Just now on "The Randi Rhodes Show", Richard Holbrooke mentioned this article, about a new Pentagon/CIA report, as showing just how bad the situation is and how badly we have underestimated the insurgency in Iraq:
Rebels With More Funds
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
Published: October 22, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 21 - Senior American officials are beginning to assemble a new portrait of the insurgency that has continued to inflict casualties on American and Iraqi forces, showing that it has significantly more fighters and far greater financial resources than had been estimated.
The full article is available (registration required) at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/international/middleeast/22insurgents.html?hp&ex=1098504000&am
p;en=e40ae916b3f0b5bd&ei=5094&partner=homepage
More below the break . . .
According to the article, hardcore resistance fighters number between 8000 and 12,000 (both Iraqi and foreign), with a total of about 20,000 when sympathizers and covert accomplices are factored in.
The U.S. was previously operating under estimates of 2000 to 7000 insurgents. The fighters, the report says, are organized into "50 militant cells that draw on 'unlimited money' from an underground financial network run by former Baath Party leaders and Saddam Hussein's relatives ..., supplemented in great part by wealthy Saudi donors and Islamic charities that funnel large sums of cash through Syria."
This dovetails with the International Institute for Strategic Studies' annual military survey, which posits that about 1000 Islamic jihadists have joined insurgency forces in Iraq, and estimates that "it would take five years for the American military to prepare Iraqi forces to take over fully from the forces of the United States and its allies."
Combine this with a 2001 CIA study of Al Qaeda, mentioned a bit earlier in the diaries, which stated that there was no active Al Qaeda presence in Iraq at that time, and I think it is evident that Bush's "cowboy" approach of reckless and contemptuous unilateral militarism has made the Middle East -- and Iraq in particular -- a much more unstable and dangerous place, and has effectively created a stronger, more numerous, more financially viable Al Qaeda.
Almost 1100 of our young servicemen and women have lost their lives, thousands of allies and allied civilians (including Americans) have lost their lives, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have lost their lives for this -- to make Al Qaeda stronger and more dangerous???