tell me when it hasn't been an offensive
It hasn't. Occasional hit and run attacks aren't an offensive, let alone a sustained one.
And I'm not saying that pauses mean an offensive has stopped. When we attacked the Nazis in Germany we has pauses, even small reversals (most dangerously at the Battle of the Bulge), but it clearly was a sustained offensive. Every month we controlled more ground, and weakened the enemy more.
Its not as much that this is the opposite of a sustained offensive, its just that the notion of a sustained offensive really doesn't apply to guerilla warfare. (Think of the relationship of amoral, and immoral, to moral, if "moral" was "sustained offensive", the insurgents operations would be "amoral". While they are operating as guerillas they aren't trying to gain land, and often they don't have the capability to directly defeat or severely weaken their enemy. Its true the boundary between guerilla warfare and low scale conventional warfare can be blurry but the insurgents in Iraq are not near it. They are closer to the boundary between guerilla warfare and random use of terrorism tactics. They are trying to be a severe irritant to the US. They are succeeding in doing that but it isn't there eventual aim. There strategic aim is to control Iraq. That will prove much more difficult.
There is a history of occupiers vs. insurgents, and the insurgents almost always win.
That isn't really true. In any case the battle here, esp. in the long term, isn't between the insurgents and the US but rather between the insurgents and the Iraqi government. The key question is not how insurgents historically do against foreign powers but rather how well we can strengthen the Iraq government. At some point America will pull out (although unlike with Vietnam we probably will continue to supply air-support, and re-supply, and possibly advisors/trainers). Local governments backed by foreign powers have defeated any number of insurgencies, and contained without fully defeating many more.
Tim |
