Flurry
For Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor the counterinsurgency campaign is taking on a shape. (Hat tip: DL) He believes the Iraqi insurgency is "under pressure" from repeated assaults but has shown the ability to reconstitute itself by moving to new locations.
it is under increasing pressure from numerous US offensives in western Iraq, the loss of two-dozen top lieutenants, and intelligence from Zarqawi's captured computer. Iraq's budding government is also tightening its grip, announcing Thursday that it would launch a new offensive with 40,000 troops and set up 600 checkpoints in Baghdad. ... "If he (Zarqawi) dies, it would be a blow," says Mr. Ranstorp, contacted in Copenhagen. "It may atomize the insurgency, and different centers of gravity would emerge. He is a unifying factor for them." Those divisions already appear to be taking root, with competing claims Thursday on the Web about the appointment of an interim leader of the group. ...
The intense violence of May has also hidden thefact that fewer attacks have taken place against US and Iraqi government targets, according to US officials. They say that the current surge - 118 car bombs since mid-April - was ordered by Zarqawi at a meeting last month in Syria. ... But success in one place often just shifts the problem to another. "It's like toothpaste: You squeeze somewhere, and it just pushes the insurgents somewhere else in Iraq," says Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. "It would work if you had enough people to cover the ground."
Dan Darling at Winds of Change believes that after being driven out of Fallujah, Zarqawi attempted to reconstitute in Mosul but was unsuccessful. He then fell back on the area near the Syrian border but that was assaulted too. An earlier post suggested that Operation New Market, a battalion-sized attack on Haditha, was significant because it demonstrated that the Coalition could maintain a high operational tempo. The announcement of the massive Operation Thunder involving 40 battalion equivalents of Iraqi police and troops right on the heels of New Market suggests that the tempo has not only increased but that the rate of increase itself is rising.
The Iraqi Prime Minister sought yesterday to recapture the initiative by reaching out to hostile Sunnis and international critics, even as his Government announced an unprecedented security operation involving 40,000 police and soldiers in Baghdad. ... the capital would be divided into 2 sectors and 15 districts where police would operate 24 hours a day, monitoring all foreigners and “going into every hotel, every restaurant and every street and take to prison every Arab who does not have authorisation to be here”. ... Dr Jaafari said that the clampdown was intelligence-driven. The original plan was to control 23 access points to Baghdad on the assumption that car bombs were being made outside the city and brought in, but that had to be changed, he said. “Recently we have discovered that there are factories within Baghdad . . . a car can be driven and loaded within an hour to become a car bomb. This forced us to modify the plan.”
The US ability to increase tempo effectively means that it has more troops,
even though the actual number of personnel may remain the same. When
'toothpaste' is coralled faster than it can ooze, using the metaphor of the Iraq
expert Toby Dodge, the insurgency will be forced into lower and lower energy
states. The
surprising thing about this uptick in tempo is that there are actually fewer
American troops in Iraq today than three months ago:
9 Comments:
I wonder what effect the lengthier-than-anticipated struggle is going to have on U.S. domestic politics and willingness to take other significant military actions in the future. I think that is the main question. Ultimate victory in Iraq has never (IMO) been in doubt.
Add to Wretchard's and Doug's points that the enemy is continually being identified as non-Iraqi combatants ("monitoring all foreigners and 'going into every hotel, every restaurant and every street and take to prison every Arab who does not have authorisation to be here'").
See also Syria's recent claims of stopping people at the border (so they claim they are able to stop the flow, but they have chosen NOT to for 2 years...hmmmm... not exactly the admission I think they were aiming for).
By allowing less toothpaste back into the tube, the sooner it can be corraled or eliminated.
The #1 force multiplier we have is secure communications networks.
They are open to at minimum to traffic analysis.
It is also quite possible that there are means including decryption to decode messages. Not to mention capture of current dictionaries (human and written) of code signals. Allowing at least the understanding of old messages to get a better organizational picture.
The picture looks to me like:
Keep minimal pressure on while building up forces. Once the forces are sufficiently built take insurgent strongholds by assisting the locals and leaving the locals behind to garrison the taken areas.
It is no wonder that the insurgents put so much effort into attacking soldiers and police when they were massed for entry into the services, during training, and once trained.
By "they are open..." I meant the jihadis.
Just think how fortunate we are! We get Wretchard's intelligent analysis of what is going on militarily, while many on a different side of the political spectrum listen to such "military experts" like Juan Cole (here's an example of his analysis: Why the US is screwed in Iraq). I am often struck by how much wishful thinking (always to the detriment of the U.S.) is infused into the analyses of many in the MSM.
Whoa! Thanks to all for great posts. Nice, positive thinking. I'm only here for the edification. Thx.
Good one TallDave.
Here's a Juan Cole column generator:
[any US action] has been a disaster. [any US leader] doesn't understand the Mideast and is totally incompetent...
To add insult to injury, just remember, "experts" like Juan Cole don't come cheap.
It is crucial to keep on the pressure. Patton in France, if he had been supplied, could have driven into Germany, and changed the course of history. In the Pacific, if we hadn't deflected our advance after the turkey shoot, but gone straight to Iwo and Okinawa, we could have cut a year off the war.
We were lucky Hitler diverted the Panzers in 41 down to Kiev, otherwise Moscow falls in August, and the Russians lose the war.
I wonder if the MSM is cooking up some atrocity stories to try to divert us from attacking, since if the Sunni join the political game, Syria cuts off its support of the jihad, and we are able to focus our attention in offensive operations, we win.
We just need to remember that this is just the bottom of the 4th, there is a lot of game left to be played. One major wild card is Nukes, both in America and in Iran.
Iraq of Iraqis, by Iraqis and for Iraqis should have been our policy from the get go. It has been a tough slog to get these fellows up to speed.
Soon enough we can withdraw from policing actions and leave those to the indigs. Our Combat Power will chase down the remnents of their Command Structure until they cease to exist as an active military group. Bloody politics may continue for another year or so but the "Insurgency" will be broken.
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