Deus Ex Machina

The dramatic arrival of Major General Jassem Mohamed Saleh  with the newly formed Fallujah Protection Army, to which the USMC is supposed to hand over control of Fallujah, must rank as one of the most surprising episodes of the war. The Washington Post said:

The surprise agreement in Fallujah, which was authorized by Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, is intended to give more responsibility to Iraqis for subduing the city while attempting defuse tensions by pulling Marines back from front-line positions. ... The Marines will be replaced by a new militia called the Fallujah Protection Army, which will comprise 900 to 1,100 Iraqis who served in the military or other security services under former president Saddam Hussein, Marine officers said. The militia will be commanded by a group of former Iraqi generals, the officers said.

"They will bring in former Iraqi soldiers who are committed to fighting and maintaining the peace in Fallujah," said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, a battalion commander who was briefed on the deal. "They'll pick up from us," Byrne said. "The plan is that eventually the whole of Fallujah will be under the control of the Fallujah Protection Army. The goal is that anyone should be able to come into the city without being attacked."

The obvious question of where the Fallujah Protection Army came from is only slightly less interesting than how General Saleh came to head it. This article from the Egyptian Al Ahram describes the ongoing formation of the new Iraqi Army, made up quite literally, of a Kurd here, a Sunni there, and a Shi'ite in between. Many of the units they are to command are being trained in Jordan. More are being trained there and equipped by Australia.

The coalition authorities in Iraq this week appointed the leadership of Iraq's new army. A Kurdish general who organized the Kurdish fighters since 1973 will head them, with a Sunni Arab as the chief of staff and a Shia as his deputy. Each had already left Saddam Hussein's army before the last war, unlike dozens of officers who are now being trained to join the new army.

"They are my friends," says Saad Baryas Al- Waaly, 37, which is also why he will not furnish any details. But the former army doctor who is now working in a civil hospital in Najaf does acknowledge that quite a few of his former colleagues are now being trained in Jordan and Iraq. They will be the new officers in an army that is supposed to consist of around 40,000 men.

One of the unresolved questions about the new Iraqi Army is not only its command structure, but its size, allowable weaponry and ethnic composition. Many have argued, quite plausibly, that a lightly armed 40,000 man army is far too small to secure a country as large and lawless as Iraq, which is surrounded by terrorist hotbeds on every side. However that may be, some Jordanian trained units have been fighting beside Americans in Fallujah for a while. The invaluable Darrin Mortenson of the North County Times describes some of them.

When a loud crack sounded from the adjacent building in Fallujah on Thursday, the frontline Marines chalked the blast up to their noisy new neighbors and waited for the report of another "kill." The new Iraqi Counter Terrorism Force soldiers hidden in the house next door had just fired on a man carrying an AK-47 assault rifle in a neighborhood where U.S. forces have declared there are "no friendlies." As the violent stalemate in Fallujah bags a third week, the appearance of specially trained Iraqi snipers this week was a welcome development for Marines at the front ---- and an opportunity for the Iraqis and their U.S. Army Special Forces advisers to prove that not all Iraqi troops will cut and run when the shooting starts.

"They're doing all right ---- damned good shots, actually," a U.S. Special Forces adviser said Thursday, refusing to give his name. He said his small team of Iraqi Counter Terrorism Forces, part of a larger group of tough Iraqi volunteers who recently returned from four months of training in Jordan, were on their way to becoming a lethal weapon against the insurgents of Fallujah and elsewhere in the beleaguered country.

But although the 82nd Airborne had been training the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps around Fallujah for months, the provenance of the Fallujah Protection Army is still unexplained. One of the most difficult operations of war is relieving a unit in contact with the enemy. It first of all requires the existence of the relief force. News accounts which suggest that this-still-to-be formed Fallujah Protection Army (FPA) will take over from the Marines, said to be evacuating "front line positions" within a few days, are only slightly less incredible than a report that Batman, the Hulk and Wolverine have joined the Navy to see the world. The news up this point has raised more questions than it has provided answers. The key points which may become clearer in the coming days are:

• the relationship between the FPA and the forming Iraqi Army;
• the relationship between the FPA and the enemy holed up in the 'Golan' neighborhood;
• the combat role and time-to-establishment of this force.

The most likely scenario is that the FPA will be given charge over city areas free from heavy fighting and assigned general police duties. Those who perform meritoriously in this on the job training could be given regular ranks in the new Iraqi Army, a common relationship between paramilitaries and regulars. But forming militias, especially from local toughs, has always been a tricky business. There is plenty of money to raise militias against the enemy, but left unchecked, they can become lawless gangs unto themselves.

The one certain thing is that return of sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30 will not see the end of conflict. The numerous insurrections, regional wars and massacres during the Saddam era are proof of the volatility of the Land Between the Rivers. And unless America can use its military power and wisdom to hold these fractious elements together, or transform them into a functioning society, it will remain a basket of snakes ready to strike at all and sundry.

Nightfall

This map from the Times of London gives a fair, but dated overview of the fighting in the Fallujah area. It is basically a lower resolution version of Global Security's 1:10,000 aerial photograph of Fallujah with an overlay. If you consider Fallujah a rectangle lying on its side, the map shows the US firmly established in the lower right hand about two thirds of the way up the box and more than halfway right to left. Although the Times map shows the US line still south of Highway 10 (an east-west road that cuts the rectangle in half about two thirds up) as of April 7, the northward march of clashes basically suggests that the Marines now hold the city everywhere south of Highway 10, that is, the lower two thirds of the city right up to the banks of the Euphrates.

It suggests that the enemy is basically confined to the northwest corner neighborhood of 'Golan', a slum area of winding streets. I would guess -- purely guess -- that the Marines hold the southern half of Highway 10 and everything east of the main road which leads up from the Mayor's compound to the northern city wall. The tactical motivation would be obvious. The Marines, and especially the snipers, would have clear fields of fire across these thoroughfares and use them to cut off the enemy stronghold from the rest of the city both to the east and to the south. To the north the Marines hold the 8-foot high railway embankment, which is about 200 meters parallel to the north city limits.

It was along Highway 10 that the Blackwater contractors were ambushed and their mutilated bodies hung from the Euphrates bridge not far from the 'Golan'. Now that fighting has revealed the enemy numbers and heavy armament actually present in town, it is obvious that the contractors escorting a convoy through Fallujah were as doomed as an enemy patrol entering the gate of Fort Bragg. The decision by the Marines not to rush in and recover the contractor's bodies, for they which they were heavily criticized, now seems absolutely justified in hindsight. Even a company strength unit would have been in serious trouble had they taken the bait.

With this basic layout in mind, we can now understand Darrin Mortensen's account in the North Country Times. The Marines must have raided south into the 'Golan' from their positions on the railway embankment and returned north. The second, less successful probe which resulted in the heavy engagement of a Marine platoon and the destruction of a mosque minaret was actually about 100 meters inside the city's northern boundary by cross reference to the Times of London map. It is around the northeastern corner of the 'Golan' that the recent fighting, including the AC-130 strikes have taken place. An article by the New York Post describes an engagement near the Fallujah railway station, which should be in the northeast corner of the 'Golan'.

April 29, 2004 -- Marines, backed up by jet fighters, attack helicopters and an aerial gunship, fought furious battles yesterday with Fallujah terrorists - who used women and children as shields. For the second day, black smoke and flames billowed into the sky and earth-rattling booms shook the Iraqi city as the fighting erupted on three fronts in the Sunni stronghold.

The clashes began when a Marine sniper unit came under fire from guerrillas unloading weapons from a cache near the train station. The rebels, using women and children as shields, fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Marines. The troops took fire from three buildings and responded with machine guns, rockets and missiles. Video footage showed a Marine sniper, using a rifle with a long-range scope, firing at targets from behind a barricade. In the afternoon, the Marines called in two helicopters: a Cobra and a Huey gunship to rescue the sniper unit pinned down near the city's train station.  After the snipers were extracted, U.S. forces dropped 10 laser-guided bombs, including a 1,000- pounder, against buildings the terrorists were firing from, said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, a U.S. military spokesman.

We can guess that the "snipers" were possibly USMC designated marksmen positioned south of the train station, between the rail line and the city, engaging the enemy on the northern city wall. The use of civilian human shields shows there are still significant numbers of noncombatants in the area and the removal of the weapons from a cache on the northern wall suggests they are repositioning weapons into a central redoubt deeper into the neighborhood. Although the hard core of resistance is penned up in the northwest corner, large areas of the city may harbor stragglers. The joint Marine-Iraqi police patrols will probably patrol the neighborhoods behind the forward USMC positions to establish Iraqi Governing Council control over these areas.

If my map analysis is right it reveals an astonishing success by the USMC. The enemy is now largely in a square about 2,000 meters on each side, with the river to one side and the open railway area to the other, facing the city streets both south and east. On the other hand, the enemy has been compressed to the point where a further advance becomes very dangerous. The Associated Press describes the neighborhood which the Marines must now take in order complete the job.

In the ancient slum at Fallujah's heart, Marines rely on high-tech equipment, night vision and the fearsome AC-130 gunship. But their Sunni foes have their own advantages - the labyrinth of alleyways that offer deadly ambush sites shielded by a civilian population. The Golan slum, home to some 40,000 people, has seen three days of intense combat, with Marines fighting mainly from the air with precision weapons. If they enter in force, it will mean deadly urban warfare. U.S. forces are so concerned that when Marines begin moving through Fallujah on patrols with U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces on Friday, they will skip Golan.

Golan - named after the strategic Golan Heights that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 war - is the oldest part of Fallujah, its tight alleyways and old, ramshackle houses pressed between railroad tracks and the muddy Euphrates River. An estimated one-third of Fallujah's 200,000 people have fled the siege this month, but not many from Golan. Most are too poor to afford alternative housing.

Marines say Sunni Muslim guerrillas are also concentrated in that part of the city, and a key concern is to avoid harming civilians wedged in the middle. Troops on the northern fringe of the neighborhood stare down fighters just a street away. A satellite photo of Fallujah shows a city with wide roads, neatly-organized blocks of houses and open spaces, and in the northeast corner Golan, a knot of streets too narrow for tanks and heavy armor. To fight the insurgents but keep casualties down, U.S. forces have turned to the air, using laser-guided bombs and other munitions to hammer at insurgents holed up in buildings.

The urban terrain from the ground will look something like this (this is a link to photos taken at Jenin but it should be somewhat representative of the kind of construction and the crazy angles that Marines may have to deal with. The final reduction of 'Golan' may not be long in coming. The Associated Press, in an article entitled Marines Prepare for Fallujah Pull Back reports:

Marines in Fallujah began packing up gear and loading heavy trucks Thursday, saying they had been ordered to leave the southern industrial zone that they have held for weeks and pull away from the city. It was not immediately known if the move represented a withdrawal of Marines from their siege of the city or if other Marine forces were being rotated in to replace the withdrawing 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.

Those readers who have been following the map so far will immediately recognize that the southern industrial zone has been in the Marine rear for weeks. This "withdrawal" could just as well be a redeployment of units to the northern boundary of the city or preparation for a cross-river assault. But it might be a real withdrawal all the same for there are real dangers to assaulting the 'Golan'. The defended area is now small enough for the enemy to have turned it into a wonderland of explosive devices. The fairly light construction of homes within the slum means the walls are principally an obstruction to sight rather than to fragments and bullets. Combat in 'Golan' will be like a shootout in a cardboard maze. Enemy machinegunners can fire through walls or blast fragments right across fragile homes at advancing Marines.

But the physical fragility of the enemy redoubt may perhaps is the single reason the USMC might not need to assault the area at all, except in its most final, weakened stages. The battle for this urban maze will be largely a battle for line of sight as it probably has been from the beginning. The press reportage of USMC sniper-spotter teams has mentioned but not emphasized the fact that they possess imaging devices, comms and computers (and probably range finders) apart from their rifles. Their most damaging function has perhaps not been shooting (although that has been bad enough) as much as observation. One can almost imagine enemy movements being correlated from several observers onto a very detailed intel map. The physical characteristics of Fallujah, but especially the lightly built 'Golan' means that enemy safety depends utterly on visual concealment, not reinforced concrete fortification. Once an enemy position is known, it is extremely vulnerable to high angle downward attack. There is nothing between a Jihadi unit and an AC-130's Gatling guns except a sheet of galvanized iron roofing: he is dead once his position is known. I will venture to speculate that a subsidiary goal of the limited air strikes has been to open fields of view to observers.

That fact makes it very desirable for the US to encourage surrenders, both civilian and otherwise, because of the information they can provide, besides getting them out of the way. This goes a long way toward explaining why the Jihadis have chosen to keep their wounded in the fetid confines of the slum rather than allow them to be treated in a Fallujah hospital. They fear what may be revealed under questioning. But the dynamics of the siege mean that US will continue to gain the upper hand until a breaking point is reached. In a struggle in which visual information is paramount, the US will continue to throw a curtain of blackness over the enemy even as it enhances its own acuity. As the batteries of the enemy night vision equipment and radios drain out or are lost, the defense will grow ever more blind. The moon will begin to wane in 10 days and the hopes of the Jihadis with it.

Thrust and Parry

A very poorly written CNN dispatch describes an attempt by Marines to maneuver forces into Fallujah to gain positional advantage on the defenders. 

The Marines went and occupied two buildings. They were occupying those so that they could look out for suspected Iraqi insurgents. Snipers posed some positions on the other side and deeper into the city. They holed up in those buildings for about four or five hours. Then in the words of one Marine, "All hell broke loose." Iraqi insurgents had massed around the two buildings occupied by Marines, and they opened fire with mortars, with rockets, with automatic weapons fire. While we were inside that building, we saw rockets smashing into the sides of the buildings, rockets smashing through the windows.

We heard mortar rounds landing nearby, exploding and setting neighboring buildings on fire. After about an hour and a half, the Marine commander gave the order for his troops to pull back, and that they did with the help of two U.S. tanks that were also called in to assist. The Marines withdrew from two alleys and returned to one section of their base.

The firefight, though, continued for a good two hours after that. [There were] very heavy exchanges of gunfire; U.S. Marine Cobra attack helicopters were called in. They were firing off missiles, and also we're told a mortar platoon from further back in the rear was firing off 8-millimeter mortars, and those impacted in a number of buildings behind us, setting them on fire and sending plumes of black smoke into the air. Also, there was a mosque ... here; it had a minaret 50 to 60 feet high. Marine commanders say they were taking sniper fire from that minaret. That minaret has now been leveled by U.S. military ordnance, missiles and mortars. There's nothing left at all of that minaret. ...

Although the reader may shake his head at the "8-millimeter mortars" -- smaller than pistol caliber, this operation sounds much very similar to one mounted a few days previously, described in Darrin Mortensen's much more coherent account in the North County Times, though this time with less successful results.

The Marines, members of Camp Pendleton's Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, sneaked out of the houses they've occupied for nearly three weeks at 1 a.m. Saturday. They slowly and quietly crept south house to house toward a mosque where gunmen gather almost daily to lead attacks against American troops. They said their mission was originally a probe ---- a secret move behind enemy lines to check out their defenses and identify enemy positions as targets for a possible Marine offensive.

On Saturday, after inching their way through buildings and homes full of broken glass and household goods scattered on the floors after weeks of warfare, the Marines set in near the mosque and waited all day until almost dark. "It was ghostly," said Cpl. Christopher Ebert, 21, of Forest City, N.C., after he and the others arrived back in their defensive position together and safe Saturday night. "We only had about three hours to go and then these six guys showed up." After the six armed men entered the mosque, the Marines radioed what they saw to Fox Company commander Capt. Kyle Stoddard, who watched the mosque from atop a building some 400 yards away. Moments later, at 7:10 p.m., Stoddard and others listened to the burst of fire as the insurgents ran out and Marines opened fire at close range. The deadly ambush  was over in an instant. "We got 'em!" Jamison yelled. "They're dead!" 

The tank and the other squad battled back a hasty counterattack from the southeast. Insurgents fired mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and drove three vehicles down the street with gunmen firing rifles at the Marines. Two of the vehicles were disabled, and Marines said they believed their occupants were dead or wounded. Within an hour, the insurgents seemed defeated or had fled the area. The Marines said they then searched the mosque, searched the bodies, and lined them up in the street before they beat an uncontested retreat back to their positions in the north.

In both cases the Marines moved into positions under cover of darkness. In the first case, the Marines ambushed an anticoalition force before being subjected to a heavy counterattack, which they likewise defeated. In the more recent case, the Marine position was discovered and attacked. In both cases, the Marines had armor and supporting fires ready to punish the counterattack and cover a planned withdrawal. The enemy defense was in both instances based on mobile tactics, with coordinated defensive actions by teams equipped with machineguns and RPGs. Mortensen described what may have been the same battle reported by CNN.

Two Marines were killed and at least 13 more wounded in Fallujah on Monday in a bloody street battle fought close enough that the combatants tossed grenades and fired pistols at each other, officials said. ... The battle began as several recent battles have: after Marines left their lines to move deeper into the city. According to 1st Sgt. Bill Skiles, the senior noncommissioned officer of Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, a platoon of about 40 Marines advanced about 200 yards beyond their lines before dawn Monday to clear buildings of snipers. After the troops sneaked into their positions, the insurgents surrounded them on three sides, Skiles said, and opened fire on the houses in which the Marines were hiding, getting close enough to toss grenades through the windows.

He said the Marines were also pinned down by rebel snipers shooting from several buildings, including a nearby mosque that was later demolished by tank fire. "They waited a few hours after we went in and then they attacked," said a stunned and angry Skiles several hours after the fighting Monday, staring off and shaking his head slowly from side to side as he repeated his words: "They waited, and then they attacked." Duty and Skiles said most of the Marines killed or wounded Monday were hit with shrapnel from grenades tossed by rebels into open windows. At least two of the Marines were also shot, said Duty, whose boots were black with the blood of his comrades as he recounted the fight. Duty said he had to fire his pistol at gunmen just to get into the building where Marines lay bleeding, still fighting off insurgents, some of whom were only 10 yards away.

In terms of the number of men involved, Marine casualties were heavy, with 2 KIA and 13 wounded out of 40. The enemy adapted to the probing tactics by mounting even heavier mobile counterattacks, probably in company plus strength, supported by sniper fire. Both the Marine attack and the enemy defense have followed the anticipated pattern.

The Marines will probably exploit the uncoverable yardage of Fallujah to feint from several directions, essentially forcing the defense to continuously run around within the perimeter. They can feint continuously, especially during the hours of darkness. Anyone who has experienced running around nighttime streets knows that unit cohesion will gradually evaporate and bits of equipment will be mislaid. And then there may be long-range fire from American assets. Because the Marines have the initiative, they can enforce a rest plan while Anti-coalition forces cannot. A semi-mobile Grozny style defense will probably not work in Fallujah; it will wear out against a cunning, fencing Marine Corps. At some point, the enemy will feel the need to pull into a continuously defended, but shrunken perimeter.

Mortensen's earlier story indicated the Marines were returning to positions north; since it is known that they already hold positions south it seems clear that the enemy is now squeezed from two sides and is probably contained in the northeast corner of Fallujah, an area full of meandering streets and mosques. The enemy would prefer a linear American advance, hoping as in the case of Jenin, to mine buildings and blow them up as Americans occupy them. Not wanting to oblige, the USMC is mounting relatively small probes forcing the enemy to react. The current Marine strategy is ripping up the mobile defense. The company plus unit which attacked the platoon is probably no more. However, it will not be long before the enemy must retreat into a continuous perimeter, as his manpower dwindles to the point where a mobile defense is no longer viable. The remaining enemy forces are probably in the battalion plus range. And then the ghost of the Shuri line will rear up, in which there were no other option but to go directly into the teeth of the defense. The density of the defense displayed in the recent encounter may mean that time is near.

The important thing to know now, and Marine commanders are probably working to find out, is where the enemy plans his last stand. When that is prepared, the enemy will probably abandon most of the territory he now holds and collapse his remaining manpower into the stronghold. During that withdrawal he will be somewhat vulnerable, although the presence of civilians frustratingly precludes any kind of aggressive pursuit even when the retreat is underway. There, in that redoubt, he will present the whole panoply of mined buildings, IEDs, strongpoints, spider-holes and pillboxes, all in continous and interlocking line. Then there will be nothing for it but to reduce it by overwhelming fire.

The analogy of the Shuri may be especially apt, since it was on Okinawa that a large number of civilians were caught in the battle and whole families jumped from cliffs in obedience to the dictates of their Emperor rather than surrender. From the fighting up till now, it also seems likely that the enemy at Fallujah, probably stiffened by hard core jihadis, will fight to the last like Imperial Japanese Army and will take as many civilians as possible with them. It was probably in anticipation of this that the US has made special efforts to create a negotiation process. Although much maligned, the links with community elders is probably the only hope for averting a large number of potential civilian deaths.

In the end it is possible that the US will have the worst of both worlds. It lost the opportunity to "bag" large numbers of the enemy when it slowed down the pace of operations on Fallujah, allowing them a slower tempo to adjust their lines. And in the end, it may have to inflict hundreds or thousands of civilian deaths as the Jihadis fight to the last. But in exchange, the slowdown destroyed the political momentum of those who had hoped to provoke a widespread insurgency all over Iraq and provided an opportunity for thousands of civilians to move into areas of the city which have been unaffected by the fighting. History will tell whether the gamble was worth it. But now that the US has chosen a slow tempo of attack, with all its drawbacks, it may fairly claim all its benefits in compensation. Because the jihadi enemy has no offensive capability left, the US can even enlist starvation as a siege weapon or resort to hostage rescue tactics such lacing the water supply with emetics or using see-through-the-wall technologies in the final stages to whittle the enemy down.

In the terrible calculus of urban warfare, in which thousands of lives have historically been expended for negligible yardage, the USMC has done very well, despite the complications of the campaign. (At Jenin the IDF lost 23 men for 47 enemy in a much smaller area. The total enemy force was estimated at 250 and did not have the mortars, machineguns and even anti-aircraft weapons present in Fallujah.) The enemy has boasted that he will repel the Marines like the Sixth Army at Stalingrad  -- no chance of that -- but the final and hardest chapters remain to be written.

Fallujah Update

An AC-130 struck two sites in Fallujah about 150 meters apart resulting in secondary explosions. It is possible that the USMC, after probing consecutively, has thrown the enemy a curve ball and attacked the mustering sites where the Jihadis were briefing and arming their mobile task groups for the night, the locations deduced from movement patterns gleaned from previous engagements. The other possibility is that the USMC has identified preparations for the final redoubt and struck at their magazines. The creation of a continuous enemy line would require consolidating munitions, especially explosives, into the defensive area to wire it up completely. The distance of 150 meters between attack points is consistent with a defensive area about 300 yards square. The loss of munitions is irreplaceable to the enemy and probably reduces their effectiveness as much as attrition in men.

If the Marines follow up, the enemy may be forced to continue a plan now in shambles right over a cliff. Hence, it is possible the enemy will develop a sudden appetite for a truce to gain time to rebuild their scattered positions. Alternatively the Marines themselves could ease up the tempo, handing the enemy another unexpected change of pace, to haul more civilians out of the area and snipe at the stragglers as they regroup. Either that or launch more and possibly multidirectional probes. The enemy has no good moves left, only the evil choices of continuing a mobile defense with dwindling numbers and weapons or consolidation in a bastion with much a much reduced magazine capacity. Of course, the trapped men are probably hoping for a diversionary attack from their cohorts in the rest of the Sunni triangle, but that is a forlorn expectation. Killing those four Blackwater contractors was an expensive proposition.

