Tejek, the most important phrase in that article is that:
>>"The number of troops, boots per square inch, is not the issue," Abizaid said. "The real issue, by the way, is intelligence. You have to have good solid intelligence in conflicts such as this ... and we're working hard on it."<<
In every sense of the word, that's an admission that we're in deep shit in Iraq. Reading between the lines of the deliberately obscure terminology, the statement can only mean one thing; no matter how many men we put on the ground, no matter how much force we can bring to bear and not matter how hard we try, we cannot defeat what we cannot find.
If we cannot identify the guerrillas and therefor cannot effectively fight against them, we can assume two things. First, we can assume that we are NOT getting the necessary cooperation from the Iraqi "grateful" population. The guerrillas have to live, travel, eat and operate within the population and there are clearly plenty of Iraqis that know and suspect those that are involved. If we are still trying to develop effective "intelligence" then we know that they are generally not volunteering information. The second thing we can assume is that there is no strategic plan that we can put into place that will neutralize the effectiveness of the guerrillas. By this I mean that we cannot create "safe" enclaves from which we can operate and still achieve whatever goals it is that the Bush people have.
So the bottom line is that unless we can somehow become, once again, the darlings of the average Iraqi citizen, we are stuck with a strategy that leaves our troops and our necessary defensible properties at risk for deadly guerrilla attacks, and we have no effective fallback plan that will reduce the risks.
Much like in Vietnam, those that argue that we will, by force of numbers, will and superior technology "win" against the guerrillas, are living in a tooth fairy world that fails to take into account the realities of guerrilla wars that enjoy significant popular support. Those people should accept the realities "sooner rather than later" so that more families are spared the agony of losing a loved son or daughter, so that American credibility is not further damaged and so that our American wealth is not squandered in a cause that sucks the discretionary spending of our country dry. |
