The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Conclusion 269
observers of the fight were noting the deleterious impact of the Coalition’s
obsession with supporting top- down governance from Baghdad. 46 Bing West
claims that Marines were “deprived of local allies” by the Coalition’s determination
to build a modern Iraq. 47 Only after years of bloody stalemate did
Marines break with this pattern and provide a measure of empowerment to
the tribes, a decision that had the effect of providing a check on Baghdad’s
power by keeping local power brokers in the game.
In their nation- building efforts, US policymakers and their military services
fall victim to a second consistent blind spot: a fixation on their own
efforts as the primary determinant of counterinsurgency victory and a concomitant
undervaluing of the critical role of the host government. Colin
Gray notes the futility in remaining blind on this score: “Even if the armed
forces of a polity are organized, commanded, and led in battle by a general
blessed in good measure with competent strategic sense that advantageous
fact will prove of little value should the country’s political leadership not be
capable of exercising political sense.” 48 Given what may seem an obvious
fact—that the character and practices of the host government are the most
critical factors in establishing its political legitimacy and thereby energizing
citizens to fight on its behalf—it is somewhat alarming that this determinative
feature of counterinsurgency success is a subject of only passing mention
within Marine journals. Instead, Marines remain dedicated to a no- excuses
approach to their mission sets, leading them to shoulder responsibility for
the whole of counterinsurgency success. In addressing the problem of garnering
support for the host government, one of the Corps’s brightest lights
continues to see this as a Marine problem to be fixed: Marines, alongside
their indigenous security force counterparts, “should force the local leadership,
both formal and informal power structures, along with the average
local person, to make a conscious choice of which side to support, the government’s
or the insurgent’s.” It is the Marine’s job to “ultimately persuad[e]
all players involved to side with the host- nation government.” 49
US forces justify their ownership of this problem through a fiction
embraced in Vietnam and pursued again in Iraq and Afghanistan: that the
goodwill US military forces establish with host populations, whether through
the provision of security, the construction of infrastructure, the distribution
of humanitarian aid, or the offer of education or medical services, can somehow
be “gifted” to an unpopular host government in order to enhance its
legitimacy. It cannot. Local populations are not typically naive to the source
of help provided. As noted in the last chapter, Iraqis who had already soured
on the Shi’a bent of their Baghdad government did not afford it new credit
as a result of Marine efforts: “The government of Iraq didn’t help us with
anything. It was all help from the Coalition.” 50 As a foreign force, Marines
can work to provide a strategic pause in violence and can use their resources
to amplify the efforts of indigenous governing structures, but it cannot earn
political legitimacy for them.