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[Previous entry: "We're up and running"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Doubt"] 09 September 2003: "Werewolves? In Mesopotamia?"Well, it's quite the pile of bedside literature I have these days: Kanan Makiya's Republic of Fear (the writing style can be a bit impenetrable), Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm and I'm re-reading Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945 (non-US title Berlin: The Downfall 1945). Saturday afternoon, I was kicking back on the couch with the newly arrived issue of The Economist, when I came across a line in the article "They came to bury him, and many to praise him" on Iraq after Ayatollah Hakim's murder (premium content). It was this: Both inside and outside Iraq, reports are growing that the Baath is reconstituting itself, after melting away before the Anglo-American advance.At first glance, The Fall of Berlin 1945 might seem to have little bearing on Iraq 2003, but the line from the article reminded me of something from the book. From chapter 12, "Waiting for the Onslaught": In September 1944, when the Western Allies and the Red Army had been advancing towards the Reich with great speed, the Nazi leadership wanted to fight on against its sworn enemies even after defeat. It decided to set up a resistance movement to be known by the codename Werwolf.As Beevor goes on to describe, the Werwolf project never came to much; in the East, "hardly any groups were trained or equipped in time," while the groups in the West proved short on equipment and even shorter on motivation. That latter point is less than surprising when one considers Germany was running low on able-bodied men of military age, and most Werwolf recruits were drawn from teenage Hitler Youth members. Nevertheless, just because it failed for the Nazis doesn't mean such a plan couldn't be made to work, and I find myself wondering whether the Ba'athi régime might have implemented a very similar plan. It seems very likely to me that the notion of an American(-led) invasion of Iraq is a possibility the Iraqi government has been forced to take very seriously since 1991. It would also have had to acknowledge, given the results of the 1991 war, that such an invasion could probably not be repelled with the conventional military means at its disposal. Clearly, the preferable option would be to prevent such an invasion from happening at all, an endeavour in which Saddam was successful for twelve years. But this tactic might not work indefinitely, and it would therefore have been advisable to plan towards this contingency. Now, I admit that the following is largely conjecture, but I think it's a theory worth entertaining. What if, faced with the inability to repel the invasion, the Ba'ath régime decided to put up only a token resistance to an invasion? What if, instead of making a last stand in the ruins of Baghdad or Tikrit, the Ba'ath party leadership settled on a plan whereby they would allow an invading force to occupy the country, and harrass it with incessant guerilla attacks until public opinion in the United States would no longer tolerate the steady trickle of body bags and call for a withdrawal? At this point, the Ba'ath would be able to re-emerge and reassert its control over Iraq. This strategy did not work for Nazi Germany, but there are crucial differences both in the nature of the régime and of its opponents. The biggest threat to Nazi Germany in 1944-1945 consisted of the Soviet Union; its army had been thoroughly convinced by three years of Soviet revenge propaganda such as that of Ilya Ehrenburg in the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, as well as the experiences of the soldiers themselves, that all Germans were ravening beasts. In 1942, Ehrenburg had written: Do not count days, do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the German — this is your mother's prayer. Kill the German — this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.A wall of the canteen at the headquarters of the 1st Belorussian Front bore a slogan as late as 1945, which read "Have you killed a German yet? Then kill him." Though the Soviet government changed tack in April 1945, when it realised that alienating the populace of the territory it was about to occupy for an indefinite period might not be the smartest thing to do, but the switch in policy did not filter down to the rank and file of the armed forces in time to make a difference; Soviet troops routinely indulged in what the Soviet bureaucracy euphemistically termed "extraordinary incidents" (i.e. looting, rape and murder). Behind the Red Army came the NKVD divisions, whose first task was to clear the rear areas of German stragglers and stay-behind groups. To say their methods were ruthless would be an understatement. Local German males drafted into the Volkssturm militia (which was in effect every male between 15 and 55) were regarded as regular army by the NKVD; if local Volkssturm remained at home