The Ceasefire Begins

When the Marines began encircling Fallujah the Belmont Club remarked that the the last historical parallel was the the showdown between Blackjack Pershing and the Moros at Bud Bagsak. That analogy may be appropriate in more ways than one. One overlooked aspect of Pershing's Bud Bagsak campaign was that it included the Philippine Scouts, a unit consisting of both Filipinos and Americans in the engagement. If one looks at this painting commemorating Bud Bagsak (ironically available from the an Islamic terrorist website) one will see the depiction of a Filipino Scout in khaki bayonet fighting a kris-wielding Jihadi beside an American who fires his .45 automatic in one of its first combat employments. Those with a taste for history will recall that Scouts, whose motto was "Anywhere, Anytime" would go on to win the Medal of Honor against the Moros and the formation would fight alongside US divisions in Bataan, where they held out against the Imperial Japanese Army for nearly six months when pure British formations in Malaya collapsed in weeks. Three would win the Medal of Honor there, including Jose Calugas.

The Boston Globe is reporting that US Marines will begin joint patrols with Iraqis in Fallujah as part of a new ceasefire attempt in that city. More likely, it will be the first instance of US and Iraqi troops going into combat together.

FALLUJAH, Iraq -- As US officials grappled with whether to attack this insurgent stronghold, US and Iraqi negotiations announced yesterday that US Marines will start joint patrols with Iraqi police and civil defense forces in Fallujah on Tuesday morning. ... After Tuesday, anyone carrying a weapon openly ''will be considered hostile and will be dealt with accordingly," Ambassador Richard Jones, the second-highest US civilian official in Iraq, said after the negotiations at the Marine base here.

The new "ceasefire", coming after consultations by the President, and the command decision to start the patrols involving Abizaid, Sanchez and Bremer, indicates a willingness to clean up Fallujah despite any consequences in conjunction with Iraqi forces.

The joint police patrols seemed a riskier strategy, designed to put an Iraqi face on security. It is unclear whether Fallujah residents will be any more welcoming this week to police than in the past, when police have been routinely attacked. That's one reason for the rule against carrying guns, said Jones, but another is to reassure Iraqis whose biggest concern is security.

He said he hoped the ban on carrying weapons would soon apply across Iraq, where nearly every family has a weapon. ''I don't care if they have them in their houses," he said. ''The problem is carrying them in the streets." About 500 police and members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps have reported for duty in the past week, US officials said. About half the police are from Ramadi, the provincial capital and a traditional political rival of Fallujah's.

It's unclear whether the recruits have any experience, Coleman said. ''I didn't ask that question very hard. I just said, 'Bring people with good character.' " Jones added, ''We'll see how many show up."

It atmospherically recalls Pershing, greeting newly arrived officers and sizing them up for toughness, before putting them on a steam launch to Jolo with a month's pay, a detachment of Scouts and the promise that the launch would be back to collect whoever survived. The Marines snipers may now have open season on any armed men in the Fallujah streets, where Americans and Iraqis of  'good character' will find it tested as never before. The Iraqi nation will be born or fail in Fallujah, but if they succeed, the words "Anywhere, Anytime" will be translated into Arabic.

The Eye in the Sky

Whether or not the President decides to attack the holdouts in Fallujah, the next months will see a gradual increase to US military capability in the shape of armed UAVs. One system specifically tailored for Iraq is the Viper Strike-Hunter combination. The Hunter UAV is a long endurance, fairly high altitude platform which has been extensively used in Iraq. It is able to remain overhead unseen by the ground observer for hours. With the Viper-Strike munition and others like it, the armed UAV solves the time-lag problem in air targeting.

Right now the ability to “park” a UAV over a trouble spot is one of the systems’ greatest advantages, said Dyke Weatherington – deputy of the UAV planning task force in the defense secretary’s office – in a recent interview. “These systems ... park over the bad guys, watch them continually, never give them a break from (our monitoring) their activities and severely limit their ability to mount an effective threat,” he said. ... "operators would see targets of opportunity with UAVs but have to call in manned aircraft to attack them, Weatherington said. “In many cases, we either couldn’t get strikes to the target in time or the manned aircraft couldn’t find that target the UAV had found,” he said.

By arming the UAV the ability to "park" over the the enemy and destroy him becomes fused into a single platform. US forces, seeking to improve on the Apache-Hellfire combination that Israel has used to target the Hamas leadership, adopted the Viper Strike glide weapon because it can drop nearly straight down silently, making it ideal for use in mountainous areas and urban canyons.

Another class of armed UAV aimed particularly at patrolling roads and counter-ambushing forces which mine roadways is the Dragonfly-Metal Storm combination. The Dragonfly airframe is extremely small, a UFO-like object the size of motorcycle and is of very advanced design that allows it to deploy like a helicopter yet range out like fixed wing. But it will carry a multibarreled 40 mm Metal Storm grenade launcher.

The Dragonfly DP-4X is a man-portable, remotely controlled, Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) UAV that is approximately 85.5 inches long, 32 inches wide, 44 inches high, has a rotor span of 118.5 inches, and weighs approximately 140 pounds. ... Dragonfly Pictures Inc. chief executive officer, Mr. Michael Piasecki, said the integration of Metal Storm's unique, lightweight, electronic, multi-shot weapon system complemented DPI's 'systems' approach in preparing the new Dragonfly DP-4X as a weaponized UAV helicopter.

The Metal Storm system is an Australian designed weapon which consists of stacked rounds in a set of barrels which can be fired electronically at unbelievable rates. A system like the Dragonfly might be armed with a two barrel launcher with eight 40 mm rounds (I'm guessing here) all of which could be fired in a fraction of a second. It could be all over for an enemy unit before they even react.

But airframes and guns are not as impressive as developments in sensors and software. The US is deploying the 21st century equivalent of the Civil War balloon to Baghdad. The Martin-Lockheed Aerostat will stay aloft continuously, and it opens the possibility of "replaying" traffic movements from a God's eye point of view. Combining sensors like synthetic aperture array radar and persistent platforms will increase the risks of mortaring targets in Baghdad dramatically. The real breakthroughs could be in software. There have been reports that recognition software has advanced to the point where it can recognize individual faces from the air. This, from Aviation Now (hat tip: The UAV Blog):

Intrigued by the possible applications to UAV surveillance video, the UAVB conducted a test last year at Eglin using streaming video from a Pointer UAV. A captain's face was entered into the computer as a search item, and the UAV was launched. "It starts beeping on this clump of trees," Cook said. "And they had to drive the UAV about another two miles before they could get close enough [to see] there was a vehicle underneath the trees." The captain whose face had been loaded into the computer was sitting in his truck eating lunch. "It found his face through the trees, through the windscreen, in the shadows of the trees, and we went, 'Wow, we need to explore this,'" Cook said.

Dubbed DIVOT (Digital Imagery and Video Object Tracking), the software later was put to work on pre-recorded video taken by a Predator UAV in Iraq. The system was provided with imagery of certain objects, then told to identify them in another video. "The scene is a flat desert with some black clumps on it," Cook said. "And when the Predator is about 10 miles away, it starts beeping on one of the clumps. And it takes probably five minutes for the Predator to fly close enough where you can finally make out with the human eye that it's even [an object], let alone the one that we told it to find."

Even current systems are probably unbearable to anticoalition forces. On April 24, a rocket attack was directed against Taji Airforce base, killing 5 Americans, suggesting an effort to strike back at the tormenting Eyes in the Sky. In one sense, the prodigious American technological engine assures a near chronic imbalance between US military capability, which has increased exponentially and the slow, uncertain and labor intensive process of political transformation. The contemptuous ease with which US Marines ambushed and killed 11 insurgents in Fallujah without resort to any wonder weapons illustrates a hidden peril in the Iraqi campaign. It is sometimes observed that allies fighting alongside US troops, and the Iraqi police may be no exception, develop a dependence on the American way of war without the American means. One can sympathize on a certain level, with an Iraqi policeman who hesitates at entering a Fallujah 'mosque' to serve a warrant, at considerable danger to himself, when the incomprehensible Americans could demolish it in a second were they not perplexingly constrained by rules he could never understand. It also creates the temptation in this politico-military theater to reduce politics to the junior partner of the very capable military. The interesting thing about recent US operations in Iraq has been the incorporation of explicitly political elements into the tactical campaign itself.

U.S. officials are still pursuing two other efforts to defuse the crisis short of house-to-house urban combat. On one hand, they are offering millions of dollars to help rebuild the city in an effort to coax Iraqis to join them in disarming the insurgents and policing the city. On the other, they are conducting selective strikes aimed at thinning the ranks of the insurgents. Early Saturday, Marines called in AC-130 "Spectre" gunships and killed about 30 Arabs at an encampment along the Euphrates River after two people were spotted setting up a mortar.

"I can rubble that city and reduce it to crushed stone and walk over it quickly. But that is not the ideal, it may be the worst thing to do," said Col. John Coleman, chief of staff of the 30,000-strong 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, in charge of military operations across Anbar province, where Fallujah is located. "I don't want to be owning Fallujah with some Marines downtown who are getting potshots everyday because we took no Iraqis with us."

This fusion of politics and warfare, long forgotten by modern armies, is a process that would be strangely familiar to Julius Caesar and the emperor-generals of the ancient world who treated with brigands and conquered chieftains, laying and raising sieges, threatening destruction or granting clemency, offering bribes and accepting service. And it is strangely emblematic of the current struggle -- the camels, the sand, and the antedeluvian hatreds -- resolving themselves beneath a constellation of American robotic aircraft.

The Hammett Citation

Reader RH has located the Dashiell Hammett lines that I quoted, with errors, from memory. They are from a Sam Spade story entitled "Too Many Have Lived". It's a verse from a book Spade finds in a prospective client's house. The poem was written by a man Spade his hired to find. The correct verses are:

To many have lived 
As we live 
For our lives to be 
Proof of our living. 

Too many have died 
As we die 
For their deaths to be 
Proof of our dying.

In Hammett's verse, the certitudes of life and death exchange places. The detective goes down the fog-curtained "mean streets" of San Francisco to find his client as much as himself. There, in the labyrinth of lunch counters, frosted-glass fronted offices and walk-up apartments with men in undershirts playing cards, guns on the table, Sam Spade keeps looking for something he isn't letting on. And yeah, why not? In the days when I could still cycle a century, I'd go up into the hills and climb them, rank on rank, until at the end of a dirt road perched on a high ridgeline with nothing but another blue line of mountains across the wide valley. Maybe that was the moment I was thinking of when I heard of Tillman's death, looking out at the far horizon and asking 'Yeah, why not?'. I think we have all had such thoughts, but Tillman went the distance.

Pat Tillman RIP

We are affected by the deaths of heroes not because we know them, but because we know ourselves. Millions who never knew Pat Tillman, what he wore or drank or drove, will want to believe they could not as he did, walk away from a small fortune to face pain and death to defend his home and country. Yet that is not the truth. A hero in the shroud of mortality reminds us that we are separated only by our capacity to dare.

Too many have lived as we have lived
for our lives to be worth the living.
Too many have died as we will die
for our deaths to be worth the dying.
-- Dashiell Hammett (from memory. I cannot find the source.)

No More Groupement Mobile 100s

In 1954 a motorized infantry regiment consisting of 3 battalions of crack French soldiery, led by highly experienced officers and NCOs, equipped with light armor, artillery and an abundance of automatic weapons was virtually annihilated in the Vietnamese Central Highlands. The French column had been expecting an ambush. They had light spotter aircraft overhead. Air support was on call. Where action was expected, they dismounted infantry to scout ahead. Before undertaking the road march, the French had divided their weapons so that each battalion was a miniature combined arms unit, ready to fight in a perimeter. But it only made things worse. Groupement Mobile 100 was destroyed by the 803rd Vietminh regiment. It was one of the final blows in a disastrous campaign which cost the French more than 170,000 troops and the loss of their Indochinese possessions. This was the legacy of Vietnam.

Across the world in North Africa, the French faced another foe and met it with different methods. Unlike the Vietnamese, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) fought in the Arab way. In place of conventional maneuver they used political warfare and terrorism, often directed against the Algerians themselves, inflicting a kind of self-mutilation that would stop only when their insistent demands were met. Indeed, large scale French intervention was prompted by the FLN massacre of 123 civilians at Philippeville. The French, for their part, responded by fighting an intelligence war, repeatedly striking at the leadership structures of the FLN. Amazingly, they broke the FLN and forced it to seek sanctuary in Tunisia and Morocco. But although it had won a military victory, the FLN continued to deny Algeria any degree of stability. Finally a Charles de Gaulle seeking the French presidency struck a deal and evacuated Algeria. French military losses exceeded 18,000. The FLN had killed 12,000 -- nearly as many of their own as French soldiers -- in internal purges. Nearly 80,000 noncombatants died and France fled.

A generation obsessed with Vietnam was blind to the fact that the Algerian war provided a far more powerful model of offensive action against the West than Indochina. It was always impossible for Giap to transport his coolies and NVA regiments overseas, but it was clearly feasible, indeed only a matter of time before the Arabs extended their operations overseas. And extend it they did. The methods of assassination, terrorism, intimidation and political warfare rapidly became internationalized, reaching Europe as early as 1972 during the Munich Olympics. It took easy root in the secret societies of the Middle East and spread outward from there. When radical Islamism found its confidence in Afghanistan and its money in Saudi Arabia, it found its weapon in terrorism: the Arab Way of War. From the very beginning the plan of campaign was never strictly military. It was always politico-military, tuned to the internal weaknesses of the Western enemy. The French had been understandably evicted from Indochina by being militarily beaten by the Vietnamese. But the French had been ousted from Algeria -- part of Metropolitan France -- despite beating the FLN; that was the lesson and legacy of Algeria.

Taken in this context Osama Bin Laden can be forgiven for believing that the defensive phase of Islam's war against the West has long ended. He considered it to be in its final offensive stages, so far advanced that a strike against New York City, the Pentagon and White House was perhaps overdue. Osama draws confidence from his belief that the new Arab Way of War has never been defeated, not in Algeria, Soviet Afghanistan nor in Somalia. The possible withdrawal of Honduras, the Dominican Republic and perhaps Thailand from Iraq truly shows the power of his methods. Most conventional military establishments are simply incapable of surviving on the terrorist battlefield, their armed men no better than civilians. But the withdrawals solve nothing. Radical Islamists know there is no reason in principle why they cannot follow retreating European forces to their home ground and rout them there, where they will if anything be more hamstrung, using the immense Islamic immigrant communities as their base. For the first time in 600 years, Western Europe stands before an Oriental enemy it cannot defeat on the battlefield. The commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, Lt. General John Vines contrasted the GWOT to Vietnam. This, he says, is a "national war for our survival as a nation". Europe knows this too but are subconsciously already beaten.

The sole obstacles to the wave of darkness are the Anglosphere -- and ironically for the Europeans -- Israel. The strongest proof against the irresistibility of terrorism is Israel, which is often dented, but never seriously hurt by Arab Way of warfare. Indeed, at each clash the terrorists whine at being unfairly worsted because the Israelis have shown themselves capable of dealing out punishment an order of magnitude greater than they suffer. Israel is particularly irksome because it diminishes the psychological aura the Islamists work so hard to achieve. How can terrorism plausibly defeat America if it cannot beat a handful of Jews? And America too, is a deadly enemy. Already militarily invincible and capable of immense adaptation, it has already solved the military problems the French faced in Vietnam. Never again can a regimental force be marshaled against an American unit, like NVA Regiment 803. Now America is facing the challenge of a modern Algeria, the prototypical terrorist war. Waging a covert war across the globe, America is likely to succeed, like the French, in destroying the terrorist leadership cadres. Terrorism remains confident that America will be politically defeated though even here doubt grows, because America is also groping for a model of political warfare to use against its enemies. But maybe Osama is right. The Democratic Party continues to conflate one challenge with the other; to see in Iraq another Vietnam; and to offer up in Kerry not a John Kennedy but another Charles de Gaulle.

Attrition

The Coalition may resume operations in Fallujah in "days not weeks", following a ceasefire that could more aptly be called a slowdown as each side repositioned itself. The anti-coalition forces responded to a call for disarmament by turning in a load of broken weapons and firing a rocket propelled grenade into the collection center set up to receive arms. The truce had been more honored in the breach than in the observance, with enemy forces consolidating within the town and launching attacks from mosques and the Marines responding with fixed wing, helicopters and snipers. In the parallel war of press releases, the Islamists have responded to the recent charges by the coalition that they have been using ambulances and mosques for military purposes by declaring these have been targeted directly.

The allies have brought more Iraqi security personnel into the fight while anticoalition forces have responded by a further campaign of intimidation against Iraqi police, recently killing forty at 3 police stations with bombs. US forces have attempted to crack down on the Sadr's forces outside of the holy cities and anticoalition forces outside Najaf proper.

In the 1st Infantry Division's north-central area, Big Red One soldiers conducted a series of raids against safe houses near Balad, used by militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Kimmitt said. The raids resulted in the detention of six targeted individuals and 15 other men. The 1st Cavalry Division's Task Force Baghdad captured 18 enemy personnel and confiscated a large amount of ammunition over the past 24 hours. In the western zone, three attacks took place against coalition and Iraqi security forces. Kimmitt said coalition forces continue to see anti-coalition forces fighting from fortified positions, misusing mosques as weapons storage sites and using them as command and control nodes. Outside Fallujah, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force continues aggressive patrols and offensive operations outside Fallujah. The Marines had to halt the movement of humanitarian assistance into Fallujah due to attacks on coalition forces. They have since resumed, military officials in Baghdad said.

Possibly the most damaging weapon employed against the Fallujah insurgents has been the the disruption caused by the fighting and the "truce". Bits and Pieces noted that Fallujah waxed on the smuggling trade occasioned by the decades long sanctions. It has remained a smuggler's haven on the route to Syria largely because of its position as a nexus of highways and its position as a crossing on the Euphrates. The closure of the western highways from Baghdad probably one reason why the community "elders" have been urging the insurgents to lay down their arms. The enemy has attempted to break the containment of Najaf and Fallujah by launching diversionary atrocities elsewhere, a standard Islamic tactic worldwide, the largest being a multiple car bombing in Basra, which led to the death of more than 50 Iraqis, including schoolchildren. Sadr's agitators have blamed the blasts on British missiles.

Yet if the atmospherics are indicative, the US does not seem to want a new round of high intensity fighting in Iraq. From a statistical point of view, the current situation represents a return to November, 2003. In retrospect, the situation then was as bad, given what we know now, only not as obvious. Even then, the US was in a battlefield shaping mode, standing off from the principal hotbeds of Iraqi trouble. It had never entered Fallujah or Najaf in force, contenting itself to building up Iraqi security forces and maintaining the security over the road network and key infrastructure. A secret war with Syria was already under way on the border, probably mirrored by a similar one at the Iranian crossings. But the boils had never been lanced nor may they be in the near future. For now the movement is positional. 

Iraq is in its way a microcosm of the the unresolved strategic issues in the larger GWOT -- the role of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Pakistan -- in the context of our changing international alliances. The recent but under-reported engagements between "our" Saudis and Jordanians and the enemy has provoked a massive response. Both the Jordanian and Saudi security establishments have been attacked with huge bombs, including an attempt with VX gas. A recently concluded offensive against the Al Qaeda in Pakistani tribal areas is part of this pattern. There is no essential difference between the attacks on the Jordanian intelligence headquarters and an isolated Iraqi police station except scale. The principles are the same. The search for an "end point" in Iraq simply mirrors the global ebb and flow of the fight. We bear the Ring though we do not know the way.

Bits and Pieces

Sorry about the light posting today.

Just a few interesting tidbits. This Global Security has an archival link to an Iraqi yellowcake program (uranium enrichment) which was located at Al-Qaim, Iraq. Because the map on the site doesn't show international boundaries, it was not until the recent border battles between the Marines and a battalion sized force of uniformed Jihadis and the revelation that America had been fighting a secret war against infiltrators on the border that I realized that these yellowcake refining facilities were right on the Syrian frontier. I am now beginning to understand why David Kay believed that WMDs may have been shipped to Syria in the lead up to OIF. With the recent VX gas attempts against Jordan, whose provenance is suspected to be Syrian, the plot thickens indeed.

Of a piece is this backgrounder of Fallujah from the Department of Defense. Apparently, the town is an artificial nest of criminals almost entirely created by the sanctions policy which the US had pursued in the 1990s and bloated by the UN "Oil for Food" program. Here's an excerpt, but follow the link to read the whole thing.

While Iraq is laced with antiquities, Fallujah isn't one of them. Just after World War II, the population of the town was around 10,000. The city, about 40 miles west of Baghdad, is on the edge of the desert, and now has about 300,000 citizens. It is a dry and arid landscape, made productive only because of extensive irrigation from the nearby Euphrates River. It was, however, located on the main routes into Jordan and Syria. And in crime, as in real estate, location is everything. The city was on the main route for smugglers, and sheltered a number of very successful crime lords. The area is poor, and the villages surrounding the city still shelter subsistence farmers and their families. The smugglers were a source of money – even wealth – for those in the region. Even government officials sheltered the smugglers, DoD officials said.

When Saddam Hussein took power in 1979, the city received a boost. Many of the people in Fallujah supported Saddam, and many of his closest advisors, highest- ranking military officers and high-ranking members of the Baath Party came from Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and other areas in the center of the Sunni Triangle. Arab tribes in and around the city also owed fealty to Saddam and became bastions of the regime. Hussein returned the favor by building factories in the city and providing jobs for his chosen people. Fallujah took a number of hits in the first Gulf War. News reports indicate that in one instance, a U.S. bomber tried to take out Fallujah's bridge over the Euphrates. The bomb missed and allegedly killed 200 Iraqis in the city market. Following the Gulf War, the city became an even larger smuggling center, this time with government encouragement, officials said. Saddam encouraged the smugglers to skirt the U.N.-imposed sanctions on Iraq. Since the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, former regime supporters have allied themselves with foreign fighters who seem to be entering Iraq via Syria, officials said. U.S. officials suspect that members of al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam have cells in the city. Other terror groups have allied themselves with former regime elements and Sunni extremists, making for a very volatile mix.

To an almost literal degree the current fighting in Iraq is the direct consequence of catastrophic policies of the 1990s and to some extent, the failures of the post 9/11 response. It is clear now that Saddam Hussein and his allies never stopped fighting after Desert Storm, they simply continued the offensive by other and covert means. Worse, they funded the offensive from the very sanctions process that the "international community" put in place. Then the prolonged United Nations inspection process, which was the pride and joy of Hans Blix, may have provided the window of opportunity for Iraq to simply skip the yellowcake and the VX over the border.

A Few Laughs

Things have gotten a little too heavy of late, so its over to a Saudi blogger who is a barrel of laughs. The Religious Policeman talks about the social stresses caused by cellular phones. A sample of his stories:

Mobile phones are legal. Camera phones are not. OK, you say, but camera phones are a minority, what's the problem?

The problem is the march of technology. Ten years ago, PC's had floppy discs and big cubic screens; now CD-RW and flatscreens are becoming the norm. In 5 to 10 years time, all phones will be camera phones, it'll be the standard. So will the muttawa try and ban all phones in Saudi Arabia? It'd be like trying to take an American's gun, or an Englishman's dog. Arabs in general, and Saudis in particular, live for their mobile phones, in a way that other parts of the world would not understand. And we are physically incapable of ignoring our phone when it rings.

Let me illustrate with 3 incidents from the last 4 weeks.

1. My wife and I went out for dinner in the Italian restaurant in the Sheraton. At one point I looked across at a booth where another Saudi couple were holding an animated conversation. However they didn't quite seem "in sync". That's because they were each talking to two other people on their phones.

2. A Saudi was giving a presentation at my place of employment. Screen, PC projector, Powerpoint, the whole thing. Then his phone rang. He didn't switch it off, he answered it. Just as well, it was his Mother! We sat listening for 5 minutes while he explained why he'd not been to see her for two days. I have to say, some of his excuses were ingenious, I'll use them myself sometime. Finally he resumed his presentation, without an apology.

3. I have an Arab (non-Saudi) colleague who is divorced and a womaniser. He actually goes out in Riyadh in an evening and picks up women. How? I haven't a clue, but it's very risky, to say the least. Anyway one lunchtime I had to get in touch with him urgently, so I called his mobile. After 4 rings it answered. The person at the other end of the line was obviously having trouble getting his breath; in fact it sounded like a terminal asthma attack. All I could hear was gasping and wheezing. Then I realized what the "problem" was, asked him to call me back, and quickly put the phone down. I was clearly more embarrassed than he was.

