by David A. Bell

The decision to escalate in Iraq reminds me of a series of letters I read a few years ago in the French military archives, from the French commanding general in Pamplona, Spain, in the years 1810-11. All right, it may not seem like an exactly obvious connection. But the war fought in Spain against Napoleon between 1808 and 1814 was a classic case of insurgency, seen by many historians as the first great modern example of the phenomenon. In fact, the word "guerrilla" was first popularized during the conflict (it comes from the Spanish for "little war"). In 1808, Napoleon overthrew the ruling Spanish dynasty and named his brother Joseph to rule Spain as a satellite kingdom. There followed a long, messy and incredibly vicious war that pitted France against regular Spanish, Portugese and British troops, and also against native insurgent forces. These were not the heroic popular fighters of enduring Spanish legend, but a motley group of ex-soldiers, refugees, peasants and brigands, commanded by colorful figures with nicknames like "the Doctor," "the Potter," "the Grandfather," and even "the Stick-in-the Mud" (El Empecinado). Rather like in Iraq, the conflict also had elements of a civil war, with self-proclaimed "enlightened" Spaniards taking the side of the Bonapartes, and paying a heavy price for doing so (you can read more about this all in my newly-published book The First Total War). The letters from the French commander, Honoré-Charles Reille, are eloquent about the frustrations of fighting an insurgent force, and eerily reminiscent of our own current quagmire. Again and again, Reille complained of attacks from men his troops could not even see, who approached and fired, then quickly melted back into the countryside. He worried that the French could not move about except in large detachments, lest guerrilla bands pick them off (lacking "improvised explosive devices," a favorite tactic was attacks by hundreds of guerrillas at once on small and isolated French units). He blamed the insurgency on religious fanaticism, in this case of Catholic Spaniards who had missed out on Enlightenment and French Revolutionary anti-clericalism. To curry favor with his superiors in Paris, he boasted of the atrocities he was carrying out--guerrillas executed, hostages taken and shot, villages burned--until his own letters came to resemble an indictment against him for war crimes (this did not stop the French from later carving his name onto the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, where it remains to this day). Reille repeatedly begged his superiors for more troops--for a "surge." But in his more reflective moments, he recognized that it might not make much difference. "Unfortunately," he wrote, "in this region as in many others of Spain, our influence extends only as far as the range of our cannon [...] The Spanish say quite rightly that our troops are plowing furrows in the water." Situations like this are, unfortunately, among the most common things in modern military history. You can read similar complaints from French officers in Algeria, from German ones in Russia, from Russians in Afghanistan, and from Americans in the Philippines, Vietnam, and now Iraq, where, in many regions, the Coalition only controls the small areas in which its forces are physically present. There have been, of course, successful instances of counter-insurgency--the British experience in Malaya between 1948 and 1960 is often cited. They usually involve heavy reliance on local allies, and a mixture of bribery and coercion to break the connection between insurgents and their local base of support. Napoleon himself, using such tactics, eventually managed to overcome insurgencies in relatively small, isolated areas of Europe like Calabria and the Tyrol. But the job is extraordinarily difficult, and becomes almost impossible in a country as large, hostile, and divided as Iraq. Will adding 20,000 or 30,000 American troops really turn things around there? More likely, these men and women will just plow their own furrows in the water--and in too many cases, to borrow the words of the Marseillaise, stain those furrows with their blood.