they could have

used native personnel. General Vallely believes that it

was a mistake to disband the Iraqi army (or what remnant

hadn’t already gone home) and not to have immediately

installed an interim government after the fall of Saddam.

“General Casey is working on border patrol and an Iraqi

intelligence network, but we lost a year,” he says.

Similarly, Newsweek reported on Jan. 10 that the Coalition

is finally training undercover units, composed mostly of

Kurds and Shiites, to hunt down Sunni insurgents. Whether

such changes, plus an elected government, will have an

impact remains to be seen.

In the meantime, Iraq remains a cautionary tale for Israel

that, no matter how good your urban warfare skills, they

might still not be enough to defeat an insurgency. “We are

deluding ourselves if we think that we are fighting a war

in the territories,” says van Creveld. “The army is doing

quasi-police work … If the enemy had heavy machine-guns,

our helicopters would be shot out of the sky.”