US strategy in Iraq: Is it working?

[sabra]

<<SNIP>>
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0621/p01s01-woiq.html

US strategy in Iraq: Is it working?

Major sweeps show results in western Iraq. But insurgents keep adapting and attacking.

By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The US military strategy in Iraq has been consistent for months now: Use aggressive military operations to disrupt the flow of foreign fighters entering the country and the insurgent support lines that run along the Euphrates River west to the Syrian border. Simultaneously, the US is training Iraqi troops to fill the security vacuum that persists in the center and north of the country.
By any metric of tactical military success, it's working, say analysts. US forces have strung together victory after victory. Marine and Army operations from Najaf in the south to Fallujah in the heart of the Sunni triangle and on to Mosul in the north have ended with thousands of insurgents killed and captured and tons of enemy munitions destroyed with minimal US casualties.

This is what Vice President Dick Cheney probably had in mind when he told "Larry King Live" last week that the insurgency is in its "last throes."

But if another measure of success is used - a reduction in the number and lethality of insurgent attacks - the US and the new Iraqi government are failing. In the past two days, for example, US Marines and Army soldiers carried out Operations Spear and Dagger (designed to disrupt insurgent capabilities between Baghdad and Syria). At the same time, separate suicide attacks killed 20 policemen in the Kurdish city of Arbil and 23 people in a Baghdad restaurant popular with policemen, while insurgents overran a police station in southern Baghdad, killing eight officers.

<</SNIP>>

[Jacobin]

1. I can only surmise this is a rhetorical question

[Inland]

2. Check out Halliburton's share price.

It's working great.

[w8liftinglady]

9. It has gone up by about $50 a share since the beginning /eom

[Inland]

18. Mission Accomplished.nt

[kwyjibo]

3. Isn't it obvious that it's not?

[maddezmom]

4. is that a headline from "The Onion"?

:shrug:

[donco6]

5. Has anyone heard of Irael and Palestine?

How long have they been at it? 60 years? What makes us think we can "get the job done" when neither of those two have been able to figure it out? (And I'm not coming down on either side of THAT problem).

[Straight Shooter]

6. No. eom

[endarkenment]

7. No

We simply do not have enough troops. We can disrupt the Syrian supply lines, but not permanently and not completely. The strategy also assumes that there are no supplies or support coming from Iran or Saudi Arabia, not good assumptions. SA is the heartland of wahabbi radicalism and there most certainly is lots of material support coming from SA. Iran, like Syria, has a vested interest in making sure that our forces stay bogged down in Iraq until the leave the region entirely. The original military estimate for CONTROLLING Iraq required something like 3x the troops we have on the ground.


Instead we are in a war of attrition against an adaptive insurgency that has nothing to lose and therefore no reason to stop fighting. On the other hand, our people, americans, your neighbors, not the a*holes in Washington, have no vested interest in this war and nothing much to gain from it. Time is not on our side, and that reality is starting to sink in even in Fortress Washington.

[rocktivity]

12. The real tragedy is not the lack of troop strength per se

but the fact that Bush was told in no certain terms that he didn't HAVE the troop strength. The general who told him that he'd need at least 250,000 troops--twice what he had--found himself demoted and retired.

:headbang:
rocknation

[TomClash]

8. This sounds more like Vietnam every day

The Battle of Fallujah now looks like la Drang '65.

[rocktivity]

11. "If we don't put some thought into HOW we retaliate

we're going to end up with a war that has VIET NAM'S fingerprints all over it."

rocknation (late September 2001)
:headbang:

[IChing]

10. Pass the Failure Fries

[Zerex71]

13. Answer: No.

Whatever it takes to GET US THE HELL OUT OF THERE is fine by me.

[wallwriter]

14. Um, that would be NO

[damntexdem]

15. What is really amazing to us old guys is ...

how much it sounds like Vietnam. Yeah, we won one victory after another, until we were defeated.

[mbperrin]

16. If the strategy was to stuff hundreds of billions of dollars into fatcat

pockets, it worked great!

Otherwise.....what the hell other strategy could they be talking about!!!!????

[AUYellowDog]

17. I wasn't aware that we had one. n/t

[modrepub]

19. Hard to evaluate

how well your doing if you haven't set any concrete goals or set up an independent way of evaluating your success.