Exsurgency

The lessons of history can teach us much, but sometimes we find that there is something new under the sun, something our experience, and even our language, is unprepared for. Now is such a time, and the new concept is that of exsurgency.

"Insurgent" is a word that can have many applications, but it is limited by those first two letters. The in in insurgent implies that the "surging" comes from within the body being affected. In Iraq, however, that is largely not the case at all.

The offensives and actions in (and sometimes not in) the news hint at that. From Rawah to Qaim to Sadah to Tal Afar, there are hot clashes between coalition (mostly Iraqi and US) forces, and what the news refers to as pockets of foreign fighters. Of course, that simply makes sense - towns filled mostly with regular people down run guns or behead "sympathizers," especially in the numbers met by opposing forces. These fighters have to come from somewhere, not to mention get their weapons from somewhere, and it's no secret that they're not mostly from Iraq, let alone from a couple towns over. Even the de facto leader of these counter-coalition elements, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, is himself a Jordanian.

Yet, despite all of this evidence, the language of today still maintains that these elements are an "insurgency," as defined that that they counter the intended status quo by unconventional means. While the latter is true, they are nonetheless obviously not from within Iraq, perhaps we should take to calling an exsurgency, to emphasize their non-native origin.

When you do that, you get an entirely new picture of the situation, not to mention a much more accurate one. No longer are random, ticked-off Iraqis lashing out at us "imperialist Americans," instead, directed and organized armies of foreigners are striking innocent Iraqis, and being fought by US-aided native Iraqi security units. The picture becomes a clash of order vs. disorder, not some grassroots uprising of the Arab Street. And considering that, historically, clashes between order and disorder are infinitely more common than an ultra-violent grassroots rebellion, this tends to hold quite well with what we can take from the overall human experience. In other words, in the big picture, this really isn't something new at all.

How did we get to this point of exsurgency? Surely, the enemy combatants in this war haven't always been foreign fighters streaming in across porous desert borders. The answer, it turns out, is fairly simple. The military has taken to using terms like "OIF 1" and "OIF 2." I never really figured out where the lines for each period were drawn, but it's obvious that someone who was "in OIF 1" was in Iraq for the first parts of the war. Now it seems that the era is currently OIF 3, but I don't know where the memo came from stating such. These terms could refer to any number of things, though. First, Operation Iraqi Freedom has been going on for just over three years. You do the math. Similarly, it could refer to the roughly year-long Army rotation schedule somehow. But in the context of the action itself, it also applies, and this becomes really three distinct wars consecutively.

First was the conventional action - air strikes on military targets, rolling tanks north to Baghdad, that sort of thing. The primary objective was to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, and defeat any resistance posed by his conventional units. The second course of action was, to use an analogy, fertilizing the soil. This included rooting out Baathists and other former regime elements, organizing forces for a long-term rebuilding effort, and containing Iraqi radical clerics and other leaders who would incite violence. The last was accomplished by involving their constituencies in the political process, which, oddly enough, happened to kick off the third portion. It began with the provisional elections last January, and continues with the recent (pending) ratification of the constitution. The greatest threat now is exsurgency, namely the foreign fighters and those mostly Sunni Iraqis they wish to recruit, supply, and direct. The exsurgents are being dealt blows by conventional military means, in operations manned by both US and Iraqi forces. They are also being harmed by their falling standing among the civilian Iraqi population. After all, you can't car-bomb peoples' cousins and other fellow tribesmen without alienating a few people here and there. But, much like the final strike against any true insurgency, the ultimate blow to exsurgency will be involving their potential recruits in the political process, leaving the exsurgents smaller and smaller influence, and thereby more and more exposed.

It's important that we remember the picture of conflict between order and disorder, not only because it's accurate, but also because that's the way our enemy views the conflict. In a recent speech regarding the continued War on Terror, and the current battlefield of it in Iraq, President Bush quoted both Osama bin Laden and Zarqawi. The former has said "The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It's either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation." Zarqawi was also up front about his intentions: "We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life." In both cases, neither hid his aims within the cloak of some anti-Western grievance. They clearly recognized the importance of the Iraqi front in their plans for world domination, and they certainly did not limit their call to arms in this battle to those followers only with Iraqi citizenship.

