Wednesday - December 14, 2005
How to Win Over the Locals
Major Nick Visconte was the company commander of
India company. He took over from Major Steve Lawson, the commander of Lima
company, for Firm Base 1 in the city of Hit. Two better men would be harder to
find. Steve was there for the initial invasion of that city, and Nick took over
shortly after. We were glad to have India company back with us, they were
detached to the air wing guarding the air station our entire time overseas until
then. Nick proved to be the right man for the job of dealing with the Iraqis in
Hit.
The Marines have two main schools
of thought on how to win over the locals to the idea of supporting us. One is
to go through existing power wielders, the other is to appeal directly to the
people. There is no one method that always works, sometimes one works where the
other won't, but each officer tends to have his own
trend.
Each method has strengths and
drawbacks, and you can say that the history of the counter-insurgency in Iraq
has seen the US see saw back and forth. We disbanded the Iraqi army and all of
its government, yet we let engineers continue running infrastructure like dams
and refineries. We brought back Iraqi army units in the first battle of
Fallujah only to disband them almost immediately.
This same see sawing occured at lower
levels too. Here's a story of what happened with my battalion in the city of
Hit.
When we set up a permanent presence in that city,
we shocked the city leaders. The city had been totally controlled by the enemy,
and not so much by foreign elements as by former regime elements and local
strongmen.
This was a critical phase of
the non-kinetic battle, where Information Operations and Civil Affairs are most
important. Civil Affairs deals with the well-being of the locals, they're the
softies that build schools and make water treatment system repairs, and they get
a lot of press. Information Operations is often confused with them, but it's
not a group as much as it's a way of thinking and acting. Information
Operations is a euphemism for Propaganda Activity. It's the attempt to
influence the indigenous people to be on our
side.
Sadly, IO is not a very well
developed concept yet. Oh, you can attend lots of classes on the topic where
people from various puzzle palaces will tell you how important it is to provide
all your people and assets to IO. Mostly that is simply empire building from on
high. After three hours of such classes before we deployed I asked the
following question: "You've shown us examples of how the enemy uses IO against
us, and you've shown how we can use IO at a national level, but can you give me
an example of how we can use IO at the battalion level." I expected a quick
and ready answer. Instead I had to repeat the question, without an answer, so
many times that I was finally asked to let someone else ask a question. They
could not cite a single example of how IO is to be used at the battalion level,
and didn't seem to regard this as
unexpected.
So, in empire building for
a task that is poorly defined, you can expect a lot of in-fighting and some less
than stellar people being assigned the job.
The city leaders in Hit took advantage
of us at every opportunity that they could. Like all Iraqis they denied that
any insurgents had ever been in the city. Finally, we invited them over to a
site, without explaining why, and took pictures of them standing in front of
recently discovered weapons caches. They stopped denying that insurgents were
in the area only after having proof like that. They wouldn't admit insurgent
activity even if they were shown the weapons cache, only having them in a
picture with it were they finally able to admit
it.
Our Civil Affairs officer had set
up a system where we give the city leaders money to pay to those whose property
was damaged. This was an attempt to recognize them as leaders and bolster their
standing in the community. It's the nature of military operations that things
break. Marines are not gentle people. When we drive our tanks down the street,
the water pipes are buried too shallow and tend to break. Gates and doors are
broken. But we always pay for damage done, it's important to us. The theory
was that they would appreciate this and support us, or at least this is what the
IO officer seemed to think would be the
case.
But it didn't work. Here's where
my hero of the day, Nick Visconte comes in.
Nick understands people. He
understands strongmen. He likes to imply that his family "knows" mafia members
in the US and this helps him understand Iraqis. On his last trip to Iraq the
locals made him a sheik of their tribe, he has all the paperwork to go with it.
He is the tribe's sheik for the New York
region!
One day Nick decided to go to
the city plaza and make restitution to the people directly. One effect was that
we now knew as a fact that injured parties were compensated the full amount.
The other effect was more dramatic and much more
important.
Before the city leaders were
quite haughty and disdainful of us. They had power and felt secure in their
power. But this one act of going around them and directly to the people
suddenly made them aware that they were not as all powerful as they pretended --
and we knew it. The farce of tribal power was brought right out into the
open.
At the next meeting with the city
leaders, amazingly all the city leaders showed up and were very attentive. They
didn't like losing power and would do everything to convince us not to take it
away again.
This one small act did more
to win over both the people and the leaders than anything else we did.
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