Iraq War: And they blame "The Media"

The US military didn't learn very much, it seems, from their "credibility gap" during the Vietnam War.  That applies even more to the civilians currently running the department.  This is a classic illustration: Beyond Embattled City, Militants Exploit Chaos by Alissa J. Rubin and Tyler Marshall Los Angeles Times 11/12/04.

"There are large areas of countryside that are controlled 24 hours a day by the mujahedin, where people do not see U.S. forces," said Charles Heyman, a senior defense analyst for the London-based Jane's Defence Weekly.

With voting scheduled to take place in less than three months, there has been no let-up in insurgent attacks nor any sign that the government can curb them.

"You need to be able to replicate the density of troops now in Fallouja right across the Sunni Triangle, at least, and in Baghdad, and we don't have enough soldiers to do that. And its hopeless to pretend Iraqis have the ability to do that," Heyman said.

Pentagon officials Wednesday denied that a security vacuum had developed in some areas, stating that Iraqi security forces were growing in strength and that patrols by U.S.-led forces were conducted routinely throughout the Sunni Triangle — the heavily populated Sunni areas of central Iraq north and west of Baghdad where guerrilla attacks have been most prevalent.

"Everyday we're gaining more control over the Sunni Triangle region, and the Fallouja operation is an example of that," said a senior defense official, who declined to be identified. [my emphasis]

Why didn't he just say, "Every day, things are getting better and better in every way"?  It would have had the same level of credibility.  (In this case, senior defense official is apparently one of the Pentagon civilians.)

But we could have four years of this fakery, with turning points and tipping points and eternal progress over and over again, as we take the same city and the same neighborhoods over and over again.

The virtual total lack of a domestic Iraqi army, and a severe shortage even in the police forces, are looking like a fatal weakness of the US counterinsurgency effort.  Happy talk is not going to beat this well-armed and well-organized insurgency, nor get American troops home.

The Rubin/Marshall give some details of how the insurgents are approaching their guerrilla war. Depressing to read.  But I don't think anyone is doing our troops or our foreign policy any good by just making up happy fantasies about how well things are going.  More from the article:

Mustafa Alani, chairman of Defense and Terrorism Studies at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai said that Baghdad was likely to be a chief target of the insurgency. It is the country's nerve center, and with at least 6 million residents spread over a vast area, difficult for U.S. and Iraqi forces to stabilize.

"Baghdad is the real battlefield right now," Alani said. "It's the largest city, it's impossible for the U.S. troops to control. They cannot really occupy Baghdad; they are spread too thin."

The capital has become a prime site for one of the guerrillas' most effective tactics: assassination. Often unrecorded in the daily violence is the frequency of attacks on low and mid-level government workers. [Prime Minister] Allawi's accountant and his son were shot to death two weeks ago; so was one of his secretaries. A deputy director general of the Oil Ministry was killed a week ago, along with a defense official. ...

In Samarra, which the insurgents abandoned after intense battles with U.S. troops and Iraqi forces in early October, the guerrillas have begun to re-assert themselves. Two coordinated car bombs and several mortar attacks Saturday killed more than 30 people. This week insurgents killed a shop-owner suspected of spying for the U.S. His body, was left in the street as a warning to others.

In the north, Mosul, once trumpeted by the U.S. military as a model of stability, is now mostly controlled by insurgents. Two U.S. soldiers were killed there in mortar attacks this week. insurgents killed four Turkish truckers Wednesday and guerrillas armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades clashed with American troops for several hours. They attacked two U.S. convoys, killing four people, a reporter on the scene said.