It looks like the insurgents have figured it out

[PurityOfEssence]

There's a very alarming new trend: blowing up bridges and overpasses. These are not things that can be repaired quickly, either. If this continues, our supply lines will be thoroughly disrupted, and what with the "splurge", more soldiers need more of everything.

Good generals study tactics; great generals study logistics.

Just to take a brief look at our supply lines is sobering: everything comes from great distances through hostile waters and lands. There simply aren't very many routes one can take to get supplies in: through Kuwait, through the small coastline of Iraq, through Jordan and through Turkey. Saudi Arabia's out. Getting anything to Baghdad puts one onto miles and miles of hostile roads from any direction.

If more bridges and overpasses are blown, it'll take more vehicles--burning more fuel--to get the same amount of supplies through, and they'll be driving on less and less drivable roads. Not only that, we need MORE supplies than we've been getting due to Smirky's escalation. It'll take more resources, take longer and make the convoys much more vulnerable. Unless more vehicles and people are allocated to supply transportation, shortages could become chronic and dangerous.

If they can starve us for supplies and step up their small-unit attacks, they'll be able to start taking out small outposts or even make a Tet-like play for the Green Zone. By keeping up the pressure, they can force us to expend more ammunition and fuel until we're bled white. Our standard tactic when attacked is to use overwhelming firepower, but that only works if one has things to fire.

It's also about to be summer, which must be truly nasty for Americans with all that body armor.

What a mess. I hope Junior lives to be a thousand so he can see his disgrace and humiliation; he'll never feel guilt or responsibility, but his narcissistic ego will rage in knotted hatred, so at least that's something. Cheney will simply die soon, but at least he'll see that he's a loser; may he live long enough for it to truly sink in.

If the Sunnis and Shiites could bury the hatchet for the moment--like Mao and Chiang did to fight the Japanese--we could have a real Dien Bien Phu on our hands. At least that doesn't look likely.

Predictions, anyone?

[truebrit71]

1. I hadn't thought of it that way...and it's not a pleasant conclusion...

...but if that IS what the insurgents have figured out, this could get very nasty for the guys in-country, VERY quickly...

[Orsino]

28. It's not possible to "win" an occupation...

...against a determined insurgency, on the other side of the world. Yes, our military might can overrun pretty much any location we pick for it--but holding that territory is a lot tougher. Cutting off our supply lines will speed our inevitable and humiliating withdrawal.

We'd better hurry up and declare victory first.

[donco6]

2. The only people they hate more than each other . . .

is us. So I predict your prediction is accurate.

[BikeWriter]

3. I predict more of the same.

[Bonhomme Richard]

4. Wars, won or lost, the results have always been due to logistics. n/t

[lyonn]

5. Sheesh, that makes all kinds of sense.

When the bridge was blown a few months ago and the photo of the many bridges that lead into Baghdad were shown my thought was what a disaster it would be if most or all those bridges were damaged and how simple it seemed to be to accomplished. Sure enough, it appears to be easier than one would think. According to reports from Iraq, people are having to take back routes that are al queda infested. Who is watching the bridges?

But your explanation of getting supplies to our troops is even more dangerous. How much humiliation can we take before someone decides this is not our fight. Just our presence is adding fuel to their civil war.

[Disturbed]

8. America cannot allow Iraq's oil to fall into terrorist's control.

Busholini made a statement to that effect. This is why the US Occupation will continue no matter how many US Troops need to die.

[Jacobin]

6. Its what we would do if our country were occupied.

Disrupt supply lines, wear them down, use guerilla warfare tactics and wait them out.

They are doing exactly what any nationalists of any country would do if they were invaded and occupied by a foreign power.

[PurityOfEssence]

12. No argument here

We're the bad guys. It's the most depressing thing about this evil administration: we're in league with evil and even if we fight against it, if we don't do so with every fiber of our beings, we're part of the problem. So, as I try to make a living and bring up the kids, I feel the pangs of being one of the feckless ones who at least somewhat lets it happen.