So that's an idea of the priority that we attach to our phones. And when the day dawns that all phones are camera phones, and the Muttawa try to confiscate them, that'll be the day that the revolution starts. You heard it on this blog first.

Zeyad over at Healing Iraq has a review of new Arab blogs. There's one he calls "brainwashed but intelligent". Yet another has devoted itself to the Middle Eastern version of the pop idol contest. It has got everything but the gong and the hook that pulls the disqualified contestant offstage.

The most dangerous thing about the Internet from the point of view of those who would create a totalitarian or theocratic state is that it allows people to see others as men -- who may disagree, or who on reflection decide to fight -- but men nonetheless. The average person is never wholly unaware, as some academics are, of the humanity of other people. Nor is the average person wholly indifferent to concrete evil and imminent danger. Both are real and ancient things, ignored by those who live in a bubble of artificial laughter and contrived wit, but alive to those who meet them in the everyday. The Los Angeles Times article on Marine Corps snipers drives home how these marksmen, who live closer to the enemy than the ethereal postmodernist beings who jeer them, can never seek solace in abstractions. They must glimpse the faces of those they are about to shoot, the horror and necessity of the act combining in the single pull of the trigger, doomed to live in a world of specifics: fighting identifiable evils and performing individual acts of kindness. In this strange universe an Italian rips off a hood and with a final shout proclaims himself undefeated. Todd Beamer crashes an aircraft that others might live. Chief Wiggles raises money for children whose names he knows. And somewhere in a Riyadh a Saudi makes excuses to his mother.

Only the Grand Inquisitors stand apart, disdainful alike of both kindness and human weakness, full of schemes and plots. And of their false truces and cunning offers we should have no part except to answer it with silence (as in Dostoeveky's parable) and to go get a beer.

Mainstreet Iraq 3

Reader DL links to an article at the Naval Institute (publisher of Proceedings) by Captain Peter Layton of the Royal Australian Air Force. Entitled The New Arab Way of War, the article describes a parasitic method of warfare raised to an art. 

The new Arab approach to conflict is an adaptation of the revolutionary warfare of the second half of the 20th century. Assassins using this new way of war now swim among the populations of the world. With cheap, unrestricted global air travel provided by Western technology, they can deploy wherever they wish; there are no front lines or safe rear areas. The assassins make effective use of liberal immigration policies that have permitted large numbers of Middle Eastern migrants to settle in the West. Small numbers of fellow travelers and sympathizers are distributed throughout Western nations, able to be activated to provide local support, protection, and knowledge for deploying assassins. Their command-and-control system relies on commercial communications systems and business application cryptography. This makes their control system strong, redundant, secure, and global and the assassins hard to detect, track, and target. They do not rely on their own technology even for weapons, instead using in situ civilian, commercial equipment for attack.

The new Arab way of war is parasitic. Local supporters acquire weapons and explosives, provide safe houses, arrange transportation, and steal or hire vehicles. Assassins fly in, carry out attacks, and fly out quickly, avoiding arrest. Relying completely on local sources, they can strike deep into the Western heartlands, mimicking the strategic air attacks characteristic of the West.

To those who are concerned about the 'Vietnamization' of Iraq should understand that these methods of attack, the generalized avoidance of state responsibility and the deliberate targeting of civilians are not only characteristic, but the core of this mode of Islamic warfare; that were we not there it would be here and if the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will come to the mountain.

Intentionally, there is no obvious state involvement. In his attack, the assassin dies or melts into the crowd, providing no proof of who is responsible. This tactic is meant to confuse and frustrate a legally justifiable response, as the Western paradigm based on the 1648 Peace of Westphalia assumes a state-versus-state conflict. Avoiding giving the West a defined, obvious state opponent is a rational strategy peculiar to the Arab way of war.

The Arab combat style imposes small financial burden on its parent societies, allowing long and protracted wars without inflicting economic hardship. Employing only small numbers of personnel with few needs, wars can be financed privately and seemingly remain independent of overt government support. Such entrepreneurs can be hard to trace and impossible to stop.

A major innovation of the Arab way of war is the deliberate targeting of civilians. The assassins' rhetoric makes no distinction between civilian and military targets. Attacking civilians guarantees global attention as the media, reflecting global values, has a horror of the infliction of cruelty on noncombatants. Attacking civilians is perceived by the assassins as the most direct route to influence global opinion and to affect the national will of the nations struck. Attacks usually are conducted with considerable skill, timing, expertise, and precision but are designed to kill absolutely indiscriminately. Given this, the strategic aim of attacks is hard to discern. Violence customarily is conceived as a means to an end, but the essence in this style of war seems to be inflicting terror. Pakistani Brigadier S. K. Malik notes: "Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose on him."

Captain Layton concludes that the enemy is nevertheless vulnerable to a combination of military, cultural and political warfare. As Dr. Condoleeza Rice emphasized in her testimony before the 9/11 commission, the war cannot be won by narrow police methods. Only an application of all the elements of national power will suffice. Layton continues:

The assassins inevitably are from the middle class, with their commanders among the more wealthy members of the country. The middle and wealthy classes have great power in their own societies at the local level, and more real influence with the masses than their usually despotic governments. If the majority of the middle and wealthy classes determined to no longer directly or indirectly support the Arab style of conflict, this would have a significant impact. Without an active support base, and with the possibility of their activities being compromised at any time, assassins' freedom of action would be curtailed severely.

An intense, relentless psychological campaign could be undertaken targeting the middle and wealthy classes of the Middle Eastern nations involved. Mass-marketing methods may offer insight into how to apply long-term, focused psychological pressure. The aim of such a campaign would be to make each individual perceive being held personally responsible and targeted for his or her support of the Arab way of war. The proud, strongly religious societies of the Middle East may be vulnerable to considerable self-doubt about the moral bankruptcy of their actions and their pronounced ethical decline compared to the remainder of the world. This effort would complement the other measures of defense and containment already being undertaken. Consideration also could be given to applying economic pressure, restrictions, and constraints, such as those used against South Africa during the apartheid years.

America is potentially the most powerful media power on earth but it is not at war in Iraq, except with itself. The real tragedy in Iraq is not so much that men die but that we as a society have left them to die without even naming those with whom we are at war. This, from CNN:

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- The body of a Spanish police officer who was killed in a raid on suspected Islamic terrorists was removed from its tomb Sunday night, dragged across a cemetery, doused with gasoline and burned, a Spanish police official told CNN. Police do not know who committed the crime, and an investigation is under way.

Sure.

Mainstreet Iraq 2

Ron Harris's dispatch on Marines fighting at Al-Qaim, near the Syrian border is a good point of departure to discuss the political and cultural aspects of the war in Iraq because it highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of the campaign so far. From the military point of view American performance has been incomparable. But its political and cultural aspects have been strangely stunted. Part of the problem arises from an American reluctance to wage war on the political and cultural institutions of another society.

The US military dominance of the battlefield and its ability to suppress the activities of criminal gangs has meaning only if it creates the necessary space to peaceably alter the dysfunctional aspects of Middle Eastern society which are the wellsprings of terrorism. What is the use of American military superiority if it simply provides an opportunity for Al Jazeera to spread its propaganda via the newly licit satellite dishes? The normal metrics of military success should also have their cultural analogues. The GWOT cannot be considered won until 90% of the viewership in the Middle East watches something other than Al Jazeera. The campaign in Iraq cannot be considered a success until Baghdad becomes the cultural capital of the Arab world, producing not less than 200 Arabic films a year: comedies, family dramas, stories of Arab boys who have triumphed over adversity to become doctors, scientists and explorers in outer space. Until the day when an Iraqi boy looks at an aircraft and dreams of flying to the moon instead of turning it into a 150 ton bomb the war will not be won. It must be our goal to create a system of education which would make attendance at a madrassa a stultifying experience by comparison: dreaded as a dark place of bad food,  harsh punishments and ignorant men. One of our objects must be to create a situation where a degree at the Al-Azhar Islamic university has as much relative value as a correspondence certificate from the Maharishi University. We must work for the day when the Jihadi ninja suit becomes the working attire of a carnival clown.

And the Marines cannot do this with their rifles or valor alone. The problem, as the Belmont Club has pointed out repeatedly, is the exact opposite of that posited by the Press. It is not the soldiers but the cultural force of the nation that is missing in action. We on the home front have let our soldiers down. It is a disgrace that initiatives such as Spirit of America are forthcoming only after a year into the campaign. It is nothing less than scandalous that al-Hurrah, a coalition television station, is only now taking the airwaves. Historians of the future will wonder how a cultural elite, paid on scales unseen before, could have sent 20 year old boys into battle before settling into sofas and jeering them from afar.

In truth, what US soldiers and Marines have accomplished at Qaim, a border town steeped in lawlessness and depravity, is nothing short of miracle. The fact that in recent engagements, they were alerted to danger by the behavior of the inhabitants and have been approached, however timidly, by the people with whom they cannot even converse is astounding in itself.

Although the military conflict will be won the ground, political victory in Iraq will be won on the American front. Many tens of thousands of Americans must be trained to speak Arabic and to understand the cultural terrain of the Middle East better than the inhabitants know it themselves. Only then can the business, personal and scientific relationships which are the true foundation of nation building take place. And on that day the power of the nation will stride forth to the aid of their sons who have served so long and with such little thanks.

Mainstreet Iraq

Another gem from Ron Harris, an embedded reporter with the St. Louis Post Dispatch, who asks the really tough questions:

"I don't think the American people understand that this is full-blown guerrilla warfare," he said as he stood inside one of the cramped barracks housing scores of Marines in this remote outpost. ...

Any Marine here who fought during the early stages of the invasion of Iraq will tell you that the Marines' mission now is more complex, more difficult and much more dangerous _ even before the recent upsurge in violence in Fallujah, Ramadi and Baghdad. "What you are really facing is what the Marines call `the 3-block war,'" said their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Matthew Lopez, a 40-year-old Chicago native. "On one block you can be doing humanitarian aid. In another block you could be providing security. In the third block you could be engaged in full combat. "In this environment, the transition between those three blocks happens instantaneously." ...

Their mantra is: "Marines: no better friend, no worse enemy." They hope to achieve their mission primarily through civil affairs projects and good public relations. They want to help rebuild schools, sewer systems and other infrastructure, train and equip an Iraqi police force that will be the first line of defense against crime and violence and build an Iraqi militia, called the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, that will back up the police. But to do so, they must establish security in the region, a former Saddam Hussein stronghold where U.S. failure would be good news for a number of factions:

Low-level street thugs, who have no use for law and order. Local crime lords, who have profited for years on smuggling and have held the local population in check through bribery, murder and intimidation _ with the understanding of Saddam. Corrupt politicians and tribal chiefs, many appointed by Saddam, who don't want to see their power diminished. Ideology-driven insurgents, "the Jihadists," the Marines call them, who take advantage of all the other factions to try to drive the "infidel" Americans out of their country. ...

Last year, they took over Karbala, a city in southern Iraq dominated by Shiite Muslims. The battalion provided security and reconstruction, and made tremendous strides with a more accepting population. Iraqis and Marines alike wept when they pulled out. But one month after the Marines turned over their mission there to the Bulgarian Army and returned to the United States, a suicide bomber rolled a car into Lt. Col. Lopez's former office and killed five Bulgarians and two Iraqis.

Doubt has begun to creep into the minds of even the most committed Marines as to the ultimate success of their mission. Staff Sgt. Carl Scott of Pine Bluff, Ark., a veteran of Desert Storm in 1991 and the early push into Baghdad, has heard a number of Marines voice reservations. "Most of these Marines, you can give them an M-16 and one bullet, and they'll go out there and battle to the death," said Staff Sgt. Carl Scott, 39, of Pine Bluff, Ark. "But some are beginning to question why we're here. It's not that they don't want to be here. It's just that in times like this, it's hard for them to find a purpose."

One officer put it more bluntly. "I love my country, I love the Marines and I love George Bush, but Iraq is going to collapse the moment we pull out," he said. "It doesn't matter what we do. It's time to go home." ...

Henderson turns to the interpreter. "Ask her if she will accept a gift until her brother returns," he says, and the interpreter complies. "I can't," she responds, as does everyone else on this day. Their refusal reflects the intimidation and corruption that has stymied the Marines' ambitious efforts. Numerous are the stories of Iraqi policemen who have been kidnapped and killed by those opposed to the Marines' presence.

"Civilians are being found dead and gagged, bound and shot execution-style, beaten, cut and tortured," said Fareed, a defense corps lieutenant working with the Marines to bring stability to the town of Ubaydi. One of the most disheartening failures for the Marines recently was an effort to help a local school. When they approached the principal to see how they could help, she told them that she would like to have the schoolyard paved, and a wall built. The wall was to have been built when the Army was here, but local leaders pocketed the money the Army had given them and never built the wall. Marines started in on the project, lining up contractors and planning the work. But on their fourth trip to the school, they were barred from the property. A staffer explained that the principal was no longer there; she and other staffers had been threatened with death if they continued to cooperate with the Marines.

Read the whole thing. Harris raises totally different issues from the stock polemic raised by the Left or Conservatives. The enemy is not a "freedom fighter" or an "Iraqi nationalist", still less the romantic Islamist with flowing robes, just a plain thug, encrusted with the brutality and corruption of hundreds of years of Arab culture. Neither is the Joe Iraqi of Marine acquaintance the Middle Eastern equivalent of an American just yearning to be free, eager to seize an historic opportunity to shuck off his Islamic chains. The picture is rather one of a people comfortable in their dysfunction, who know no other and yearn for no better.

All throughout the Harris piece Marines ask themselves if this was what Vietnam was like. Not the burial place of imperialist legions so much as the graveyard of youthful idealism. In many ways, the United States has been far more successful than its detractors will admit. It has won the war against Saddam. It may even win the war against organized Islamism. What is in doubt is whether anything can prevail against a six thousand year old culture that gave the world Ali Baba, the Assassins and baksheesh. It is now up against the bedrock of opposition, the hard fabric of Arab-Islamic society itself.

"If you look at it, the Marines who died in Vietnam died for nothing," said one veteran, whose father served two tours in Vietnam. It was a shocking statement, one that only a veteran Marine would dare make in the presence of other Marines. "Look, they were there supposedly so that Vietnam wouldn't become Communist and become a threat to the United States and the world," he said. "Well, Vietnam is Communist. Is it a threat?"

The other Marines mumbled, but there was mostly silence.

Then the discussion turned back to Iraq. Saddam is gone, his sons killed and his regime destroyed. There are no weapons of mass destruction. Why are we still here? Why not leave now? "We owe these people," said one Marine. "We owe them to finish the job that we have started." Plus, he said, with the intense criminal element intimidating the people, the corrupt politicians, the sense of lawlessness, the weak police force and the Jihadists operating in the region, the area could easily become a haven for terrorists.

The other Marines nodded in agreement. Ultimately, the conversation drifted to the upcoming missions. Kilo Company was going out that night to search a house in Karabilah believed to be a center for making roadside bombs. India Company was assigned to do security patrols the next day and wouldn't be back for another 36 hours. Another Marine was headed up to Lima Company, near the town of Husaybah, considered the region's most dangerous location. After a few more minutes of small talk, the men drifted off the balcony and back to their assigned sleeping areas where they would prepare for another day of "the real war."

In the classic scene from Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurz, played by Marlon Brando, recounts how he returned to a village shortly after having inoculated the children there against disease in an effort to win 'hearts and minds'.  (Hat tip: Gerard Van der Leun of American Digest)

"back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile...A pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried... I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot...Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought: My God...the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we."

The ultimate difference between Vietnam and Iraq has always been the fact that the Viet Cong could never follow the boys home. But the jihadis will and many are already here, smiling, waving, hating. And they will have nuclear weapons. Failure is not an option.

Showtime

Two weeks of intense combat in Iraq have created a number of outstanding situations that cannot continue indefinitely. The most well known is Fallujah, where 3 Marine battalions have stopped short of taking the town outright in favor of a kind of low-intensity conflict, called a truce, featuring negotiations that no one seems interested in. The other is the question of the warrant of arrest for Moqtada al-Sadr and the dissolution of his Madhi Army. Sadr is holed up in the city of Najaf, sacred to the Shi'ites, with a brigade in loose blockade around the city. Another area -- one that has received scant attention from the press -- is the battle on the Syrian border to interdict the ratlines to Fallujah along the Euphrates river. A story by the AP's Robert Burns described this long and largely ignored battlefront.

Maj. Gen. John Sattler, director of operations for Central Command, said a number of Marines have been killed in the process. He said security concerns prevented him from saying how many died, how many are involved in the border-sealing effort or how many infiltrators they caught. "We had an extreme amount of success on the front side, meaning that we did find, fix and ultimately finish a number of cells that were up there that were facilitating" the infiltration, he said. The State Department, meanwhile, said Secretary of State Colin Powell sent a message this week to Syrian President Bashar Assad urging that his government help promote stability in Iraq.

"We know for a fact that a lot of them find their way into Iraq through Syria for sure," he said, referring to foreign fighters who are seeking to kill Americans. "I mean, we know that. The ones we've captured, the ones we've detained, we know how they get here," he said, adding that "to some extent the same thing happens on the Iranian border as well." U.S. officials have frequently cited the Syrian border as a source of foreign extremists who make their way east to the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, and in some cases to Baghdad, and attack U.S. forces.

By tomorrow however, it is likely to be front page news that at least 300 men, a force of battalion size, complete with mortars and uniforms, attacked the Marines near Camp Al-Qaim, less than half a kilometer from the Syrian border, resulting in the death of 5 Marines in exchange for the practical annihilation of the attacking force. (See map)

According to the Marines, the insurgents apparently ignited the bomb as a decoy. A Marine unit responding to the bomb pulled in front of the former Bath Party headquarters here at around 8:30 a.m., where they were met by rocket propelled grenades and machine gun fire. The unit radioed for help, and a second group of Marines trying to reach them were hit by heave mortar fire as they traveled along their normal route into the city. Once the second group of Marines arrived in the city, they were strafed by small arms and machine gun fire from insurgents hiding homes along their route. As more Marines were sent from the nearby base, the day-long battle ensued. All of the slain Marines were killed in the first 90 minutes of the battle, when they went to clear a house and were ambushed by Iraqis hiding in the building.

Late Saturday night, Marine Cobra helicopter gunships were still strafing enemy positions around the soccer stadium near downtown Husaybah while medical evacuation helicopters carried wounded Marines back to Camp Al Qaim. ...

Marines cordoned off the city of about 100,000 residents, halting all traffic in and out except for women and children who were fleeing the fighting. At one point, many of the insurgents reportedly had gathered in a local mosque, and Marines were preparing to bomb the building. They pulled back the attack, however, when they couldn't not get positive identification of the occupants of the mosque. According to Marine snipers reporting to their commanders by radio, some of the insurgents fired at Marines and then hid behind children. "We're trying to get the snipers in position for a shot," Major George Schreffler told the other commanders through tactical radio communications. "They're looking at guys in blue uniforms and others with black clothes and black masks. Some are using children to shield themselves. We will not take shots in which we could possibly hit children."

In a related development, the US announced it was shutting the western highways out of Baghdad, which lead directly to Ar Ramadi and Fallujah -- and onward to Qaim, ostensibly due to lack of security on these routes. However, it has the secondary effect of preventing open movement by nonmilitary vehicles along these routes, clearing the stage as it were, for any following act.

The last two weeks in Iraq have been characterized by almost continuous 'secret' combat, where quiet and low level operations have been continuously underway in Ramadi, Fallujah, on the outskirts of Najaf, in Kut and on the Syrian border. Although reported by the press as mere incidents, disconnected ambushes or random minings, over 80 US soldiers have died in what amounts to a widespread campaign of operations across the entire middle of the Land Between the Rivers. Oliver North reports:

During my first 40 hours on the ground, anti-Iraqi forces haven't stopped shooting at the Marines, making it more difficult to get around. ... In fact, in ar-Ramadi, it's going a lot better than some might perceive. While much of the media's attention has focused on Fallujah, where four American civilians were killed, here in ar-Ramadi, Marines and soldiers are socking it to the enemy. "The fighting has been intense, but we've been kicking butt everywhere we go," is the way one Marine sergeant described it to me

Yet to the outside observer it has seemed a shapeless campaign either because it is shapeless, merely a set of defensive reactions by an overstretched and bewildered US military, or because we are being kept from seeing the outlines of the campaign by CENTCOM itself. Although the media has painted a picture of a command caught wholly by surprise, the Belmont Club noted in The Recursive Battle  that CENTCOM began tightening up on the Iranian border 45 days before the Iranian stooge Sadr launched his attack on the Spanish base. The skirmishes along the Syrian border and on the riverline leading southwest to Fallujah have also been happening for some time. Ron Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on April 13th that a Marine company commander realized he stumbled on to an unreported hot zone.

Gannon was surprised when he saw the heavy casualty reports from the 82nd Airborne, which had been there before the Marines. "I was, like, 'Whoa, why haven't we been reading about this?'" he said while sitting in the small office that is his command center. "What's been going on here? Have they been having some kind of silent war? And, sure enough, they had been."

Indeed, it is virtually certain that Al-Qaim, Ramadi and Fallujah and the road network from Baghdad constitute a single "front" centered on Syria, whose principal axis is the Euphrates itself. Operations in Fallujah cannot be understood without putting it in the context of the wider area. A more balanced assessment suggests that CENTCOM was aware of an offensive in preparation on the anniversary of OIF as strongly hinted by the reluctance by US commanders to rush into recovering the bodies of the mutilated contractors at Fallujah. It is very probable that CENTCOM has had a counteroffensive plan on the books for some weeks now, that while those plans did not entirely survive the first shock of contact with the enemy, they exist all the same. Those who have been following the news stories will have noted that nearly all press accounts have highlighted the activities of MARCENT like a matador's cape, while ARCENT (the US Army) hardly appears at all. Apart from the spotlight on a few carefully chosen locations, such as Fallujah and the outskirts of Najaf, many major US formations have simply dropped out of media sight. That state of affairs can't  last much longer. The recent battle on the Syrian border adds to growing list of crises whose resolution cannot long be delayed.

Personally, I get the sense that US forces are letting a pre-planned set of attacks blunt themselves on its shield and are letting the sword flash out only in limited counterattacks. But of the larger game we know nothing as yet; whether it is deep or simply does not exist. But we will know it soon.

The Last Debate

Regnum Crucis has an exchange between Dan Darling and Abu Noor, who maintains that the West is historically guilty of oppressing the Muslim world and that any attacks we may be experiencing are consequently richly deserved. One of saddest truisms of political debate is that it is almost impossible for either side to convert the true believers of the other. Experienced polemicists advise us not to try; it is only the uncommitted middle that is worth talking to. This requires us to accept, as Mao Tse Tung never ceased to remind us, the existence of an enemy who can only be treated with destruction and subjugation. But it also reminds us that there is a vast public that is neither friend nor foe, which must be won over.

Holding this distinction clearly in mind is hardest for those who believe reason can settle any dispute. The words 'enemy', 'neutral' and 'friend', while unthinkable in the academe, are the three most important words in wartime, because they have defined policy from time immemorial: destruction to the enemy, respect and punctilio towards neutrals, succor to friends. The United States has been dragged unwillingly into war and mentally at least the process has not yet been completed, but it is proceeding apace.

It is gratifying to see public figures starting to speak of the enemy as foe. Defense Secretary called Al-Jazeera an outlet of lies. CENTCOM is now finally recounting instances, common for some time, of the Islamists using ambulances to transport weapons and using the guise of Red Crescent convoys to move war materials. Previously forbidden characterizations are beginning to see print: mosques as thinly disguised military bases, imams as gangsters in flowing robes, madrassas as factories of hate. If the image of a jackbooted Nazi was rooted partially in the imagination of Allied propagandists, the face of the current enemy has been painted largely by himself.  The videotaped execution of hostages, including the brave Italian Quattrocchi, the mutilation of the four Blackwater contractors, the ceaseless capering and firing in the air, the constant drumroll of terrorist attacks suggests a basic nature which cannot be ameliorated by any amount of television make-up.

