I would like your views on the latest situation in Iraq. I ask because I see a considerable change in the private confidence within the Pentagon over the last week or two in regard to what is happening over there.
Let's take today's news. AP report that American troops opened fire after their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb at a checkpoint south of Baghdad, killing at least two policemen and three civilians (if we accept what the police said Sunday about casualties).
The story implies that wild firing occurred after the detonation at whoever was in the locality and at those whom troops felt might have detonated the bomb. It follows a new declared strategy of not pursuing the possible enemy but holding ground and trying to engage in gunfire those who, in the confusion of the immediate aftermath of the explosion, might be thought to be implicated.
It has all the appearance of a changed tactic not by choice but as a consequence of the increased danger of over exposing troops by asking them to engage in pursuit. The result is blind firing at unidentified groups as their own comrades lie dying. It is the response of frightened and angry troops, unable to leave the fortification of their encircled wagons because of a better organised enemy employing new tactics of ambush.
Yesterday , AP reported the United States military admitting that it dropped a 500-pound bomb on the wrong house outside the northern city of Mosul on Saturday. They claimed it killed five people whilst the AP reporter on the spot said it killed fourteen (now increased to sixteen) and said seven of them were children.
I like to compare Iraq to a larger and far more complex Northern Ireland. That comparison is becoming less and less valid. The war in that country was fought on the ground and rarely involved major shoot outs. Random shooting involving civilians at road blocks or during riots were rare and subject to civil courts and legal investigation.
However precise the guidance system, bombing from the air is not a tactic against insurgents that you use in a country where you are claiming a degree of pacification sufficient to allow an election to occur. It is the action taken in a military war, not in quelling an insurgency within a civil society.
We are told that a senior military officer has been sent to Iraq to review the failure to establish an effective Iraqi force and to evaluate the number of troops required in that country. This has all the hallmarks of what happened in Vietnam as secret memos were sent back to the Pentagon of ever worsening scenarios becoming reality on the ground.
We have had planted news items that there have been new strategies proposed for placing a cadre of a dozen specially trained US troops within each group of about a hundred Iraqi soldiers. Now we are told of new special anti-insurgency groups to pursue suspected terrorists by means of targeted strikes at individuals.
I believe that the last week has seen a major departure from the plan designed to lead up to an election that recognised that there would inevitably be an increase in insurgency attacks. It is change forced by a failure to recognise how severe the attacks would be and is forced by a lack of success in combating these.
It shows the continuing uncomprehending ignorance by the Bush administration of the real position on the ground. Worse, if my reading that a major rethink is now occurring in the Pentagon is correct, it confirms that the hopes that Bush held out to the American people that the elections would help to resolve and de-escalate insurgency were false, just as the promised results from the destruction of Fallujah were false.
All of us on DKos have seen the Iraq situation as being worse than the majority of commentators. I am suggesting that the events of the last week means that it has taken a new turn and grown more desperate than even we believed.
Do you share this view or am I wrong to take the events of one week and regard them as symptomatic of the future?