Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Alex G]

Flaming Fallujah

Friday, November 12, 2004

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to read Thursday’s news out of Iraq and not be deeply depressed. As I scanned Friday morning’s papers online and watched the TV reports on CNN and ABC, I felt a physical chill.

The U.S. push into Fallujah, which seemed to meet little resistance for the first three days, has now run into heavy resistance. The escalated urban fighting looks to inflict heavy casualties on both forces as well as the hapless civilians squeezed in between.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, openly hedges and fudges on the count of American killed and wounded – a particular insult to our troops and their families on this Veterans’ Day. Some accounts put U.S. dead at around 30 or more over the last three days. A horrific number.

The insurgents hardly concentrated all their forces for some sort of last stand in Fallujah. And who would have expected such folly anyway, except for some empty-headed TV gasbags? On the contrary, the insurgents struck back hard Thursday in the northern city of Mosul, attacking a string of police stations. ABC News says that as many as half of the region’s new 8000 Iraqi police instantly deserted. The same report said that armed insurgents had also taken over a number of neighborhoods in Baghdad. The counter-blow in Mosul packed such punch that the U.S. command had to quickly pull some units of the unfinished fight in Fallujah and redeploy them to the north.

Only a fool would now deny the U.S. is facing a full-blown, nationwide guerrilla war in Iraq – a war that deepens in intensity and that it not likely to be at all muted by the elections scheduled for January.

This sort of guerrilla war is never won through pure military counter-insurgency programs but rather through political negotiation. But what would that look like in Iraq? As I said above, I felt a cold chill tonight looking at the fiery imaged on the screen but seeing no one putting forward a strategy except for more of the same.

http://www.marccooper.com/index.html