Why is the insurgency so effective?

The insurgents are among the 350,000 Iraqi men in Saddam's army that Mr. Bremer, acting on behalf of the stupidest president ever, decided to disband after the initial seige.

This put 350,000 trained Iraqi military men out of work. They are the insurgency. And we are seeing they are well-trained indeed.

Point of conjecture: Assuming 10,000 are in prison, 40,000 are dead, and 100,000 have come over to "our" side (which I find unlikely) that potentially leaves 200,000 insurgents.

Considering the extremely poor leadership and management of our military, this could go on for a long time.

thanks to another big blunder - securing the oil fields but not securing ammo/weapons.

along with the $9 billion in cash.

Sheesh.

Didn't bush point out that the insurgency is running scared and they only blow up so many people because they are panicking?

Unfortunately, 53% of Americans believe this horseshit.

Mosul is a hotspot
Baghdad is a hot spot
Falluja WAS a hot spot
Kikirk is a hot spot, and so on.

as if each one is an isolated incident.

Damn! The whole country is a "hot spot."

...person, but they can't kill an idea!

<snip>
Ernesto Che Guevara
Guerrilla war, a method

<snip>
The guerrilla war was utilized many times in history under different conditions and following distinct objectives. Lately, it has been used in several popular emancipation wars, when the people's vanguard has chosen the way of irregular war against enemies who have bigger military power. Asia, Africa and America were targets of these actions when they tried to obtain the power against feudal exploration, neocolonial or colonial. In Europe, it has been utilized as complement of regular armies themselves or allied.

In America, one has searched the guerrilla wars in several opportunities. We can quote the experiences of Augusto Cesar Sandino as the nearest antecedent, fighting against yankee expeditionary forces in Nicaguara Segovia. And recently Cuban revolutionary war. From then on, the problems of guerrilla wars were mentioned during the theoretical discussions of progressists parties in continent, and the possibility and convenience of its utilization generated contradictory polemics.

These notes will try to express our ideas about guerrilla wars and how would be its correct utilization.

First, one has to elucidate that this modality of fight is a method; a method to obtain a result. This result, indispensable, unavoidable to all revolutionaries, is the conquest of politic power. Hence, analyzing specific situations of different countries of America, one must use the concept of guerrilla reduced to the simple category of a method of war to obtain a result.

Almost immediately arises the question: is the guerrilla method the unique formula to conquest politic power in all America? Or, anyway, will it be the predominant formula? Or, simply, will it be one more formula between all used to fight? After all, they ask, will Cuban example be applicable to others continental realities? During these controversies, it is used to criticize those who want to adopt guerrilla war, saying that they forget the class struggles, as if they were opposed. We refuse the concept inherent to this position; the guerrilla war is a people's war, is a class struggle. If one pretends to realize this kind of war without the support of the people, will see the prelude of an unavoidable disaster. The guerrilla is the people's combative vanguard, situated in a certain territory, armed, disposed to realize many warlike actions who drift to the unique strategic possible aim: the capture of the power. It is supported by the peasant masses and workers of the region and of all territory. Without these premises one can not admit the guerrilla war.

<more>
<link> http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1963/misc/guerrilla-war-method.htm

and very few Iraqis want us there, whether they are actively shooting at us or not.

Civilian casualties due to aerial bombs and massive firepower only cause more sympathy for the resistance. You need a scalpel, and the US Army is a broadsword. It won't work if you level whole cities and expect those who haven't picked up a gun yet to like you. This didn't work in South Vietnam. It only turned more people against the US, in fact, and I doubt it will work the second time around.

Nobody is free from blood here. The ones who, for instance, just targeted a Shi'ite funeral in Mosul today and killed over 30 folks deserve their fair share of blame for the chaos. There are ugly folks on both sides from the sick dumbasses behind the Abu Ghraib torture sessions to the guys who think it's okay to inflict massive civilian casualties with car bombs and suicide bombers as long as the "right Iraqis" are among the dead.

This is why I wished we had exhausted all peaceful remedies before going down this road. War is unleashing chaos on the face of the earth, and it shouldn't be treated like just another tool to achieve an end.

our government has taken every step possible to find ways to lengthen this war.

Weapons dumps left unprotected.
Use of napalm in Fallujah.
Thousands of civilian deaths.
Torture of detainees.
Missing detainees.

The list goes on and on and the press and our own countrymen believe the insurgency is solely responsible for the "hot spots" in Iraq.

I just don't get it any more.

Perhaps not the exact quote from Chairman Mao but, at least the gist of it.

Without the support of the Iraqi people the "insurgents" would lose.

The insurgents are winning because they have that support. Why? Because their country has been invaded and subjugated by the our military.

