The New Road

What's going on in Iraq Pt. I - Samarra

I'm more worried about Iraq than usual. Things are trending very badly. The most recent case in point was our Samarra attack, if you can even call it that, on a supposed insurgent stronghold in central Iraq. The military called this Operation Swarm and hyped it as the biggest offensive since the mission accomplished speech. But you know what happened? We threw an attack and nobody showed up. No insurgents. No nothing. The most interesting thing that happened was a local woman had great bread that the soldiers snacked on. Seriously. We threw a war and nobody showed up!

At least, that's what I think happened. Nobody in the media seems to really know for sure. Jim Lehrer reported one casualty, while CNN now reports no casualties and mimics some previous reports about almost nothing happening. It's also unclear how long this operation took or is taking. It's possible that it's done. It's possible that it's ongoing but largely over. And it's possible that it's still going strong. Let's assume it's largely over and that CNN's story this morning is a reasonable picture of what took place.

Now you may be thinking to yourself. Hey, that's great. No blood. No killing. Not a shot in anger. Well, if you are the pacifist type you may think that. But let me tell you, sending out a major force to a place where we were thinking we would find an insurgent stronghold is a serious military intelligence blunder. Particularly when we are supposed to own that land, and have bases there. You know, entrenched with the locals. Hearts and minds and all that.

Well, turns out the hearts and minds stuff not much. In fact, from what I have seen (and I actually watch the Iraq conflict as close as I can) it looks like our strategy of late has been driven by a politically based want to reduce casualties. How do you reduce casualties in an occupation? You don't leave your base. Casualties happen on patrols, casualties happen on supply runs. If you don't leave the megabases, like camp Anoconda, a base so huge it's actually a reasonably sized American town, you don't get casualties. It's exactly like Vietnam all over again.

The problem with staying in your bases is that you don't get access to the locals who want to help you. So your intelligence goes to hell. And thus you end up flying lots of troops into a battle where no enemy is to be found. Oops.

And I'm not even sure if Bush knows that this is happening. My guess is that he first ordered a reduction is casualties. Now the casualty rate is down, but he probably doesn't understand why. Because recently he has asked that we own 75% of Iraq by the end of the year. Yes friends, we actually don't control most of Iraq. It's pretty clear to me that anyone who brings Bush bad news has his ass handed to him. So now the yes-men generals who holed the troops up in bases are in a pinch. They need to attack, but they can't do that while keeping the casualty count low. And since it's unlikely that Bush's management style will change, it's likely that there will be more turnover and distancing in the general staff, more bunker mentality, and more of a war of attrition against 130,000 of our troops in a country of 27 million.

There is one bright spot though; General Pace. God I love that guy. He really sticks it to Rumsfeld and Bush. Bush talks about how Iran is behind the IEDs. The press asks Pace about it and Pace gives a sideways glance over at Rumsfeld, and says there is no proof of that. Sweet. Go Pace! The only honest man in this whole fucking fiasco.