McCain and the Oil Spots
Senator John McCain has now jumped on the "oil-spot" bandwagon, urging that the US forces concentrate on making a handful of key cities safe rather than doing sweep and clear missions like Tal Afar and Husaybah.
Unfortunately, this strategy is impractical, even if the US put 10,000 more troops in, as McCain suggests.
First, the elected Iraqi government doesn't want it. In fact, they have been pushing US and coalition troops out of the cities. They had nice ceremonies when Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad were "turned over" to Iraqi forces. Elected Iraqi politicians simply could not risk putting more foreign troops into a place like Baghdad-- their constituents would rebel. Why does McCain not know this, if I do?
Second, do the math. Mosul is 1.1 million, Baghdad is about 6 million, Kirkuk is about a million. All are highly mixed ethnically, and all are tinderboxes. If you put 50,000 US troops into each of those three cities and just abandoned Anbar province, you still could not control them. The US troops can't tell a guerrilla from an ordinary Iraqi. They cannot penetrate urban extended family networks or neighborhoods. Adhamiyah would be opaque to them. And having a military force in the capital that would be only 1 percent of the population would not be decisive in ending guerrilla actions. The patrols and house invasions and inspections would also turn more and more urban Iraqis against the US presence.
Where have I heard this theory of fighting wars before? Here is what an Afghan general and his coauthor said about Soviet tactics in Afghanistan:
"The Soviet concept for military occupation of Afghanistan was based on the following:
# stabilizing the country by garrisoning the main routes, major cities, airbases and logistics sites;
# relieving the Afghan government forces of garrison duties and pushing them into the countryside to battle the resistance;
# providing logistic, air, artillery and intelligence support to the Afghan forces;
# providing minimum interface between the Soviet occupation forces and the local populace;
# accepting minimal Soviet casualties; and,
# strengthening the Afghan forces, so once the resistance was defeated, the Soviet Army could be withdrawn.
Sound familiar?
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/11/2005 12:06:00 AM
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9 Comments:
I'm surprised so many people have not heard of the "oil spot" theory before. I recall it was one of the French strategies in Indochina ca. 1950-54. The idea was that French forces would establish strongpoints (read, "forts") from which they would sortie to "pacify" the immediate surrounding countryside. As an area was made secure, new strongpoints would be set up on the periphery to start the process over. Of course, as we should all remember, it didn't work there, either. Same reason. Unless the populace has strong reasons to support the central government they aren't going to risk reprisals from the guerrillas to provide the intelligence needed to combat the insurgency.
For those of you who would like to read more about a real world application of the "oil spot strategy," please see (begin underscore) Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (end underscore), ed. by Edward Mead Earle, Princeton Univ. Press, 1943, (and, I believe, many subsequent editions), Chapter 10, "Bugeaud, Gallieni, Lyautey: The Development of French Colonial Warfare."
Is this really what McCain has in mind?
One of the stranger aspects of the "oil spot" theory is the repeated reference by its supporters to its success in Malaya in the 50s. Any relationship to Iraq has always seemed strained to say the least.
Just one example - in that conflict almost all the Chinese peasants in Malaya were uprooted and put into "new villages" surrounded by wire fencing. This was to stop the villagers from sending out food to the guerillas in the jungle. As part of this effort , all the food in the "new villages" was cooked in one kitchen. The theory being that since rice spoiled after a few hours it could be withheld from the enemy more easily.
Hard to see this working in Baghdad.
Well, to be fair, the tache d'huile theory, as formalized by Lyautey at the end of the 19th century to deal with resistance in Algeria, and as consciously applied to various degrees in places like Malaysia, Algeria and Vietnam, has always been a countryside based theory. It's not about holding the cities and branching out. It's about controlling a piece of countryside and the spreading out, the theory being that once you've provided solid security for people, you'll gain their loyalty, and information, and their neighbors will envy their situation and want to emulate it and help you. So the area you control will spread like an oil spot to contiguous areas.
So it's not the same as confining yourself to the cities, which in a guerrilla war situation is kind of like calling defeat victory. And it's not the same as saying we have a strategy for leveraging our control of the cities (when we have it) to control the countryside. If there was any obvious way to do that, there wouldn't be any guerrilla wars because the guerrillas controlling the countryside when the government controls the cities is the basic starting position in a guerrilla war. How to control the countryside afterwards that is the soul of the question facing the government. To say "And then we move on to control the countryside" is like saying "And then voila a miracle happens."