Want to end the insurgency? Get our troops out of Iraq and let the Iraqis sort out their own problems in their own country.

Also, they are completely free to choose where and when they strike whatever targets are accessible. And that is a big advantage, when they can then melt into the population.

our own CIA was buying Soviet-made arms from Pakistan and supporting some insurgent groups inside Iraq with them?


I can't seem to find the thread(s).

Not militarily, at least. We're not losing large portions of our forces or anything like that.

The only reason it has a large impact on public opinion is because the occupation is unjust, and everyone knows it on some level. That old myth that "Americans won't stand for large numbers of casualties" is wrong. We've absorbed massive casualties in past wars without much complaint at all.

The American public won't stand for large numbers of casualties in pursuit of an unjust cause. The insurgency is effective in terms of public opinion, because the public knows- or at least suspects- that the occupation is based on a fraud.

I say people.

I don't distinguish between Americans and Iraqis, although I tend to have more sympathy for the Iraqis as they did not ask to be invaded.

the American public that the occupation of Iraq is an unjust cause. This administration has been very successful in spinning just about everything from 9/11 to the Saddam's existance to the insurgency as a justification for our occupation. One would have thought that with no WMDs found the public would turn on Bush but there he sits in the WH for another 4 years.

Now it's about freedom and democracy. Shit, what's not to like about freedom and democracy? How can anyone be against freedom and democracy. And aren't we the absolute best for helping it along? It's messy but these good folks will get the hang of it eventually, so what's a little insurgency and a couple of thousand American deaths when freedom's on the march? Blah, blah, blah.

People are still buying into this crap and as much as wish, I just don't see it changing. It took 10s of thousands of American lives before people got fed up with Vietnam and there are still plenty of people out there who think if we just hung in there awhile longer we could have "won."

I hope you're right that the public suspects the occupation is based on a fraud, but I see so little outrage that I am seriously doubtful that the public is awake enough to see it.

Mz Pip
:dem:

Especially when the country is covered in them.

The disorganized structure makes it extremely difficult to combat.

The amount of "collateral damage" we cause fighting them turns the public hostile towards us if it doesn't make them active supporters of the insurgency.

It's the same reason Israel hasn't been able to stop terrorist attacks.

but when a car bomb goes off and kills 50 Iraqi's or so (and I think to most it's clear that it wasn't the US's car bomb, we prefer other means) wouldn't that turn the public hostile to the insurgency as well? Between the suicide bombs and the areal bombs, I suspect that many average Iraqis are fed up with both sides.

At least not effective in the sense that it seems to have any goals aside from simply killing people. Effective insurgencies have some kinds of ideology behind them and this one is vague beyond getting the Americans out (and it's obviously not working in that regard).

What the insurgents have been good at is killing a lot of people. And the reason for that is simple. We don't have enough troops to occupy the country in a meaningful way. We barely have enough boots on the ground to occupy Baghdad. The insurgents have a lot of room to negotiate and some really stupid mistakes by Bremer early on allowed them to acquire supplies needed to make a lot of bombs.

But it's not an effective insurgency in any kind of historical sense. There is no real ideology behind. No real leadership. No real supply system or training system. And it's not going to be able to hold any territory.

But it might be enough to keep Iraq in chaos long enough for the US to just give up. And the pre-war planning is at fault for that.

The resistance in South Vietnam, for instance, was not a monolithic front of Viet Cong; that's a bold-faced lie. There were several different factions made up of various partisans and nationalists, and they sometimes fought with each other, but almost all of them banded together when it came to the issue of the US presence. They had all turned against the US due to the number of civilians being killed. Many of them were fighting to avenge the loss of loved ones.

The point of guerrilla warfare is not to win tactical victories against a much superior opponent on the battlefield. It is not about "holding ground" because the VC certainly didn't hold any ground for long or win major tactical victories against the US. In every major tactical engagement in Vietnam, the US won. That is a fact. The point of guerrilla warfare is to bleed the enemy slowly until the enemy quits the battlefield out of disgust and disillusionment. That only has to involve killing a few US soldiers a day. The effects are cumulative. As the years roll by, the body count continues to climb, while no apparent progress on the ground is being made, and people begin asking, "What's the point? Why continue fighting if there is no progress?"

1,500 dead, 10,000+ wounded/crippled, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, untold billions used up, and what have we seriously accomplished? They talk in Baghdad about a new government forming, but while they talk, the war rages on in the streets, and the innocent continue to die. The flag-draped coffins keep rolling in.

Yes, it is possible to win every confrontation against a much weaker enemy, but it is also possible to still lose to that weaker opponent in the end. Why? Because he was more determined than you to fight for his home than you were to fight for a lie.