The United States is finally beginning to think like a belligerent, despite it's best efforts not to. The United States Marines are seeking private donations -- not government money -- to set up a number of television stations in Iraq to broadcast our side of the story through a program called Spirit of America. No one should imagine that this effort, nor that of Chief Wiggles, nor the personal kindnesses shown by hundreds of thousands of American in the Middle East will have the slightest effect on the Jihadis. For them there is nothing but the rifle bullet. Our efforts at nation building and personal outreach will find fertile ground only in the hearts of the uncommitted and in confirming belief in those who are already our friends. But there are those who will never be won over and accepting the consequences of this fact defines the boundary between war and peace.

The enemy -- the true believers on the other side -- will never be softened by negotiation or mollified with obsequiousness. He is implacable and his will to resist is illustrated by the cache the Marines found in in Fallujah: a MANPAD, 40 RPGs, a 120 mm mortar, 9 82 mm mortars, a 50 mm mortar, 65 major caliber artillery rounds, probably for use as booby traps and the usual machineguns and rifles. It is a catalogue of death for us. For them there is this:

Lying on his stomach on a rooftop and wearing goggles and earplugs, a Marine sniper keeps an eye to his rifle sight. His main task in recent days has been trying to hit the black-garbed gunmen who occasionally dash across the long street in front of him. To dodge his shots, one of the gunmen recently launched into a rolling dive across the street, a move that had the sniper and his buddies laughing. "I think I got him later. The same guy came back and tried to do a low crawl," said Lance Cpl. Khristopher Williams, 20, from Fort Myers, Fla.

Others have run across the street, hiding behind children on bicycles, said the sniper. In his position — reachable only by scaling the outside ledge of a building — he sits for hours with his finger poised on the trigger of a rifle that fires 50-caliber armor-piercing bullets with such force that the muzzle flash and exiting gasses from the weapon have blackened the bricks around the gun. On the street in front of his position sits a car riddled with bullets, where the bloated, fly-infested bodies of three armed men have been left. The vehicle was shot up by Marine gunmen before the sniper set up his position.

Along the front line, Marines have been firing warning shots to scare away dogs chewing on corpses. In some cases, the troops have wrapped bodies in blankets and buried them in shallow graves.

At night, the psychological operations unit attached to the Marine battalion here sends out messages from a loudspeaker mounted on an armored Humvee. On Thursday night, the crew and its Arabic-language interpreter taunted fighters, saying, "May all the ambulances in Fallujah have enough fuel to pick up the bodies of the mujahadeen."

Posting Will be Light

Work pressure means posting will be light. Have a nice weekend.

Two Civilizations

A letter said to be from a Chaplain at Fallujah was posted at the Free Republic. It is plain tale, and on a superficial level, it is about man doing his job, attending to specific duties, in the way most of us do. He coordinates services -- it was Easter, after all -- and prepares sets of prayers for different military functions. For the commanders, a petition for wisdom. For those on convoy duty, a petition for safe passage. For everyone, a plea for the grace to stay human in a situation where that is almost impossible.

The number of prayers is going up, hourly, as the ambushes continue. Here's how intense it has become .. today's standard preconvoy brief now includes the following: "If you drive into the kill zone .. two options .. drive through and on, or reverse and drive out. Do not stop. If you are blocked into the kill zone .. displace from the vehicle, find cover, fix the target, engage, maneuver and destroy the hostile forces. Target selection .. rules have changed...avoid civilians, if possible. Hostile forces are now using civilians as shields. We are not interested in losing more marines. If you can avoid putting civilians in your line of fire, avoid it. If not, fire to take out the hostile forces. Implication? Chilling...we've entered a new dimension. We are fighting an enemy who respects no laws of humanity, knows no rules of land warfare and gives no quarter. How do we fight, without become barbarians ourselves?

Across the lines, the imams pray too, their voices booming over loudspeakers. The anonymous chaplain understands Arabic and knows the imams are praying for their deaths.

On another level, the Chaplain can't help but aware of how bizarre his job would seem to civilians, this admixture of God and the Marine profession of annihilation. All he can do is assure the reader that if he were present, it would all be perfectly natural and clear. The Marines, no less than their foes are a tribe. Their religion, apart from anything the Chaplain can teach them, is each other.

This is a tribe of warriors. They exist to close with and destroy the enemy. They have their tribal mores, rituals and rites. Their enemy has desecrated members of the tribe and taunted the marines. They've asked for a fight. The marines are in full pursuit and absolutely determined to annihilate their foe. I'm sure that sounds harsh to politically correct ears and those for whom this type of violence is anachronistic. It does not sound foreign here ... it is status quo. We are in a violent land, with an evil element and they are having violence visited upon them. There is no room here for half measures. This is a test of wills...one side will prevail. That is clearly understood and never discussed .. it is obvious. We aren't playing paintball .. we are at war.

But the reader is not present. Through no fault of his own, he lives in a world as far away from Fallujah as the surface of the Moon. He might imagine, but never actually experience, the presence of evil. He may think he understands, but probably never will, just what a world of violence is kept at bay just beyond the horizon. And he may never realize, even with the best will, that we aren't playing paintball but are at war.

No matter. For the teenage Marines in Fallujah, the normal world doesn't exist either. Yet that isn't quite correct. Perhaps it better to say that for the Marines in Fallujah, the normal world is all too real.

Return to Rwanda

Hat tip to reader BM, who links to the tremendous blog, The Last of the Famous International Playboys. The first of a two part post considers whether the genocide was masterminded by France or by current Rwandan President Paul Kagame. The case against Kagame was made by French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere.

Recent developments began on March 9 when Le Monde published excerpts of the final 220-page report by the crusading anti-terror investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière following his six-year investigation in the airplane crash of Habyarimana's plane at the request of French nationals also killed in the crash. A firestorm of recrimination and scandal has followed the publication of this article.

Bruguière's report names former rebel leader and current Rwandan president Paul Kagamé is the main organizer of the attack and puts him at the top of a list of high-ranking rebel accomplices, members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR).

Bruguière's investigation collected hundreds of accounts, filed dozens of letters rogatory, required numerous missions abroad in collaboration with other investigators and included testimony from anonymous FPR dissidents under witness protection, of which one was a member of the "network commando," a clandestine group allegedly under Kagamé's direct control and allegedly responsible for carrying out the assassination.

Kagame pointed the finger the other way, fingering France as the mastermind of the terror.

Kagamé tried to turn the situation on its head, telling Radio France Internationale that

"the French were there at the moment the genocide occurred. They trained the killers. They were stationed at command positions within the armed forces that carried out the genocide. They also directly participated in the operations: they filtered the road blocks, identifying people on an ethnic basis, punishing the Tutsis and favoring the Hutus.

All this was done in broad daylight at the road blocks. We've got it all on video, numerous pieces of evidence of the participation of the French. Not the French people but certain elements acting on orders from the government and who were manning these roadblocks during the genocide. They knew. They supported it. They supplied arms and they gave orders and instructions to the killers. What more can I say?"

France immediately denied the charges but in 1998, the Assemblée Nationale began a fact finding mission into the participation of French authorities in the genocide. It declassified 3,500 documents and heard from foreign policy officials from that time. CNRS sociologist Claudine Vidal said that the inquiry "arrived at a very severe judgment on French involvement in Rwanda, the goal of which was to prevent at all costs the military victory of the FPR. According to the report, 'at all costs' meant an 'underestimation of the authoritarian, sectarian and racist nature of the Rwandan regime.' It meant arming and organizing an army that 'some French military personnel may have felt they formed'. It meant a French military presence 'verging on military engagement on the ground.' Finally, it meant continuing to confer legitimacy on an interim government [put in place after the assassination of Habyarimana] while ignoring the reality of the genocide. Nevertheless, no direct participation by French soldiers in the genocide has been established by the mission."

Yet former Socialist defense minster Paul Quilès, the chair of the panel conducting the inquiry, said that the "military aide for the government forces verged on direct engagement: operational consultation at all significant levels of command, from the Chief of Staff to sector command posts, training of long range commandos, participation in check points at a time when Kigali was threatened by FPR troops."

Hovering over this entire mess, like a dark Sphinx, was the United Nations, which comes across as an organization dedicated to cover-ups, but for reasons that are never made clear.

"sources close to the French investigation" said on March 12 that they were "stunned to say the least" by the Secretary General's statements about "effective cooperation." They added, "a considerable number of the witnesses in this case returned to us after having bumped up against blunt refusals at the UN" both at headquarters and at the ICTR in Arusha. "Moreover, the transfer of several documents, such as the 'memorandum' drawn up by the former UN investigator in Kigali, Michael Hourigan, was denied us at the instructions of the New York Office."

The story continues in the second part, too funny and grotesque for tears. It weaves around the story of the data flight recorder, which may or may not have been in incumbent Rwandan President's aircraft on the day it was shot down or sabotaged; an aircraft provided by France, maintained by Air France. The recorder itself found its way to an obscure United Nations filing cabinet -- if indeed it was ever in the aircraft -- without ever being officially examined.

One commenter, Tim, asked, "So...has the black box been analyzed? If so, what did it reveal and if not, why not?" ... When the presence of the "black box" at UN headquarters was revealed, Annan said, "From what I have picked up, it sounds like a real foul up, a first class foul up," and denied that there had been a coverup. But his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali told Libération on March 19 that There is something truly mysterious and synchronized in this whole matter: the black box goes missing, the ICTR stops its investigation... the UN system has been deeply inflitrated. A network has formed to burry this subject. Boutros-Ghali added that, "If I'm still alive 20 years from now, I'll say a lot of things."

It will be worth the wait. Boutros-Ghali darkly hints that the UN was heavily infiltrated by American agents, but to what end he does not make clear. What is definite is that the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan massacre was observed recently, with one of the principal suspects of the outrage, Paul Kagame, presiding over a memorial ceremony which included hymn singing, ceremonial reburials and copious tears. Yet culpability for planning the massacre of  800,000 people, nearly five times the number killed in both Atomic Bombings, remains undetermined. It was carried off with cold calculation, relieved only by ironies which create the air of a monstrous joke.

The genocide was anything but a spontaneous explosion of violence, as many have long assumed, but rather an operation orchestrated by Hutu extremists from Rwanda's north attempting to maintain their hold on power. Melvern uses this and other documents to demonstrate the meticulous premeditation of the killing, revealing, for instance, Kambanda's testimony on cabinet-level discussions about the genocide. She also reveals that the Rwandan government imported $750,000 worth of Chinese machetes (enough to arm one in every three Rwanda men). Mulvern also discusses arms imports from France and Egypt shortly before the genocide and offers an "insider's account of the roadblocks where so many Tutsi lost their lives." Many of the road blocks were manned by French troops.

However, these revelations merely confirm what has long been known: the UN received a telegram on January 11, 1994 from its local force commander Roméo Dallaire who has since published a book on "the failure of Humanity in Rwanda." Dallaire sought protection for the wife and family of an informant, as well as the informant himself, who told Dallaire of Hutu plans for the Tutsi genocide and of the location of interahamwe arms caches. The informant revealed that all Tutsi in Kigali had been registered by the government and that Interahamwe personnel could kill 1,000 in as little as twenty minutes. Kofi Annan replied the same day telling Dallaire to inform president Habyarimana of the informant's statements — though the president's men were the ones they implicated.

Last february and March, filmmaker Georges Kapler filmed interviews with three Interahamwe militiamen which he presented in Paris. The three men say they were "trained and assisted" by France and one of them, Jean-Bosco Halimana, says that "the French gave us a license to kill. They came to support the genocide in a clear and visible manner."

In the end we are left with a list of suspects without a definite culprit. Kagame had the motive but not the means. A rebel leader at the time, he didn't have the juice to pull strings at the highest levels of the UN or at the Security Council. France had the means, but not the obvious motive. What could be possibly be worth enough in a place like Rwanda to make killing nearly a million people worthwhile? Most mysterious of all is the role of the United Nations. One gets the sense that they were in on the plot early on, but what was the plot? Read the whole thing.

The Recursive Battle

It is difficult now to remember that the scheme of operational maneuver during Operation Iraqi Freedom consisted not of slaughtering the enemy but disorganizing him. Where possible, enemy units were deprived of their sustenance and allowed to disintegrate. Most cities, except those which absolutely had to be traversed, were simply bypassed, including Najaf, Karballah and Fallujah, none of which saw heavy fighting. Only Iraqi units which stood and fought were destroyed. Most enemy combatants simply took off their uniforms and melted into the general population.

Throughout the campaign, the Press took the view that Americans had brought far too few men. At An-Nasiriyah, the Marines faced heavy resistance while supply columns were beset by bands of guerillas known as the fedayeen, who ambushed supply trucks and took Americans hostages, including Jessica Lynch, to national despair. In the realm of political warfare, Americans seemed singularly ill-equipped. All they had with them were a pitiful band of emigres, many of whom had lived abroad most of their lives, to set against a Ba'athist regime deeply rooted in the clan structure of Iraq.

If the story sounds disturbingly familiar, that is because it describes the current campaign by US forces against the new enemy, insurgencies fueled by Syria and Iran. Even before Operation Iraqi Freedom, thousands of Iranian and possibly Syrian operatives were infiltrated into Iraq to contest the control of post-Saddam Iraq, a process described in The Wider War. They constitute the current equivalent of the conventional forces and feyadeen encountered by US Forces in March and April of 2003. Instead of Saddam's Ba'ath Party, current armed elements are led by a coalition of Islamists, former Baathists, professional terrorists and secret agents.

Once again, the US is trying to engage only hard core elements which actively resist, attempting to bypass the population masses, leaving them "unoccupied" as it were, to be dealt with later. In place of a band of emigres, the US has the Iraqi Governing Council, comprised of representatives from various religious and ethnic groupings, with which to conduct political warfare. Force is apparently being used, in conjunction with Council, to effectively replace Anti-coalition leadership in Fallujah and Najaf with Iraqis who are more congenial to the coalition. With what results remains to be seen.

A briefing given by Generals Abizaid and Sanchez at CENTCOM is maddeningly hazy about the acceptable end-states of Sunni fighting at Fallujah and the rebellion of Moqtada al-Sadr.

Q: Again, in Fallujah, you said it was a tenuous peace. Could you elaborate on that and talk about key U.S. and Iraqi Governing Council demands? What will make that into a lasting peace?

Sanchez: The part that is tenuous is that we are continuing to get attacks from the insurgents that are in the city. As I stated, we suspended our offensive operations to allow these discussions to go forward, and I must add that these are just initial discussions. We are not negotiating at this point until we achieve some confidence building and a period of stability; then we would consider going into significant negotiations to end this battle. But at this point, we have had continued attacks by the insurgents up until about eight to 12 hours ago.

One gets the sense that something is being held back. It would be inconceivable for commanders as experienced as Sanchez and Abizaid to tie down three battalions of Marines to indefinitely await the result of "initial discussions" or "confidence building". Things are rather clearer on the Shi'ite front, where Moqtada al-Sadr's forces have been in retreat from cities his forces had claimed to occupy.

Sanchez: Sir, the situation down in the south, the area that was being terrorized by Muqtada al-Sadr over the course of the last few days, is now stabilized. We are clearly in control of al Kut, which, as you' know, had been controlled by his gang for some time, for about a day and a half before we maneuvered 1st Armored Division forces down there. That is now completely under our control, with Muqtada's elements gone. Nasiriyah, we have reestablished control down there, and we have great cooperation in both of those cities from the moderate Shi'a, and they were glad to get rid of that element that was terrorizing them. In the Hillah area, also that is now stabilized, and getting great cooperation from the people down there.

The obvious line of speculation is that US forces, which have always regarded the Shi'ite situation as the most dangerous, have concentrated on diffusing it first. There are broad hints that the Iraqi Governing Council, almost certainly in consultation with Sadr's rival, Sistani, have decided themselves to neutralize him.

Abizaid: Well clearly, it is the intent of the Governing Council to bring Sadr to justice. How they go about doing that I think will probably end up being a uniquely Iraqi solution, but I believe that they're moving in that direction themselves. We're applying the military force necessary to assist in that regard, as you might imagine.

Once Sadr is brought under control and the Shi'ites placed unambiguously under the leadership of a moderate cleric, the strategic protection of Fallujah will evaporate overnight. Its main defenses have always been the human shielding afforded by its civilian population and its potential as an inflammatory symbol to create Shi'ite-Sunni cooperation. Fallujha's military defenses are negligible in the face of Marine manuever. And that may in fact be the plan. CENTCOM has driven Sadr's Madhi Army from the field and may be poised to arrest or kill him with assent of moderate Shi'ites. Once that is accomplished, Sanchez would be in a position to issue new orders to the Marines encircling a Fallujah conveniently evacuated of civilians.

Yet the most tantalizing nuggets in Abizaid's CENTCOM briefing are the lines no one had time to pursue.

Q: Generals, Bret Baier again at Fox News Channel. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said last week that Iran is meddling in the situation inside Iraq. General Abizaid, can you tell us how Iran is playing a factor in the current situation on the ground? And have you taken any action along the border that may have involved Iranians?

Abizaid: Well, we haven't taken any action recently on the border that had to do with any specific Iranian activity. But clearly, there are indications from intelligence folks that there are some Iranian activities going on that are unhelpful, as the secretary put it. He's absolutely right. And there's also unhelpful actions coming from Syria.

But on the other hand, with regard to the Iranians, there are elements within Iran that are urging patience and calm and trying to limit the influence of Sadr. So it's a complicated situation. But what we need is all of the nations around Iraq to participate in calming the situation and assisting with a sovereign and stable government emerging.

Sanchez: If I may add, Bret, as part of our ongoing operations, we had increased the capacity of the border police out in the Iranian sector, and we had also increased some of our patrolling along the southeast and up in the central part of the country to prevent some of the illegal movement that had been occurring from Iran. So, as part of our current operations over the course of the last 30 to 45 days, we had increased some of our ops in that area.

 This is the first direct confirmation that CENTCOM was to some degree expecting Iranian-fueled trouble among the Shi'ites. And then, there is this:

Abizaid: It's also very clear that we've got to get more senior Iraqis involved, former military types involved in the security forces. And in the next couple of days you'll see a large number of senior officers being appointed to key positions in the Ministry of Defense and in Iraqi joint staff and in Iraqi field commands. And General Sanchez and I are very much involved in the vetting and placing of these officers, and I can tell you the competition for these positions have been fierce.

That and the suggestion that American Special Forces are going to be deployed with Iraqi Army units. Taken together, they provide a fairly interesting preview into the shape of the coming campaign. In sum, it looks like US forces are going to be used in a targeted fashion against elements which directly resist the coalition. However, the main weapon will be political warfare. The priority now will be to displace enemy leaders from their community positions with members from the new Iraqi government. It is possible that the US has decided to deal with the Shi'ite situation first, and has purposely left the Fallujah matter in abeyance until the Sadr matter is settled. It also looks like the US has decided to rebuild the Iraqi Army out of proven command elements, even though it risks the return of former Saddam-era officers and to stiffen it out with Special Forces. Lastly, the US has clearly recognized the aggressive role the Iranians have played in the current crisis and may be preparing to wage a defensive war against Teheran's agents -- as a first step. There may be a new Deck of Death, with terrorists like Imad Mugniyeh as face cards. And that's as far as Belmont Club speculation will go.

Coincidences

The circumstances fueling the account by Lee Gordon of the London Telegraph has so many eerie similarities to the New York Times John Burns piece on the Golden Mosque that they fairly jump out. A team from a writer or newspaper respected by conservatives is captured on the road. The journalists are taken to a picturesque location where they are first greeted with hostility, then granted surprising liberty. A sense of shared danger bonds them with their captors. Scenes are provided to lend color. Due to a surprising coincidence, the captured journalists stumble on information every Western intelligence agency wants to know. The preparations to defend the Golden Mosque, the fate of the missing German counterterrorism agents. Then, as quickly as they were captured, they are released. Not for them is the long and slow incarceration of Terry Waite, but a hearty goodbye, encumbered only by the promise that they will tell the world the truth, on their word as Americans or Englishmen.

This sounds like a disinformation operation targeting journalists. Maybe their captors went to the same school.

New York Times	Daily Telegraph
The Capture and Initial Suspicion
A reporter and photographer for The New York Times had a rare — and unplanned — opportunity to see Mr. Sadr's battle troops up close on Tuesday. A 100-mile drive from Baghdad for a supposed news conference by Mr. Sadr ended up with no news conference, and a handful of the newspaper's Baghdad staff, including drivers, security guards and an interpreter, detained for nearly eight hours. They were suspected, their captors said, of being Special Forces operatives or intelligence agents for the United States, Spain or Israel.	My car was stopped, and with my driver I was hooded and bundled into the back of a pick-up truck and taken to a small house. As I stood against a wall at gunpoint, for a moment the world went black. The interrogation began. Who was I? What was I doing in Gharma? Where was my satellite telephone? They tried repeatedly to trick us into admitting to something we were not - to being spies. But that was hardly surprising. Britons are hated as deeply as Americans by these people.
After a few questions, acceptance
But before and after being driven away blindfolded to a makeshift prison deep in the semidesert landscape outside Kufa, the visitors were left under loose guard at the mosque's main entrance and, for about an hour, inside the courtyard.	I answered their battery of questions, about Kuwait, British soldiers in Basra, whether I had been to Israel, whether I was Jewish. My translator, a Palestinian, worked the crowd, persuading them that I was not a spy. Suddenly the ice seemed to crack. Smiles broke out and we were offered a bowl of water, a sign of acceptance.
Bonding
As night fell, the militiamen and several of the detained Iraqis became visibly more nervous, and tensions rose as all of the detainees pondered what might happen to them if American troops began a nighttime assault on the mosque in an effort to capture Mr. Sadr.	What was life like among the mujahideen? To this stranger, they were polite, if suspicious; they gave me their food - sometimes from their plates. They laughed rudely at my awkwardness eating with my fingers, yet they hunted for a spoon. They joked at my discomfort squatting on the floor, but found a crate for me to sit on. And when, one night, a deadly attack was expected they insisted on providing an escort to the safer borders of their territory even though they needed every spare man for the battle.
General Message: Hatred of America
Hatred for America was pervasive. One man of about 25 thrust a long-bladed knife into an imaginary belly, telling his companions, "This is what I will do to the American infidels when they enter here." Another man approached a reporter, asked his citizenship, and turned away to spit and grind his boot on the courtyard floor. "This is our message to Bush and Blair," he said.	A 12-year-old boy spoke of helping to launch missiles at US convoys. "It felt powerful standing next to the missiles," he said. "I know it killed Americans - thanks to Allah."
Specific Message: Disinformation
The Whereabouts of Moqtada al-Sadr	The Death of the GSG-9 Agents
If Mr. Sadr was anywhere around, there was no sign of any special protection for him, and little attempt to control the wanderings of the worshipers who came and went. But there were signs of preparations for a siege. In the early afternoon, vehicles pulled up to the mosque and unloaded cardboard boxes full of food. Later, several ambulances unloaded boxes of medical supplies, labeled in English as containing bandages, cotton balls and syringes. Some were marked with Christian inscriptions in English, suggesting that they originally came from Christian medical charities operating in Iraq.	I hear how the Germans came to die. They had been travelling last Wednesday in a six-vehicle convoy of white 4x4s which had crashed through a mujahideen checkpoint on a highway running between Baghdad and Jordan. During the ensuing high-speed chase, gunfire erupted between the Iraqis and the convoy. When the Iraqis, using rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire, hit the tyres of the last vehicle it swerved off the road and pulled up by a small building that was once a school. There would be no escape. Only yesterday did I learn that German officials were still looking for two of their staff who had gone missing on the way from Amman, the Jordanian capital, to the German embassy in Baghdad. According to some German media reports, the men were anti-terrorist commandos, trained in hostage release.
The Tearful Goodbye and the Sound Bite
The security officials who had arrested them came through the door, smiling broadly. "Everything is O.K. now," they said, without further explanation. "You can go home." As the detainees were taken back to the mosque, the driver, who gave his name as Khadem, gave a hint of his thinking. With magnesium flares fired by militia outposts lighting the night sky outside Kufa, the man, who said he was 40 and a technical college graduate, explained how he had had spent two years in prison under Saddam Hussein for belonging to a banned Shiite religious party. But when he was asked if he had not welcomed the American forces who toppled Mr. Hussein almost exactly a year ago, as many Shiites did, he turned suddenly combative. "It was God who finished Saddam, not the Americans," he said. "The Americans broke all their promises to us, and they have brought their infidel beliefs to Iraq. We hate them, and they are worse than Saddam."	Their only condition was that I reported their side of the story accurately, which I promised to do. So, with a vice-like shake of my hand, the commander agreed to take me under his wing. A promise is a bond, my translator warned. Then he cracked a limp joke about my name, the Chinese and Kung Fu, at which I laughed loudly. When the commander explained the mujahideen's motivation to me, he said that they would fight the coalition, the Iraqi Governing Council - whose members they denounce as collaborators and placemen - and any of Saddam Hussein's supporters. "They will be made to leave the country. We do not agree with what happened in Fallujah when the Americans were burned and hung. We will make them surrender or we will kill them. It is simple. But there are so many angry people," he said from his command centre, a one-room outhouse beside a simple bungalow. ... "We do not hate the Americans and British, we hate the ideas they have brought here. We will now fight every person who tries to bring those ideas, including the Iraqi Governing Council.

