Has any occupying country ever "won" a guerilla war? And if so, how?

[maggrwaggr]

I realized today with the helicopter downing, that there's absolutely no way this war can be "won".

Then I thought .... has anyone ever "won" such a war? Off their home turf, against a guerilla war?

How exactly, would one define "winning" this war at this point?

This really bothers me because I saw David Gergen on the TV today saying that out of all the options we have, the one we MUST pursue is sticking with it and "winning this thing".

WTF does that mean? What example might he be following?

[mikehiggins]

1. Short answer? No

There have been some insurgencies beaten back but generally the track record is not too encourageing for the occupying side.

The Irish and the British, for example.

The Vietnamese and the French, for another.

The Vietnamese and the United States, for a third.

The Afghans and the Soviets

The smart money is on the people with the home court advantage, and now, apparently, stinger-type missles.

Oh, and Gergen is a whore.

[tsipple]

2. George Washington Put Down the Whiskey Rebellion

Does that count?

[Isome]

8. "Oh, and Gergen is a whore."

*lol*

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[jobendorfer]

21. Japanese occupation of the Philippines - question

If remember correctly, the Japanese invaded and occupied
the Philippines shortly after Pearl Harbor. The allied
forces returned in the late summer of 1944, and the
fighting continued right up to the Japanese surrender
a year later.

That's a period of about 3-4 years, depending on how you
define "effective control" of the island group. Perhaps
this data point is inconclusive? Consider that it took
the Viet Cong about 25-30 years to drive out the French
and the Americans using asymmetric warfare. Suppose the
allies hadn't returned to the Philippines -- given another
15 or 20 years of guerilla resistance, perhaps the Japanese
would have been driven off, or at least ceded large parts
of the island group.

J.

[Scurrilous]

4. Winning this thing...

...means once we've finished sucking all of Iraq's oil out of the ground, we'll declare victory and leave.

[knight_of_the_star]

5. Let's see

Rome pulled it off when they invaded England about 2000 years ago or so, but they did that by crucifying anyone who attempted to resist and wiped out the villages they lived in and shoved in vast amounts of settlers from more loyal parts of the Empire. I somehow doubt Bush could replicate that feat though.

[Maple]

11. Well Londinium

was burned to the ground once, and the Romans had to put up Hadrian's wall to stop the attacks from the north.

They also never managed to conquer Ireland. Wales was dicey too.

[Character Assassin]

41. Not quite....

"Hadrian's Wall, named after the emperor who ordered it, provided a symbol of Rome's control of this backward, savage island. All of it. Contrary to myth, the wall did not represent a line of defense, but simply a convenient, narrow, 75-mile neck of the island to consolidate lines of supply from the southern towns and the relatively unimportant north. Whenever the legions chose, they ventured north of the wall relatively unopposed, superior as they were in military organization and numbers. They marched right on up to the top of the British island at John O Groats, scattering resistance in their wake. The wall is more hubris than haven."

http://www.fracas.com/travel/hadrians-wall.html

[wuushew]

Rome did pretty well in beating down Judea

n/t

[leftofthedial]

17. they couldn't occupy the whole island

hadrian's wall and the Welsh and all that.

[wuushew]

20. King Edward I's Welsh campaign was quite successful

strategic placement of castles and forced cultural assimilation were quite successful.

[leftofthedial]

23. the post was in response to a post about the Romans, not the Brits

Edward failed in one important regard. He failed to get the Welsh to buy a fucking vowel.

(your point, in a serious context, is true).

[Exultant Democracy]

30. Guerilla warfare?

I’m not sure you can give it the same consideration. Edward was fighting troops in the pay of Llewlen; it wasn’t as if every town the English went threw rose up with their pitchforks

[Guaranteed]

6. I agree with Gergen, though.

And I can attest to you that I am NOT a whore.
The worst thing we can do is invade and then just leave. We have to "fix" things. In reality, there's no "winning" this war. The attacks will continue as long as we are there- we can't stop them. The thing we have to do is make sure that the Iraqis have sufficient governmental and societal infrastructure to sustain themselves in a civil way, and we have make sure that Saddam isn't going to come back. That may mean giving power to the Shiites (through a representative democracy, of course), which I don't really mind all that much.

