Mark Phillips: The American Question

6/20/03: Demoralization.

Iraqis protest the killing of an unarmed demonstrator, 6/20/03.

The first published indications of widespread demoralization among U.S. occupying troops appeared in the press today.

"What are we getting into here?" asked a sergeant with the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division who is stationed near Baqubah, a city 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. "The war is supposed to be over, but every day we hear of another soldier getting killed. Is it worth it? Saddam isn't in power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we still here?"

At a checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad set up to search for illegal weapons, a soldier sweating in the 110-degree heat told a reporter, "Tell President Bush to bring us home." On a skylight atop Fallujah's city hall, a soldier has scrawled in the dust: "I'll kill for a ticket home."

These signals promise nothing but bad for the occupation. There's a classical curve through which demoralization escalates. First, private grumbling. Second -- a very serious step in a first world army -- public grumbling. Third, individual acts of passive resistance, up to sabotage. Fourth, collective acts of passive resistance, including strikes or other forms of refusal to obey orders. Fifth, collective acts of active resistance, including assaults on officers.

By the late 1960s the U.S. military in Vietnam was effectively crippled by active GI resistance. The June, 1971 Armed Forces Journal ran an article by Pentagon analyst Colonel Robert Heinl titled, "The Collapse of the Armed Forces." By 1972 the Pentagon acknowledged hundreds of incidents of "fragging", in which officers were attacked by troops. Television news stories chronicled the mutiny of whole units. H. Robert Franklin's excellent Vietnam and Other American Fantasies details the process. It's painful reading, and, perhaps most disturbing, it's utterly inevitable whenever the people of any occupied country chose to resist.

Today's evidence suggests that a similar process is now underway in occupied Iraq. The outcome depends almost entirely on the depth of mobilized resistance offered by the Iraqi people.

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