Two sources within Iraq report that al-Qaeda has begun to flee Baghdad in advance of the American troop surge. Richard Miniter, blogging at Pajamas Media, confirms with US military intelligence a report from an insurgent press outlet quoted by Iraq the Model:
Al Qaeda terrorists are fleeing Baghdad in advance of President Bushs 21,500-man troop surge, a senior military intelligence officer told Pajamas Media today. Under orders from the al Qaeda commander in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, fighters are streaming toward the Diyala region of Iraq.
This confirms reports posted on Iraq the Model, which cited al-Sabah, a well-known mouthpiece for al Qaeda in Iraq.
In speaking with Pajamas Media the military intelligence officer supplied several new details of the al Qaeda retreat.
The apparent evacuation of Baghdad by al Qaeda forces comes from direct orders issued by al-Masri, the former soldier who took control of the Iraqi wing of al Qaeda following the June 2006 bombing death of Zarqawi.
Initially, the intelligence officer informed Pajamas, the Baghdad-based AQ fighters did not want to leave. Al-Masri had to send unequivocal orders for their retreat, adding that one of the lessons from the Fallujah campaign was that Americans have learned how to prevail in house-to-house fighting. Masri said that remaining in Baghdad was a no-win situation for the terrorists.
No other media outlets have reported on this story yet, but both Miniter and Omar are on the ground in the area. The al-Sabaah site appears to be down at the moment, and it may not have an English translation of any statements in any case. If confirmed, it would be the first public retreat by al-Qaeda forces, a damaging development for the network, which had just started to earn back some of its luster thanks to its efforts in Iraq.
Miniter warns that this could be just a tactical retreat to lure the Americans out of Baghdad. The strategy might be to pull the US into a region where the Sunni insurgencies enjoy more support and cover, and while we engage the native insurgents, al-Qaeda could slip around us and get back into Baghdad. Why that would be preferable to just staying in Baghdad from the beginning isn't immediately clear
In any case, the message from AQ, via its al-Sabaah mouthpiece, seems to be that the surge has made an impression on the right people. It already has the terrorists scrambling for position, and the motion itself will make them much more vulnerable.
#1
Back before the invasion I postulated that the best strategy Saddam could have employed was totally backing down after the US had spent a ton of money and political capital building up. Lather, rinse, repeat, until Iraq became a political albatross no President wanted to get near.
The same could be worked against the insurgents. Imagine rumors of a surge every once in awhile to cause them to flee like cowards.
#2
There was an article here the some days ago that the bad guys are finding it difficult to leave their neighborhoods. Once they flee to the provinces this time, how difficult will it be for them to get across the city to return home, in order to resume their nefarious activites?
#3
Well the jihadis that were left were able to carry out a double bombing yesterday at the Univ. so I'm not convinced operation Flee Baghdad is a real order.
Of course it could be that the double bombing was a send off before the fleeing. In that case it would be interesting to see if the Shia terrorist "operation ethnic cleansing" takes a break from their activities.
#4
Once the terrs leave and the joint bases are put in place, it is going to be very difficult for them to come back and setup shop again. Also, something that a lot of people seem to forget about the surge : the media lives and reports from Baghdad, not the rest of the country. Some reporters leave Baghdad but most do not. So, if Baghdad calms down for a 6 month period, it makes it difficult for the media to keep hyping the terrs. Plus, that 6 month period gives the US and Iraq time to move more Shia/Kurdish majority units into the Greater Baghdad Zone, thereby cutting off the oxygen to the Sunni/Baathist terrs. The underlying ethnic cleansing by the Shia death squads will continue at a lower rate, and Baghdad's neighborhoods will be effectively segregated by sect before long. That in and of itself will lower the violence level in Baghdad.
Also, the outlying communities are screaming for US/Iraqi troops to protect them from the fleeing terrs, and giving good intel as incentive for that protection. Naked self-interest is driving a lot of decisions in Iraq now, and the possibility of the car-bombings moving to their neighborhoods has many Sunni communities scared to death. Add in the collateral damage from counter-attacks by Iraqi Army units which do NOT pay for damage like the US military does, and the downside for the Baghdad suburban zone of receiving fleeing Sunnis becomes close to unbearable.
Vietnam taught many Americans the wrong lesson: that determined guerrilla fighters are invincible. But history shows that insurgents rarely win, and Iraq should be no different. Now that it finally has a winning strategy, the Bush administration is in a race against time to beat the insurgency before the publics patience finally wears out.
