SITTING beneath a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt pinned to the wall of his office in Tikrit, Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Stockmoe lolled back in his chair and roared with laughter at the fatal idiocy of so many of his enemies. "We've had well over a dozen examples of these knuckleheads doing stupid things," he said. "Here's a funny story. There were three brothers down in Baghdad who had a mortar tube and were firing into the Green Zone ... They were storing the mortar rounds in the car engine compartment and the rounds got overheated. Two of these clowns dropped them in the tube and they exploded, blowing their legs off." Abandoning the lifeless carcasses and smouldering wreckage of the car, the third brother sought refuge in a house. The occupants were less than impressed, Stockmoe said, slapping his thigh. "So they proceeded to beat the crap out of him and then turned him over to the Iraqi police. It was like the movie Dumb and Dumber."
There have been so many examples of such incompetence that Stockmoe, who left Iraq last week after a year as the senior military intelligence officer with the US Army's 1st Infantry Division, has been doling out unofficial Darwin Awards in honour of the most side-splittingly useless insurgents. Created in 1993 by a Stanford University student, the official Darwin Awards commemorate those who contribute to the improvement of our gene pool by removing themselves from it in stupid ways. According to Stockmoe, Iraq's gene pool is in better shape each day.
It is perhaps a rash soldier who mocks an adversary that has killed more than 1000 US troops in 18 months. But Stockmoe has a serious point, and a close look at insurgent attacks since the Fallujah offensive in November reveals that while the numbers might have increased, they are becoming less effective. The January 30 election certainly marked a political defeat for the insurgents, but it was also a crushing military one. Despite having 5200 polling stations to aim for, they could not bring off a major attack on a single one; one hapless suicide bomber apparently had Down syndrome. Iraq's insurgency is not about to end. Indeed, there is every chance it has several years to run. Despite the loss of thousands, it has consistently been able to regroup. So, no one should be declaring "mission accomplished". But as Stockmoe might cheerfully put it, the knuckleheads are in deep doodoo.
