What do insurgents want?

As it becomes ever clearer that the Global War on Terror will also also involve a War on Semantics, Christopher Hitchens unloads today in Slate on a New York Times Week in Review article about the opaque strategy of the Iraqi insurgents. The article made the basic point that killing lots of people makes it difficult to sustain a popular movement. Now it didn't have much to say beyond that, which is why we decided to work through Hitch's tirade about the uselessness of the article.

Indeed, in the print edition of the NYT, the article was accompanied a by a huge picture of the aftermath of an IRA explosion, a picture so large that we suspected its purpose was to take up space rather than contribute anything of substance to the analysis. To be sure, there was a "to be sure" analogy of the seemingly aimless Iraqi insurgency with everyone's favourite developed country white English-speaking insurgents:

If the immediate objective of the insurgents is relatively limited - not to topple the government and drive the Americans out now but to pin them down and bleed them - that at least would have solid precedents. As the counterterrorism expert Bruce Hoffman noted in a paper for Rand last year, "For more than 30 years, a dedicated cadre of approximately 200 to 400 I.R.A. gunmen and bombers frustrated the maintenance of law and order in Northern Ireland, requiring the prolonged deployment of tens of thousands of British troops." Yet the I.R.A. is still far from its larger goal: to drive the British out.

Our longtime readers will know our suspicion of IRA-GWoT comparisons, and in this case the sheer scale of the mayhem in Iraq suggests far more limited patience than the apparent long-haul strategy of the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein. And mention of Sinn Fein brings us to another of Hitch's dodgy points: that any analysis linking the strength of the insurgency to stalled political goals is wrong:

The corollary of this mush-headed coverage must be that, if a more representative government were available in these terrible conditions (conditions supplied by the gangsters themselves), the homicide and sabotage would thereby decline. Is there a serious person in the known world who can be brought to believe such self-evident rubbish?

From this we learn that Hitch and former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor (see our previous post) are drinking from the same punchbowl, and thus that Hitch needs to take his quest for believers in "such self-evident rubbish" to the higher-ups in the US government who are apparently negotiating with elements of the insurgency on political concessions.

Hitch's broader error is to trace the psychopathic behaviour of the terrorists (our point, unlike Hitch's mood, doesn't depend on semantics) back to al Qaeda and thus claim that the only strategy is to kill all non-Sunnis; so, Hitch says, what's the point in looking for any other strategy when they're so clear on that one?

But in his eagerness to slot Iraq into the GWoT, he forgets the history of non-Islamic insurgencies. Recent history is full of examples of deranged brutality and murderousness by "rebel" movements, yet over time these same rebels gradually evolve political causes and either wind up in government or as beneficiaries of generous amnesties for their atrocities. An alleged leftie like Hitch can surely recall the activities of rebel movements in Angola and Mozambique, the more recent example of Sierra Leone or the active set of psychopathic loons in Uganda. All of these would fail the same test of "rationality" in the NYT article and yet none were or are linked to al Qaeda.

Terrorists don't always begin with much of a strategy. But with an opponent as incompetent and short-sighted as this White House, they may not have to think very hard to come up with one.