Iraq and Afghanistan

The War in the Sunni Triangle and environs seems to be going worse than ever. As American forces finish up Falluja, the insurgent counterattack in many other cities and towns throughout the Arab Sunni area and beyond its fringes appears to be getting ever more destructive. These are concentrating their fury on the new Iraqi police and the oil export pipelines. They are also anxious to do damage to the Americans wherever they can be found. The Falluja victory is fraught with more and more questions. To me, the most alarming is the change of military reporting to emphasize “body count”, with all the implications of the usage that came back to haunt us in Vietnam. “Body count” is a handy way to measure “success” when fighting a war on multiple fronts, or without a front at all. Here, the usual measure of success, the taking of territory no longer makes sense. Two problems with “body count” are that it more starkly reveals what is happening in a war than more sanitized measures and its wild unreliability. It relies on the men and officers directly involved in military actions reporting back truthfully. But these persons know that their reputations in this war and throughout their careers will depend on whether they were successful in battle. Consequently, overestimation cannot be avoided. In this case, as Falluja winds down, 1600 insurgents are reported to have been killed in the city. Reporters with the troops say, however, that they have seen very few bodies. Usually this has been ascribed in Iraq to the Arab habit of immediately burying persons where possible. But it is hard to imagine that the hard-pressed guerrillas in Falluja have had time to bury more than a 1000 bodies.

In the widespread counterattacks outside Falluja, it is reported by our officers that the insurgents seem to be better organized and trained than they have been. This is true both of conventional attacks and of suicide bombings that now involve more than one attacking vehicle at a time. Better planning and coordination also seems to be true of the overall pattern of attacks. The guerrillas are less intent now on vanishing after each attack. They are more out in the open more of the time than they have been. Their morale is obviously high, even foolishly high. Yet the most recent consensus seems to be that this is largely a Baathist or nationalist campaign rather than a campaign by religious extremists. In Falluja, 1000 were captured, of which only a handful were non-Iraqis. Apparently, the movement feels they can take the losses. If we assume there were 5,000,000 Sunni Arabs before the war, this makes 2,500,000 males, of which perhaps 1,500,000 were potential fighters. Let us assume that 750,000 of these are bitterly opposed to the Americans; this is not an unreasonable number given the interviews that reporters have had with Sunni Arabs. If we have killed 75,000 in this war, it means we have killed only 10% of the potential Sunni Arab guerrilla pool. Armies have in the past often suffered fatalities at this rate and continued to come out and fight.

There seem to be a steady stream of those groups exiting from the struggle. Doctors with Borders has left. The Hungarian parliament has decided that their troops should come home now rather than stay until after the elections as their government has wanted. The argument of the center-right group that led the charge on this is that the troops were there to help bring democracy. They have concluded that this is not going to happen, so they should come home now. It makes sense to them, but it doesn’t help our government and its allies. Many Americans are going to start thinking the same thing.