[R-P] Sabiduría enloquecida de un oficial de Marines

[Nestor Gorojovsky]

[Un joven oficial de los Marines, que estuvo de servicio en Iraq, une 
sus experiencias en la tierra de Hammurabi con la exitosa campaña de 
Hezbollah en el Sur del Líbano, y recomienda una táctica ingeniosa a 
los Estados Unidos:  "mezclarse y confundirse con la población civil, 
tal como lo hacen ellos".  No es broma.  No está en la página de los 
chistes.  Es todo un artículo del Washington Post, es decir el diario 
que encabeza el grupo Newsweek.

Así como lo leen.  Es más, el hombre tiene en claro incluso que "la 
necesidad básica de cualquier conflicto humano, tenga o no tenga 
violencia física, es hacerse cargo de la propia base política antes 
de salir a golpear al adversario".

Por lo tanto, sugerimos al oficial Humphreys que su programa debería 
incorporar la siguiente consigna:  "Las tropas del invasor deben 
mezclarse con la población, hacerse cargo de sus deseos, asumir su 
programa político... y combatirse a sí mismas".

No tengo tiempo para traducirlo, pero este delirio desopilante tiene 
la virtud de mostrar por el lado grotesco el callejón sin salida de 
las aventuras colonialistas del capitalismo desencadenado por la 
caída de la URSS.]

Fuente:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/11/AR2006
0811 01398_pf.html 

*Learning From Hezbollah*

By Brian E. Humphreys
Saturday, August 12, 2006; A21

From my first day in Iraq as a young infantry officer, I was struck
by the huge perceptual gulf that separated us from the Iraqis. My first
mission was to escort a civil affairs team assigned to supervise the
rebuilding of a local school. After tea, smiles and handshakes, we
departed and were promptly struck by a roadside bomb. Our modest
efforts to close the perceptual gulf, exemplified in our
smile-and-wave tactics and civil affairs missions, seemed to my mind
well-intentioned but inadequate.

At a deeper level, the motives of the local populace remained largely
invisible to us, as people smiled one minute and attempted to blow us
up the next. We knew little or nothing about their grievances and
aspirations, or where the political fault lines ran in the cluster of
small cities in the Sunni Triangle we were tasked with pacifying.

We experienced many periodic spasms of violence that seemed to come
out of nowhere before disappearing again. Of course they came from
somewhere, but it was a somewhere we didn't understand. In a battalion
of more than 800 men, we had one four-man team assigned to interact
directly with the local population, and even this team was frequently
sidetracked to deal with routine translation duties or interrogations.

Perhaps understandably for a conventional military force trained to
focus on the enemy, our primary intelligence focus was on the
insurgents. Much less attention was paid to the larger part of the
population. Although we were a visible and sometimes forceful
presence, I'm not sure we were a truly influential one.

Now, watching the latest news dispatches from Lebanon, I find myself
comparing our efforts to introduce a new order in Iraq with
Hezbollah's success as an effective practitioner of the art of
militarized grass-roots politics. Frankly, it's not a favorable
comparison -- for us. Hezbollah's organizational resilience in the
face of an all-out conventional assault shows the degree to which it
has seamlessly combined the strategic objectives of its sponsors with
a localized political and military program.

Using the grass-roots approach, Hezbollah has been able to convert the
ignored and dispossessed Shiite underclass of southern Lebanon into a
powerful lever in regional politics. It understands that the basic
need in any human conflict, whether or not it involves physical
violence, is to take care of one's political base before striking out
at the opponent.

As many informed observers have pointed out, Hezbollah has engrafted
itself to the aims and aspirations of the Lebanese Shiite community so
completely that Israel cannot destroy it without also destroying the
community, with all the attendant political and moral costs. It is the
willingness of women, children and old men to support Hezbollah and
its political program at the risk of their lives that gives the
organization power far beyond its military means.

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. (Of more concern is the fact that
few Iraqi security units or political leaders appear to have done so,
either.) Commanders have come and gone, elections have been held,
Iraqi soldiers trained, all manner of strategies for dealing with the
insurgency attempted -- but with only limited and localized successes.
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. It is
the politics of getting people jobs, picking up trash and getting
relatives out of jail. Engaging in this politics has the potential to
do much more than merely ingratiate an armed force with a local
population. It gives that force a mental map of local pressure points
and the knowledge of how to press them -- benignly or otherwise -- to
get desired results.

Some may say that this is just standard insurgency-counterinsurgency
doctrine. True, but 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.




Este correo lo ha enviado
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro en fibertel.com.ar
[No necesariamente es su autor]
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"La patria tiene que ser la dignidad arriba y el regocijo abajo".
Aparicio Saravia
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