iority would defeat them. The word is of Spanish origin, dating from the
Napoleonic Peninsular wars, when some Spanish partisans kept up such
unconventional combat. Still in this original sense, the heyday of guerrilla
warfare was in the Second World War and, after, in Asia.Mao Zedong’s
peasant armies, when fighting the better equipped Nationalist forces in China,
resorted to such techniques, and, indeed, Mao wrote what is still probably the
definitive textbook. Thereafter independence movements elsewhere in Asia,
especially in Malaya and what was then French Indo-China, used the tactics to
try to force out colonial powers. In Malaya the British army managed to
develop counter-guerrilla tactics which worked effectively, but Ho Chi Minh’s
guerrillas ultimately defeated the French colonial forces, leading to the creation
of North Vietnam. Subsequently guerrilla warfare contributed to the defeat of
the US forces in theVietnam War, though it should be noted that the more
conventionally organized North Vietnam Army was the force that actually
inflicted serious harm on US forces.
Since the 1960s the phrase ‘guerrilla groups’ has taken on another meaning,
to cover the so-called ‘urban-terrorists’, for example extreme left-wing groups
like the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhoff gang in West Germany,
and similar violent opponents of the regimes in Italy and Japan. The tactics are
analogous in as much as they consist of sniping and harassment raids against the
state power, rather than the building of a conventional revolutionary under-
ground intended to fight a pitched battle against police and army. Part of the
theory of guerrilla warfare was always to try to force the conventional enemy
into repressive actions which would cause those exerting the repression to lose
the support of the general population. Although it took a long time for the
lessons to be learned, the professional military in most Western countries have
developed very powerful anti-guerrilla techniques. Many senior officers in the
British and American armies have become converts to the idea that countering
guerrilla warfare tactics is the prime professional activity, an argument made all
the more powerful with the diminution of traditional military activities with
the ending of thecold war. Such approaches have come even more to the fore
since the launching of the USA’s ‘war on terrorism’ after the atrocity of 11
September, as can be seen by the huge reliance on ‘special forces’ rather than
conventional infantry in,inter alia, the Afghanistan campaign.
Gulf War
Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and this event led to the first major
United Nations (UN)military campaign since theKorean Warof the early
1950s. Although the UN Security Council unanimously, and within hours of
the invasion, passed Resolution No. 660, calling for the immediate and
unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces, it was not until November that it
Gulf War