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Instead I propose to break new ground by focusing on two modern counter-insurgency campaigns that succeeded; to wit, the one conducted by late President Hafez Asad in Hama, 1982, and the British one in Northern Ireland.
Whether or not it had been planned that way, the uprising provided Rifat and Hafez with the excuse they had been waiting for. Relying mainly on their most powerful weapon, heavy artillery, the Syrian troops surrounding Hama opened fire. Anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people, many of them women and children, were indiscriminately killed. What followed was even more important than the killing itself. Far from apologizing for his action, Rifat, asked how many people his men had killed, deliberately exaggerated their number. As his reward, he was promoted to vice-president for national security; several of his fellow butchers were also promoted or decorated. Later, survivors told horrifying tales of buildings that had collapsed on their inhabitants and trenches filled with corpses. They also described how, in an attempt to get at jewelry, Syrian troops did not hesitate to cut off people’s fingers and ears.
Hama’s great mosque, one of the best known in all of Syria, was razed to the ground and later became a parking lot. Years afterwards a journalist, Scot Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor, who had visited the city, told me that when people passed the place they still looked away and shuddered. Some of them were so terrified that they did not even dare pronounce the word “Alawite”; instead, pointing at the hills, they spoke of “those people there”. In the words of Asad’s Israeli biographer, Prof. Moshe Maoz, “the terrible crushing of the Hama revolt not only broke the military backbone of the Muslim Brothers but also served as a vivid warning to them, as well as to other opposition groups, against further acts of disobedience. And although in recent years small groups of Muslim Brothers have occasionally conducted guerrilla attacks on army units, the mujahidun ceased for the time being to be a threat to Assad.” Having fallen out with his brother, Rifat had to flee abroad. Not so Hafez who went on ruling Syria with an iron fist. His son, Bashir, continues to so today.
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Had things been allowed to continue in the same way, no doubt the British attempt to hold on to Northern Ireland would have ended as so many others since 1941 had, i.e. in complete defeat followed by elaborate analyses as to why it took place. If, for a change, this did not happen and the outcome did not correspond to the usual pattern, then perhaps there are some things to be learnt from the effort. This article is hardly the place to detail all the many different things the Army did during its thirty-year involvement, let alone follow the immensely complicated political process with all its twists and turns. Instead, all I can do is provide a short list of the things that the British Army, having used “Bloody Sunday” to reconsider its actions, did not do.
First, never again did the British open indiscriminate fire into marching or rioting crowds; in the future, however violent the riots and demonstrations with which they faced, they preferred to employ less violent means that led to a far smaller number of casualties. Second, and in marked contrast to most other counter- insurgents from the Germans in Yugoslavia to the Israelis in the Occupied Territories, not once in the entire struggle did they bring in heavy weapons such as tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, or aircraft to repulse attacks and inflict retaliation. Third, never once did they inflict collective punishments such as imposing curfews, blowing up houses, destroying entire neighborhoods to open up fields of fire, and the like; by posing as the protectors of the population, not its tormentors, they were able to prevent the uprising from spreading. Fourth and most important, by and large the Army stayed within the law. Partly because they restrained themselves, partly because there were other, less conspicuous organizations to do some of the dirty work for them, they were able to refrain from arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and illegal killings.
What I still consider the most important insight, however, was given to me not at Camberley but over dinner in Geneva some time in the early 1990s. My interlocutor was a British lieutenant colonel who had done several tours of duty in Northern Ireland but whose name, alas, I cannot remember either. What he told me can be summed up as follows. Look at almost any one of the hundred or so major counter-insurgency campaigns that took place all over the world since 1945 (or, if you wish, 1941). However great the differences between them, they have one thing in common. In every known instance the “forces of order” killed far more people than they lost. Often by an order of magnitude, as is the case in Iraq where the Americans always emphasize how many more Iraqis died; and often in such an indiscriminate manner (in counter-insurgency, whenever heavy weapons are used, the results are bound to be indiscriminate) as to make the result approximate genocide. By contrast, up to that date the struggle in Northern Ireland had cost the United Kingdom 3,000 casualties in dead alone. Of the 3,000 about 1,700 were civilians, most of them innocent bystanders who had been killed as bombed exploded at the time and place they happened to be. Of the remaining 1,300, 1,000 were British soldiers and no more than 300 were terrorists, a ratio of three to one. And that, he ended his exposition, is why we are still there.
The Tribal Way of War
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Originally Posted by Gelatinous Cube
you are highlighting a dilemma.
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