A Third Coincidence

Hat tip: reader RC. I kid you not. A third incident from same info-kidnapping playbook, this time from the Toronto Globe and Mail's Orly Halpern. If you don't believe me, follow the link. I can hardly believe it myself. The same modus operandi. The kidnapping. The initial hostility. The dramatic change of heart. A glimpse into the resistance. A sudden release. The tearful goodbye. The parting soundbite.

A large open-bed truck passed next, carrying more armed men wearing checkered kaffiyeh scarves and mismatched clothes, all of them with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and AK-47s that they were firing at our vehicle. ... Five minutes before the attack, the trip was proceeding uneventfully. But near Fallujah, on the main highway to Baghdad, we stopped before a roadblock where U.S. soldiers said we couldn't continue because the marines were conducting an operation. So we followed our hired Iraqi taxi driver to a side road, which led us straight into a hotbed of insurgents who were engaged in one of their largest running battles since the end of last year's war.

I was hauled out of the vehicle by a black-clad young man carrying an AK-47. "We are journalists, journalists," I repeated clearly in Arabic. He slapped me as he shrieked orders at the dozens of others surrounding us on the road. Two gangs tried to separate us, but Steve forced his way over to me and grabbed my arm. I was thrown into a taxi and Steve pushed himself in, too, and was head-butted by the man in black who screamed that we were intelligence agents. Because they were Muslims and I was a woman, I would not be killed, he said. But Steve was going to die.

Suddenly a black sedan screeched to a halt and another young man holding a walkie-talkie jumped out of the car. He saw Steve's press badge and yelled at the others to free us. "What are you doing?" he said frantically. "They're press." We had our reprieve. "We are the mujahedeen," the young man said after we were transferred to his custody. "Don't worry, we won't hurt you."

We were dropped off again, at the home of the village leader, the mukhtar, and led to a guest room where a 60-year-old mujahedeen leader entered in a flurry, followed by armed flunkies. We had an interview sitting on the floor of that room: an American, a Briton and an Iraqi resistance leader. "I need for you to tell the news," began the man, who called himself Abu Mujahed, in halting English. "I need to know why the American army is killing the people of Iraq." Then he answered his own question: "The petrol." "I ask Bush or Blair: Why do you need to kill people for the petrol? Today, Americans killed three children, ages 5, 3, and 4. Why? Americans are all around Fallujah now. Democracy is [about] killing the people? This is the lie of America. The American people -- no problem. The American army -- problem."

After he left, the mukhtar's family took care of our needs. Lunch and tea were served and our belongings arrived. But night was falling, and the mukhtar's family refused to let us return to Baghdad alone, insisting we be led by another car. "God willing, you will leave here happy," the mukhtar said. "We will make sure you get to Baghdad safely. It's too dangerous to go alone."

Third time is a charm. It is definitely a special forces operation. The question is: whose special forces?

The Wider War

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which translates articles from the regional press, cites an April 9 report that Iran was in the process of infiltrating Iraq on a massive scale even before Operation Iraqi Freedom. The preparation included the use of the Shi'ite religious network, the infiltration of agents into the mass media, the recruitment and training of thousands of militants, the fielding of candidates for the promised elections and a program of targeted assasination. All backed by seventy million dollars a month in secret funds from the Mullahs.

The London Arabic-Language Daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat quoted extensively the former Iranian intelligence official in charge of activities in Iraq, identified as Haj Sa'idi, who recently defected from Iran. "Haj Sa'idi told Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that the Iranian presence in Iraq is not limited to the Shi'ite cities. Rather, it is spread throughout Iraq, from Zakho in the north to Umm Al-Qasr in the south, and the infiltration of Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Al-Quds Army into Iraq began long before the war, through hundreds of Iranian intelligence agents, amongst them Iraqi refugees who were expelled by Saddam Hussein in the 1970's and 1980's to Iran, allegedly because of their Iranian origin, and who infiltrated back into Iraq through the Kurdish areas that were out of the Iraqi Ba'th government control.

"After the war, the Iranian intelligence sent its agents through the uncontrolled Iraq-Iran border; some of them as students and clerics, and others as belonging to the Shi'ite militias.

"Haj Sa'idi said that the assassination last summer of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir Al-Hakim, who headed the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), was a successful operation carried out by the intelligence unit of the Iranian Al-Quds Army. He also revealed that there was a failed attempt on the life of the highest Shi'ite Marja, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, at the Eid Al-Adha holiday last year, and that there was another plan to assassinate Ayatollah Ishaq Al-Fayadh.

"Haj Sa'idi claimed that some of the Iranian intelligence officers in Iraq are known to everybody, for example in Al-Suleimaniya and Derebendikhan in the north. However, he said, the real threat comes not from the officers that are known, but from those that are unknown. Amongst them are 18 Shi'ite charities in Kazimiya, in Al-Sadr city in Baghdad, in Karbala, Najaf, Kufa, Nasiriyah, Basra, and other cities with a large Shi'ite majority. In those offices, new agents are recruited every day, under the guise of financial aid, medicine, food, and clothing for the poor.

"Haj Sa'idi said that the Iranian plan to turn Iraq into another Iran is a wide-ranging plan, and it involves the recruitment of thousands of young Shi'ites for the next stage, which will take place with the [first] parliamentary elections in Iraq. Those recruited now are supposed to enlist their relatives to vote for candidates that will be endorsed by the Iranian intelligence apparatuses.

"Haj Sa'idi also mentioned that more than 300 reporters and technicians who are working now in Iraq for television and radio networks, newspapers, and other media agencies are in fact members of the Al-Quds Army and the Revolutionary Guards intelligence units.

"He also mentioned that the Iranian money allocations for activities in Iraq, both covert and overt, reached $70 million per month. He claimed that 2,700 apartments and rooms were rented in Karbala and Najaf, in order to serve agents of the Al-Quds Army and the Revolutionary Guards.

If true, these reports suggest that American and Iranian forces are now in a meeting engagement in Iraq. Nearly a year ago today, Michael Ledeen at the National Review warned of the mustering of Iranian agents in strangely prescient terms. Ledeen's 12-month old article so eerily resembles events that are unfolding today that they would shame, by comparison, any "smoking gun" the 9/11 Commission may uncover in relation to the WTC attacks.

The military battle to destroy the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein has virtually ended. Now the political battle for the freedom of the Iraqi people ensues, and it may be over very quickly, to our surprise and shame.

We have a very narrow window in Iraq to win the support of the Shiite community, which constitutes a majority of the Iraqi people. If we do not manage that in the next month or two, the radical Iranian regime will almost certainly succeed in its ambitious and, thus far, brilliantly managed campaign to mobilize the Iraqi Shiites to discredit the Coalition victory, demand an immediate American withdrawal, and insist on “international” — that is, U.N. and European — supervision of the country. That would leave Iran with a free hand in Iraq, strengthen the regime in Tehran to our detriment, and give a second wind to the terror network. Our victory, as the old saying goes, would turn to ashes in our mouths.

Some of our leaders seemed surprised to discover that both Iran and Syria were sending thousands of terrorists into Iraq to attack Coalition forces, but there was no reason for surprise. Both Bashar Assad in Damascus and Ali Khamenei and his fanatical allies in Tehran had publicly announced that America would sink into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Iraq, and the long delay between the end of the Afghan campaign and the onset of the liberation of Iraq enabled the Iranians and Syrians to plan their moves to best assure this outcome. The Syrians have been caught red-handed, opening their border with Iraq to terrorists moving East and weapons and Baathist hierarchs fleeing West. As usual, the Iranians have taken pains to cover their tracks. Even so, there is plenty of reliable information about their operations. In the middle of the war, for example, many Iraqi leaders — reportedly more than a hundred in all — made it by bus across the border to Iran, were escorted onto a commercial aircraft, and were flown to a safe haven in the Sudan.

But the true audacity of Tehran lies in their political moves. The Iranians have infiltrated more than a hundred highly trained Arab mullahs from Qom and other Iranian religious centers into Iraq, especially to Najaf and Karbala, the holy cities of the Shiite faith. They are poisoning the minds of the (largely uneducated) Iraqi mobs with a simple slogan, repeated five times a day in the mosques: “America did it for the Jews and for the oil.” They are also distributing cash to the Iraqis.

Just as they did against the shah, the Iranian Shiite leaders intend to build a mass following, leading to an insurrection against us. Look carefully at the banners carried by the Shiite demonstrators. They are very clean and well produced, with slogans in both Arabic (for the Iraqis) and English (for Western media). That is the Iranian regime at work, one of the most brilliant and patient intelligence organizations in the region. The slogans chanted by the mobs in Baghdad are Iranian slogans, calls for an Islamic state. It may seem fanciful to suggest that our liberation of Iraq could be transformed into a pro-Iranian regime applying sharia law, but after all just last year our negotiators permitted the creation of an Islamic Republic in Afghanistan.

The Iranians will combine this political strategy with terrorist acts and assassinations, as in the case of the very charismatic Ayatollah Khoi in Najaf. He was a real threat to them, because of his personality and his solid pro-Western views. So they killed him, and they are planning to kill others of his ilk, along with as many Coalition soldiers as they can murder. Thousands of Iranian-backed terrorists have been sent to Iraq, from Hezbollah killers to the remnants of al Qaeda, from Islamic Jihadists to top Iranian Revolutionary Guards fighters.

Here are two accounts, one translated contemporaneously from the Arabic press and a year-old analysis from the National Review which agree on almost every single salient point. What we do not know is the extent to which the US Government appreciated the threat, and how this now-manifest Iranian intervention interacted with European efforts to convince Teheran to open their borders to nuclear inspection. In the coming days the public may learn what contingency plans, if any, CENTCOM had poised against this threat. More importantly, we will discover whether these plans were held back or watered down over a desire not to antagonize Teheran, lest the nuclear proliferation issue be entailed. The linkage between the two would establish that the current war in Iraq is far more perilous than it might seem at first glance. What we are witnessing is not a confrontation between the United States and some nationalist "insurgents", but possibly the opening acts of a confrontation with a nuclear armed terrorist state.

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the workings of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby. ...

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.'
-- Robert Browning

Good News, Bad News

The Washington Post reports that an Iraqi Army battalion refused to deploy to Fallujah after taking fire from Shi'ites en route.

The 620-man 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Armed Forces refused to fight Monday after members of the unit were shot at in a Shiite Muslim neighborhood in Baghdad while en route to Fallujah, a Sunni Muslim stronghold, said U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, the official overseeing the development of Iraqi security forces. The convoy then turned around and returned to the battalion's home on a former Republican Guard base in Taji, a town north of the capital. Eaton said members of the battalion insisted during the ensuing discussions: "We did not sign up to fight Iraqis." ...

The battalion, traveling by truck and escorted by troops from the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division, passed through a Shiite area in northwest Baghdad. They were fired on, and six members of the unit were wounded, one seriously, Eaton said. A crowd of Shiites gathered and "surged" at the convoy, he said. "They were stunned that they were taken under fire by their fellow population," he said.

The battalion was then sent back to Taji, where preparations were made to fly it to the Fallujah area. But opposition to the mission stiffened, Eaton said, "so we decided not to involve them in the Fallujah operation."

Readers may wonder why the unit did not return fire, the supposed first reaction of any trained unit, nor did their escorts from US First Armored Division. The only speculative scenario that fits the known facts is that the convoy took a fire after which the assailants fled and the crowd pelted the Iraqis when they were recovering their wounded. Then the whole column turned around. The other interesting data in this story is that there was resistance to movement in Baghdad itself and that Shi'ites were supporting the Sunni battle in Falluja.

The good news takes several forms. First, the Iraqi Governing Council has finally taken partial ownership of the political process to bring their country under control. They are attempting to negotiate an acceptable surrender to Coalition Forces in Fallujah. On the Shi'ite front, Ayatollah Sistani has issued a fatwa to his adherents to stay calm. But the mood, at least to Zeyad in Baghdad is that the entire country is spiraling into an uprising. He adds:

It is the most foolish and selfish thing to say "pull the troops out", or "replace them with the UN or NATO". Someone has to see us through this mess to the end. Only a deluded utopian (or an idiot peace activist) would believe that Iraqis would all cosily sit down and settle down their endless disputes without AK-47's, RPG's, or mortars in the event of coalition troops abandoning Iraq. Please please don't get me wrong, I am not in the least saying that I enjoy being occupied by a foreign force, I am not a dreamer who believes that the USA is here for altruistic reasons, I am not saying that I am happy with what my bleeding country is going through, believe me when I say it tears my heart every day to witness all the bloodshed, it pains me immensely to see that we have no leaders whomsoever with the interest and well-being of Iraq as their primary goal, it kills me to see how blind and ignorant we have all become. Iraqis are dying inside every day, and we are committing suicide over and over and over. Some people call me a traitor or a collaborator for all the above and for speaking the truth as opposed to rhetorical, fiery speeches which have been our downfall.

The crisis has created a sense, evident to Iraqis like Sistani and Zeyad, and perhaps the Governing Council, that they are staring catastrophe in the face. One of the tasks for the Coalition is to exploit the Iraqi urge to take things in hand and use it to mold the new nation. In one sense, we are seeing Iraq -- post Saddam Iraq -- born before our eyes. All of the unaddressed issues, the simmering hatreds, the lack of leadership, the musterings in no-occupation zones which were never controlled by US forces, have come to the fore demanding a resolution. Objectively speaking, this moment would have come anyway. It is George Bush's great good fortune that it arrived in April and not in September.

And where will the Iraqis get the time and space to step up to the plate? The New York Times reports:

Officials in Baghdad and at the Pentagon said the military was prepared, if no peaceful solution materializes, to use two distinct sets of tactics to counter what they viewed as two different insurgencies — both of them dangerous and complex situations on difficult urban battlefields.

One campaign would entail retaking cities around Baghdad, if necessary block by block against an entrenched Sunni foe. The other would involve a series of short, sharp, local strikes at small, elusive bands of Shiite militia in southern cities, continuing until the militia was wiped out. Even as commanders offered a cease-fire to Sunnis in Falluja, allowing Iraqis to try to find a peaceful solution, and postponed any assault on Shiites in Najaf and elsewhere during religious holidays, they prepared for campaigns against foes who showed unexpected discipline and ferocity this week.

Lost in the frenetic headlines of the last week was an unnoticed military revolution. Never in history have 1,200 men stormed a city of 230,000 in urban combat without extensively using heavy weapons before the US Marines did in Fallujah. This is nothing short of amazing because the 90% of the combat power of an infantry unit is embodied in their heavy weapons. And they were stopped only by a truce, not by enemy resistance. When the Marine casualties from the Ramadi ambush,  not part of the Fallujah battle are subtracted, the Marine losses have been spectacularly low by historical standards. They are actually lower than the IDF losses in the smaller Jenin engagement (which used armored bulldozers to clear lanes) and several orders of magnitude beneath the Russian casualties in Grozny, despite the lavish use of armor, artillery and air by the Russians. US forces were never tested in extensive urban combat during Iraqi Freedom. MOUT is no longer theory. It is practice. Nor is the American success confined to Fallujah. Kut is being retaken without significant losses. The New York Times continues:

Already, "We think we have taken away a significant capability," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director for operations of the military's task force in Iraq, said in a telephone interview. "It no longer is an offensive threat; but it still remains a threat." General Kimmitt said the order had gone out "to destroy the Sadr militia — deliberately, precisely and powerfully." But now the militiamen who took control, to varying degrees, in Kut, Kufa, Najaf and a section of Baghdad called Sadr City have broken into small groups, with some already seeming ready to melt away to fight another day. "We believe that many who were wearing the Mahdi Army uniform last Saturday have tucked it under the bed and put their AK's back in the closet," one senior military officer said.

That means detailed intelligence will be required to identify the militia's leadership and important fighters, a factor noted by Mr. Bush in his radio address, which carried a warning of the "struggle and testing" that lay ahead. In Falluja, he said, the Americans "are taking control of the city, block by block." In the south, he said, "they have taken the initiative from al-Sadr's militia.""Prisoners are being taken, and intelligence is being gathered," Mr. Bush said. "Our decisive actions will continue until these enemies of democracy are dealt with

To sum up, the Jihadis have demonstrated two new capabilities. The ability to create cooperative engagements between Sunnis and Shi'ites; and the ability to combine special forces tactics with religious militias to wage political warfare. Against this, the Americans are demonstrating two new countervailing capacities of their own. They have shown that US forces can take any urban area at casualty rates less than 1 to 50. Second, they have begun to wage joint political warfare in cooperation with the Iraqi governing council. The demonstrated capability to reduce any former "no-occupation" zone opens the way to expand the "good cop, bad cop" approach used in Fallujah. Council delegates can now treat with rebels on an authoritative basis. Sistani's fatwa, till now unobserved, acquires an ominous new meaning for Sadr. A third and potentially war-winning development may be in the wings. The US has seized the intelligence apparatus of a great Arab state but has barely begun to realize its massive investment in additional human intelligence capability. US intelligence capabilities in Iraq today are much, much larger than pre-Operation Iraqi Freedom. Recent events have suggested US intelligence has been able to discern the basic outlines of Syrian and Iranian operations on their own home ground. That is an achievement equal to the Jihadis competing head to head with the FBI in the continental USA. The US may still be on the steep part of the learning curve, but it is the rate of change that counts, and in this respect, the Jihadis are falling behind..

The reluctance of any population to cooperate with a new government stems from a fear no different than that which prevents citizens from testifying against the Mafia. The population had nothing to fear from America and everything to fear from the enemy. And that state of affairs remained unchanged throughout the no-occupation zones which were virtual sanctuaries for subversive activity. The plan was probably to defer the cleanup on the ground until after the handover of power and intelligence capabilities had risen sufficiently. Recent events have advanced the agenda a little.

In this light, it is evident that the poor performance of the Iraqi Army battalion is a secondary problem. There is surplus military power. What is on hand can hardly be used to maximum potential. The real challenges remain political. The events of the last week have empowered the Iraqi Governing Council to an enormous degree. In a sense, the transfer of power has begun two months early. The requirement now is to forge a real alliance with the new Iraqi government, now facing its first crisis and to make them part of politico-military operations in the nation and the region. Paul Bremer and CENTCOM seem to understand this, yet implementing this difficult task remains a challenge.

Truth or Consequence

Iraqi blogger Zayed is following events in Baghdad and elsewhere through Al Jazeera because there is no other coverage. He wouldn't be much better off with the majors. Some stringers, interpreters, cameramen and support personnel of the international news agencies are probably Jihadi sympathizers. This is the result of a several structural factors. The first is the reluctance of the US government, until recently, to provide a news service of its own, to avoid the charge of "propaganda" -- a claim from which Al Jazeera is curiously exempt. The second is the need, illustrated by the admissions of Saddam-era CNN chiefs, of news organizations to reach a modus vivendi with thugs on the ground, by spinning news a certain way or hiring preferred individuals, or lose their ability to move around or access to terrorist figures. Together these twin circumstances allow radical Islamic groups to dominate the news and political warfare to their benefit. It is a crucial theater of operations where the enemy shapes the battlefield and is dominant at nearly all points.

The enemy capacity to mould the news takes on particular significance because Hizbullah operations in particular, as well as terrorist actions in general, are aimed at conveying political statements through violent acts. With his power over news coverage, the enemy is  not only in a position to choose the nature of the terrorist act, but is increasingly free in choosing how to portray it. Many of the recent events in Iraq, such as the murder of the Blackwater contractors, the abduction of American truck drivers, the demonstrations, the hostage takings and so on are literally made for television. If left unchecked, it will create a major collapse in the civilian intelligence system -- the system you and I employ to determine the state of reality -- that is, the news. No one without access to classified information has any alternative except to read the papers or switch on the TV to check on the progress of world events. Even analysts at the CIA rely to a large extent on "open" sources, which means the news. What happens when the "open" sources become polluted?

The deliberate penetration of the press by Jihadists, a process long perfected in Lebanon and the West Bank, inevitably means counter-penetration by antiterrorist forces. Intelligence and counterintelligence go together like Heckel and Jeckel, and one is inconceivable without the other. The Press, which holds that it is loftily above the fray, may soon become a murky sewer of intrigue. This could reduce the quality of "open" sources still further, for bias, in any form reduces our capacity to deduce truths from reality.

What is to be done? One increasingly useful method is to use the Internet to find collateral sources of information in much the same way as amateur radio in an earlier era supplemented official sources in reporting maritime disasters. The Internet does not have the flexibility to cover breaking news, although the introduction of camera phones may make it possible to a certain extent. Traditional news crews are still needed, warts and all, for that. However, it is already invaluable as a way of checking facts. A telephone call, an email response or a live blogger at the scene of reported action can be an invaluable resource in verifing the facts. 'Can you hear any firing?', 'What is the local rep of Moqtada al-Sadr?', are all questions that can be reasonably put by an enterprising analyst.

Ultimately, the Islamist strategy of spinning news is a self-defeating one. It portrays a false reality upon which they will ultimately founder. How many young Arab men in Fallujah are dead because they believed Al Jazeera? The real problem with lies is that ultimately, one lies to oneself. As a consumer of news like anyone else, the Belmont Club must flail away at the layers of disinformation, bad reporting or plain egregiousness that encrust the reportage. This is the fog of war.

An Entirely New Enemy

One newspaper connecting the recent fighting in Iraq with Syria and Iran is the Jerusalem Post. They maintain that the general staff behind the current anti-coalition activity is Hizbullah, working through their agenda Moqtada al-Sadr.

This week it finally happened. Hizbullah has come out of the closet and launched a full-scale military campaign against US-led forces in Iraq. Two weeks after the US shelved its sanctions against Hizbullah sponsor Syria, and as the US remains silent in the face of increased Iranian assertiveness in advancing the mullocracy's Manhattan Project, the cat jumped out of the bag. Ushering in his fight against the US, Hizbullah-Iranian front man Moqtada al-Sadr told his followers last Friday, "I am the striking arm for Hizbullah and Hamas in Iraq because the fate of Iraq and Palestine is the same." Under the spell of Sadr's call to "terrorize" the Americans, Shi'ite militiamen launched attacks in several cities at once. Militarily, the results have been mixed but have served to cause a political maelstrom by spooking US coalition partners into reconsidering their involvement in Iraq.

