Kool Aid in the Canteen

Billmon: A Different Kind of Cluelessness

Marine officer Brian Humphreys looks at his experience trying to win hearts and minds in Iraq and wonders what Hizbullah has got that the few and the proud don't got:

"Whatever the objective truth of Hezbollah's motives, its many supporters in southern Lebanon believe fervently that it is their organization, not an Iranian surrogate. Few if any American units in Iraq have achieved anything close to this level of success in winning the support of the local population . . . Hezbollah's success among civilians in Lebanon, which is only reinforced by a ruthless pummeling from a reviled enemy, contrasts sharply with the continued fragility of the much more modest U.S. gains in Iraq, achieved at a much higher price.

The lessons should be clear. To engage in insurgency or counterinsurgency -- fancy terms for grass-roots politics by other means -- one must be willing and, most of all, able to work in the underbelly of local politics, as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon. . . one has to ask why Hezbollah has been able to pull it off in Lebanon, while young Americans continue to endure a host of nasty surprises in Iraq."

Washington Post
Learning from Hezbollah
August 12, 2006

I dunno. Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that Hizbullah in Lebanon is an authentic grassroots political movement composed of local Shiites, while the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq is an occuping army of foreign infidels. Could that be it?

I probably shouldn't be so harsh on officer Humphreys. He at least understands what has gone so disastrously wrong in Iraq. But the fact that even he can't figure out why Hizbullah has been able to achieve what the military might and financial majesty of the United States government could not is a pretty sad commentary on the fog of delusion that constitutes how Americans tend to see themselves and their place in the world...