The cold, hard truth about the Bush administrations strategy of surging additional U.S. forces into Iraq is that it could work. Insurgencies are rarely as strong or successful as the public has come to believe. Iraqs various insurgent groups have succeeded in creating a lot of chaos. But theyre likely not strong enough to succeed in the long term. Sending more American troops into Iraq with the aim of pacifying Baghdad could provide a foundation for their ultimate defeat, but only if the United States does not repeat its previous mistakes.
Myths about invincible guerrillas and insurgents are a direct result of Americas collective misunderstanding of its defeat in South Vietnam. This loss is generally credited to the brilliance and military virtues of the pajama-clad Vietcong. The Vietnamese may have been tough and persistent, but they were not brilliant. Rather, they were luckythey faced an opponent with leaders unwilling to learn from their failures: the United States. When the Vietcong went toe-to-toe with U.S. forces in the 1968 Tet Offensive, they were decimated. When South Vietnam finally fell in 1975, it did so not to the Vietcong, but to regular units of the invading North Vietnamese Army. The Vietcong insurgency contributed greatly to the erosion of the American publics will to fight, but so did the way that President Lyndon Johnson and the American military waged the war. It was North Vietnams will and American failure, not skillful use of an insurgency, that were the keys to Hanois victory.
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Posted by: Steve White ||
01/17/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Common sense - good to see it still exists.
But even in the unlikely event of a US bug-out or some such, I don't think the "insurgency" will have won much. The insurgents are Sunni, and they're destined for misery or oblivion regardless. As some have long noted, Iraqi security forces without US supervision will likely be fairly brutal towards the Sunnis.
Nice that he added the bit about mismanagement of US public opinion. Maybe some Rantburgers can help me here - I keep oscillating between lowered respect for the US public (wimps, narcissists, ignoramuses, self-involved twits who don't know the world they live in) and, of course, white-hot fury towards the WH and others for simply abandoning the electorate to the dysfunctional media. Perhaps both reaction are correct, in which case things are dark indeed .....
#2
A decisive insurgent victory is rather unlikely. Iraq is most likely to become even more chaotic and then partitioned by its neighbors.
Guerrillas and insurgents had little or nothing to do with the fall of South Viet Nam in 1975. By 1973 the war in South Viet Nam had been won, in the sense that US forces were no longer needed on the ground, the gov't there was stable under a rule of law. Hanoi was continuously being supplied by the USSR and would re-invade as soon as supplies and training were adequate. Supporting the South cost the USA much less than supplying the North cost the USSR. Did US combat air support (when necessary) cause it more casualties than intensive training? By 1975 the civil war was long gone, the US's obligation was simply to protect an ally from an out and out invasion. The continued existence of this ally would be "victory." The key to Hanoi's 1975 victory was the refusal of the US Congress to provide sufficent aid to South Viet Nam when the resupplied/restored NVA army pushed its conventional Soviet-style forces into the south in a very conventional, Soviet-style armored attack, not involving anything like the Viet Cong. This "defeat" was more the abandonment of an ally than a defeat.
The Viet Nam insurgency did win in the sense that it eroded the US will to persist. The Soviet effort to support world-wide insurgencies and keep roughly even with the US military failed when they went broke.
Is there still a US will to persist now? Is the prospective "surge" likely to result in "victory"?
#4
WRONG WRONG WRONG about the Boere (not "Boers" - that's what the English called them so they could pronounce it "Boors" to denigrate them.) First and foremost, the Boere were the legitimate government of the day, NOT the insurgents (see some basic history on the Transvaal (Boer) Republic and the (Boer) Republic of the Orange Free state.
Second - their first war was fought (and won) against an INVASION led by an adventurer by the name of Starr Jameson (see more basic history on The Jameson Raid.)
Third - They were then invaded by a vastly superior force, the super power of the day, Great Britain. This time they lost, but only after a prolonged struggle and after the British resorted to a number of war crimes (see basic history on The Second Boer War and Concentration Camps run by the British in South Africa)
I could provide you with links, but your ignorance on this issue prompts me to suggest that you do penance by doing some Googleing.
Posted by: John ||
01/17/2007 2:41 Comments ||
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#5
"Is there still a US will to persist now?"
My guess: NO. It looks to me like the Democratic Party, their paid propagandists in the MSM, and their indoctrination cadres in academia have largely succeeded in their quest to stamp out all public support for the war, and "We've lost in Iraq" seems to have become the almost universal received wisdom-- not just on the Left, but lately on the Right as well, and among the general public.