But this doesn't undercut your criticism, it only magnifies it. The problem with invoking the oil spot theory now is that the oil spot theory assumes you already control the cities. And it assumes that you already have a strong state. Neither of which is at all true now in Iraq. Iraq and Afghanistan are 4th generation wars, which are entirely different. Now you don't have weak forces trying to wrest control from a state. Rather the guerrillas are trying to stop a state from coming into being, which is much easier. In the entire history of colonialism and the cold war, a steady flow of random terrorism never accomplished the first. But in the world of post-cold war failed states, it can accomplish the second. It can stop strong states from coming into being.
And all of this leaves to one side that there is always a huge divergence between the theory and practice of tache d'huile. In practice, tache d'huile always means a massive -- and I mean massive -- program of relocation camps. That sometimes works (viz. Turkey's war against the Kurds, or the British war against the Mau-Maus). But it's the way to institutionalize ethnic divisions, not overcome them.
One the many, many, many reasons why Malaysia was an unduplicably unique case, a single point everyone keeps trying to draw a curve through but can't, is that it was perhaps the only time in history when massive relocation wasn't a huge offense against the relocated people. The Chinese who lived in rings around the cities (and formed a bridge to the jungle that the british wanted to remove so they could isolate the guerrillas) had only moved there recently during WWII and lived in shantytowns. They weren't attached to their homes and didn't much like them. They preferred their new villages and saw the move as a great government service. And that made a big difference in gaining their loyalty. Almost all other similarly transported people have felt very differently.
In sum, the answer to why McCain is embracing the oil spot theory now has nothing to do with the facts and everything to do with the politics of selling. Buzzwords fuzz the mind and make people pliable.
McCain is running for president. He is confronting the administration with the anti-torture admendment. This new stance may be an attempt to make a uninformed public think he is the one who has the expertise to win the war and bring our troops home. He continues his ploy of stradling the fence by giving a little to the left while leaning to the right. But when push comes to shove, he falls on the conservative side.
Thank you Michael Pollak for a very useful analysis of the oil spot theory. I'm sure you're right that McCain is just using this to appear clever. All the same, the oil spot would be a valid approach to Iraq, despite the antecedents, if 200,000 rather than 10,000 more soldiers were used - i.e. were the draft to be reintroduced. This doesn't look likely at the moment, but who knows, if the wind turns? On the ground in Iraq it might fail - but it might not. Anyway, as Michael makes clear, it would require massive population relocations and to all intents and purposes a military dicatorship.
One Afterthought, in the interest of fairness. McCain's comment might not be nonsense if we suppose he was referring to point in the hypothetical medium term when Iraqi troops were able to control and police the cities.
Then conceivably he could be saying that the US forces should use an oil-spot theory to retake the majority Sunni provinces -- concentrating all their forces in a small area, policing it intensely, and making the goal providing security rather than killing enemies (i.e., rating our success or failure in terms of whether the number of incidents against civilians rises or falls, with the number of enemy killed being considered irrelevant to the strategy). Then trying to slowly expand outwards.
It wouldn't work for lots of reasons (chiefly national identity issues that would make it impossible for civilians to consider themselves part of "us" vs. "them;" and the impossibility of the government being considered legitimate so long as huge independent American forces were in the countryside. Plus little things like language incompetence, etc.).
But at least if parsed like that it isn't nonsensical on its face.
I find it ironic that is called the "oil spot" theory, how apropos. I would love to see the real troop deployments so that we may determine what is exactly being defended.
I would also wonder if the Jordan issue takes the eyes off the Iranian border and if they are not the prime instigator in antagonizing the situation. Israel will have a difficult choice if the area is destabilized.
What of Egypt?
I may be in the minority but I think the tache d'huile theory could work in Iraqi cities--just take the 'oil spot' down to the neighborhood level.
Organize not only your ground forces around this, but also your intelligence analysis of the insurgent networks--instead of going back up to some big, impersonal group somewhere in the capital. Also roll in your Aid agencies and public works projects so that the citizens of these neighborhoods see a consistent, cohesive effort to help, not harm.
For successful employment of this theory, the U.S. would need to learn from the mistakes of the past:
1. True cultural understanding (to include language mastery) is critical.
2. Transparent, ethical actions must be the standard. If a U.S. servicemember violates ROE, his/her punishment must be made public and not hidden behind coalition compound walls.
3. When Iraqi military/police units are ready, make them the 'face' of the operation, but ensure that the U.S. maintains at least some degree of oversight until we are sure that criminal or sectarian elements are not at work in the very establishment created to counter these elements.
4. Existing tribal/religious structures must be respected (see point 1). How elite and out of touch is the U.S. to think we can reverse generations of Iraqi culture and make them modern citizens of a democratic society in a scant three years?!?
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