Fester's Place

Get over yourself

In response to the coordinated bombing attack against a ceremony celebrating the opening of a sewage treatment plant that killed 35+ children and wounded ten or more American soldiers who were present, Roger Simons makes the following comment:

Is today's carnage in Iraq...... timed for the debate tonight? It's hard to know, but it's far from impossible. We do know, the terror mongers have tried to influence elections before,

I need to respond to this idiocy. The attack was brutal and I wish it did not happen, but Mr. Simons needs to get over himself and his extremely narrow viewpoint. Not everything that is happening around the world is occurring because of its potential effect on the upcoming US elections.

The Iraqi insurgents have been operating on their own rhythm and motives since the very beginning and although there is a political and propaganda component to it, it has not been specifically targeted at immediate inflection points. Instead it has been targeted at isolating the battlefield and dictating a situation where the US becomes more isolated and less able to create winning situations. The overall military strategy, either explicit or implicit of the Iraqi insurgency has been relatively simple; force the United States to bear the overwhelming cost of occupation/reconstruction until it is no longer worthwhile. After that who knows what happens as anarchy breaks out.

The means to accomplishing this burden narrowing has been to ruthlessly target American forces and more importantly any other actors that could share the costs and burdens. An insurgency collapses when the anti-insurgent forces are trusted by the vast majority of the population to be looking out for their best interests and to be able to provide effective security. The US military has not demonstrated the latter to be true in Iraq. The population is worried about security and is supporting the insurgents out of fear, nationalism, pride, or familial ties. The insurgents need to keep it that way to continue to survive.

This explains the logic of attacking the United Nations, the logic of attacking the Red Cross, the logic of attacking civilian contractors and the logic of targeting any Iraqi(s) whom the insurgents see as working with or at least tolerating the American occupation. This attack is most likely just a further extension of this logic; hit the Americans hard, and also hit a target that the Americans built to further illustrate that there is no security and no gain for the average Iraqi of working with the American military. Look at the logic of guerilla warfare first before coming up with cockamanie ideas please.

Labels: insurgency, iraq

posted by fester @ 15:27