bongblaster@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> More proof American gun-slingers and their Jewish money-men can be
> defeated on the battlefield:
>
>
> How the U.S. Just Got Schooled by a 'Rag-Tag' Neighborhood Army in
> Iraq
> http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/81147/
>
> A week ago, Bush called the offensive in Basra a "defining moment" for
> Iraq. Suddenly he's gotten very quiet.
>
> What happened in Iraq this week was a beautiful lesson in the weird
> laws of guerrilla warfare. Unfortunately, it was the Americans who got
> schooled. Even now, people at my office are saying, "We won, right?
> Sadr told his men to give up, right?"
>
> Wrong. Sadr won big. Iran won even bigger. Maliki, the Iraqi Army,
> Petraeus and Cheney lost.
>
> For people raised on stories of conventional war, where both sides
> fight all-out until one side loses and gives up, what happened in Iraq
> this past week makes no sense at all. Sadr's Mahdi Army humiliated the
> Iraq Army on all fronts. In Basra, the Army's grand offensive,
> code-named "The Charge of the Knights," got turned into "The Total
> Humiliation of the Knights," like something out of an old Monty Python
> skit.
>
> Thousands of police who were supposed to be backing up the Iraqi Army
> either refused to fight or defected to Sadr's Mahdi Army. In Basra,
> the Iraqi Army was stopped dead and clearly in danger of being crushed
> or forced to retreat from the city. In Baghdad, Sadr's militia was
> rocketing the Green Zone non-stop -- not a good look for the "Surge is
> working" PR drive -- and driving the Iraqi Army clean out of the
> 2.5-million-strong ****a slum, Sadr City. And in every poor ****a
> neighborhood in cities and towns all over Iraq, local units of the
> Mahdi Army were attacking the government forces.
>
> Then, after four days of uninterruptedly kicking Iraqi Army ass, Sadr
> graciously announces that he's telling his men to end their "armed
> appearances" on the streets. Makes no sense, right? It makes a ton of
> sense, but you have to stop thinking of formal battles like Gettysburg
> and Stalingrad and think long and slow, like a guerrilla.
>
> If you want to know how not to think about Iraq, just start with
> anything ever said or imagined by Cheney or Bush. Our Commander in
> Chief declared a week ago when the Iraqi Army first marched into
> Basra, "I would say this is a defining moment in the history of a free
> Iraq." When the Iraqi Army fled a few days later, he suddenly got very
> quiet. But anybody could see how deluded the poor ****er is just by
> all the nonsense he managed to cram into that 15-word sentence. I
> mean, "the history of a free Iraq"?
>
> But that's nothing compared to Bush's fundamentally wrong notion that
> there's even such a thing as a "defining moment" in an urban guerrilla
> war. Guerrilla wars are slow, crock-pot wars. To win this kind of war,
> the long war, takes patience. Trying to force a "defining moment" by
> military action is not just ignorant and idiotic, but risks further
> demoralizing your side when that moment doesn't happen, as it
> inevitably won't. What happens when you launch premature strikes on a
> neighborhood-based group like the Mahdi Army is that you just end up
> convincing their neighborhoods that the occupiers are the enemy, and
> the Mahdi boys -- local guys you've known all your life -- are heroes,
> defending your glorious slum from the foreigners and their lackeys.
>
> By the time a homegrown group like Sadr's is ready to "announce
> itself" on the streets, it's put in years of serious grassroots work
> winning over the locals block by block. The Mahdi Army runs its own
> little world in the neighborhoods it controls. It distributes food to
> the poor, deals out rough justice to the local criminals, and runs the
> checkpoints that keep Sunni suicide bombers off the block. It's the
> home team, the Oakland Raiders times one million, for people in places
> like Sadr City. You can't eradicate it without eradicating the whole
> neighborhood -- or making it so rich that people don't need a gang.
> That's probably the only sure way to end guerrilla wars: make the
> locals so rich they're not interested in gang life any more. And
> that's not going to happen any time soon for the people crammed into
> places like Sadr City. Until then, the Mahdi Army is their team and
> they're sticking by it.
>
> By attacking Sadr's neighborhoods this week, Maliki's troops pushed
> the ****a m***** closer to Sadr; and by losing, they made the slum
> people prouder than ever of their home team. That's what you get when
> you go for a "defining moment" in guerrilla war.
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