Sen. Edward Kennedy's recent characterization of Iraq as President Bush's Vietnam is as predictable as it is misleading. The news is actually much worse. Iraq may be shaping up to be America's Algeria.
Day by day, the evidence mounts that an ugly war is turning uglier. U.S. and coalition troop losses, which have again spiked upward, provide one measure of that ugliness. The ratcheting up of American firepower and the climbing toll of Iraqi dead, many of them evidently innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, provide a second. But there is a third measure, perhaps the most troubling of all: hints that the discipline of U. S. forces is beginning to fray.
In a story that has not attracted widespread attention but should, the Washington Post has reported a second incidence of an Army battalion commander being cited for misconduct. The first episode involved terrorizing an Iraqi prisoner. The more recent involved American soldiers dumping a pair of Iraqi detainees off a bridge into the Tigris River -- a clear violation of the Geneva Convention -- and the commander being reprimanded. Iraqis claim one detainee drowned.
Welcome to urban guerrilla warfare -- a type of war radically different from the United States' last unhappy encounter with guerrillas. In Vietnam, intense fighting was concentrated in the countryside. South Vietnam's mountains and jungles offered communist guerrillas sanctuary, concealment and a base of operations. Major cities saw heavy combat only rarely, as during the famous 1968 Tet offensive.
In Iraq, the situation is the reverse. The countryside is a barren wasteland of little use to the insurgents. The dense and complicated urban landscape, by comparison, offers an ideal operational environment. So cities like Baghdad and Fallouja have become focal points of resistance. Here the insurgents hide, draw sustenance and launch their most effective attacks against coalition forces.
This is where the Algerian parallel becomes instructive. In the Algerian war for independence, which began in 1954 and lasted until 1962, cities also played a central role. Control of Algiers, the capital, was the war's primary bone of contention and, hence, the site of the bitter struggle that pitted Algerian "terrorists" against the French "forces of order."