These two armies are clashing. On one side are the supporters of Zarqawi's Islamofacist ideal. On the other are the US and other coalition forces building up an independent and sovereign Iraq. The enemy will fight with all it has; we must not fail to recognize this, nor fail to act against it. For on one side is misery and humiliation, while the other is victory and glory. And the winner gets to pick the outcome.

Sacrifice and Victory

Three-Hundred.

Seven-Hundred.

The headlines start like a faucet dripping into a hollow steel sink.

One-Thousand.

Then a dull roar invades your head.

One-Thousand, Eight-Hundred American Soldiers Dead.

The roar gives way to pained screams wracking your brain - ENOUGH! ENOUGH!

We've all felt it. It's the reaction any decent person is supposed to have, and that sense of decency is precisely the target. After all, Americans are essentially a peaceful, isolationist, decent people. It is in our history, in our myths, and practically in our blood. We can be excited beyond that, of course, but, just like an electron, it takes a good deal of influence and energy, and we tend to fall back to our natural state rather quickly.

But, just like an electron, as we fall from that excited state, America gives off Light. The late President Reagan spoke of America as being a Shining City on a Hill; that was no mere metaphor. Throughout our brief history, America has risen to great energy and industry only a handful of times. Each time, while slow to light, America has done no less than save a significant portion of the humanity, time and again, by undertaking, and accomplishing great feats, spending our blood, toil, sweat and tears from Gettysburg to Normandy to Fallujah. And each time, after accomplishing these victories, Americans have simply gone home. In doing so, Americans have exchanged that energy to light the way for those we'd fought, showing them that this is what Free and Just people do, and giving them the well-lighted room in which to be Free and Just themselves.

Those dark and morbid headlines are not the stuff of American history. In merely accounting the numbers, they are derelict in telling the true story - stories of battles won, towns freed, and murderers captured. We, after all, don't refer to "almost 2,500 dead near Shiloh Church" or "over 20,000 killed in the Ardennes Forest," yet those were surely battles from which the death tolls were quite newsworthy. Why do we insist on referring to re-taking Fallujah or sweeping terrorists out of Hadithah in such language?

The implied purpose, of course, is that when enough decent Americans say "enough," perhaps we'll come home, once again. Now, given that, in this view, the requirement to come home isn't Victory, but rather the sheer numbers of American soldiers killed, to dangerous and insidious outcomes result. The first is obvious: things that would have been required for victory will be left undone, and the light of our departure will as likely be used to burn the country down as it will be to set men and women free. The second, less obvious, and thereby far more dangerous result is that each and every brave American soldier, sailor, airman and Marine who gives his or her life in the ultimate cause of freedom becomes but one more decibel added to that screaming voice, and one more nail in the coffin of the victory they paid so dearly to gain and the liberty they fought so bravely to protect. Dying for one's country is no longer one's "last full measure of devotion," but rather it has become nothing more than abject defeat.

Think about that for a minute.

Perhaps in the cold, black recesses of your post-modern-conditioned mind, thoughts of what that possibility means to the morale of our brave men and women, concerns about how your worries honor or dishonor their sacrifice, and the shame of your failing in the face of mere numbers, while they, in the face of bullets and roadside bombs, and in spite of those numbers, continue to accept their mission of victory, perhaps those thoughts will drown out those Headlines of Defeat, like a march, conquering a dirge.

Hear that march. Hear the honor of being an American, the honor in risking everything you have only to share the spoils of victory with the defeated. Eighteen-hundred? God Bless Them. Perhaps Two-thousand? For them, and for those who continue to still, we can win, we will win, and we must win.

Perhaps in another dry, dusty corner of your mind, one with a flag, neatly folded, next to an old picture of a smiling relative in a uniform, you hear another voice. This one echoes out of a history so deeply-instilled in who you are, it's like an American gene, perhaps passed down from the relative in that picture:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. –Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Hear that voice, yet recall the darkest days of what seemed like our utter defeat. We are stronger now. We have come farther than we dared dream. Yet we still have much farther to go; we will not be deterred. Let yourself be lifted up again, from that easy state of peaceful isolationism into the excited state of action, because much remains to be done. We've been here, in these days of sorrow and doubt, before. And, as before, we will leave them again, and press home the victory. To the hands of brave and free men and women, Victory must not be denied.