Then, we leave.

[Isome]

12. giving power to the Shiites

I'm not certain that bestowing power on one group over another is the way to "fix" things or to insure civility. In fact, I'm not too sure we can even "fix" things.

The best plan of action, as I see it, is to get the U.N. in and the U.S. forces out. Then we can pay (through the nose) for the damage we've done and call it a day.

[Guaranteed]

15. Well of course we need the UN in there

but as long as they're not, we can't leave. And we do need to have some kind of democracy there, even if it means the fundamentalists get the power. The great part about having at least halfway legitimate democracies in other countries is that their people suddenly become much more accountable for the country's policies.

[Isome]

27. By definition...

A democracy cannot be "installed" by force.

[MGKrebs]

34. But they won't come UNTIL we leave.

Because we won't let 'em.

When a Dem get's elected, we can get them involved, and gradually pull out. Hopefully, the Dem candidates and the UN are talking right now so that this can happen quickly.

[Devlzown]

7. The U.S. Civil War

Most of the war was fought on Southern soil, and the some of the tactics used by the rebels might be described as guerilla tactics. Of course, it was also one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

[Guaranteed]

9. That's true.

However, the difference is that was an attempted revolution that was put down. What we have currently is an invasion by a foreign country. That will lead to certain cultural and economic issues that probably don't apply as severely to an attempted revolution.

[Devlzown]

16. The weapons are a lot different, too.

It seems to me that the only way to "win" this thing would be to reinstate the draft, throw more troops in there without regard to loss of life, and turn Iraq into a police state. By then the war will have cost us more in lives and money than all the oil in Iraq is worth. Talk about a hollow victory!

[starroute]

10. We put down the insurgency in the Philippines in 1898

That's the one that happened when they realized our liberating them from Spain didn't mean they were actually going to be free.

The guerrillas there were pretty low tech, and the Philippines being islands, they didn't have ready access to outside supplies of weapons. Even so, it took some 10-15 years for the US to put the uprising down completely.

Perhaps the strongest factor, though, was that there was a local elite which made up its mind that in order to join the modern world, they would have to accept US rulership for a time. Once they came around, the uprising had no real chance of success, even though it dragged on for many more years.

It seems to me there was another uprising in the Philippines after World War II -- communists, I think, under Megsaysay. I don't know the details of that one, though.

[bvar22]

13. The Nazis would have been successful...

...with their occupation of Poland had the World not intervened. Of course, they would have eventually killed all of the Poles.

Likewise, the USA would have been successful in Vietnam had we killed ALL of the Vietnamese ( and Loatians...and Cambodians...and probably all of the Thais.)

The USA was successful in its occupation of the lands West of the Appalacians....of course, we had to kill (or imprison) ALL of the Native Americans.

And we can be successful in Iraq...if we simply....

The really scary thing is that this is an acceptable solution to a sociopath.

bush*, cheney*, pearle, rumsfeld, rice...have you noticed how their eyes gleam when they talk about carnage and mass murder?

[tsipple]

14. Native American Wars

That's a major series of wars that was "won."

[Kinkistyle]

18. Exactly.

Basically by wiping out the entire population. There's no other way really.

[Johnyawl]

19. sure

It's been done. Read War In The Shadows By Robert Asprey, he wrote the definitive book on the History of guerilla war. I'm gonna paste a couple of reviews of that book here.

