Iraq War: Flying blind in Iraq?

There isn't a Christmas truce in effect in the Iraq War, as the attack at Mosul among others reminded us.

I continue to be surprised that the press, even some of the papers that are covering the Iraq War more thoroughly, don't talk very specifically about the resistance.

A welcome exception is Blind in Baghdad by John Prados Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Jan/Feb 2005

This is a good article talking about, among other things, how ideology blinded and continues to blind the Bush adminstration about the nature of the Iraqi resistance.  And Prados provides some more information on the resistance than we usually see:

He poses a very pertinent question:

For more than a year U.S. spokespersons, from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to John Abizaid, the commanding general, to CIA officials, estimated the enemy's number at 3,000-5,000. During the same period, coalition forces conducted hundreds of operations, fighting an earlier battle at Falluja as well as major engagements at Najaf, Tikrit, Baquba, Baghdad, and elsewhere, frequently claiming to have killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The number of Iraqis killed is estimated in the range of 10,000 to 20,000, with one scientific study suggesting as many as 100,000. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal it emerged that coalition forces had arrested some 44,000 Iraqis. Coalition forces have thus neutralized many times the number of assessed adversaries without appreciably affecting the level of resistance. How can that be?

What it means, of course, is that resistance is being underestimated, and that some of the civilians killed are miscounted as guerrillas.

There is a fatal flaw in the Bush administration's characterization of its enemy. Consider developments last summer, when the insurgents adopted the tactic of going after civilian employees of contractors working in the country, frequently taking hostages, for which Iraqi resistance groups then claimed responsibility. Early last year the administration began describing the perpetrators as outside agitators, that is, foreign terrorists epitomized by the Jordanian Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.

Indeed, Zarqawi took credit for beheading one American hostage and taking others. But many more groups than Zarqawi's stepped forward, and others have become widely known. There is the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance (a.k.a. the "1920 Revolution Brigades"), the National Front for the Liberation of Iraq (an alliance of almost a dozen smaller groups), the Iraqi Resistance National Front (also a union of subgroups), the Hamzah Faction, the Iraqi Liberation Army, the "Awakening and Holy War," the White Banners, and the Al Haqq Army. All of this is before you get to the remnants of Saddam's regime or Sadr's militia, the Al Mahdi Army. And there are Shiite factions other than Sadr's, such as the Imam Ali Bin-Talib Jihadi Brigades.

Groups revealing themselves through hostage-takings include the Assadullah Brigades, the Islamic Retaliation Movement, the Islamic Anger Brigades, the Khalid Bin Al Walid Brigades, the Black Banners group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, the Ansar Al Sunna Movement, and the Al Tawhid wa Al Jihad. Some of these groups undoubtedly consist of just one or a few persons, while others may be front groups for the same organizations. A few have an affinity for the Al Qaeda view of jihad, but the point is that the opposition in Iraq is something new in the annals of guerrilla warfare: a decentralized constellation of resistance units with different but complementary goals. It is significant that the U.S. Army issued a fresh version of its standard field manual for counterinsurgency operations last October--the first since the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile the Pentagon's highest estimates of foreign fighters remain in the hundreds. In short, Zarqawi cannot be the leader, nor can his group be the core, of the Iraqi resistance. It has been important to the Bush administration to identify foreign terrorists as the core of the resistance, because this argument links the Iraq War to the war on terrorism and Al Qaeda, but the very act of advancing it has helped blind the Bush people to the realities of Iraq.

The article is also good on the institutional rivalries and some of the other problems that inhibit intelligence-gathering and usage.  Not least of those is the distrust of the Americans produced by the notorious use of torture in the gulag, as famously revealed in the Abu Ghuraib photos.  "Moreover," Prados writes, "if the Iraqi provisional government security forces are as heavily penetrated as suggested by both U.S. and Iraqi interim government spokespersons, the resistance has much better intelligence than U.S. coalition authorities."