People are just asserting that counterinsurgency doctrine doesn't apply in a civil war, but the Vietnam war was a civil war, with heavy reliance on guerrilla tactics by the North Vietnamese. Some of the lessons discussed in the counterinsurgency manual were drawn from that conflict.

The notion of providing security and building trust locally in order to allow the noncombatants (i.e., the great bulk of people) to get on with life and eventually participate in securing themselves would seem to apply equally to two-, and multi-party conflicts.

TJ, some people might be asserting that, I dont know. What I take yggles to be asserting is that we don't have an actually existing political coalition whom we want to win (which is quite unlike the Vietnam war, I think), and that the actual advice in the actual manual assumes the contrary, that there is such a group.

There are competing armed groups in Iraq

There are monolithic insurgencies? Not likely given the personalities needed to have an insurgency in the first place. They only become united when the victory is close at hand.

Of course the tactics could work if we put in enough time, money, and lives, they're the same tactics the other guys use and they're winning now. It's a question of whether it's worth trying at this point. IMO, not.

w/d,

Sausagely writes:
There is, as everyone knows, a condition of multi-pronged civil war and we're not eager to take sides in it. Under those circumstances, however, handbooks about beating back insurgencies aren't relevant.

Now there's definitely a political question--can we please get the Iraqi gov't to stop the "unsanctioned" violence. But that doesn't mean you can't apply the tactics of counterinsurgency to stop the illegitimate violence.

It just doesn't seem right to dismiss the tactics of COIN doctrine so readily.

Wasn't it a matter of contention during Vietnam War debates that the North Vietnamese represented a party in a civil war? I remember Halberstam and Neil Whatshisname insisting that Vietnam was too a civil war, which suggests that conventional wisdom at the time held otherwise.

5: As I remember it, "civil war" or "invasion" depended on who you talked to. I mean, there were either three very wily VC being supported by the whole NVA, or lots of VC with a few rice balls contributed by Uncle Ho.

As I remember it, we lost the g-ddamn Vietnam War, so there really is no point in studying, imitating, or whanking academic about the unsuccessful strategy we deployed there, regardless of the situation in Iraq. We should just stop pretending that we know how to fight wars like this, period.

Better yet, if we stop occupying other countries we won't even need to worry about fighting back the insurgencies engendered by that policy.

Well, Yuri, we'll be sure to never examine our failures in hope of fixing what we did wrong.