Not "We need to change our strategy and/or tactics because we're not getting the results we want", or "There are some severe problems with how we're going about this", or "This isn't getting the job done quickly enough", or even "It looks like this 'Arab/Islamic Democracy' thing isn't going to do the trick in combatting Islamic aggression." No, it's just "We've lost in Iraq."
The drumbeat of negativism from the MSM and the Democrats has been relentless and deliberate-- and it has worked: at this point, I think very few Americans have even the vaguest idea what we are up to or why, and even fewer have any confidence it will work.
And it hasn't helped matters that the Administration has been almost complete passive against the propaganda onslaught, apparently in the naive belief that all they have to do is conduct the war, and that public support for the endeavor will take care of itself.
"Is the prospective "surge" likely to result in "victory"?"
Does it matter, even a little? I don't think so, not as long as our media are allowed to continue spinning every victory as a resounding defeat. We may indeed win Baghdad, but we're clearly losing America.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
01/17/2007 7:51 Comments ||
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#6
Verlaine-I tend towards anger at the WH for not engaging in an all-out PR war in addition to the hot war. And I mean internationally in addition to domestically. So much of the WOT is a war of perceptions and I don't think we are fighting that front hard enough.
#7
The MSM has a standard script that they use every time it looks like the administration is going to form an organization to explain the news about the war to the people:
1. Express outrage that a "propaganda" agency is being created.
2. Make dark comparisons to the Nazis.
3. Coordinate attacks with allies in Congress.
4. Bang on the story until the administration gives up in frustration.
The MSM understands what they are doing--they are making sure they have a monopoly on shaping the story. The administration either doesn't understand this or lacks the will to thumb their nose at the MSM and do it anyway. The best thing Dubya can do now is form such an organization in the waning days of his admin when nobody is paying attention and have it there for his successor.
Posted by: Jonathan ||
01/17/2007 10:55 Comments ||
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#8
Also, the algeria insurgency was NOT a victory; in fact, when this former french department (IE part of the country, not a colony) was given independence, the insurgency was crushed military, its leaders were snuffed or in jail (the keys to the power had to be given to the "outside fln"), its weapon supply was cut off (with a serie of judicious boat sinkings and targeted killings of various european arms dealers), and, more importantly, the "psychological war" had been WON by the french counter-insurgency specialists, who basically wrote the textbook about that type of operations. I don't have the figures in mind, because it is rotten by porn, but the number of muslim algerians enlisted in the defense apparatus (local militias, armed forces,...) was VASTLY superior to the number of those who had joined the fln... if only because they were driven to France by the sheer abomination of the fln's truly terrorist strategy, which involved slaughtering WHOLE hamlets by throat-slitting or beheading, torture, rapes, kidnappings,... in a scale very reminiscent of the 90's civil war.
JFM will explain it better, but you can't fudge with the facts; the algeria war was NOT a french defeat, it was a major political blunder made by de gaulle, who basically gave away this country created ex-nihilo by french colonization to the national-islamists of the day.
#9
I wrongly put my answer in the comments about Al Quaida fleeing Bagdad due to American surge.
But basically the French , but DE Gaulle wanted to get rid of Algeria. In his opinion Algeria costed more than it brought. In addition he had only disdain for the French of Algeria: except for the minority of descndants of Alsatians (who had fled Alsace in 1871), most Europenas from Algeria were untermenschen to him (descendants of Spaniards or Italians). To him they were French enough for him for dying at Cassino (my grand uncle got a bullet in the lung) or for saving Strasbourg during the Bulge but once the job was done they could go to hell.
About the Algerians who fought the FLN alongside the French Army at the Independence, despite the turn-coating when it became evident that France would cut and run, they outnumered the FLM in such proportion that they had to be disarmed by the French. Then they were left to mmet horrendous deaths at the hands of the FLN. Some French officers risked their carreers to bring their men to France. However these were parked in camps in such conditions I can only think that De Gaulle wanted them to die (not French enough despite fighting for France, less French than collabos). A real example: a woman who wa s going to give birth is brought to a hospital, but the same day she and the baby were brought back to the concentration camp. Her lodgement was mere tent. Temperature was minus 20C. I ignore if the baby survived. May De Gaulle roast in hell.
#10
The MSM understands what they are doing--they are making sure they have a monopoly on shaping the story.
Then they will have to be eliminated, sooner or later. I am not opposed to some old fashioned vigilante type action targeted at the Media.
