Today's news that a suicide bomber had struck the Iraqi Parliament building within the Green Zone in Baghdad and that a suicide truck bomb had destroyed a key bridge in the city yet again underlined the absurdity of the happy talk of rug-buying Senator McCain and the down-hunkering Boys in the Bunker, as well as of their remaining, but dwindling, enablers on the Hill and in the MSM.While today's news may not yet demonstrate that the Sunni insurgents, and perhaps in parallel, Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army, have begun to implement their strategic endgame, Gen. Petreaus may have handed them their best plan for ultimate success.
Here is why and how, below the break. (I cross-posted this as a comment in a thread at Daily Kos today.)
When Gen. Petreaus announced that his strategy would be to embed small U.S. units with Iraqi units and have them sleep at night in the Baghdad neighborhoods (i.e., at police stations) that they would be assigned to secure, he virtually dictated the endgame for the insurgent strategists to follow:
(1) Make movement of armored units and even Humvees more difficult within the city of Baghdad. Destroying bridges as we see in today's truck bombing is certainly one way. Another is substantial deployment of EFP devices, both in roadways and horizontally across streets. A well-fabricated EFP can be lethal at ranges out to 100 yards, more than enough to be placed behind a window in a streetside building while insurgents simply wait for the U.S. or Iraqi Army convoy to pass. Shaped charges, the basic technology behind the EFPs, are widely used in the oil and mining industries. They were used in weaponry by the Russians in WWII, by Baader-Meinhof in the 1980's, and more recently by Hezbollah. A competent third-world machinist can easily assemble HE, plastic plumbing pipes, a properly machined pure copper concave "liner" (they have been making perfect copper bowls in Mesopotamia for thousands of years), and a detonator into a working EFP. One can be assembled for perhaps $30, certainly no more than $50. The EFP becomes the insurgents' weapon of choice against an up-armored occupation force. It is extremely cost-effective.
(2) Use shoulder-fired SAMs to make it more difficult for U.S. helicopter gunships to intervene decisively. After the sudden spurt of activity earlier this year, the insurgents have not had much success lately in downing U.S. helicopters. Have they been saving their SAMs for the right moment? The Russian SA-14 and SA-16 man-portable SAMs are similar in effectiveness to the U.S. Stinger. Remember that the U.S. introduction of Stingers into the Afghan War in 1986 was the catalyst that turned the tide, both psychologically and militarily, against the Soviets and their Afghan clients and ultimately gave the victory to the Mujahedin three years later.
(3) Simultaneously attack several of the isolated U.S. "outposts" that Gen. Petreaus has scattered throughout Baghdad. The insurgent action will not be on the scale of Tet in 1968, but its strategic impact will be the same, for it will demonstrate the futility of extending indefinitely the U.S. occupation of Baghdad and the rest of Iraq. Little Big Horn times five or ten, anyone?
(4) It is unclear to what degree the Sunni insurgency and Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army may have reached some sort of accommodation to go after the U.S. presence simultaneously, though not likely in a coordinated way. If they do strike at least in parallel, Mahdi Army elements in Basra could make life more difficult for the British and could cut U.S. supply lines from Gulf ports up toward Baghdad. Recent public signals from Muqtada al Sadr imply that he is prepared to reach such an accommodation with Sunnis in order to resist the U.S. occupation.
Will this scenario unfold right now? It is still too early to tell, but we may know this very weekend. The striking irony here is that Gen. Petreaus has shown the insurgents their quickest way to success, and he is supposed to be our real expert on counterinsurgency.
Of course, we can assume that the Sunni insurgents and Muqtada al Sadr, not being stupid, would have figured out on their own how implement this Tigris Offensive, even without Gen. Petreaus' telegraphing of his punch--or surge--or futile, last-gasp squirt as demanded by the Boys in the Bunker.
I very much appreciate the thought that goes into your postings.
If I may, I'll reprint here the bridge picture I posted under another diary this morning.
Let's see how the MSM handle the reporting on this topic tonight and this weekend.
I do have a sense (drag me back to reality if I am fantasizing) that just in the past week even the MSM have started to edge away from simply and approvingly relaying the White House's happy talk assertion of the moment. Joe Klein's outburst in Time Magazine this week may have been something of a signal that more mainstream journalists will now begin to follow the facts and write their own stories, just like in the good old days of serious journalism, i.e., Watergate and Vietnam.
During my Vietnam tour, the enemy would routinely attack an overwhelmingly larger U.S. force mostly in areas considered "secure". Ho Chi Minh was dead by then but his message from the grave to U. S. parents was that none of your warriors are safe--anywhere. You cannot write your folks that you are quite safe in a rear secure area named Quon Loi City because next week CBS may report across America that 1000 North Vietnamese attacked Quon Loi City in a two day offensive.
Every square inch of Iraq is now a potential target for the lone offensive insurgent who, having read Ho Chi Minh's book, will show up damn near anywhere he wants and press the plunger seeking a 10:1 casualty ratio. His message is still directed to the parents and loved ones of our warriors.