A senior U.S. military official said on Saturday U.S. troops rotating into Iraq will have fewer soldiers, helicopters and tanks and less artillery but should be more mobile and better suited to deal with guerrillas. (Less is more in Bush's small mind.) By the time power is handed over in June, the U.S. military presence will be downsized to around 105,000 from about 130,000, the official said. The official said though numbers were being cut, soldiers would be better equipped for the
low intensity conflict the military expects to face in the next six to 12 months.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4152546&pageNumber=1 "I believe there's mid- level Ba'athist, Iraqi intelligence service people, Special Security Organization people, Special Republican Guard people that have organized at the regional level in cellular structure and are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us. It's
low-intensity conflict, in our doctrinal terms, but it's war, however you describe it." said Gen. John Abizaid, commander, U.S. Central Command.
____________________________________________________________________
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) derided the Pentagon's description of the current fighting in Iraq as
"low-intensity conflict." "I want you to know when your kid dies, it's not a low-intensity conflict," she said.
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An excellent essay by Philip Gourevitch about links between Algeria and Iraq entitled, "WINNING AND LOSING"
"One day late last summer, as the tally of bombings, shootings, and acts of sabotage against the American occupation in Iraq took on the unmistakable profile of a war of guerrilla insurgency, the office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, at the Pentagon, designed and distributed e-mail flyers with a cautionary headline: “how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.” The e-mail invited those involved in the “wot”—the war on terrorism—to a private screening of the Italian Marxist director Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, “The Battle of Algiers.” The movie, which will be rereleased in theatres next month, is surely the most harrowing, and realistic, political epic ever filmed. It depicts the conflict between Algerian nationalist insurgents and French colonial forces in the late nineteen-fifties, or, as the flyer put it: “Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?”
For all the differences between France’s fight to keep Algeria—a country it had occupied since 1830—and America’s current dispensation in Iraq, the parallels between the drama of insurgency and counter-insurgency in “The Battle of Algiers” and our present Iraqi predicament are as clear and as depressing as the Pentagon film programmers promised. The ugly truth that Pontecorvo lays vividly bare, as his camera tacks back and forth between the Algerian guerrillas and the French paratroopers, is that terrorism works. For, although the film focuses on a chapter in the Algerian struggle when France succeeded in crushing the rebel movement, the final moments of the movie show how within a few years the French were forced to accept defeat and retreat, an outcome that in retrospect appears historically inevitable.
Such is the bind that the Bush Administration has led us into in Iraq. Appalling, intolerable—in all senses, maddening—as the terrorist tactics of the Iraqi insurgents may be, their truck bombs, donkey-cart missile launchers, and sniper rifles are tactical political instruments that have steadily and systematically succeeded in isolating American forces in Iraq. They have effectively driven the United Nations, the international staff of the Red Cross, and other aid groups from the country, and—more disastrously—they have fostered a mutual sense of alienation between the American forces and the Iraqi people they are supposed to be liberating.
Triumphalist pronouncements from Washington notwithstanding, our occupying forces are now clearly on the defensive. And the more aggressive their defense becomes, the more it serves the insurgents’ purposes. When an American adviser in Iraq speaks of a new strategy of “terrorism versus terrorism,” as Seymour M. Hersh reported in these pages last week, and an American lieutenant colonel tells the Times, “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them,” one may be forgiven for concluding that the enemy is defining the terms of the fight to his advantage."more:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031222ta_talk_gourevitch
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