Posted by: Chuck Darwin ||
01/17/2007 19:03 Comments ||
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#11
"Is there still a US will to persist now?"
Of course there is. Look at Afghanistan.
The problem is it looks like we're loosing in Iraq. Americans don't like to back a loser. And that's the problem the donks will face in '08. They can't afford to be seen as cut and run cowards or they'll get a repeat of 68 and 72. And Hillary knows it.
By '08 it may be difficult for the MSM to continue to make the case that we have lost because of the results of Bush's stubbornness in continuing the war regardless of public and legislative opinion. Even if it's not, the winner will be the one who comes closer to defining a strategy for victory in the Long War, not the candidate who cuts and runs from Iraq.
#12
Sooo.... If America pulls out the Shia will slaughter the Sunni. So what? I know, I know, we can't allow that blah blah blah. Is an Iraq/Saudi war a big problem for us?
Posted by: Mike N. ||
01/17/2007 21:38 Comments ||
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#13
Actually, we as a country would make a mint from selling spares to the Saudis : doubt that the Saudis could keep much of the high-tech stuff going more than a week without us though. The pilots in Saudi Air Force think they are too special to be dirtied with manual labor, they don't even do standard plane walk-arounds, per regulation in most Western air forces.
Insurgents and terrorists are already abandoning some of their positions in Baghdad and moving to Diyala, al-Sabah said:
In Diyala, politicians, religious and tribal figures demanded that their province be included in the security plan of Baghdad. This came after dozens of foreign Arab militants ran away from Baghdad to areas across Diyala in order to avoid raids by the Iraqi and American forces during the incoming security plan to secure Baghdad.
Eyewitnesses told al-Sabah that areas such as New Baquba, Gatoon and al-Zour in Miqdadiya have become convenient bases for terrorists and foreign al-Qaeda members from Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan.
This movement of terrorists forced most of the families in these areas to leave either to neighboring countries or to the southern provinces.
The people are asking the interior and defense ministries and the MNF to seal the entrances and exits in order to contain and capture those terrorists in order for Baghdad's plan to succeed. In the same regard a knowledgeable security source stressed that the success of Baghdad's plan depends on the stability of surrounding provinces, especially Diyala
The U.S. 7th Cavalry buglers are sounding the charge!! Get after 'em boys!!
#1
Yep - Baquba and the rest of Diyala are the obvious first hidey holes. I recall US forces coming across an actual "training camp" for bad guys in Diyala a few months back. Perhaps it's my lack of depth on military matters, but I thought that incident alone was a firing offense for Abizaid, Casey, Chiarelli - and perhaps the civilian bosses who indulged their costly experiment since early '05.
It's amusing - or is it depressing? - that the average Baghdadi is calling for some cordons and interception operations as the idiots flee Baghdad. I mean - do you think MNC-I thought of this too??
Reminds me of the first time I really got scared about how the civilians and military were handling Iraq - a wire service reporter quoted a street vendor as hailing the blockade of Fallujah that followed on the PSD incident, as it had of course interrupted the flow of car-bombs to B'dad, since everyone knew most of them came from Fallujah.
#4
The Boers was not an insurgency but state who fought with flexible units (called commandos) against the slow, rigid and stupid British Army (stupid enough to startthe war with those d...d red uniforms, so stupid they had managed to be crushed at Isandwalna by assegai wielding Zulus)
Boers had betterartillery than the British; their smokeless guns destroyed impunely their counterparts as teh Bristish artillery observers were unable to pinpoint them by the smoke of the Bruitih guns signalled them to the Boers observer
I don't know if the Boer had uniforms (but in history there have been examples of guerrilla campaigns led by uniformed units of regulmar armies). AFAIK they applied the (future?) Geneva conventions in their treatment of enemy prisoners, wounded and civilian populations. They also beat the British in set piece battles.
#5
Also the French didn't lose in Algeria, the insurgency was on the ropes (1). But De Gaulle thought that Algeria was not an asset but a burden for France, that she should look to Europe instead of the Mediterranean, that her engineer should be doing high tech in France instead of roads and bridges in Algeria so he decided to cut and run.
(1) The successful French offensive was led by paratrooper officers who had known the Vietmink prisoner camps, had drawn lessons about French errors in Indochina and were determined to not make the same ones in Algeria. BTW, well after Dien Bien Phu had become a death trap there was no shortgae of volunteers to parachute in it. Many of these volunteers had never parachuted before.
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