I would prefer to see this battle become larger than it apparently is when I first posted. A decisive victory is definitely possible imho, but it needs to happen in battle.
This looks to me like a planned, coordinated attack. Whoever did the planning certainly knows that the attack will not result in a military victory, and has probably written off all forces committed to the attack. They will not deploy anyone they are not prepared to lose.
The objective, I assume, is not military but political. The opposition is not trying to defeat the US military force, but to demonstrate to the US that the war is not over, and that it is still capable of significant action. These objectives have, to a large extent, been achieved already. If the opposition forces can force the US to commit more forces, or to delay the turnover of the country to Iraqis, or to reduce that turnover to a clearly nominal action, it will count actions like this as victories, no matter how lopsided the bodycounts are.
The Shiite militants would just love to see us snatch Badr. Unfortunately, they have us boxed into a place where we almost have to do that.
One of the basic problems of occupation is that forces inevitably become static to some degree. They are initiating and we are responding. Since our response is inevitably designed to respond to their actions, this concedes some degree of control to them: by controlling the type of action they initiate, they can call up responses that they want to see. This is not a good thing, even if we lose 1 man to their 100. |
