Worse than you think

[billvon 3,131]

Interesting take on Iraq from Newsweek:
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It's Worse Than You Think
As Americans debate Vietnam, the U.S. death toll tops 1,000 in Iraq. And the insurgents are still getting stronger

By Scott Johnson and Babak Dehghanpisheh
Newsweek

. . .

It's not only that U.S. casualty figures keep climbing. American counterinsurgency experts are noticing some disturbing trends in those statistics. The Defense Department counted 87 attacks per day on U.S. forces in August—the worst monthly average since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. Preliminary analysis of the July and August numbers also suggests that U.S. troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties apparently took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting—a step up to phase three.

Another ominous sign is the growing number of towns that U.S. troops simply avoid. A senior Defense official objects to calling them "no-go areas." "We could go into them any time we wanted," he argues. The preferred term is "insurgent enclaves." They're spreading. Counterinsurgency experts call it the "inkblot strategy": take control of several towns or villages and expand outward until the areas merge. The first city lost to the insurgents was Fallujah, in April. Now the list includes the Sunni Triangle cities of Ar Ramadi, Baqubah and Samarra, where power shifted back and forth between the insurgents and American-backed leaders last week. "There is no security force there [in Fallujah], no local government," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. "We would get attacked constantly. Forget about it."


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5973272/site/newsweek/

[Zenister 0]

the sad thing is 4ID and the 3rd SBCT had Samarra locked down and relatively passive when I was there. We were able to walk the streets as unarmed civilians and helped resore some of the power and telecommunications.... 4ID has since left and the SBCT is in the north.... but we dont need anymore troops

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Those who fail to learn from the past are simply Doomed.

[kallend 2,174]

Not worse than I think.

www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1073670#1073670

www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1058837#1058837

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.