I feel sorry for the soldiers and certain other people over there, but I can't say I have any sympathy for anyone who joined the military after March of '03. Many of those in the military before that were there for patriotic reasons and may have bought into the pitch. Of course, many people join the military for sick reasons, too, but that can't really be said in polite society. Anyone who joined after the Iraq invasion, however, is guilty of either being part of an aggressive evil regime of world domination or criminally ignorant. One has an obligation to be somewhat aware.

Once again, it's funny how conservatives, who endlessly worship the past, never seem to have read any history. Had they done so, they'd see parallel upon parallel stretching to the vanishing point like reflections in two mirrors that face each other: occupations rarely work.

[calimary]

23. Damn straight. We'd be doing EXACTLY that, to subvert the invaders

in ways large and small. And we'd never let up, either. They don't give up over there. That's why they will prevail in the end. Ours is a losing proposition, and we should get the hell out before there are more dead on both sides - dead for NO reason whatsoever. Dead for NOTHING.

[Orsino]

29. Or the invaders would have to emulate Sherman...

...and destroy everything preemptively. That's probably not an instructive example, though, when the goal is occupation.

[AndyA]

7. Chilling theory.

But I fear you may be right, and that does not bode well for our military on the ground in Iraq.

Those responsible for this nightmare of death and destruction MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. Hear that, Nancy?

[karlrschneider]

9. Summer is pretty much there already - 110 to 113 next few days

http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/40650.html

[Blackhatjack]

10. Remember... "The enemy of my enemy is my friend...."

They will stop fighting long enough to turn on the American troops. Count on it.

THen it will be back to normal, fighting each other for hundreds of years to come.

[shadowknows69]

11. Bush has served our Army up on a silver platter

Cut off and entrenched in an urban setting. Like being stuck in a castle after the walls have been breached and the other army is pouring in.

[PurityOfEssence]

13. Chinese Gordon in Khartoum

Then there's Stalingrad. That particular parallel is quite similar: a highly mechanized army trapped fighting house-to-house against the locals in a huge sprawling city. The wrong kind of troops in the worst place to fight; so many people have seen it coming for so very long, yet Deciderboy sent 'em right in the same old way.

The fact that we've had relatively few deaths so far may be the real sucker-punch of the whole thing, too: it lulls us into thinking that it's a smallish and not-so-dangerous affair. (Much of this, of course, is due to our vastly improved medical techniques and the fact that the huge numbers of wounded aren't being reported in the press.) Twas a time, for much of the history of warfare, when wounded to killed was something like 2:1; in this little fracas, it's about 8:1.

We've got something like 150K troops in Iraq, and only a rather small proportion of them are combat infantrymen and they're spread out all over the country. Baghdad's population is something like 2.5 million. History's pretty clear about this: numbers win.

[shadowknows69]

14. The casualties would be comparable with 1960's field medicine

Some of the tales I've read and heard about how they patch these guys up are astounding. I just fear some of the wounded may come to envy the dead someday. I can't even imagine. It's "The Horror" that Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" spoke of.

[Downtown Hound]

20. Yeah, in Vietnam the wounded to dead ratio was 3 to 1.

So if this was then, we'd be looking at about 10,000 dead so far. And when you consider that our enemy has virtually no anti-aircraft capabilities, is not a regular national army like the NVA were, does not have superpower backing like North Vietnam did, and is only made up of a minority of Iraq's population, the casualty figures are actually quite high.

[damntexdem]

15. It'll be that much harder to cut and run.

Better do it now, while things still aren't so bad.

Picture the helicopter taking off from the roof of the Apartment building in Saigon, with a long line of people left stranded, a few losing their desperate grasp on the copter. The U.S. doesn't ever seem to learn from experience.