Hizbullah's appearance in Iraq is not a surprise. Although Sadr's offensive has been sudden, it followed a year-long buildup of Hizbullah's organizational, propaganda, and military apparatuses in Iraq. In the weeks before the US-led invasion last March, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah was already calling for suicide bombings against US forces in the event that they went through with the invasion. Shortly after the fall of Saddam's regime, Hizbullah opened offices in Basra and Safwan. While press coverage of Sadr has portrayed him as a young firebrand who acts autonomously, his connections to Hizbullah and to Iran are long-standing. Nasrallah is personally tied to Sadr's family. In 1976, he studied under Sadr's father Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in Najaf. Back in Lebanon, Nasrallah joined the Shi'ite Amal militia when it was led by its founder, Sadr's uncle Musa. Aside from his personal ties to Nasrallah, Sadr takes his direction from Ayatollah Henri, one of the most ardent extremists in Iranian ruling circles. And on the family level, Sadr's aunt is reportedly the first lady of Iran, Mrs. Muhammad Khatami. Iranian Revolutionary Guards reportedly comprise the backbone of Sadr's fighting force.

Hizbullah's modus operandi was perfected in Lebanon, where it used astute political warfare to force the Israelis to withdraw from Lebanon, abandoning their Christian allies, and retreating behind the Green Line, which Hizbullah swore was their final demand -- and which they now claim is insufficient.

Aside from Hizbullah's ability to unify the forces fighting the coalition, it is a threat of a new magnitude because Nasrallah is the world master of terrorist warfare. With Syrian and Iranian military sponsorship, he successfully trapped Israel into abandoning the initiative in the fighting in southern Lebanon. Through a nefarious mix of terror, propaganda, negotiations, and blackmail, he forced the government to accept a low-intensity conflict it could not shape through offensive strikes. Nasrallah made brilliant use of psychological warfare against us. He was able to convince Israel to cut and run by playing to our worst fear as a nation: that we were fighting a pointless and unnecessary war. He did so by carefully orchestrating terror attacks at key political junctures and by convincing influential Israeli constituencies that our actions in Lebanon were futile and pointless, and therefore our losses were self-inflicted. These constituencies were then galvanized to act unwittingly as Hizbullah's representatives to the nation as a whole.

CENTCOM was probably aware of the gathering danger. In January, 2004 Belmont Club posted Cedars of Lebanon, which quoted Jane's via the Jerusalem Post as saying that contingency plans existed to deploy Special Forces in the Bekaa Valley, Hizbullah's stronghold. The same contingency plans were collaterally referenced to an article in the Washington Post. It never happened. The out of theater battle that actually took place was Mountain Storm in Afghanistan. But it indicated that CENTCOM was watching the slow buildup of Islamist secret service and terrorist forces in Iraq and preparing their riposte.

In hindsight, it was possible that CENTCOM arranged for its troop "rotations" in Iraq with the end in view of increasing the available forces under the cover of regular replacement. When the Blackwater contractors were murdered in Fallujah, an operation some speculated was organized by Syrian Special Operations, US commanders probably saw it for the signal that it was. They had arranged media coverage of the outrage for a reason. It was followed by Shi'ite attacks on coalition bases, one attack per ally and a wave of kidnappings. Then Moqtada al-Sadr conveniently seized one of the holiest sites in Shi'ite Islam, the Golden Mosque and proclaimed he was going to die there. Two New York Times staffers were kidnapped and conveniently held in the Golden Mosque, an incident described in Belmont Club's The Time Traveller. There, they were allowed to glimpse preparations for the final stand. The script written for CENTCOM to follow was probably this (what follows is speculation). Small Marine units would rush into Fallujah to recover the Blackwater corpses and trapped themselves. The Marines would mount a desperate rescue which would create heavy civilian damage. In the meanwhile, Sadr would attack the coalition partner's bases and flee to the Golden Mosque, where his presence would be confirmed by newsmen who just happend to be to imprisoned there and later released to tell the tale. CENTCOM would destroy the mosque from which he had 'just left' or perhaps only occupied by a double. Catastrophe would follow on catastrophe, necessitating the postponement of the June 30 transfer of power.

But CENTCOM refused to sing from the sheet. Sanchez lagged the Fallujah operation and then when the traps had staled, attacked on his own terms. With a keen awareness in the operational limitations of Sadr's men, he let them strike their impotent blows, then picked them up piecemeal. Within 72 hours, CENTCOM had essentially deflected the Syrian/Iranian offensive and regained the initiative. In the coming days, it will be important to see whether Sadr and the Hizbullah lackeys can maintain their tempo. If they cannot, then the next moves are CENTCOM's. It seems that Sadr rapidly went to Plan B, leaving the Golden Mosque for Najaf  without finding any takers at CENTCOM. He must be looking at Plan C. President Bush has been on the telephone with key coalition heads of state, bringing them up to speed on the current situation. Syria and Iran have dished out their best shot and landed it on CENTCOM's arm. Now it's our turn.

Update: GSG-9 personnel kidnapped?

Spiegel is reporting that 2 GSG-9 personnel are missing after an ambush on a convoy between Baghdad and Amman last Wednesday. GSG-9 is the elite German counterterrorism force. The delayed release of this information means implies that a thorough search for these guys has yielded nothing, they are presumed lost and no point in keeping it hidden any longer. It has all the hallmarks of a professional counter-intelligence operation. The GSG-9 men, like the Blackwater contractors, would have been consummate professionals. Mounting surveillance on men of this caliber is nothing regular "insurgents" could do. This it implies the use of static and moving posts with first class communications to track the men. Nobody can do that but the intelligence department of a State or an extremely dangerous terrorist organization like Hizbullah. That party wants to know what we know and thinks this is the best way to do it.

In the nature of things, the authorship of this operation will be known. Terrorists have struck at CIA personnel and kidnapped station chiefs before, but in the 80s and 90s when they could safely assume they could hide in Syrian or Iranian sanctuaries. This act suggests they feel that political considerations will prevent President Bush from widening the war. One thing seems certain. The war against Saddam and the remnants of his regime are over. This struggle is against a new set of Islamist enemies and they are desperate. Their despair has only just begun.

Mirror of the West

Once upon a time, in a place perhaps no further than your town center there existed a world which in attitude at least, would have understood the passions and the hatreds of places like Najaf or Fallujah. The following passages have been taken from the classic first chapter of Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages. I have quoted passages here to remind myself, like a memento mori, that despite the claims on both sides that an irreconcilable conflict now exists between Islam and the West, we are not as unlike as we think. The world of the Middle Ages towered into the clouds like the dream of Islam. Yet we now know that it was not the apotheosis of faith, but it's degenerate counterfeit. Reviewer Wiltrud Goldschmidt observes:

Huizinga discerns a gradual rigidification of all manifestations of life: faith degenerates into superstition, love of beauty into ostentatious display, models of conduct deteriorate into empty formalism. Once-vital expressions of love, piety, courage and honor become so stylized that they lose all meaning. Profanation of the sacred, blasphemy and idolatry abound. Itinerant preachers whip up mass hysteria; witch hunts and prosecution of heretics are the predictable result. In the arts, excessive and repetitive use of imagery and allegory stifles creative impulses.

It could have been written yesterday in Najaf. Fanaticism, someone observed, is always the product of doubt: never faith; the grasping of the doubter after the certainties of youth. It is the last fire before the dark; or perhaps, as some of the wise in Islam may suspect, the final gathering of shadows before the real dawn. The following subheadings are mine to illustrate the parallels, but the incomparable text is Huizinga's.

The Childlike Nature of the Islamic Street

When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. ... There was less relief available for misfortune and for sickness; they came in a more fearful and more painful way. Sickness contrasted more strongly with health. The cutting cold and the dreaded darkness of winter were more concrete evils. Honor and wealth were enjoyed more fervently and greedily because they contrasted still more than now with lamentable poverty.

The Call of the Muezzin

But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused with other noises, and, for a moment, lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells. The bells acted in daily life like concerned good spirits, who with their familiar voices, proclaimed sadness or joy, calm or unrest, assembly or exhortation. People knew them by familiar names: Fat Jacqueline, Bell Roelant; everyone knew their individual tones and instantly recognized their meaning.

Clamor in the Streets: the Mighty Sermon

Processions must have also been deeply moving. During sad times -- and these came often -- they could occasionally take place day after day even for weeks on end. .. They continued from the end of may into July and involved every different groups, orders or guilds, ever different routes and ever different relics ... there were always many small children with them. ... Processions were joined or watched, "with great weeping, with many tears, with great devotion".

Rarer than the processions and executions were the sermons given by itinerant preachers who came, from time to time, to stir the people with their words. We, readers of newspapers, can hardly imagine anymore the tremendous impact of the spoken word on naive and ignorant minds. The popular preacher Brother Richard, who may have served Jean d'Arc as father confessor, preached in Paris in 1429 for ten days running. He spoke from five until ten or eleven o'clock in the morning ... when he informed his audience after his tenth sermon that it would have to be his last ... "the people, great and small, wept from the bottom of their hearts as if they were watching their best friends being put into the ground, and so did he".

Fallujah and Kut

More speedblogging. No time for style.

The Associated Press is reporting that civilians are evacuating Fallujah, but men of military age are being held back. This creates a cruel dilemma for families that don't want to be separated. There's some suggestion that Marine commanders want to keep up operational tempo to prevent the enemy from regrouping. About 300 Iraqi KIA were reported in Fallujah more than 24 hours ago, with more unrecovered elsewhere. At the normal ratios, this suggests about 600 plus wounded. A thousand casualties, almost entirely young men, in a town of 230,000 is catastrophic for the enemy and human tragedy for that community. It is probably much higher now as the enemy has been compressed, low on ammo and physically exhausted. Two US Marines were reported wounded in yesterday's fighting.

The picture emerging is a fight where some civilian activity continues beside  military engagement. Positions previously taken are sometimes reinfiltrated. Civilians still move around.

"There was one car with two women and a man. I told them that he couldn't leave. They tried to plead with me. But I told them no, so they turned around." ... A long line of cars snaked its way Friday afternoon through parts of the city as residents lined up to be checked by Marines before being allowed out, said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.

Maj. Larry Kaifesh, 36, of Chicago, said the rebels were disguising themselves as civilians and hiding their weapons in white rice sacks to move around the city before launching ambushes against the troops. "It is hard to differentiate between people who are insurgents or civilians. It is hard to get an honest picture. You just have to go with your gut feeling," he said. Soldiers also said they found weapons hidden inside an ambulance.

Meanwhile, US Army units were reported back in Al Kut, which is on the eastern side of the the Land Between the Rivers. There are reports that tribal leaders are also attacking the Shi'ites in Kut.

Personal Take

The most serious aspects of the current crisis are political rather than purely military. It has been suggested the Hezbollah units (with long association to Iran) were behind the kidnappings of expatriate civilians. Some have also wondered whether the Iranians and the Syrian secret service are now actively engaged, in view of the actuations of Sadr and the number of Syrian nationals found captured or killed in Fallujah. Lastly, it underscore the need to maintain the June 30 deadline at all costs. Let's each point in turn.

The pitiful accounts of the battle of Fallujah should put paid to the silly press suggestions that the US military is "overwhelmed". The problem is that the terrifying combat efficiency of the Marines may in fact lead to the literal extermination of enemy forces. US authorities, with a longer term end game in mind, are balancing the political outcomes of letting the Marines continue, even in their restrained mode, and taking more US casualties from holding back. When the media learns the full extent of enemy casualties in Fallujah, Kut, Ramadi, Saddam city and elsewhere, the image of the US military will be switched from "hapless" to "bullying" in a millisecond. As pointed out previously, the real problem in this cycle is intel and planning and not so much the shooting. Finding the right targets to hit to advance our political goals is the crucial part. CENTCOM I think, has been trying to use force to shape the situation.

About three days ago, I suggested privately to a reader that the retention of some units scheduled to rotate to the US was really a contingency against possible Iranian involvement. Ralph Peters, in the New York Post, is openly claiming Syrian and Iranian involvement. This would create, for the first time, the basis for guerilla war. Many posts ago, I recalled that the three requirements for guerilla activity are: sanctuaries, a source of logistical support and a national front. If the Syrians and Iranians are involved, these now exist. They did not exist for Saddam's stay behinds, who the Press called guerillas. They were wrong then and they do not see it now, when the prospect actually exists.

In a way, it fulfills the strategic goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom far better than hoped. Iraq has forced a decisive showdown between the US and the enemy in the Middle East. Even Kerry will find it hard to back down now. In a sense, George Bush has won his gambit to set up a winner take all confrontation. The basic plan now must be to hammer down the fighting, which is contracting faster than expanding. Kut nearly down and Fallujah down for military all purposes. Then the US must switch gears to shift this engagement to the political arena.

The problem is that the occupation has made Sadr the only Iraqi politician by default. Therefore all Arab forces will instinctively rally to him. The problem can never be corrected until an Iraqi government, even a nominal one, takes control. Then, there will be two Arab power centers grappling for control. Relative moderates like Sistani have cast their lot with the Council. If the Council's accession is now delayed or indefinitely postponed he will have no role and will probably take to the streets himself to prevent an erosion of support to Sadr.

To recapitulate. The press has got it absolutely backwards. There is no crisis in military capability. The real problem is political. There are now huge strategic opportunities and dangers. But the first step is to put the revolt down, and this is near to happening, and to install the Iraqi Governing Council as soon as possible. Then we should focus on how to turn the tables on the Syrians and the Iranians. The crown sits none too easy on their heads.

Quick Notes

I won't be able to post much in the coming days due to the pressure of work, and all I can do is regurgitate a reply I sent to a reader.

W: I'm getting nervous. Feels like it's spinning out of control. Reminds me of the Spanish Civil War and Vietnam -- we can win if we want but is there the will on the part of the West to win this? Hezboallah and Iran are clearly making their play. Do we have what it takes? I don't know. The news here is working against the bigger picture. And, Condi testimony, in the middle of all this....I watched it live, what a tragic backdrop for a key battle in ther war. Victor Hanson got it right today on NRO....

Dear ...

I've been looking at the casualty returns and the type of ops. The Marines killed in Ramadi, plus the Army soldiers who died in Saddam City are the bulk of the "spike" casualties so far and they seem to have been hit in vehicular ambushes. The kind of rear echelon attack or "counterseige" I've been talking about. In the Fallujah battle itself, very few Marines have died. That's going into the end phase because the Marines now have position on them. They're two klicks in from the south and one in from the north. The town is 4 klicks wide and deep, almost a square, so the enemy is compressed into a very narrow pocket. Probably cut in two by the times you get this. News is lagged. The Marines have got Iraqi Special Forces knocking on doors to while they do the maneuver. Things like this are like arm wrestling. Looks slow at first, but once you get on top, its a slaughter.

But on the main Shi'ia front, things are more fluid. I think the US is in intel gathering and economy of force mode. The real question is why they are holding back on Sadr, indeed why Sadr decamped from the Golden Mosque to start with. The problem does not seem to be lack of US forces, as such. The Marines have two identified battalions committed to Fallujah, although the operation probably has involved more, maybe half of total Marine combat strength is engaged in some form or other including security duties. But the real problem is operational. You can't just whack away at everything. CENTCOM is looking to use the force available as a scalpel to adjust the political situation in Iraq. So the priority now is not, as the press opines "finding enough troops" -- let the enemy believe that though -- it is creating a plan of operations. Finding the targets and hitting them to change the political situation in our favor. We'll whack Sadr if and when it suits us.

Back to type of ops. We are seeing hostage taking tactics plus a few symbolic types of seizures by the Madhi Army. Painful to see, but objectively it is greasy kid stuff. The only really sustained fighting is in Fallujah involving a Marine brigade. So this gives you the measure of the enemy combat power. They have to find some more. Therefore their basic hope is to start a panic, get a bandwagon going. Ergo this hostage routine and symbolic seizure routine. Raise up all Iraq. Uh, huh. That's easier said than done. That fits in just fine with intel and planning cycle, to get the Mahdi Army in a self-identifying process. Knowing what to hit is, with the US forces available, 95% of the problem. The rest is relatively straightforward.

A few other comments. During Iraqi Freedom, there were severe logistical problems. The tail stretched back to the Gulf. Aircraft flew thousands of miles. Now the US has dozens of airfields and bases. Logistically, personnel are the easiest of all the move. It's equipment that takes time. We could ship more troops into Iraq, but there's no sign of that and that is information in itself. What is the Press metric for stretched? Look at the air support used in Fallujah. Single aircraft strikes. Well, well within the envelope. That indirectly says a lot about how confident CENTCOM is. When you can tattoo the enemies nose with artistic punches you are in no real trouble. Not saying things are easy, that people aren't dying or getting maimed. But the forces in Iraq are pretty cool. Cooler it seems than we bystanders might be.

The most important thing about force is for it to be controlled force, guided by a intelligence and political goal. And the great thing about CENTCOM so far is they have not let their legs get ahead of their brains.

Regards.

Dallaire

A lot of readers, especially Canadians, have taken exception to what they perceive as a slight of General Dallaire's mission in Rwanda. The post in question says this:

Dallaire's statement is astounding on three counts. First, it is a candid admission that the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission was wholly unprepared to fulfill its mission. Even had he been prepared to disobey the United Nations instructions to sit on his hands, Dallaire is arguing he did not have the military means to be more than a sacrificial force. The second is that he accepted this lunatic mission, by his own description little more than an imposture or a fraud, and reposed on it the credulity of an entire African nation. The third is his revelation that criminal responsibility lies, not with the men who shot, hacked and stabbed thousands to death, but with the American taxpayer who did not do enough to restrain them, as those who are responsible for naughty children. That said, Dallaire has admitted that he unit he commanded could not and it would not fight. It would be cruel to compare this hapless man, left to finger his peace medal in lieu of a reputation, by comparing him to military worthies of the past. There is no point. But if the 800,000 deaths and General Dallaire's humiliation are to mean anything then at least the world should never again commit the mistake of entrusting the survival of a country to the United Nations.

It makes three points, which I will attempt to justify. Dallaire undertook a mission which had no hope of succeeding. The mission gave a false assurance to the Rwandans. Dallaire claims that the responsibility for the debacle lies with the Great Powers, who did not provide the means for him to carry out his mission, instead of the Rwandans themselves. Here's a link to the Canadian Conference of Defense Associations Site, which analyzes Dallaire's mission very sympathetically.

Belgian commanders refused to comply with Dallaire's orders. Concentrating soldiers, even in company locations, would require quartering them in tents. Belgian field living standards demanded that their soldiers be put up in hard shelters. With no extra UN funds to provide accommodation large enough to house a Belgian company, they instead dispersed themselves in platoon strength or less around the city. Each small position required its our security detail further reducing the already minimal UNAMIR capacity to conduct any kind of pro-active operations.

Given the reduced strength of the Belgian contingent with its light vehicles, Dallaire's only other option was to designate a Bangladeshi company as his reaction force. The ill-trained and equipped Bangladeshi's did possess eight armoured personnel carriers and were thus suitable for containing the frequent civilian riots in Kigali. However, they were less than ideal for carrying out offensive operations against an armed aggressor.

In particular, it deals with his handling of the Belgian paratroops, who captured by the Rwandans, were subsequently hacked to death in a slow and tortuous fashion.

Some Belgian military officials asserted that they knew what was about to happen. During Marshal's court-martial, it was revealed that Belgian authorities had an elaborate intelligence network set up in Rwanda. Information from these sources was passed to Brussels, but not to the UN Force Commander. ...

Dallaire's critics must also be unaware that his jeep had been stopped at an RGF roadblock near the city centre early in the day. Risking his own safety he continued on foot until the RGF commander ordered him into a car and had him driven to a meeting of senior Hutu RGF officers. It was at this point that Gen. Dallaire noticed the two Belgians in the courtyard. Upon spotting them, Dallaire ordered the driver of his vehicle to stop -- in no uncertain terms. The officer driving the car, fearing his own safety from the enraged off duty soldiers in the camp, flatly refused and proceeded to the meeting point. With no clear picture yet of what was happening, Dallaire could only hope to find answers at the meeting.

As for the prospects of a rescue mission, some have claimed that it would have taken only minimal force to crack open the largest RGF military compound in the city to free the Belgian troops. In particular, these charges were made by Capt. Yves Theunissen, second in command of the Belgian company closest to the massacre site. At the court-martial Theunissen was identified as the least credible witnesses called by prosecution lawyers.

Largely on the basis of Theunissen's word, Dallaire's critics claim that Camp Kigali was manned by logistics types and some second rate material that would break under any real military pressure. In truth, the compound held an elite recce battalion and elements of the Presidential Guard, all manning well-fortified bunkers and entrenchment's.

To attack such a position with a handful of trained soldiers, no secure startline, no artillery, and a shortage of machine-gun ammunition would most certainly have failed. In addition, it would make every isolated and undergunned UNAMIR position in all Rwanda a target for Hutu attacks. General Dallaire made a difficult decision that day, but in my opinion, he took the only option open to him.

The report depicts Dallaire in command of little more than a rabble. He had insubordinate soldiers, intelligence never reported to him, no logistics, no ammunition and scattered deployments. How he could have withstood the humiliation of accepting such a farcical command is the first and most fundamental question. It is abundantly clear that taking this circus into Kigali, far inland, without any prospect of reinforcement, was probably an act of military folly, or at least so events proved. One of the fundamental tests of command must be a reluctance to lead your men into an ambush. The report goes on to relate how Dallaire personally pleaded with the Rwandans for the Belgian paratroops, who were by then hanging like meat from the wire. It recalls Lord Elphinstone's pleadings with the Afghans during the horrible British retreat from Kabul.

I will make the three points again. Dallaire's recent statements in Kigali amount to this. "First, it is a candid admission that the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission was wholly unprepared to fulfill its mission. Even had he been prepared to disobey the United Nations instructions to sit on his hands, Dallaire is arguing he did not have the military means to be more than a sacrificial force. The second is that he accepted this lunatic mission, by his own description little more than an imposture or a fraud, and reposed on it the credulity of an entire African nation. The third is his revelation that criminal responsibility lies, not with the men who shot, hacked and stabbed thousands to death, but with the American taxpayer who did not do enough to restrain them, as those who are responsible for naughty children." I don't think these coments are unjust.

Today there are calls for more UN peacekeeping in the Sudan. If Rwanda teaches anything it must be that "Never again" means "Never again under the UN".

"I was only following orders"

I will let this post stand for historical purposes, but say here that no negative imputation on the person of General Dallaire is intended and any impression to the contrary I may have conveyed, I deeply regret. I do not regret the assertion that this deployment was a mistake. I can't bring myself to honestly say, "well done" and if we could do it all again, we'd do it the same way.

Peace award-winning General Romeo Dallaire was raked over the coals at the International Conference on Genocide, held at Kigali, Rwanda in the very country  where his United Nations Command had failed to prevent a massacre of 800,000 people. He was asked by angry participants how he could have let the very thing he was charged to prevent happen without resistance. He blamed the Britain, France and the United States for not coming to his aid.

"You, me, my forces, were abandoned by our own countries and the international community," the retired Canadian Armed Forces lieutenant-general told the International Conference on Genocide, being held in Kigali as part of events marking the 10th anniversary of the slaughter. Gen. Dallaire, who was head of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda at the time, used his scheduled five-minute talk to give a forceful half-hour explanation of his actions 10 years ago. "There exists no country today that, 10 years later, has the right to wash its hands of Rwandan blood, by simply saying 'sorry' and giving money," he told the mostly Rwandan audience. "It comes back to Rwandans to make sure they [other countries] never forget they are criminally responsible, I will use the term, criminally responsible for the genocide." ...

He faced two specific attacks yesterday, one from a Belgian academic who questioned why he did not disobey orders from UN headquarters and do more to protect civilians, and another by a Belgian doctor-turned-legislator who said Gen. Dallaire should have resigned when it became clear the UN Security Council would not appropriately support his mission. ...

Gen. Dallaire angrily denied the charge. "With no resources to sustain a battle, I would have become the third target, the third force in the battle, and as such would have been free game for the other side to eliminate the force in total," he said, explaining why his troops did not engage Hutu militias to defend Tutsi civilians who sought shelter with the peacekeepers.

