How many Iraqi insurgents are there?

Mike Rogers over at the LRC blog links to an interview of Iraqi intelligence service director General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani in which he states: “I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people.”

“Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter.”

This insight from Shahwani is very interesting, and telling if he is correct, but even if he is wrong about the size of the Iraqi insurgency I think that the American government’s nation-buiding project was doomed from the start. It is counterproductive to attempt to militarily build a liberal democratic state out of Iraq when that country lacks the necessary cultural foundations to make it work. (See Sciabarra’s L&P post, Moving Toward Democracy?, for more on this.) And, relatedly, it is counterproductive to attempt to crush a guerrilla insurgency with a modern statist military. But if Shahwani is correct, there is more popular support for the insurgency than the American government would have us believe.

Mike Rogers asks rhetorically: “Are we winning yet?”

“Asked if the insurgents were winning, Shahwani answered: ‘I would say they aren’t losing’.”

In short, the neoconservative project in Iraq is in deep trouble.

Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the Libertarian Fiction Authors Association. His academic work has appeared in Libertarian Papers, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, the Journal of Value Inquiry, and Transformers and Philosophy. He lives in Greenville, NC.