Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Here is the story, with pictures…

Oh yea, oh yea, oh yea–

1.  Let’s get clearly why this story is important:

It shows how amazingly stupid the plan for Iraq was.

Assumptions of the plan for Iraq:  The Bush planners sat in Washington, D.C. and assumed (or at least argued to the American people)
that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that could be
used against those outside of Iraq.  And the Bush planners assumed
the people of Iraq would welcome us like the French welcomed the US-led
liberation forces in WWII.

Reality on the ground in Iraq:  It turns out most of the people were appreciative but not affectionate
toward the US liberators–and had absolutely no basis for long-term
loyalty to a program to make their country an oil-supply subsidiary of
the US. 

And though Iraq did not have WMDs, Iraq had plenty of conventional weapons
that could be used against occupiers..and plenty of young men willing to use these weapons to fight the US forces…

The missing explosives story brings this point home, coming after months of increasing success by the insurgents.

2.  Next, let’s step back and examine our mental framing of the problem: 

The situation in Iraq is framed all wrong, as if the insurency just kind of emerged after the occupation…

Isn’t it possible that the insurgency was planned from the beginning?  What if an “indefinite insurgency” was part of Saddam’s game plan from the beginning?

Wasn’t it really obvious that the US would “win” the initial battles?

Isn’t it plausible that Saddam’s forces were told not to fight
directly, but to melt away into the crowd–to fight an insugency once
the occupiers had moved in and made themselves local and vulnerable
targets?

3.  The lesson of history is clear:

Insurgents usually win.  And amazingly,
insurgents usually do best against the strongest conventional
powers–because the conventional powers over-estimate the potential of
their paradigm of warfighting–and underestimate the effectiveness of
insurgency and “asymetrical warfare.”

By the way, there is a strong parallel in technology and business: Clay
Christensen’s well-known work on disruptive technologies:  Clay
emphasizes that the player being disrupted usually has so much mental
and emotional investment in its paradigm of value that it is blind to
the new value being created.

4.  Why do insurgents usually win?  Because they set up a disruptive value competition, and they provide better value:

In Iraq we have two sources of “new value” that the US is competing
with: 

First, we are using “military occupation” which has a value
of controlling territory in a macro sense, against “insurgency” which
as a value in controlling territory in a micro sense.  And
experience shows that if insurgencies can be sustained long enough,
they eventually succeed at defeating the occupier–starting at least in
the American revolution in the late 1700’s where George Washington led
a long-term insurgency that eventually sapped the British and made
their future rule of their former territories untenable.

Ask youself this:  Do you think that long-term US-friendly rule of
Iraq is becoming more or less tenable the longer the insurgency
continues?

The second value competition in Iraq is about meaning and the
organization of civil life. This is a competition that on one side has
a US-promoted puppet government and a vision of eventual US-style
democracy, carried out day-to-day by US military forces and local
military-backed “councils.” 

On the other side are religious and social networks that defend and
feed people, provide moral support and hope to members of
congregations, and promote a persuasive way to understand the
historical situation that people are living through, a situation framed
as a fight for Iraqi self-control and for freedom Iraqi-style.

5. What do we do? Change our mental frame, so we can at least understand the challenge:

Hmmmm.  Which is likely to win?  Under the current US
strategy I would bet on asymetrical warfare and the religous and social
networks that are evolving within the current social ecology of
war-torn Iraq.

The US might be able to modify social evolution in Iraq to something
different. But this will happen only when the US leaders in Iraq wake
up to the current value competition, and understand what they are up
against.