Dallaire's statement is astounding on three counts. First, it is a candid admission that the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission was wholly unprepared to fulfill its mission. Even had he been prepared to disobey the United Nations instructions to sit on his hands, Dallaire is arguing he did not have the military means to be more than a sacrificial force. The second is that he accepted this lunatic mission, by his own description little more than an imposture or a fraud, and reposed on it the credulity of an entire African nation. The third is his revelation that criminal responsibility lies, not with the men who shot, hacked and stabbed thousands to death, but with the American taxpayer who did not do enough to restrain them, as those who are responsible for naughty children. That said, Dallaire has admitted that he unit he commanded could not and it would not fight. It would be cruel to compare this hapless man, left to finger his peace medal in lieu of a reputation, by comparing him to military worthies of the past. There is no point. But if the 800,000 deaths and General Dallaire's humiliation are to mean anything then at least the world should never again commit the mistake of entrusting the survival of a country to the United Nations.

The Time Traveller

A wonderfully atmospheric piece by John Burns of the New York Times describes the atmosphere in the Golden Mosque before Sadr bugged out. Two NYT journalists who were temporarily held prisoner at the Mosque relate:

the visitors were left under loose guard at the mosque's main entrance and, for about an hour, inside the courtyard. There, seething antagonism for Westerners blended with a haphazard, almost chaotic approach to maintaining control. Hundreds of worshipers made their way into the mosque past groups of men toting Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and a variety of bayonets and knives. Along with weapons, the constants among the men were religious fervor and loyalty to Mr. Sadr. Many wore black headbands inscribed in yellow with Shiite religious tenets, black turbans or common red and black checkered kuffiya headdresses. Some of the militiamen were in their 50's and 60's, but most were young, some no more than 12 or 13. Weapons training among them appeared virtually nonexistent; Kalashnikovs with loaded magazines and safety catches off were nonchalantly waved in the air.

... But there were signs of preparations for a siege. In the early afternoon, vehicles pulled up to the mosque unloaded cardboard boxes full of food. Later, several ambulances unloaded boxes of medical supplies, labeled in English as containing bandages, cotton wool, and syringes. Some were marked with Christian inscriptions in English, suggesting that they originally came from Christian medical charities operating in Iraq. ... Vehicles came and went, among them white and blue patrol cars and pickup trucks supplied by the United States to Iraq's new American-trained police force, filled with some of the heavily armed militiamen who took control of Kufa on Sunday.

It might have been a scene from the twelfth century. Nowhere does the conception of Iraq, or loyalty to its government, still less to its constitution enter into the story. Whatever allegiance animated the crowd was purely tribal and more than tribal -- personal -- to Sadr and his deity. Goods are handled like plunder from a raided caravan. Donations are regarded as payment in tribute from a terrified America and grinningly turned to Jihadi uses. Striplings and greybeards mingle exchanging jingling equipment in anticipation of a coming raid, the tradition of the long centuries.

Outside are the strange Americans with alien notions of neighborliness, of working for a living or reading a book. They are perplexingly powerful yet somehow weak. The Times relates how the sound of an aircraft creates a momentary panic among the fearless fighters of Sadr, but no bombs come. The infidel is too pusillanimous to do what anyone in this Holy Place would do without hesitation. Too weak to even push a button! And the 12th century lives on into another day.

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now--if I may use the phrase--be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know--for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made--thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.

If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank--is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story.

And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers --shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle--to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

-- H. G. Wells "The Time Machine"

Hitting Bedrock: the Battle for Iraq's Future

When American forces overthrew Saddam Hussein, they shredded the lid of terror that had contained the cauldron of seething cabals comprising Arab/Islamic society for years. The names and sects were different in each country, as were the preachers, but the primal aggression was the same. Middle Eastern tyrannies had developed along lines in which the Secret Police was valued more than a legislative assembly and bribery far more important than the provision of services. The function of the Arab tyrannies and dynasties which President Bush set out to destroy, besides enriching the ruling clique, was first and foremost to mask the underlying purulence and enable Arab society to lurch on like a zombie, the very image of life-in-death.

The spasms racking the Sunni and Shi'ite areas of Iraq, with their mixed messages of mutual ethnic hatred, aspirations to tribalism, theocracy, a life of crime, a demand for entitlement and a sheer love of killing are djinns escaping from a bottle to which Saddam was the cork. The West, and especially Europe, had long relied on mustachioed strongmen with kilometric names to keep these noxious spirits in place. But they seeped out nonetheless, establishing themselves in enclaves all around the world where, freed from the Secret Police, they set about the usual business of manufacturing bombs and poison, imported by a coterie of social workers who found their manners, because incomprehensible, most charming.

The greatest mistake America could make would be to take the counsel of the past and either reconstitute a dictatorship in Iraq or withdraw into the illusory safety of a Western homeland. Like the Spaniards, Americans will find the Jihadis already there before them, ready to pelt them at the homecoming parade. It should never forget that the reason America came to the Middle East in the first place was precisely to meet these toxic religious and political forces head on. And if American policy makers are shy about it, the Jihadis are not. They are lining up to fight Western infidels at an immigration office near you.

Those who scoff at the idea that Western freedom and material development can succeed where Saddam's torture chambers could not are ignoring the numbers. Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam killed many hundreds of thousands to maintain his rule, most of them innocent people. The targeted assault of Sunni and Shi'a gangsters, whose total casualties are in the hundreds, stands in stark contrast. The differential is due not merely by the efficiency of the US Armed Forces, which would shorten the time, but not the carnage. The imbalance is due to the relative weights given to force and to development; to the fact that many Iraqis have gainful employment and other avenues of political action as never before. If there are less than a hundred thousand dead, it is because the 99,000 are working. The AC-130 or the MOAB are not America's ultimate weapon. It is the Iraqi Governing Council and the hope that it represents.

In this light, President Bush's insistence on maintaining the June 30 deadline for transferring authority is fundamentally correct. Victory is defined as the ability to impose one's will upon the enemy and America has done just that.  Yet a moment's reflection will reveal the surprising fact that by a subtle transmutation the enemy upon which America's will has been imposed is no longer a moth-eaten dictator but the malignant spirit itself.

It is said that the most ancient of Mesopotamian demons is Pazuzu.  Here, not far from historic Eden, he waxes strongest, contemptuous of the empires which tried to vanquish him only to fall in turn beneath his compulsion. And whether we believe in him or not, the story may serve as an allegory for the enemy that America's soldiers must vanquish, with steel in places, but with a weapon he cannot understand in all others.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Slim Pickings

The lesser theater

Very little information on Fallujah to go on now with the news clampdown. Four Marines died in Anbar province, in which Fallujah is located, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. At 11:12 Zulu, Reuters reported "fighting" in the industrial part of the city,  possibly in the southeastern corner of the map near the quarries. The aerial photo map shows an area of distinctly larger compounds in that vicinity.

Falluja, Iraq - Heavy fighting erupted between U.S. troops and Iraqi guerrillas on the edge of Falluja, an anti-American hotbed west of Baghdad. Witnesses on rooftops said they could see clashes on the highway just north of Falluja, with explosions and heavy gunfire echoing across the town. Fighting was also reported in the industrial area of the city.

This account if true could indicate fighting on opposite sides (north and south) of the city and possibly a Marine penetration nearly as far as Highway 10, the main road which runs East-West through the city. But reports are so sketchy that it is hard to say.

Update

Yahoo News (Hat tip: Freerepublic) has more details:

The bulk of the coalition force has remained on Fallujah's edge, apparently held at bay by tough resistance from anti-American fighters against Marine forays probing the outskirts ...  In Fallujah, explosions and gunfire were heard from the city through the night Monday and into Tuesday morning, apparently U.S. troops shelling targets and clashing with guerrillas as Marines probed the outskirts with reconnaissance patrols. A force of Marines pushed into an eastern neighborhood, clashing with guerrillas Tuesday. Gunmen carrying automatic weapons were seen in the streets. Guerrilla fire set one vehicle ablaze, said a witness, Issam Mahmoud, who said a soldier inside was killed. There was no immediate confirmation of the death. Troops broke into houses in the neighborhood, carrying out searches, and entered a mosque, witnesses said. U.S. troops waiting on the northern edge of Fallujah for orders to move in came under fire from nearby houses Tuesday, wounding two Marines. Tanks and Humvees moved into the neighborhood where the fire came from, and the sound of tank fire was later heard. The military reported six Iraqis killed in fighting Monday, saying all were guerrillas, though residents said five of them were killed when helicopters hit a residential area. In the nearby city of Ramadi, another hotbed of guerrilla activity 24 miles west of Fallujah, U.S. troops and insurgents clashed on a downtown street. One Iraqi was killed and three wounded, doctors said.

Compare this account with the earlier Belmont Club projections, here and here, which seem to be holding up pretty well in general outline. It is unlikely the Marines are being "held at bay". They are deliberately infiltrating the town and whipsawing the defenders back and forth. The Belmont Club projections seem to be off in two respects. First, the Marines are moving at a far faster tempo than predicted. Also, they seem less impeded by civilians and don't seem to need to process them out of the way. It appears they are looking through specific places without having to do a block by block search, perhaps because they have better intel. Second, the Marines are operating over a far wider area than Fallujah. They seem to be raiding throughout the environs, perhaps using the mini-raid method discussed in Operation Mountain Storm. Mobility and networked resources allow them to create a "virtually everywhere" type of combat presence.

The Main Show: Sadr and the Shi'ites

The New York Times is reporting that Moktada Al-Sadr has barricaded himself inside the most symbolic site  in Shi'ite Islam: the Golden Mosque.

KUFA, Iraq, April 5 — The Grand Mosque of Kufa has now become the grand arsenal. On Monday, as American authorities issued an arrest warrant for Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who set off the most serious insurrection so far against the occupation forces, hundreds of his supporters were busy fortifying the mosque here with heavy weapons, bracing for an American invasion.

Mr. Sadr has barricaded himself inside the golden brick walls, refusing to surrender. His militia is prowling the streets, staring down the sights of machine guns, building fighting positions in and around the mosque, the town's biggest, and pointing rocket-propelled grenades at the highway heading north — the road they expect to see American forces come rumbling down.

"The only way the Americans will enter this city is entering over our bodies," said Sheik Abu Mahdi al-Rubayee, a commander in Mr. Sadr's private army, estimated to number in the tens of thousands. "If they come for our leader, they will ignite all of Iraq."

If Sadr died in Kufa's Golden Mosque, it would be ironic. He was reported to have murdered one of his rivals, Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim in the very same place nearly a year ago to this day

It was probably the followers of this fiery young leader who murdered his religious adversary, who arrived in Iraq from London on April 10th. Al-Khoei, a friend of America, was ambushed at the golden mosque and hacked to death with knives. Muktada al-Sadr denies having ordered the murder, claiming that an "agitated mob" was responsible. From his headquarters on the street leading to the market, al-Sadr constantly watches the shrine, waiting, drinking tea, scheming.

But that is probably his ambition. Nearly all the holy men of Shi'ite Islam have died in Kufa, most notably its very founder, Ali. Having sought refuge there after a power struggle to lead Islam, he was stabbed to death on the site of the Golden Mosque. The eerily prophetic Der Spiegel article describes the mental landscape of Kufa and the Shi'ites.

No other religion is so enmeshed in its cult of martyrdom. The Shiites believe that all of their imams after Ali died a sacrificial death. A small minority only acknowledges seven imams (like the Ismailites), while most consider themselves part of the twelve imam Shia. The twelfth in the sequence of their leaders is said to have suffered an unusual fate. Little Mohammed, born in 869, was hidden by his father and then disappeared. Most Shiites believe that the "hidden imam," or "Mahdi," will reappear one day and will take the helm of the party of Ali to claim the legitimate rights of its ancestors and lead his followers into paradise.

By issuing an arrest warrant on Sadr, the Iraqi Governing Council and the Coalition Authority are participating, albeit unwillingly and indirectly, in a deep power struggle for the leadership of Shi'ite Islam itself. By ensconcing himself in the Golden Temple, Sadr is betting that an American assault on Islam's holiest place, so evocative of the martyrdom of the founding Ali will light a fuse that will ignite the Shi'a along a belt sweeping up from southern Iraq to Iran.

It is understandable that America preferred to see Sadr marginalized by his theocratic rivals instead of moving against him directly. They had possibly hoped that bottling the Shi'ite "clerics" in their holy cities would give them ample opportunity to knife each other, a talent they so richly display. But Sadr, like Osama before him, cunningly saw that the pre-eminence he would be denied in the natural course might be obtained by provoking an American reaction -- a deus ex machina -- to anoint himself the Mahdi of the age. Certain sects in Islam, like the Left, find America an indispensable tool to living out their sick fantasies.

If the operation against Fallujah is tricky, serving the warrant of arrest on Sadr will be doubly so. He is surrounded by hundreds of retainers, many trained by the Hezbollah in Lebanon, oozing hatred and fanaticism from every pore. The US is caught between waiting him out, so that the press can tout the pitiful weakness the America or putting a 2,000 pound JDAM through the Golden Mosque's roof with the warrant of arrest attached, so the press can decry how brutally strong America is. The sheer numbers of Sadr's bodyguards means there is no plausible method of finessing it.

It might be possible for Iraqis themselves to assault the Mosque. That would take the shine off Sadr's planned martyrdom, but it is by no means sure that the nascent Iraqi security forces could pull it off. Moreover, any American police adviser would be properly outraged at sacrificing his men in a frontal attack when supporting fires are available. No Iraqi should die simply to avoid a headline in the New York Times.

There might be a way of besieging Sadr in a manner that makes him look ridiculous rather than noble, some brilliant psyops ploy, but I do not know it. It might also be possible to shift the drama elsewhere so Sadr is left high, dry and forgotten. But absent these, it will come down to letting him play out his sophomoric part on the world stage or giving this scoundrel and his thugs their just deserts. Which course prevails will ultimately be determined by political, rather than purely military considerations.

Update:

Sadr blinks! He wants to live, probably betting that he will get a prison term (capital punishment is abolished in Iraq) he can emerge from with his reputation enhanced to claim his just reward. He is still in his 30s.

BAGHDAD, April 6 (Xinhuanet) -- Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr,wanted by coalition forces in Iraq, ended his sit-in at a mosque in Kufa Tuesday and travelled to the holy city of Najaf to prevent more bloodshed. "I have taken it upon myself to prevent more bloodshed except mine," he said in a statement, expressing his concern that the US troops may violate the sacred site of Al Kufa mosque. Sadr said he took his decision to "observe a peaceful sit-in" at the mosque of Al Kufa to protest against "the aggressions committed by the infidel occupier against civilians". An arrest warrant has been issued last year for Sadr for the murder of a rival cleric, Abdel Majid al-Khoei, just days after thefall of Saddam's regime. Thousands of his supporters gathered in the mosque and vowed to defend him to the death after US civil administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer declared Sadr an outlaw on Monday.

This is interesting because Sadr must have been convinced in his heart that the Americans would not stick at putting a JDAM through the roof. The decimation of his men may have convinced him that the US was playing for keeps. No wonder the Arab League won't even meet. It's getting hard to sit on a fence in the Middle East.

Countersiege

Glenn Reynolds links to Zayed in Baghdad, who is reporting a Shi'ite "coup" in Baghdad.

A coup d'etat is taking place in Iraq a the moment. Al-Shu'la, Al-Hurria, Thawra (Sadr city), and Kadhimiya (all Shi'ite neighbourhoods in Baghdad) have been declared liberated from occupation. Looting has already started at some places downtown, a friend of mine just returned from Sadun street and he says Al-Mahdi militiamen are breaking stores and clinics open and also at Tahrir square just across the river from the Green Zone. News from other cities in the south indicate that Sadr followers (tens of thousands of them) have taken over IP stations and governorate buildings in Kufa, Nassiriya, Ammara, Kut, and Basrah. Al-Jazeera says that policemen in these cities have sided with the Shia insurgents, which doesn't come as a surprise to me since a large portion of the police forces in these areas were recruited from Shi'ite militias and we have talked about that ages ago. And it looks like this move has been planned a long time ago.

No one knows what is happening in the capital right now. Power has been cut off in my neighbourhood since the afternoon, and I can only hear helicopters, massive explosions, and continuous shooting nearby. The streets are empty, someone told us half an hour ago that Al-Mahdi are trying to take over our neighbourhood and are being met by resistance from Sunni hardliners. Doors are locked, and AK-47's are being loaded and put close by in case they are needed. The phone keeps ringing frantically. Baghdadis are horrified and everyone seems to have made up their mind to stay home tomorrow until the situation is clear.

Before anyone gets too excited, compare the account above to the following CENTCOM briefing. Many of the elements that Zayed mentions -- the thousands of men, the Iraqi police station attacks, the helicopters (they were Apaches) are already in this briefing of April 5, 2004 2:01 p.m. EDT. They correspond to such an extent that there must be some overlap. Having said that, you will note that the briefer is not worried about Fallujah, which he sees as a strategically unimportant burp from deadend Saddamites. He does consider the Shi'ite situation far more worrying.

SR. CENTCOM OFFICIAL:  The events of the weekend surrounding Muqtada Sadr are concerning to us. They are Shi'a, and Sadr is a more or less minor cleric within the Shi'a religion. He has been more or less marginalized by most of the Shi'a community, and those that surround it, from both the Ayatollah in Lebanon as well as those that he seeks guidance and help from in Iran. But he does have a very strong following amongst a minor group, probably about 3,000 members of a militia force called the Mahdi Army, that he uses to protect himself and some of his other leaders, and then uses as he sees fit, whether it's establishing the Shiriah (ph) court or protecting a mosque from outside activities. Most of his following, I think, as far as those folks that are not involved with the Mahdi Army, come from those Shi'a members who recall with fondness and with reverence his family name, his father and others that have the Sadr name, at least two grand ayatollahs in the family, and he has a following that directly revolves around that.

This started in An Najaf with a large demonstration that got out of control. We don't think it was initially intended, at least by the demonstrators, to get out of control, but somewhere amidst the crowds that were out there, some snipers started firing at coalition members and it did get out of control.

Ultimately they went to our Joint Coordination Center that was established to work coordination between the police and the Civil Defense Corps and the coalition in preparation for the Arba'in activities that will be going on over the next week, and they also attacked a compound that housed the folks from the Spanish brigade there. The El Salvador quick response team or force counterattacked, and we did lose one El Salvadoran during that effort. But they relieved the pressure on those facilities and ultimately -- I won't say brought calm, but ended the attacks there.

Sadr City in Baghdad was the location, as you know, for several police station takeovers, and we lost several soldiers -- actually, eight -- in retaking those in very violent attacks. And actually, they did a very good job of going back in and restoring some level of order after apparent Mahdi Army folks had gone in and taken over four of the police stations. There were a number of other demonstrations around the country, in An Nasiriyah and a couple of other areas; but all told, probably the number of demonstrators and followers were less than about 10,000. A great deal of violence, mostly committed by an outlaw militia group, the Mahdi Army, and directed by a cleric who, as we see it, is attempting to gain some power, which he has not had up to now, and to gain more influence as we run up to the turnover of sovereignty. ...

As far as the Shi'a activities, I would not even begin to call that an uprising. You know, 60 percent of the population of Iraq is Shi'a, and if you figure the population is 25 million, that puts something in the neighborhood of 15 million or so. And I'm not going to try to do math in public, but certainly the numbers don't suggest even the hint of a Shi'a uprising, even though that's what the papers showed -- or the papers put on their headlines. This is an outlaw group of militia that is taking actions in support of a cleric who is not a particularly powerful Shi'a cleric. And in my view, this is more a power grab at a very difficult time, given that we have Arba'in coming up. And just the fact that we have this coupled with 500,000 to a million pilgrims makes this something of concern to us as far as how we want to respond.

...

I would say that the Shi'a community was doing a pretty good job of marginalizing Sadr on their own. And so he was walking a pretty thin line without throwing out a whole bunch of rhetoric in our direction. And certainly there are concerns as we deal with the Shi'a community that we try and do it within the rule of law. And so yes, the warrant has been out there and we have been basically trying to help the police and the Civil Defense Corps as they try to locate and determine what action to take down there.

And by the way, it seemed like after his sermons and stuff, after his Friday sermons, his followers were getting smaller and smaller in size. So we weren't -- I won't say concerned with him, but it looked like things were moving in a direction that were good as far as the Shi'a community moving more towards the Sistani view of things, if not pro-coalition or not anti-coalition, certainly in a neutral position. There certainly are concerns about inflaming the Shi'a folks, but I'm not sure that we were that concerned about Sadr doing that because he was starting to get marginalized by them already. And had a target of opportunity come up, we certainly would have grabbed him. He's known that warrant's been out so he has been very quiet -- well, not quiet. He has protected himself very well, and it has been very difficult to follow his moves. And the last thing we want to do is go into a mosque and take significant actions in there. That I do believe would incite Shi'a if we did that during sermons and the like. Although his actions did or his words did go over the line recently, I think, more so than they have in the past, where, without having heard the words or seen the translation, I believe he actually did call for violence against coalition. And that is over the line and that does -- not take the gloves off, but certainly gives us more impetus to go after him and help the Iraqi security sector get him under control and get tried before an Iraqi judge.

Two points. The CENTCOM assessment is that this is centered around Sadr and therefore limited. The alternative is that it is centered around Iran and is the equivalent of the Chinese attacking south over the Yalu to save the Nokors. We will soon know the truth. The second is that these events will curiously rally the Sunnis to the Americans. It will also rally a lot of Shi'ites. Sistani will not stand idly by while Sadr grabs his leadership. The fact that the Iraqi Governing Council (of which Sistani is a part: erratum reader AG points out he is not part of the governing council. List of members here.) has issued a warrant for Sadr's arrest indicates that. They are afraid of what will happen if people like Sadr get loose. Zayed's blog is an insight into their fears, and I can't say they are unjustified.

Having said that, it must be true that Sadr's combat power and that of his Iranian backers, if any, is extremely limited. Any kind of calculation based on available ammunition, mobility, etc. will show this absolutely. They can't sustain this for more than 48 hours and because they have exposed themselves will take terrific casualties because the Coalition will have a free hand in taking them down, something they have avoided for political reasons till now. But now they have a domestic Iraqi mandate. This is Iraq's September 11, if you will.

In earlier blogs, I mentioned the Jihadi penchant for using counterseige tactics. Whenever they are surrounded or under attack, they go off and burn down some town or perpetrate some spectacular slaughter. And here they go again. Same old, same old. These are calculated for media effect. On the ground (if you do your calculation as above) the effect is much, much smaller. These countersiege or diversionary tactics only work when the attacking force is distracted. When the attacking force keeps its cool, these stupid maneuvers are their death warrant. My own take (and it is only an opinion) is that there is no fundamental crisis. Rather, rather there is a fundamental opportunity that has been handed to us as a gift by our enemies. Let's keep cool and make the most of it. Pray for the troops and don't doubt their ability

Operation Valiant Resolve

The operation on Fallujah has commenced. From preliminary reports, it seems that the enemy will fight. Marines are taking mortar fire from town and have responded with air support. This will be an extremely difficult operation, and the degree of enemy entrenchment fully justifies the Marine decision not to rush into the fray. As noted in earlier posts, the enemy will use counter-siege tactics by creating incidents elsewhere to divert the Marines.

The Marines are currently trying to evacuate the town, using leaflets, loudspeakers and taking over the airwaves. Expect a fairly extended period in which no apparent progress will be made. The progress will be positional but the stresses will built up progressively within the enemy position which will be continuously undermined. From here on in, the ability to maneuver based on information dominance will be everything. The strategic goal of the enemy will be to inflict as many casualties on Americans as possible, behind a barricade of women and children. They will succeed to some extent. The basic goal of American forces will probably be to annihilate and capture the cadre of gangs which infest Fallujah, a town which is a byword in terror even to the Iraqis.

