TET '04

There's no point in sugarcoating what's happening in the Sunni Triangle.

The strategy seems clear (and, it seems to me, underreported, or even thought about.)

Why the waves of attacks timed to go off right as American forces assault Fallujah? I've heard many reporters blithely refer to them as a "diversionary" tactic, which seems to slap onto to this enemy an awfully conventional way of thinking.

But this isn't a conventional enemy. They aren't fighting for conventional goals, they aren't attempting to take conventional objectives, like territory.

Were their assaults to achieve diversionary purposes I'm sure they'd be delighted, but why the assumption that's the primary purpose?

Go back to basics: what is the goal of terrorism? It is violence that is fundamentally communicative, violence that does not achieve its purpose under conditions of a news blackout.

If that's the case then the question you need to ask for any given offensive first and foremost is: what are they trying to communicate?

In this case, doesn't it seem that what they are trying to communicate is that you might have taken our sanctuary (or, be in the process of taking our sanctuary) but you can't stop us? we can move at will, we can attack when and where we want with or without Fallujah? (Which sends an important message to the Iraqi population: these people cannot guarantee security. Don't throw in with them.)

But the fact that that's their message doesn't make it so.

The sanctuary gave them enormous benefits (as Afghanistan did for al Queda) and losing it will hurt them badly.

But it doesn't mean that the benefits that will accrue to us will be immediately apparent. For example, I've already complained that story after story points out that the troops are finding and destroying IED factories in mosques, but not bothering to point out that there's a benefit to be gained from that, that destroyng those factories will save lives.

But not today.

When the bad guys who left Fallujah left, there were IEDs on the roads already. And there were no doubt IEDs in their pickups when they left.

That doesn't mean they won't run out.

Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow.

But soon. I was right about why there are no bodies to count in Fallujah. But the number of detainees keeps rising, which means the amount of intelligence keeps going up.

Commanders in Iraq are required to report estimates of the numbers of fighters their troops have killed, but this is often an inexact science. Some numbers are derived from actual counts of bodies, but others come from gauging how many fighters were in a building before it was pulverized by a bomb or before their remains were taken away for the quick burial required by Islamic tradition.

But Colonel Regner said that as of Monday afternoon, 1,052 insurgents had been captured, all but one or two dozen of whom were Iraqis. The others were foreign fighters from countries he did not identify.

Yet the front page of the New York Times reads:

The wave of attacks across the Sunni Muslim heartland suggested that guerrillas were ready to carry on the war despite the loss of their safe haven in Falluja.

The reporting of these attacks without thinking them through, without question of why they might be taking place, without serious attention to the question of whether the loss of Fallujah really might hurt the enemy, either creates a sense of the country in chaos, or creates a sense that the enemy is moving towards a larger strategic goal, as if they want to gain control over the cities they're attacking, but there's no evidence of that.

But if these attacks justify violent and obvious counterassaults throughout the Sunni triangle, permit the American military to slip the leash, with the enemy concentrating for once, rather than setting off IEDs, or lobbing off mortars, or sending in single suicide bombers, but really gathering in groups where they can be found, fixed, and killed, in groups, as they gradually exhaust their resources, since so many of their weapons caches have been found and destroyed in Fallujah, then this could be a repeat of Tet. Not Tet as it was reported, but Tet as it actually happened. (WARNING: SPECULATION ALERT)

As the Americans battled near the first station,[ in Baquba] more insurgents began firing down on them from a nearby mosque, said Capt. Bill Coppernoll, a spokesman for the Army's First Infantry Division. The fighting became so intense that American jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on the insurgents, and up to 20 fighters were killed, he said.

more:

The battle in Baquba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, began about 7 a.m., when insurgents with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attacked American troops near a downtown traffic circle and police station. Guerrillas also fired at the Americans from a mosque, Captain Coppernoll said.

What really happened at Tet?

The enemy rolled the dice, attacked in force, it looked like a disaster since in the aftermath of months of positive rhetoric it became obvious that in fact they could mass and attack.

But it meant they made themselves visible and therefore vulnerable to defeat.

And the Vietcong never recovered.

In open battle, these people have no hope whatsoever of defeating the United States military.

VDH has been complaining for months that the problem is that we never actually defeated the Sunni triangle. Maybe this is our chance.

Comments

[bubba]

...the TET offensive analogy is spot on.

And after TET the Viet Cong were no longer an effective military force. It was all NVA after that.

And Syria and Iran, though capable of mischief, are not quite on the same par as the Soviet Union, China and North Vietnam.

I wish they would all don those blue cammies. Much easier to target/

[ChrisS]

Superb Tet analogy.

But not quite enough emphasis on how the legacy media are willing co-conspirators with the insurgents (or whatever the hell we feel like calling them).

You pointed out that the legacy media almost wholly ignores a balanced presentation of the pros and cons of the Falluja operation - in favor of the "Chaos! Chaos!" position. Their's is the "Chicken Little" school of military tactics and geopolitical strategy.

Since this unilateral view of the facts is almost indisputably idiotic and we all *know* how brilliant the minds at NYT/etc are (how do we know? They keep telling us how elite they are!!), the only alternative explanation is that the NYT/MsM is basically pro-insurgent (who as you point out, don't appear to pose a *military* threat to the US occupation of Iraq - absent media inspired US disillusionment, a la Tet).

It is a lot easier to believe that the NYT/MsM is profoundly disloyal than it is to believe that the NYT/MsM is profoundly stupid. Although in their disloyalty I believe plenty of stupidity can be found.

Good work, Ranting.

[dauber]

I have to disagree. The same way finding conspiracies in the government requires you to overlook incompetence, finding disloyalty in the press requires you to overlook all sorts of things: not the least of which is a lack of training in military strategy and history. Everything they report is decontextualized, I believe, because they almost all lack a context in which to place their reporting. How many of them (yes, even at the elite New York Times?) have read widely about terrorism (and therefore thought deeply about what motivates terrorists?? How many of them have read much about the history of Tet and what it meant for the history of the war in Vietnam? "Elite" means best in terms of the craft of journalism -- being able to write well, quickly, and accurately -- not elite in terms of your knowledge about military affairs or history.

[Ralph]

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