rather than fleeing before the Red Army, the NKVD would generally consider them to be part of stay-behind sabotage groups, and frequently shoot them on the spot. The same applied to German stragglers ("terrorists and saboteurs") caught behind the Red Army's advance. NKVD personnel would sometimes not bother to conduct house-to-house searches; they simply set fire to a suspect building and shot anyone who tried to escape the blaze. The brutality of the NKVD, and its counter-intelligence arm SMERSH, was matched only by its paranoia. All this is rather a far cry from the 2003 Coalition, certainly as far as willingness to ruthlessly root out any vestige of the ancien régime is concerned. Another contrast may be found in the fact that the Soviet Union conducted a "systematic confiscation of German industry and wealth," stripping German industry (repeatedly) as a down payment on war reparations. This "demontage work" was forcibly carried out by German PoWs and civilians, many of them women. Another factor is the pervasiveness of the Ba'ath party in Iraqi public life. During the 1980s, the number of full members and "organised supporters" of the Ba'ath party ran at over 10% of the Iraqi population; Kanan Makiya argues that, with four or five dependents per member, the part represented half the Iraqi population, a proportion most other totalitarian parties—including the Nazis—never dreamed about (of course, those other parties never came up with the junior membership of "organised supporters"). Mao Zedong likened guerillas to fish who swim in the sea of the people, and the waters of Iraq are especially murky. This is not made easier by the fact private ownership of firearms has been commonplace for a very long time (I have no idea what Saddam Hussein's image is doing on these shirts*), and the presence of multiple firearms in a house, even including Kalashnikov assault rifles, is not necessarily an indicator of insurgent or criminal activity. Under these circumstances, setting up a system of stay-behind groups to commit sabotage and harass the occupying forces would not be a tall order, comparatively speaking. Armed insurgency alone, though, would not be sufficient for the plan; the impression must be created at home that the invasion and subsequent occupation have not improved the lot of the average Iraqi citizen; to this end, we have sabotage strikes on the Iraqi infrastructure. Abroad, the impression must be created there was no casus belli, and I have little doubt that the régime would have been willing to sacrifice its remaining NBC weapons stockpiles and development programmes to achieve this. Less concealable items might be destroyed and/or dumped in various unmarked spots in the desert, while documentation and components might be secreted in some rose gardens (it's been done before) and later used as a basis to reconstitute the programmes. Saddam has proven himself more adept at surviving than Adolf Hitler ever did; in the wake of the Najaf mosque bombing, al-Jazeera received an audio tape, supposedly from Saddam Hussein, denying involvement in the bombing. The CIA says the tape is probably authentic, which would mean Saddam is still alive (whereas Hitler, of course, topped himself). America, moreover, is no wartime Soviet Union bent on revenge; this occupation doesn't sit well with a large part of the American electorate, and given enough setbacks, public opinion may turn against it altogether. Should that happen, the way will not only be clear for the resurgence of the Ba'ath party, but it will probably be safeguarded from further American military action for the foreseeable future, say two presidential terms at least ("Oh no, we're not trying that again! Look what happened last time!"). As I say, it's all conjecture, but I don't think it's entirely nonsensical. We'll have to see how this pans out. If anything, I rather hope I'm wrong. Update: Seems I wasn't the only one to have this idea; check out this article by historian Jeffrey Herf. * - Saddam's image isn't the only thing that bothers me about those shirts; there's also the massive number of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies. In the case of Russia and Germany, people were being sent to the camps well before the introduction of gun control; hell, the gulags were built under the Tsars. In China, before there was gun control, there were warlords. In China, as in Cambodia, the governments which introduced gun control were overthrown by armed insurrectionists, which rather disproves the claim that gun control renders a population powerless to rise up against the government. Conversely, in Revolutionary France, private gun ownership was commonplace; this did not prevent La Terreur. Communist Yugoslavia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, many authoritarian régimes have permitted (or more correctly, continued to permit) private ownership of firearms, but that did not make them any less repressive. See also this entry. |
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