To those guys who keep killing innocent Iraqis like today's bombing in Mosul, those guys are monsters, and I hope Iraqis would reject them for what they are: Murderers. They're the same kind of people who justified killing many innocent civilians if it meant killing one US officer when they attacked officers' clubs in Saigon decades earlier.

If the Viet Cong had been the only enemy, Vietnam would have been a different story. There was also a regular army in the field which did have soldiers and did hold territory.

If we're talking about NVA regular units, they did not hold ground in the face of US firepower. The Tet Offensive was a total failure in a pure tactical sense. Nearly all territory gained in the offensive were eventually recaptured by US forces, and they lost a significant amount of men and equipment to the US counterattack. However, it was a strategic propaganda victory in that it shattered the illusion that the war was being won when, in fact, it was far from it.

If America was occupied, there would be an endless supply of people who would be willing to kill the occupiers.

(Unless they wrote a new constitution for us and installed a puppet government.)

Which was about four times the tonnage used in **all** of WWII. (Note: bombed countries actually included Cambodia, Laos, and S. Vietnam.)

You cannot bomb a determined cause into submission.

On the other hand Japan, Italy, and Germany, who all still have U.S. occupation forces within their borders almost 60 years after we invaded them must not mind it too much? I do not know the reasons for the differences here? I suspect they may be cultural, but I am not sure. My guess is that America will not be still occupying Iraq in 60 years.

Don

We Illegally invaded a sovereign nation, a nation that was/is absolutely no threat to us, that never threatened us. We are forcing our way of life on the Iraqi people, killing & torturing their citizens, blowing up their buildings, schools, hospitals.

Building permanent military bases on their land, AND STEALING THEIR OIL.

If a country invaded the US and did the same thing, what would you do?

...are seen as so unjust. Period.

If we were really seen as a significant improvement over Saddam's rule, very few of the occupied would be trying to kill us.

If we want peace, we must make sure that we are at least perceived as just.

That and the fact the whole idea was a horrible and tragically flawed one from the start.
:nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke:



WHERE THEY'D GET THEIR ASSES KICKED (Just for the record)!

To merely say that the resistance in Iraq is ineffective is an argument reflecting the impatience in our own nation's mindset. America lives in a day and age of believing in quick wars. It's inherent in our fast-food mentality. This is one reason why we're in this mess to begin with, because the fast-food-get-everything-as-soon-as-possible is now squarely ingrained into the American mind. It was an influencing force as to why some in the US supported the war. Like going to the dentist to have a root canal. America doesn't follow the rule prescribed by Sun Tzu, "respect one's enemy," let alone even understanding the culture and history of our enemy.

The Iraqis, including the resistance, are united as a front by their religion and moreso by their land. This is the greatest effective impetus there is. The war in Vietnam was a nationalistic war, more than it was a political ideology on communism. The ignorance of the American people not to realize this was another tragic mistake in understanding other cultures. We are making the same mistake now.

The Iraqi resistance isn't impatient, just the opposite. They're being very selective with their targets, and for all the bravado, they're really not interested in keeping a score card on American troop deaths. What they're concerned with is the battle of their choosing, which they've obtained. It could have very well been a prewar strategy.

Look at the well-coordinated assassinations of Iraqi public officials, and the targeting of oil pipelines. They've changed their strategy recently to concentrating more on Iraqi police and those they deem signing up for the new Iraqi security force. The resistance realizes that this will be the vanguard in a newly formed government, so it is attacking upon that front currently. I'm sure the Iraqi resistance realizes that the US wants to move its troops into the 14 US permanent bases currently being built. Therefore, the Iraqi resistance goes for the next best target.

Although the Vietnam War was more costly in terms of US GDP, there are other problems in the US economy today. Bush is requesting another 80 billion dollars for the war this year, this is coupled with a growing deficit. It even has some Repugs balking. This is not lost upon the Iraqi resistance. The US must spend billions at a time that the US is having difficulty with its debt and how long other foriegn central banks will buy up its ballooning debt. How much does it cost the resistance?

How does one define victory? Who is setting the timeline?

As we go through our fast pace lives, all around the Empire … drip, drip, drip.

...Charlie only has 2 ways home. Death or Victory.

Is that more the action of an outsider jihadist?

Or are the ex-soldiers of Saddam's secular Iraq now joining jihad?

Kurovski,

It's jihadists, Saddam's army, foreign fighters, and some Iraqi people just fed up with the occupation.

I guess 300,000 people with 20 dollars each worth of equipment are harder to handle than 20 people with 300,000 dollars each of equipment