The closest historical analogue to this engagement may be the battle fought by Blackjack Pershing a hundred years ago in Sulu -- the battle of Bud Bagsak. Although this battle is now described by Islamic rebels as a scene of martyrdom, it in fact marked the end of major resistance, from which they did not recover until the 1970s.

Analysis

The following is speculation based purely on a map exercise and historical data.

Psychologically there can be few things more devastating than the sight of the population abandoning the hard core Anti-coalition forces to their fate. This would have enormous political symbolism and be extremely humiliating for the enemy. The Jihadi likes to imagine that his chattel wife will continue to wash his underpants and cook for him, whenever she is not serving as his human shield. The departure of noncombatants would also deprive the enemy of his main military advantage. Innocent flesh and blood, not concrete and steel, are what the Anti-coalition forces are relying on for safety. Therefore the enemy can be expected to exert all his power to keep the general population under his control.

Yet he must do this while keeping the Marines out. The ten mile perimeter of Fallujah is too large an area to continuously defend and if the energy required to police the population is added to the burden of the defenders, it will clearly be stretched. The overextension of the defense is the principal weakness of the enemy position in Fallujah. Historically, cities have been defended from strongpoints backed by a mobile reserve, simply because they are too large to cover in continuous line. Even the placement of IEDs and mines must be selective. It is doubtful whether the Anti-coalition forces, however well provided, have enough explosives to surround Fallujah with a continuous belt of mines. That would "tie up" their entire inventory of explosive and be just as great a danger to themselves in any mobile scenario.

For these reasons, the Chechens who defended Grozny relied upon a semi-mobile defense, in which teams of men with mixed arms, typically RPG shooters backed by automatic rifles and machineguns, guarded key approaches. To enhance their mobility, the Chechens dug connecting tunnels between buildings and under streets. They feigned retreat before mounted Russian forces, then subjected them to simultaneous fires from basement, ground and upper stories, volleying them with RPGs. The defenders of Fallujah would have read the Chechen playbook.

The first sign that the Marines are planning to turn the tables on them comes from the fact that they have wired in the escape routes from town at a standoff distance. This puts the Anti-coalition forces on the permanent defensive. The Marines will probably exploit the uncoverable yardage of Fallujah to feint from several directions, essentially forcing the defense to continuously run around within the perimeter. They can feint continuously, especially during the hours of darkness. Anyone who has experienced running around nighttime streets knows that unit cohesion will gradually evaporate and bits of equipment will be mislaid. And then there may be long-range fire from American assets. Because the Marines have the initiative, they can enforce a rest plan while Anti-coalition forces cannot. A semi-mobile Grozny style defense will probably not work in Fallujah; it will wear out against a cunning, fencing Marine Corps. At some point, the enemy will feel the need to pull into a continuously defended, but shrunken perimeter.

This will provide the Marines with continuous opportunities to gain better firing positions or even infiltrate parts of Fallujah. Before long the enemy will be forced to slacken his grip on the civilians and further consolidate to improve his position. At some point civilians will start leaving Fallujah for processing areas. The Marines can jam enemy comms to stymie coordination, and once a civilian exodus begins Coalition radio can broadcast messages in the name of the defenders asking civilians to leave. The enemy must work hard to keep his human shields in place and therefore it must be expected that he might fire on civilians in an desperate effort to keep them under control. These challenges will be met, though not without lives lost.

Yet the defenders will be operating on a steadily diminishing energy budget: less and less sleep, ammo and equipment. Because the Marines hold the initiative, they can drain the defensive energies to a monstrous degree by precipitating one crisis after the other to which the enemy must respond or concede. Gradually, the Marines will infiltrate Fallujah until the enemy is paralyzed. More than likely the press will interpret these indirect tactics as proof that Americans are afraid to advance or declare that the Marines have been pinned down. Never mind. The job at hand is to win an overwhelming victory at the lowest cost whatever its impact may be on the ratings. It is war, not entertainment.

The Bulge

To the residents of Najaf, many of whom are unaware that the Spanish contingent has been ordered home by incoming Prime Minister Zapatero, their imminent departure will be perceived as flight in the face of an Islamic attack. Forces led by a Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr led a demonstration on the Spanish base and opened fire on it, killing four Salvadorans and wounding 9 others. Fourteen Iraqis were killed and 130 wounded in the return.

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) Gunmen opened fire on the Spanish garrison in the holy city of Najaf on Sunday during a huge demonstration by followers of an anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric. Four Salvadorean soldiers and at least 14 Iraqis died, and more than 130 people were wounded. ...

In Najaf, the shooting broke out after thousands of al-Sadr supporters gathered outside the Spanish garrison. A spokesman for the Spanish headquarters in nearby Diwaniyah, Commander Carlos Herradon, said attackers opened fire about noon. The Spanish and Salvadorean soldiers fired back, and assailants later regrouped in three clusters outside the base. Shooting continued into the afternoon, he said. Along with the four soldiers killed, nine Salvadorean soldiers were wounded, the Spanish defense ministry said in the Spanish capital, Madrid. The Salvadorans are under Spanish command as part of an international brigade that includes troops from Central America. No Spaniards were injured. ...

Spain has 1,300 troops stationed in Iraq, and the Central American contingent is of a similar size. Multiple train bombings in Madrid last month killed 191 people and have been blamed on al-Qaida linked terrorists who said they were punishing Spain for its alliance with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The residents of Najaf will be right. What will now overtake the Spanish command through no fault of its own soldiers is a rout. This occurs when a force is chased off the battlefield in increasing disorder. Once the retrograde movement begins, enemy harassment is redoubled and the retreating force is ultimately pursued to the very point of embarkation and there is no reason pursuit must end when it returns to Spain. A rout can only be stemmed when a retreating army turns on its enemies and puts them to flight. This Zapatero will not allow. He is committed, for reasons of ideology, to a policy of surrender and now the Spanish command, and the United States indirectly, must harvest its bitter fruit.

Since time immemorial commanders have sought to break in their opponent's lines, and having achieved this, strike all the harder with end in view of widening the gap and pressing their advantage. Nowhere is this more instinctive than among the desert raiders. The Islamist stroke against Spanish forces in Iraq is no accident and neither will their succeeding blows be. Ralph Peters, writing on April 1, anticipated the Islamist offensive:

Next, we'll see a much greater wave of strikes - frantic and fanatical - as the June 30 transfer of power approaches. The enemies of Iraqi freedom, home-grown or foreign interlopers, must disrupt the return of Iraqi sovereignty. They've told their sympathizers that the United States wants to rule their country indefinitely and steal its oil. They can't afford the development of a rule-of-law democracy, however imperfect, in Iraq. Indeed, free Iraqi self-rule is their greatest enemy.

The third wave of attacks will come in the build-up to the U.S. presidential election. Our soldiers, contractors and Iraqi officials will be attacked throughout Iraq, and the terrorists will strain their resources to attack the United States itself. They hope to repeat their electoral success in Spain and imagine, wrongly, that a Democratic victory would mean that Washington would retreat from Iraq and the War on Terror.

There will be more, many more attacks. And the soldiers of Spain, who have proven time and again their individual bravery, have been condemned by their leaders to bear its brunt in the most humiliating possible way. Churchill's remarks to Chamberlain after Munich might just as well apply to Zapatero. "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war."

Command Decision

The Washington Post is reporting that an operational plan to clean up Fallujah is pretty well written up. In an article headed 2 U.S. Troops Killed; Fallujah Plan Readied, it says:

Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, is coordinating military plans to reestablish control in Fallujah, a top U.S. military official said in Baghdad. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Conway also will oversee a "top to bottom" review of the conduct of Iraqi security forces and local officials during and after the killings of the civilians. The Marines replaced the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division in western Iraq on March 24.

"At first blush, one has to ask: How does this happen in a city of that size, which does have a police force and an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps presence?" said the official. "We are going to be looking at all organizations inside Fallujah that have responsibility and authority . . . and anyone who has a leadership position inside that city." The official added, "The stakes are too high, the outcomes too important, to give anyone the luxury to sit on the fence in Fallujah." Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top military spokesman in Iraq, called for residents of Fallujah to identify those responsible for the killings. "I think they'll make the right choice and turn these people over to us," he told reporters in Baghdad. "If not, we're prepared to go in and find them."

The level at which the response is being coordinated gives away the possible size of the operation. General Conway commands a force of 25,000 men, with about a division's worth of infantry (9 battalions) and supporting arms, so the operation will probably involve more than a brigade. The Fallujah incident is also calling into question the reliability of Iraqi police forces not only in Fallujah, but probably throughout Iraq. The question is whether the police owe their fundamental allegiance to the new Iraqi government or to the local chieftains.

An ABC news article suggests that the contractors, who were escorting a convoy of food through the area, fell into a prepared ambush -- arranged for the media to witness -- an act impossible without the connivance of the local Iraqi police and security forces.

Iraqi insurgents had set up several ambush points around Fallujah, the city west of Baghdad that is a hotbed of anti-American sentiment, and had stocked them with gasoline on the morning of the attack, intelligence sources told ABCNEWS. Some townspeople had been warned to stay inside.

"This was clearly an attack to get maximum media exposure," said one source.

The four contractors left the Iraqi city of Taji on Tuesday to escort a convoy of several flatbed trucks full of goods. The plan was to spend the night at a U.S. base called TQ, west of Fallujah. Instead, the convoy ended up at a base east of Fallujah. On Wednesday morning, with two contractors in the lead SUV and two others in an SUV at the rear of the flatbeds, a decision was made to drive through Fallujah. Each of the security guards was armed with an assault rifle and an automatic pistol. The contractors also had satellite communications on board.

At around 8 a.m., the convoy approached a traffic circle on highway 10 going into the city. According to intelligence sources, eyewitnesses say a vehicle full of gunmen pulled in front of the lead SUV, while occupants from several other vehicles fired Kalashnikov machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. The contractors were killed, but the truck drivers escaped by driving away. Another vehicle full of attackers then pulled up and dragged two of the bodies out of the SUVs, doused them with gasoline, set them on fire, and dragged them behind vehicles.

The security contractors obviously drove through Fallujah as a last resort. They had planned to avoid it, but caught on the wrong side of the river, they decided to cross as quickly as possible. They probably assumed that there could be no fixed ambush positions in the town itself, certainly not in so prominent a place as the junction of Highway 10 without the Iraqi police being aware of it. Even so, the contractors deployed as best they could with their limited resources, and it perhaps saved the rest of the convoy. They drove into a classic L shaped ambush and took fire from ahead and from one flank in the kill zone from automatic weapons and RPGs.

It is entirely possible and more than probable that the contractors coordinated their move through Fallujah with the Iraqi security officials. And it is in this light that we can understand Conway's brief to "oversee a 'top to bottom' review of the conduct of Iraqi security forces and local officials during and after the killings of the civilians". Readers will recall that the several police stations were destroyed in Fallujah some months ago. It is conceivable that Anti-Coalition Forces then followed up this intimidation with offers of money, essentially hammering home the message that cooperation with Americans was a losing business proposition. General Conway apparently intends to demonstrate the reverse, or at least establish that he can deal out far more fearsome punishment than the Anti-coalition warlords.

One cannot but have some momentary sympathy for the Iraqi cops who are now between the hammer and the anvil. It may have been a mistake to leave this center of anti-coalition power unbroken and to rely on the local law enforcement to clean it up. Rather than the police controlling the local warlords, the warlords ended up controlling the police. The impending operation must now rectify the mistake and smash the warlords so thoroughly that any who see the light of day will end up selling pencils out of a tin cup. Every Iraqi policeman who collaborated with these thugs should be punished severely. The real trick will be to rip apart the structure of Fallujah without causing too many civilian casualties. It will be a hard, but as the Washington Post source said, "The stakes are too high, the outcomes too important, to give anyone the luxury to sit on the fence in Fallujah". The speed with which the operational plan has been drafted means that the choices long avoided have been faced. Now the Muslim holy day of Friday has come to an end and a waxing moon will soon rise over a Saturday night in Fallujah.

Addendum

Anyone who can read a map is invited to look at Global Security's 1:10,000 aerial photograph of Fallujah. Some quick observations. The built up section of the town is about 2.5 miles on each side and covers about 6.5 square miles. My guess (just a guess) is that any of the perps who didn't make it out of town in the first few minutes of the mutilation attack on the contractors have split up and are trying to walk out through ratlines of sympathizers by going farmhouse to farmhouse until they can clear the cordon. There are two problems with this. The first is that traveling strangers stick out in a rural community and are vulnerable to snitches looking to make a quick buck. The second and far more severe problem is that ratline movement can shift only a handful of people. The great majority of bad guys, especially senior men who can travel only by vehicle, are still in Fallujah.

The obvious approach is use the river, the clear demarcations to the north and east as the basic anvil. The river, railway and the eastern highway (Highway 10?) are naturally open fields of observation which are hard to cross. The area south shades into a suburb called Hamid Kanna and a marshy area with a prominent hill in the southeast corner. The hammer then, might go from the south to north, taking the high ground, and going through less built-up area, possibly picking up ratline exfiltrators in the process until the east-west main road through Fallujah is reached (the one leading to the bridge). This is a natural phase line to pause until the area south of the main road is processed. The northern section of the town is unfortunately for the defenders laid out in grid with roads intersecting at right angles. Americans may not go down these roads at all but through the walls of houses and come at the defenders from any direction. However, because the roads can be swept by fire they will work in the American favor by isolating one neighborhood from another. The Marines will gobble up Fallujah in detail and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Any defender smarter than a cockroach will see that a conventional defense is impossible. Their goals must therefore be more modest. One may be to cause as many American deaths as possible by planting mines or IEDs wherever they can along approaches. But that will only delay, not alter the result. The other may be to create as many civilian casualties as possible. An example of this would be for Anti-coalition forces to set the whole town ablaze and exploit the pandemonium. However, if the Marines exert only gradual pressure, and use neighbors or Iraqi police from outside Fallujah to guide other neighbors into processing areas, the defenders will never be presented with a clear opportunity to precipitate a crisis. Once the Marines get the momentum of processing going, the tribal leaders will lose control and the whole structure will start to crumble. The Marines can exploit their physical domination by offering clemency or even rewards to those who rat out on other perps. The inner bastion of Fallujah will collapse like a termite-eaten post as each man looks out for himself.

There is another possibility. Cornered Islamists in Pakistan and Mindanao have historically used the counter-siege to get them out of tight spots. This involves staging an attack either on Marine rear lines or making a huge bomb attack on another Iraqi city to force a diversion of resources. But Iraq is already inured to attacks like this and they cannot significantly damage Marine lines of communication to a useful degree. What works in Pakistan or the Philippines will not work against the Marines.

The wildcard is the press. The Anti-coalition forces used the media to start this game and they are doubtless thinking of ways to use it to either save their hides or finish it, politically at least, in their favor. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has everything to lose and nothing to gain by backing down, and will persevere, come hell or high water.

Cleaning out Fallujah will be a hard and dangerous operation requiring a lot of skill and good command judgment. There was a good reason why the Marines just didn't barrel into town with all guns blazing on the day the contractors were attacked.

Response at Fallujah

Directly after four civilian contractors were murdered and mutilated in Fallujah, in the heart of the Sunni triangle, the US military apparently strung a low key but effective cordon around the town. The townsfolk rapidly demanded its lifting. The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, based in the city, issued this cryptic statement:

"An agreement has been negotiated with the occupation forces to lift the siege of Fallujah and to withdraw. We are hoping you will cooperate to protect Fallujah and guarantee its security," the message said.

The cordon has if anything, been tightened. "U.S. troops, however, remained outside the city Thursday, and commanders said they would act 'at the time and place of our choosing.''' The US military defended its decision not to send troops into Fallujah immediately. Instead, the forces available blocked off the access routes. Fallujah is bounded in the West by a river and four major roads lead in and out of the town.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said troops didn't respond for fear of ambushes and the possibility that insurgents would use civilians as human shields. ``A pre-emptive attack into the city could have taken a bad situation and made it even worse,'' he said.

Because US troops have largely stayed out of the town in the past, they may have believed in the possibility of extensive defensive preparations. Kimmitt may have suspected, from the sheer barbarity of the act, that anti-coalition forces were actually aiming at ambushing the relief force. The strung up bodies were bait. But concentration on the cordon was also motivated by the knowledge that the perpetrators would seek to escape the locality immediately. Using an expanded version of the "buttonhook" tactic, US forces would have sought to isolate the area of operations immediately.

Q General, there certainly didn't seem to be a pell-mell response yesterday. We spoke to the ICDC today who went and picked up the bodies. They said they didn't dare go near the bodies which were on the bridge until 8:00 in the evening, which would make it about 10 hours after the attack. Can you explain how it was possible that American civilians' bodies were dragged around a town which is guarded by thousands of Marines for a good 10 hours, left out in the street, and nobody did anything?

GEN. KIMMITT: Well, first of all, I don't know the exact time line. And second, it was the determination of the personnel in the region that by the time they would have arrived or could have arrived, those persons were already dead and they were being controlled by some of these insurgents. I think that there was a well thought-out decision on the part of the Marines that let's not rush headlong into there, there may be ambushes set up, there may be civilians being used as human shields. And at this point, while it was dreadful, while it was unacceptable, while it was bestial, a preemptive attack into the city could have taken a bad situation and made it even worse. We will be back in Fallujah. It will be at the time and the place of our choosing. We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them or we will capture them. And we will pacify Fallujah.

Q Can I just ask one quick follow-up. Just does it not send out a rather dangerous message that these people can get away with this, pretty much do whatever they want? I mean, I was in Fallujah today and people were saying, "Yeah, the Americans were scared to come back in." Does that not send out a bad message of tolerance of violence?

GEN. KIMMITT: Ask them after the Americans have come back in.

CPA Administrator Paul Bremer chose a graduation ceremony for Iraqi police cadets to vow that the incident "will not go unpunished", possibly because a large role has been assigned to the Iraqi police in the forthcoming operation.

From these elements one can deduce the basic shape of the counterstroke. Since Fallujah and its anti-coalition forces are largely run on tribal (read Mafia) lines, the strategic goal will be to arrest the tribal leadership structure and other ringleaders such as imams.  A secondary goal will be to capture the thousands of weapons and magazines that are bound to be present. This will require a block by block reduction of an entire city of 230,000 persons. Hence, a plentiful supply of Iraqi cops is needed for large-scale  interrogation. And all this must be accomplished within the limits of acceptable collateral damage levels.

The rest is tactics. The Marines have long studied Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT). They will put snipers in dominant overwatch; use the road network to divide up the town into zones by posting the intersections; they will build EPW cages outside the town; they will put persistent aerial surveillance aloft; there will be a blanket of electronic surveillance and electronic jamming over the town; they will map out the operation to a room-by-room detail. Then they will lop off bits of Fallujah one slice at a time.

The biggest danger, as Kimmitt knows, is that the Anti-coalition Forces will use civilians, particularly children, as human shields by sheltering and firing from houses. Unfortunately for the enemy, the cordon ensures that Kimmitt will be in no particular hurry. The enemy can shoot it out with Marine snipers who have plenty of match grade ammunition. The presence of Iraqi policemen will allow Kimmitt to direct civilians into processing areas. Then the evacuated houses will be searched individually until the entire leadership structure is taken apart.

The deliberate, even cold-blooded approach by the Marines makes this incident the anti-Mogadishu. The tactics employed against the Rangers in the Blackhawk Down incident relied on the belief that Americans could be reflexively trapped into defending unfavorable positions in attempts to recover bodies. The Anti-Coalition Forces probably felt sure that taunting Americans over the media would produce the desired impulsiveness. As the minutes lengthened into hours and the Marines responded with icy professionalism, the enemy may have come to the unpleasant realization that this was not the former administration and that other still more unwelcome surprises were in store for them.

 

Unconquerable Hate

One response to the Mogadishu-like mutilation of civilian contractors ambushed in Fallujah, in the heart of Iraq's Sunni triangle, would be to pull American troops out entirely, an event eagerly awaited by some in the Shi'ite majority, the same ones who have been asking the US for permission to constitute and arm their militias. Just a month ago, 182 Shi'ite worshippers were massacred outside mosques in Karbalah and Baghdad on the holy day of the Ashura. Not a stone would be left on stone in the heartland of Iraq's former ruling elite, filled with men of whose sense of entitlement is only exceeded by their ignorance, were they not guarded by US forces.

Deeply conservative and anti-American, Fallujah has a population of some 200,000, all of whom are members of Islam's mainstream Sunni Muslim sect. Some subscribe to radical interpretations of Islam, finding behavior by American troops like raiding homes and detaining men in front of wives and children as deeply offensive. "Fallujah is a very, very complex place," said Lt. Col. Brian Drinkwine, the senior U.S. officer here. "Every time you peel back a layer you are faced with a new set of problems."

Karl Zinmeister of the American Enterprise Institute, who visited Fallujah and Baghdad last year, captures some of the toxic atmosphere in Sunni triangle at a meeting between US officers and imams that he personally attended. Note that these men were from Southern Baghdad and not from Fallujah.

Two of the most inflammatory imams in southern Baghdad--Sheik Akram of the Mekkad al-Mokarama mosque, and Sheik Riyad of Abu Bakr--have been summoned to appear before Col. Fuller. Despite being called to the police station on Wednesday and read the riot act by Lt. Col. Haight, both imams repeated thinly veiled threats against Coalition forces in their latest Friday sermon. Something has got to give.

The U.S. commanders don't know exactly where the imams live, and aren't sure they will show up for today's meeting, though Iraqi Police have been dispatched to each mosque with a summons. Finally, perhaps a half hour late, they arrive. Sheik Akram wears a kind of dished turban on his head, and a floor-length cream tunic. In two long meetings where I have a chance to observe him, Akram strikes me as a deceiver, and a bit simple. His eyes shift rapidly and he often shrugs his shoulders and cracks pained satirical smiles. Sheik Riyad, chubby and dark-bearded and wearing a white shawl over his head and shoulders that always holds an exquisite little crease where it falls above his nose, is brighter but even less transparent. He is openly haughty, arrogant, and dripping with disdain. ...

Dodging, rationalizing, and backpedaling when forced to, Akram and Riyad are skating at the brink of arrest for inciting violence. But American officers throughout Iraq are striving mightily to avoid such detainments. They are bending over backward to show respect for imams, mosques, and the Muslim religion, so as not to feed paranoia that the U.S. presence in Iraq is part of a crusade against Islam.

But since it is Al Qaeda's policy to precipitate civil war in Iraq and America's goal to hold it together, the Sunnis in Fallujah will be safe from massive reprisal for the present, though the perpetrators of this recent outrage are living out their last hours. Yet even if the challenge can be met without destroying Fallujah it is uncertain whether it can be accomplished without destroying Fallujah's culture. In a wider sense the ritual dragging and meathook hangings, the passing out of sweets and cold drinks to celebrate the death of the infidel are things not confined to Sunni triangle. The West Bank festivities after September 11, the famous scene of Palestinian youths holding out their bloodstained hands in almost sexual ecstasy as they tear a Jew limb from limb, or troops pursuing Islamic rebels on a Philippine island seemingly littered with detached heads poses an existential problem for Western democracy. They are the 21st century equivalents of finding the crematoriums of Auschwitz and Dachau or being forced to watch, with unaverted eyes, the wholesale extermination of a Chinese city under the banner of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They leave us wondering whether there are ideas on earth which cannot claim the protection of tolerance and democratic space.

Yet here lies the last danger. Our hand is stayed by fear that the Thing is waiting to transfer its malevolence to us. It has lost the field, but still hungers after our souls. 'Smite us', it says, 'and come to prayer; come to Islam'. Militarily impotent, it has retreated within its herd and built around itself a wall of unconquerable hate, daring us to enter its cave. Here it lurks safe from bullets, for in the end a culture can be displaced only by another culture. The West cannot win the Global War on Terror until it rediscovers the wellsprings of its own belief, until it sends out teachers alongside soldiers, until it finds the courage to judge Islam, or certain Islamic sects, by a higher standard. Only if it rediscovers what it found, then lost, after Nuremberg can it save itself and save Fallujah.

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
-- Satan, in Paradise Lost