# Posted 8:03 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

INSURGENCY: A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE. I recently had the good fortune to stumble upon a book by Bard O'Neill entitled Insurgency & Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare (Brassey's, 1990).

O'Neill is a retired Air Force officer with a Ph.D. in international relations who now teaches at the National War College. Although he recently put out an updated edition of his book, I'm glad to have opted for the older version, since it provides a perspective on insurgency and guerrilla warfare untainted by the politics of the current war in Iraq.

Of course, Iraq was never far from my mind while reading the book. I would like to think, however, that the book helped me to approach the current war from a new perspective. Although OxBlog periodically rails against simplistic analogies between Iraq and Vietnam, I won't pretend to have made any serious effort to analyze Iraq from a true comparative perspective that incorporates the lessons of the scores of insurgencies that raged throughout the 20th century.

So, given all my praise, is there a quick lesson to be taken away from O'Neill's book that could change all of our of perspectives about Iraq? I don't think so, but there is one factor O'Neill focuses on a lot that has received almost no attention from either the government, the media or the blogosphere. That factor is the physical environment in which insurgency takes place.

Now, even if you've watched a handful of American-made movies about Vietnam, you'll know that the jungle itself was one of the Viet Cong's best allies. More generally, insurgents need rough terrain in order to establish secure bases and compensate for goverment forces' superior mobility and firepower.

But what about Iraq? The openness of desert terrain plays into the hands of US and Iraqi government forces. But how much fighting has been in the desert and how much has been in urban areas? I'm not really sure. The best-known battles, such as Fallujah One and Fallujah Two were obviously in cities, but the Sunni Triangle and Anbar province have vast deserts as well.

O'Neill observes that in some respects, the complexity of urban terrain can provide insurgents with the same sort of protection as mountains or jungle. Yet he also observes that urban insurgents have a very poor record of achieving their broader objectives.

Broadening the issue a bit, I feel that I and others have not just ignored the role that the environment has on guerrilla and counter-guerrilla operations, but really that we haven't made much effort at all to think systematically about the strictly military aspects of the war in Iraq.

(Presumably, a lot of milbloggers do approach the issue from this perspective and so it's my fault for not paying closer attention. Anyhow, my comments still apply to both politicians and the media.)

In the final analysis, O'Neill endorses the popular notion that insurgencies are ultimately political wars and that they must be won with political weapons and not on the battlefield. Yet perhaps we have taken this lesson too far in recent years. Then again, I can't really make that case persuasively, since I don't know what I might have learned if I'd been engaging in systematic analysis of the military situation in Iraq.

And by systematic, I don't just mean how many troops are on the ground, how many Iraqis have been trained and whether there's enough body armor to go around. I mean developing a serious knowledge of the different tactics US and Iraqis forces have employed and to what degree they have been effective.

So for the moment, no hard conclusions. Just a little more resolve to get new kinds of information about Iraq that may broaden my perspective. (2) opinions -- Add your opinion