They never defeated the Iraqi army

The Easy Guerilla Victory

Your description, in the book, of the establishment of the UN mission in Somalia is very interesting. For all the professionalism it comes off as haphazard?

KR: It was an amazing show to watch how bureaucracy grew. You saw very little, actually, go into the economy other than people getting employed by the UN and the aid agencies, who, with the journalists, became the only employers in town.

It was sort of a “peace by bureaucracy”?

KR: Yes. I saw the same thing a few years later in East Timor: suddenly the aid agencies and the UN became the only source of revenue in town, they paid the highest salaries to get the best Timorese, and there weren’t any people left to do any real work at the place. Look, why do you need all these bureaucrats coming in to teach the Timorese how to improve his livelihood? Give him a fishing pole, a net and a boat. He can make his own livelihood. He doesn’t need experts in there to tell him anything. He’s been fishing for 500 years so all he needs – because the Indonesians burned it – is a new boat.

Is there in your experience an overriding lesson concerning interventions?

KR: Just keep the bureaucrats to a minimum, ask the people what they want and give them that – instead of bringing in all your experts to do “needs assessments” and get in to big scale projects. Timor was a classic example. It was a pretty primitive place to begin with: all you needed to do was to bring in a bunch of little canoe boats, or just bring them some wood so they can make their own boats and something to make fishing nets out of, and they can go out and make a living the next day, right? That was all they needed.

In Iraq I don’t know what they’re doing: they talk about building the place into a model of democracy for the Middle-East and all this crap. I don’t think Iraqis need Americans to tell them how to run their country – they have had that country for several thousands of years. There was no planning for the aftermath. Clearly, they made a couple of mistakes.

They thought they were going to be welcomed by cheering Iraqi in the South and so the South wouldn’t be a problem. The second one was, that the assumption that the entire Iraqi army would surrender, and that they would be able to use that army to be the peace-keeping force. That didn’t happen. Then they thought there would be a coup or that they could kill Saddam within the first couple of weeks, but that didn’t happen either. The problem with that was, that they were using the template of the First Gulf War where the entire Iraqi army did surrender. But here they didn’t surrender at all, they just disappeared – and those are the guys who are shooting up the place. To say that this is outsiders coming in, I think, is complete bullshit. They never defeated the Iraqi army.

It appears that, in Washington, they never had a game plan for what would happen if they didn’t fight us. If they let us come in to Baghdad and then turn it into a guerilla war. They came up with every other scenario: chemical and nuclear weapons, and so forth, but they never thought of the possibility: what happens if they won’t fight?

What do you think the outcome will be in the short to middle term?

KR: I am not optimistic about it. They keep saying we have all these signs of progress, and that the attacks are small potatoes. But the guerilla wins just by not losing. All he needs to is stay there. When I was in Asia, I spent a lot of time talking to Vietnamese. At the end of the day: America is occupying Iraq, and at some point American troops are going to leave. It may be next year, it may be in two, five or ten years. But truth is: when the American troops leave, some of the Iraqis who are now shooting at the American troops are still going to be there. Therefore the guerilla can win just by staying alive.

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Photo (illustration): BrunoInBaghdad.com

Photo (portrait):
Francesca Luk

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