Add to Anbar and Ramadi and Falluja, 3 million Shia in al-Sadr City in the middle of Baghdad. We don't go there either now.
This is beyond the old WWII terms of SNAFU (Situation Normal - All Fucked Up)
or TARFU (Things Are Really Fucked Up)
or FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition)
We need a new designation beyond FUBAR for Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL).
In the face of stubborn insurgency, troops scale back Anbar patrols
By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder Newspapers
July 20, 2004
RAMADI, Iraq - After more than a year of fighting, U.S. troops have stopped patrolling large swaths of Iraq's restive Anbar province, according to the top American military intelligence officer in the area.
Most U.S. Army officers interviewed this week said the patrols in and around the province's capital, Ramadi - home to many Iraqi military and intelligence officers under Saddam Hussein - have stopped largely because the soldiers and commanders there were tired of being shot at by insurgents who've refused to back down under heavy American military pressure.
-snip-
The apparent failure of a long line of Army and Marine units to bring peace to the province, which makes up about 40 percent of Iraq's landmass, will be a major challenge for Iraq's new government and could prove to be a tipping point for the nation as a whole. Increasingly, Iraq is a place in which cities or part of cities have been taken over by insurgents and radicals.
-snip-
"We should have worked with the tribal leaders earlier," he said. "I just wonder what would have happened if we had worked a little more with the locals."
-snip-
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9200682.htmGee I wonder why this hasn't been on the news? Isn't losing a war important enough news for Tom Brokaw?