Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | M | Middle East Policy

Walling off Iraq: Israel's imprint on U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine.

Article Excerpt
Since the U.S. military's 2007 adoption of a new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, popularly known as "the surge," the most conspicuous development on the Iraqi political landscape has been a surge in walls. From Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. military has rapidly constructed scores of massive concrete walls, barriers and checkpoints between and around Iraqi neighborhoods and cities. Euphemistically referred to as "gated communities," vast areas of Iraq have been sealed off behind concrete walls and sand berms. In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high concrete walls separate and surround at least 11 Sunni and Shiite communities, and even now subdivide Sadr City. (1) Often covered with graffiti and broken by narrow checkpoints where soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards and biometric scanning devices, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replicated Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communication. During a visit to Baghdad's Dora neighborhood, journalist Nir Rosen observed,



Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off-by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. (2)

And high above the looming walls, the U.S. military has dramatically increased its use of airpower through unmanned aerial reconnaissance drones and frequent missile strikes. (3) Although overall measurements of violence in Iraq may have numerically declined, Iraq has become increasingly caged within an archipelago of isolated ethnic enclaves surrounded by walls and razor wire and reinforced by an aerial occupation.

This surge in walls and isolated enclaves rests uneasily with the proclaimed tenets of the highly publicized new counterinsurgency doctrine developed by academically trained officers with Ph.D.s, such as General David Petraeus, Lt. Col. John Nagl, and Australian anthropologist/ counterterrorism advisor David Kilcullen, and outlined in the new U.S. Army/ Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24). (4) In sharp contrast to Donald Rumsfeld's heavy-handed military approach to the Iraqi insurgency, the new doctrine prescribes winning the "hearts and minds" of the population through minimizing the use of force, improving security, and cultivating human relationships in order to divide the population from the insurgents and facilitate a political solution. Billed as "armed social science" and allegedly based on the "lessons of history" of twentieth-century counterinsurgent warfare from such varied battlefields as Malaya, Kenya, Algeria and Vietnam, the doctrine is based on the premise that there are ultimately no military solutions to what are at root political wars.

Yet, while the military touts its increased use of embedded anthropologists and "human terrain systems" teams as examples of this new culture-friendly approach, the cornerstone of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq today is less about cultivating human relationships or political solutions than about limiting and imposing them, primarily through concrete walls backed by increased violence from the skies above Iraq.

This surge in walls and enclaves suggests that the primary "lessons of history" being followed by the U.S. military's actual counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq today derive less from Malaya, Algeria or Vietnam, than from Israel's urban-warfare laboratory in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip over the past decade.

The parallel with Israel is not simply the tactic of erecting the walls themselves, although this is its most obvious feature. Indeed, over the past decade, Israel has adopted and refined a controversial new pacification strategy in response to Palestinian armed resistance and suicide bombings. It has erected hundreds of miles of separation walls and high-tech fences and over 400 checkpoints across occupied territory that enclose Palestinians within an archipelago of enclaves in order to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. (5) This strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, backed up by frequent airborne assassinations and strikes. Although Israel withdrew its army and settlements from Gaza in 2005, its 1.5 million Palestinians are now living within an enclosed cage, while Israel controls access to the essentials of life through high-tech border terminals and unleashes "penetration raids" and airborne "targeted killings" when resistance is offered.

This parallel between the United States and Israel is frequently noted by many Iraqis: "This wall makes us feel as if we were in Palestine," said Iraqi protestor Akram al-Ani at a demonstration against the first wall built around Baghdad's Adhamiyya neighborhood. "And this is the same wall that separates Palestinians from Israelis." (6) Visiting the Sunni enclave of Amriya in Baghdad, Nir Rosen's Iraqi driver pointed to a gap in the new concrete walls surrounding Amriya: "We call it the Rafah Crossing," referring to the one gate from besieged Gaza to Egypt that the Israeli army occasionally allows to open. (7)

Yet the parallel with Israel runs deeper than walls. The emulation of many obviously Israeli-derived tactics and techniques in Iraq today is the product of a growing convergence between the Israeli and the U.S. military over the past few decades on how to fight insurgencies.

Counterinsurgency doctrine was largely banished from the U.S. military playbook after the defeat in Vietnam. Efforts to erase the specter of that war embodied in the mantra "No More Vietnams" left a major gap in institutional doctrine. But over the past two decades, Israeli technologies, tactics and even strategic doctrines have increasingly become a default paradigm and source of emulation. This process only accelerated with American involvement in Arab and Muslim lands after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and has become particularly apparent during the occupation of Iraq.

Behind the use of Israeli-style walls and enclaves in Iraq there appears to be a deeper U.S. embrace of a new post-Vietnam strategic doctrine regarding counterinsurgent warfare that bears many similarities with Israel. It is based on the belief that violent insurgencies against foreign military occupation can actually be defeated through shifting military tactics rather than through a political solution that addresses the root of the insurgency, namely an end to foreign occupation.

The...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!