Doug Lorimer
At a May 12 Pentagon press briefing, the top US military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff head General Richard Myers, admitted that the Iraqi resistance would be capable of mounting a high level of attacks for years to come.
"This is a thinking and adapting adversary", Myers told reporters, adding that the US counterinsurgency war in Iraq was years away from winning. "One thing we know about insurgencies", Myers said, "is that they last from three, four years to nine years".
Noting that Iraqi resistance fighters had increased the rate of their attacks on US and allied forces from 40 a day in the first three months of the year to 70 a day since late April, Myers said that "what we're seeing is really an attempt to discredit this new cabinet and new government" — by demonstrating that it is no more capable of imposing security, particularly in Baghdad, than its US masters.
The US-recruited Iraqi police force have borne the brunt of the recent wave of resistance attacks. Commenting on this, Myers said: "This is, in most cases, Iraqis blowing up other Iraqis. And I don't know how they expect to curry favour with the Iraqi population when we have Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence."
However, the response of Iraqis to two car-bomb explosions in Baghdad that same day provided a clear answer to Myers.
Agence France Presse reported that at the site of one of explosions, which left seven people dead and 19 wounded, "Iraqi police hurled insults at US soldiers. 'It"s all because you're here', a policeman shouted in Arabic at a group of US soldiers, after the latest in a bloody wave of attacks that have rocked Baghdad this month. 'Get out of our country and there will be no more explosions', he told the uncomprehending Americans staring at the smouldering wreck of a car bomb."
Associated Press reported that at the site of the other car bomb explosion in Baghdad on May 12, "Iraqis expressed growing fury at the relentless bloodshed, throwing stones at police and US forces who came to the scene of the bombing".
Myers' statement that the recent attacks had been carried out by Iraqis was a departure from the official Pentagon propaganda line, which claims that most of the attacks are being carried out by non-Iraqi "jihadists" directed by Jordanian-born al-Qaeda supporter Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
However, the May 15 Washington Post reported that "US military estimates cited by security analysts put the number of active jihadists at about 1000, or less than 10 percent of the number of fighters in a mostly Iraqi-dominated insurgency".
In January, General Mohamed Abd Allah Shahwani, the head of Iraq's CIA funded and directed intelligence service, told journalists that he estimated there were at least 200,000 full- and part-time resistance fighters.
The May 21 Boston Globe reported that, since October, former military officers committed to the secular nationalist ideology of the now banned Baath Party "have taken control of training and arming insurgents and directing operations, including suicide bombings and guerrilla attacks, said a pair of US officials and five Iraqi politicians who say they have links to the insurgency ...
"Fighters and documents captured in Fallujah last November showed that Baathists and former officers with Hussein's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, ran many insurgent cells, said Sami al Askary, a parliamentarian and member of the Supreme Commission for de-Baathification. The Baathists have infiltrated the new Iraqi police and military, leaking inside information to plan ambushes and bombings."
At his May 12 press briefing, Myers indicated that Washington's counterinsurgency strategy is to attempt to create more "Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence" by trying to increase the frontline role of the Pentagon's puppet Iraq security forces — what Myers described as trying "to get the Iraqis in front of this process".
The US military is desperate to get more Iraqis to do its fighting because it is running out of US combat troops. A clear indication of this was reported in the April 26 Boston Globe reported: "At least 3000 [US] Navy and Air Force personnel ... — trained mainly in noncombat specialties such as mechanics and construction — are serving on the front lines of the Iraqi insurgency. The Iraq war is the first military engagement in which such large numbers of air and naval personnel are serving in combat roles on the ground, facing imminent threat of attack.
"Most of them have received only crash courses in basic combat, in some cases after they've arrived in the Middle East and then been stationed near the front lines because of shortages of troops in the Army and Marine Corps ...
"Currently, more than 2500 Air Force personnel are involved in convoy operations in Iraq, transporting troops and supplies between cities. Convoy duty has proven to be one of the deadliest assignments of the counterinsurgency, as roadside bombs and ambushes have killed hundreds of troops."
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, May 25, 2005.
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