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.