The Sandwich Doctrine

Let's be frank. The way the case was made for undertaking the War in Iraq was rather weak. But, like a brilliant philosopher with a stutter, just because the way the arguments were put forward was incoherent and incomplete doesn't mean the reasoning wasn't sound. The media, the pundits, and the actors themselves all settled early on for stressing the mysterious, dangerous intrigue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, while all of the other very important reasons were lost in the sound and fury spent on the WMD argument. The results of this were threefold. First, the true threat posed by Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, in his regime's funding, resources, and know-how, was overshadowed by the concerns only over his existing stockpiles and intent to use them. Second, the large strategic interest with respect to the Global War on Terror became a secondary concern. Finally, any further mention of these or any other reasons were attacked as being an attempt to change the argument, rather than a full documentation of it.

Wars are complex issues, and often the reasons for them that seep into societal consciousness aren't the most important ones. The Greek states certainly didn't fight the Trojans for a decade because of one king's unfaithful, but really hot, wife. It was likely, among other reasons, a trade war for control over the Straits of Bosporus (where modern-day Istanbul is) and the Eastern Mediterranean, and thereby access to Asian markets. But economic geekery doesn't put food in a storyteller's stomach, and Homer knew that. If we want to truly understand something with as many causes as war, we can't get lost in one scary or otherwise compelling reason. We have to take that reason to be an ingredient in a larger plan, like a slice of cheese on a sandwich.

So, you want to make a sandwich. I'm not talking about just your average, run-of-the-mill bologna or PB&J affair; I'm talking about an epic, put-Dagwood-to-shame sandwich. First, you have to know what you're going to put in it; you have to have a plan. In a war, that plan is usually covered in a nation's grand strategy, which is a long-term approach to strategy, on a decades- or centuries-long level. Currently, our grand strategy is also known as the Bush Doctrine, and is best explained in a document called the National Security Strategy. Essentially, the Bush Doctrine states that our greatest threat is international terrorism, particularly terrorism aided by state sponsors. To defend the strategic interests of the United States, these sponsors must be dealt with, and we must also remove the conditions which breed terrorists, namely oppressive regimes who use their propaganda to essentially blame the "Great Satan" America for all their nation's troubles.

Next, to make a sandwich, you need ingredients. Sometimes, you already have some of them. For example, the hostilities between the US and Iraq never really ceased after the '91 Gulf War - instead there was a cease fire agreement, which Saddam and his friendly missile-site operators continually violated. But if you truly want to make a sandwich for the ages, you'll need a trip to the store. Of course, you need to go to the grocery store which will have the highest quality as well as the best selection; ingredients that will best fit your master sandwich plan. Even then, sometimes the store won't have everything, even when they say they do. The bad news here comes when it's an ingredient that everyone was excited about, like the finest of Swiss cheeses. This is essentially what happened with the WMD argument. The good news, however, is that you can still have a really good sandwich, one that still can fit your sandwich master plan. The key is not to forget the good news, and to build the sandwich from the many, many other ingredients left in the store. For example, the meat was still there, in that a state sponsor of terror was removed from power, and his fellow members of the "Axis of Evil" could see precisely what was coming to sponsors of terror who had modern armies (something that wasn't necessarily proven against the Taliban). We can say the cheese was still there, also. After all, now we have the opportunity to introduce and prove the worth of a democratic "virus" in a population of both Sunni and Shia, as well as Arab and Kurd and Persian, as an example for all who may see. It is precisely this goal - introducing popular government, thereby removing the curtain behind which someone can blame the outside world for his own domestic failures - that makes the Bush Doctrine a grand strategy. Not only are enemies in the here and now considered, but the soil from which future enemies may grow is also treated with a healthy dose of pesticide.

Finally, every epic sandwich has a few secret ingredients; those little extra touches that you don't necessarily advertise, but that make the end result that much better. In Iraq, some of the "secret" ingredients included a stronger diplomatic position with Saudi Arabia, by adding new oil competition to the world market and by removing the US bases there, and a central position against to neighboring overt state sponsors of terror. These are reasons that are certainly strong, but they are also reasons one can't exactly blame those folks who made this sandwich for not mentioning.

Of course, the key to a sandwich is the sandwich itself, no matter which cheese is missing, or which secret ingredient is added. In Iraq, the United States and its allies have spent the past two and a half years building just such a sandwich. We've removed one state sponsor of terrorism, increased our relative strength against other such state sponsors, and created new conditions that serve to stem the long-term production of terrorists as a result of an oppressive, autocratic society. Whether the Swiss cheese was there or not, it remains an epic sandwich and ought to be a pride for all who have made it.