[PurityOfEssence]

16. Tactical disengagement is one of the hardest maneuvers

That image has been haunting me ever since the fall of Baghdad, and many others have pointed it out too. You're absolutely right in every way.

It's like the last few minutes before the impact in a car crash where you can see it coming and you know there's no way to stop, except it's been going on for years. Perhaps if we get whipped we'll learn something, but I'm afraid we won't. It will all be blamed on the lily-livered liberals, of course, and the reactionaries will seeth endlessly just as they did about the peaceniks after Vietnam and the October traitors after 1918.

Frank Zappa was right: "the only things that are truly universal are hydrogen and stupidity."

[roamer65]

17. Just wait until their equivalent of the Tet offensive.

It's gettin' closer.

[PurityOfEssence]

19. Aren't your instincts just redlining right about now?

Sounds like they are. Mine certainly are. It's not like so many people aren't seeing the same thing, and not just on this board, either.

The only thing keeping it together is the enmity between Sunnis and Shiites. If they bury the hatchet, even for a short time, we're in deep yogurt.

Aaaaah! I just can't stand it. This administration is just so pigheaded, ignorant, arrogant, chickenshit, blind, pompous, flat-footed, tone-deaf, cocksure, reckless and vain that it leaves me breathless. They can't even define what "victory" would look like in this situation, and we're going to have to pour in men and materiel just to keep the men and materiel there.

[BuyingThyme]

18. Well, since the objective is to fail, I think they'll be successful.

[truedelphi]

21. Decent analysis. As I type this, Letterman just announced

As Counterpoint to your comment, "Cheney will simply die soon" the fact that the Dick man is scheduled for a replacement on his pacemaker and during that operation, there is the fact that he could die.

After Letterman stated that Cheney could die, the audience was jubilant!!

how could we have gone from a coutnry that helped committ 315,000 troops for the assault on D-Day - an assault that was managed by A Demcoratic President and A Republican general.

From the day we landed in Normandy on June 6th till the end of the war in Germany -- we were only in the fight against Germany a little bit more than ten MONTHS!!

Bush has had us in what I think is a deliberate screw-up of a juggernaut for the sake of the profits of his Halliburton and KR&B buddies.


Halliburton stock sold for under five dollars a share in the weeks right after 9/11 -- their stock went up to the mid-thirties after this damn war started.

[ComerPerro]

22. How long before the RW starts forwarding emails claiming there were no bridges in Iraq "under Saddam

[K8-EEE]

24. Thought provoking and worrying.

They've already HAD all sorts of supply line problems before this lastest rash of bridge kabooming. OMG when I think of what not only our soldiers but EVERYBODY must be going through just to get through the day in post-GWB Iraq.

[wakeme2008]

25. Very Very Good write up

I am sure Bush's Generals have not thought about that. :grr:

[Alpharetta]

26. I've been saying for years our troops are in peril there

We can't roll trucks to get out of there the way we could when we rolled in. They really weren't shooting at us on the way in.

The logistics for a withdrawal is just a mess. Getting all the non-combat personnel out of there and keeping in place enough infrastructure to support the forces who will try to guard us on the way out, that's a tough problem.

[ellisonz]

27. The New Encirclement

Encirclement is a military term for the situation when a force or target is isolated and surrounded by enemy forces. This situation is highly dangerous for the encircled force: at the strategic level, because it cannot receive supplies or reinforcements, and on the tactical level, because the units in the force can be subject to an attack from several sides. Lastly, since the force cannot retreat, unless it is relieved or can break out, it must either fight to the death or surrender. Encirclement has been used throughout the centuries by military leaders, including famous generals such as Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Sun Tzu, Wallenstein, Napoleon, von Rundstedt, Zhukov, and Patton. Sun Tzu suggests that an army should not be completely encircled, but should be given some room for escape, in order to prevent that 'encircled' army's men lifting their morale and fighting till the death - a more optimal situation would be them considering the possibility of a retreat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encirclement