Originally published in two volumes in 1975, this updated, abridged version of Asprey's monumental survey of guerrilla warfare begins with the struggle between Persian king Darius and Scythian irregulars and concludes with the mujahedin resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He discusses how great commanders such as Hannibal and Napoleon dealt with irregulars and how counterinsurgency experts such as Sir Gerald Templar during the Malayan Emergency in the early 1950s found ways to defeat the guerrilla. Roughly a fifth of the text treats the United States's involvement in Vietnam and our failure to adapt organizationally or tactically to the guerrilla challenge of the Viet Cong. Asprey's angry remarks about our "criminal military-political strategy" in Southeast Asia is even more scathing than in the original edition. This is the definitive history of guerrilla warfare over the past two millenia, illustrating its evolution into "an ideal instrument for the realization of social-political-economic aspirations of underprivileged peoples."

-----------------------------------------------

When War in the Shadows (WITS) was first published in 1975, it infuriated members of the US military. Asprey's denunciation of high-ranking officers' conduct of the war in Vietnam came under intense criticism. Asprey claimed the US military lost that war due to its total ignorance of unconventional guerrilla warfare. Though blackballed by military scholars for almost a decade, he refused to retract his accusations. Instead, he continued to cite 2000 years of guerrilla/terrorist warfare tactics, operations, and strategy as proof the US military violated most, if not all, principles of unconventional warfare. Nineteen years later, he revised WITS, and along with that revision came a newfound respect for his insights. WITS is still the most definitive study of guerrilla/terrorist warfare available and it continues to remind the military of the requirement to fully understand this type of warfare's capabilities and limitations.
Overall, Asprey's work is very edifying. His 30 year research effort brillantly imparts lessons needed today. His reminders to the military about going off to an unconventional theater of war "half-cocked" contain some of the most valuable military thinking of our time. WITS is more than a historical appraisal. It is a usable text of events that, while historically embedded, continue to speak to the contemporary experience of unconventional warfare.

[maggrwaggr]

26. great recommendation. Thanks.

n/t

[AP]

22. Ireland, Scotland, Wales???

Said, in cultural imperialism (I believe) says that no white vs brown occupying army has ever been successful.

[Captain Absolut]

24. Well, yes

1066 William of Orange, or William the Conqueror did just that. He brought the whole of England under his rule. Hell, they spoke French for many years after that. Richard the Lionheart only spoke French.

1521 Cortes conquered the Aztecs with a small force; they were outnumbered 20 to 1.

[maggrwaggr]

25. yes but Cortez pulled that off by blockading the city

and shutting off their water supply. And killing a whole TON of the inhabitants.

And he had allies.

[gbwarming]

28. and bringing smallpox nt

[Lydia Leftcoast]

29. After the Baltic countries of

Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944, there were guerilla actions against the Soviets until 1952. However, they were dealing with Stalin, who did things like deporting a large percentage of the population to other parts of the Soviet Union and moving ethnic Russians in to take their place, so as to weaken the guerillas' base of support.

Also, after the U.S. took over the Philippines, it eventually won out over the Filipino insurgents, but it took years and years of a Vietnam-style conflict.

[Yupster]

31. yes -- lots

The Romans samped out revolts pretty much everywhere, but especially in Narbonensis and Gaul which soon became main provinces of the empire.

The Turks stamped out the Armenian revolts.

The Soviets put down the Ukrainian Nationalists, and the revolts in the Caucuses back in the 20's (though Chechnya has acted up again since the SU breakup).

The British stomped out the Africaaner guerrilla warfare, and the native African revolts too.

The British stamped out the Malaysian guerrillas in the 50's.

The French were able to stamp out many Arab revolts in North Africa throughout the late 1800's.

The Boxer Rebellion was snuffed out.

Just some I can think of late at night. It is not an easy thing to do though.

[Scott Lee]

32. Short term? Yes. Long Term? No.

The few examples of an occupying power "winning" here could be explained by the amalgamation that occurred between occupier and occupied. For instance the Scots and Welsh were both robbed of their own nationhood by the English long ago - but the Island was united in "Briton-ness", making them all out as Britons and therefore citizens under the Realm. Here in North America the big push is the melting pot theory, whose take on Natives is that "we are all Americans", therefore pulling the unifying trick again.

The Romans did a similar thing in making the conquered denizens into "roman citizens" but that didn't last either.

