Replies to post #82999 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Chris McConnel]

how do you distinguish the "insurgents" from the "non-insurgents" in their hometowns???


That's simple. Shoot anything that moves. The sick, injured, women, little kids. You just never know who's an insurgent, or not.


Two of the three small clinics in the city have been bombed, and in one case, medical staff and patients killed, he said. A U.S. tank was positioned beside the third clinic.

“People are afraid of even looking out the window because of snipers,” he said, asking that he not be named for his own safety. “The Americans are shooting anything that moves.”

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/20041111-1404-iraq.html

[Orange Trendline]

Wow. Your misunderstanding of this war is astounding.

Comparisons with Vietnam and Afghanistan v. Soviets are major stretches. Vietnam was receiving financial support and supplies from both China and the Soviet Union. The Afghans were basically armed by the United States. Does the insurgency have consistent, well-organized support from a major military superpower? No. That's why improvised car-bombs and kidnappings are their favored forms of combat...it's all they've got. Can we restrict them to the point where they run out of funding, run out of supplies, andn run out of morale? Probably, but it will take time, probably years.

Second of all, popular support is behind democracy. The vast majority of the country, while not necessarily pro-US, is against the insurgency.

Third of all, only one part of the country is hotly contested at this point. The South is more or less stable. The Kurdish North is stable. It's all about the Sunni triangle, and there's no reason what the US is doing in Fallujah can't be repeated in other smaller insurgent bases.

[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