Black Flags Are Deadly Signals as Cornered Rebels Fight Back -NYT

snip>
Sitting on a third-story roof, Staff Sgt. Eric Brown, his lip bleeding, peered through the scope of his rifle into the haze. Moments before, a lone bullet had whizzed past his face and smashed a window behind him. "God, I hate this place, the way the sun sets," Sergeant Brown said.

Sgt. Sam Williams said, "I wish I could see down the street."

But these marines did see a black flag pop up all at once above a water tower about 100 yards away, then a second flag somewhere in the gloaming above a rooftop. And the shots began, in a wave this time, as men bobbed and weaved through alleyways and sprinted across the street. "He's in the road, he's in the road, shoot him!" Sergeant Brown shouted. "Black shirt!" someone else yelled. "Due south!"

The flags are the insurgents' answer to two-way radios, their way of massing the troops and - in a tactic that goes back at least as far as Napoleon - concentrating fire on an enemy. Set against radio waves, the flags have one distinct advantage: they are terrifying.
............
Immediately, shooting broke out, pinning down the marines for an hour. Finally they moved south to a mosque with the stub of a blasted minaret. An armored vehicle drove up from the rear and dropped its hatch. Out walked a group of blinking, disoriented Iraqi national guardsmen. They had been brought in only to search mosques.

http://nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12scene.html

These reporter are allowed to tell the truth. It's too late to change the course of this now.

they should if they whored for * prior to the election anyway.

With all out technology over there, we still cannot overcome the numbers of Iraqi resistance fighters. As the U.S. forces push into the city, the urban warfare will take its toll on our troops. Even if the kill ratio was 100 to one, we would still lose. We needed more troops over there, and they needed to stabilize the country instead of being conquerers. The real tragedy is that our forces on the ground are being victimized as much as the Iraqi people. Everybody over there is just political cannon fodder, be it Iraqi people, police force, or U.S. and other coalition troops.

kick

:(

</Emperor Palpatine>

on the porch of our house on January 20 (2005). We wanted to protest the Bush presidency and intended to leave it until he left office. Now, however, with this news, people in our community might see us as sympathetic to the Iraqis fighting the US troops. This could spell trouble in our predominantly Republican neighborhood.

where the Commander of one team beat the other by low tech means and instead of learning from that exercise, they stopped the war games, removed the Commander and disallowed any low tech tactics. This article is proof yet again how delusional the high command is regarding their ability to win this unwinnable 'war', imo.

The use of the Iraqi Nat'l Guard here is revealing, also. The Pentagon has really played down their desertions in Najaf and Samarra, but they can't bug out if they're delivered right to the heart of their task.

Seems unfair somehow, right?

not that really Bush knows.

His daughters use the Internets.

This is UNWINNABLE....

This is a WarCrime