The reason this won't work in Iraq is that we are not making, and cannot make, Iraqis into North Americans.

[arendt]

33. British won the Boer War - second phase was guerilla.

How?

Basically, they covered the country with barbed wire
and lookout towers; they herded civilians into
"concentration camps" - this awful idea and the
term itself were invented by the British.

At the time, the Brits were the superpower of the world,
and the Boers were a bunch of nobodies sitting on top
of what the Brits felt was "their" gold and diamonds.
The Brits had the resources; there was peace in the
world to allow them time and focus; and, in an age
of imperialism, nobody except the victims objected.

So, the Brits got away with it. In the end, they
adopted the Boers attitude towards the blacks -
treat them like subhuman slaves - kaffirs.

See any parallels?

arendt

[DavidDvorkin]

35. Even so, the Boer War was a close thing

Not on the ground in South Africa, where the British had poured in enough men and arms to overwhelm the guerillas, but at home, where political pressure was growing -- both because of the cost and the deaths and because of growing public revulsion at the methods being used. Had the guerilla phase dragged on a bit longer, the British government might have had to give up.

[Kamika]

36. england in africa, germany in europe

Germany won most countries and had very little problems with guerillas.

Same with England in africa in the 19th century

Maybe america against the natives aswell

[htuttle]

37. Not since the advent of modern weaponry

All the examples listed in this thread are, for the most part, all before the invention of the machine gun and RPG/shoulder-launched missle.

These two items give an insurgent force enough punch to avoid situations like the Philippines.

I don't think that any popular insurgency can be totally put down if they have ready access to modern weapons. Note, I said, 'popular insurgency'. If the population doesn't support the insurgents, they will lose almost always. If they support the insurgents, they will almost always win.

You can't win over a population by force, but that's all the Bush administration knows how to do, ergo, we are doomed in Iraq (and it's already too late to avoid long-term damage).

[LoneStarLiberal]

38. What Does It Mean To "Win" In Iraq? Stardate 2033.

If you want to discuss "winning" the war in Iraq, you need to discuss what it means to "win." This discussion is not taking place, however, because to discuss winning is to set a goal...a goal that will either be met or that will not be met.

Once you define winning, then you necessarily define losing. If there is one thing the PNACers and their Clown Prince President understand now is that they CAN lose. Therefore mission creep and our soldiers' safety and lives be damned, we will not lose!

If you set a broad definition of "winning," say something like all our troops home and a stable, self-governing Iraq, then yes, we can win this war, but it will take a sizeable investment of lives, dollars, and years. I look at what happened after India was granted independence after years of both peaceful and violent resistance to British rule that was localized, much like you find resistance in Iraq localized.

Now if you asked a Tory at the time or a British military officer, you probably would not get a positive response to the question of whether or not Britain "won" in India, given that it was viewed by many in the conservative establishment as a retreat from rightful empire.

The closest thing that we see in our present entanglement in Iraq to a recent exercise in peacebuilding and an extended security mission on unilateral terms (practically speaking) is Britain's involvement in Northern Ireland. Even that is not entirely appropriate since Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, has strong cultural ties to Britain, and is literally only a hop, skip, and a jump away from England. Iraq enjoys none of these ties to the United States.

The British Army has been deployed in Northern Ireland for the better part of four decades and we are just now beginning to see the fruits of a frustrating peace agreement. By this model we should be seeing results of "winning" sometime around 2033.

[bpilgrim]

39. not often

and almost never if your a super power.

it COST too much at the end of the day.

and so it goes...

peace

[Cleita]

40. The legendary Trojan war was won, not by

war but trickery. Also, remember that the Achaeans killed all the men once inside the walls of Troy and they dragged off the women and children into slavery. So even back in the Bronze Age invading forces from foreign shores knew they couldn't govern or conqueor from a distant country, so in order to win, they had to do a scorched earth policy, meaning nothing alive is left behind.

I wonder what BFEE will do next?