Thursday, April 07, 2005

 

Terror's Greatest Defeat

Wretchard at The Belmont Club quotes CBS News, and offers his assessment of the recent "insurgent" attack on Abu Ghraib, and an apparent change in tactics.

James Robbins wrote in CBS News that the recent tactical developments
reveal a kind of desperation in the insurgent's ranks.

"Last Saturday's attack on Abu Ghraib in particular is a case study in how not to conduct guerilla warfare. Al Qaeda assaulted the prison complex from several directions with rockets, mortars, car bombs and small arms. The battle raged for two hours. No Americans were killed; 16 were slightly wounded, seven others hurt more seriously. Between 40 and 60 terrorists took part, and they admitted to ten killed, a KIA rate of 17-25 percent. The overall enemy casualty rate including wounded was probably over 50 percent. No prisoners were freed. Al Qaeda claimed the raid was a success, but a few more victories like this and their insurgency will be over."

Maybe. It definitely shows to what great a depth the enemy resistance was prepared and how much they had invested in the Iraqi campaign in the long months while US diplomats tortuously attempted to obtain permission to topple Saddam Hussein. I believe that historians in retrospect will understand the Iraqi insurgency was not something spontaneously ignited by outbreaks of looting in Baghdad in the aftermath of OIF, but a meeting engagement between two prepared forces. Iraq, as Princeton's Michael Doran observed, was intended to be the graveyard of America's
counteroffensive against terror. Instead the enemy dug the grave for themselves.
What we are seeing now is not simply the rout of a few armed men, but terror's
greatest defeat in modern times.

You can take that to the bank. This "insurgency" coordinated by Saddam, Assad in Syria, and the Mullahs in Iran before we even set foot in Iraq, is desparate to win the media war, for they know they have already lost the military one.





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