Status Uncertainty and Economic Disparity
Over at Crooked Timber Daniel Davies is writing on the recent Chris Mooney book The Republican War on Science from a meta-structural point of view. Mr. Davies asks what are the factors that allow for a potentially receptive audience to swallow cod liver oil from the propagandists of the right. His fundamental thesis is that the state of flux and change leads Americans to seek out simplicity and idea-values syncronization. However he is stumped as he nearly ends his essay with the following question…..
I don’t know why the politics of status insecurity are more common in the last remaining great world power, or why they have got more rather than less influential since the end of the Cold War, but I suggest that this is the root of the troubled relationship between American politics and American science, and that because of this, the Republican War on Science is likely to get worse rather than better.
Distribution of power, resources and stability matters. The net increase of influence has been large both proportionally and absolutely since 1989 or 1991, choose whatever date you want, although I think that we are seeing some backsliding due to Iraq and our current account deficit in the past couple of years. However this distribution of new power has not been even or at least remotely proportionate.
Barry Ritzhotz notes that the technological, trade, cultural and organizational changes that have accelerated in the past twenty years and are leading towards a significant re-ordering of the economy are concentrated on a distinct and large superset of people:
Two groups seem to be bearing the brunt of economic change: the middle class,
and those who have entered into the work force over the past 20 years place
The American mythos that hard work, a good idea, and being first to market opens up the opportunity to switch between classes by advancing within society is no longer reflective of the actual experience in America. There has been an increase in stratification and familial path dependency in America over the past thirty years. It is harder to get ahead unless one is already ahead economically, and today that means having parents that were ahead of the curve twenty years ago.
We have seen a reacceleration of income disparaity and non-supervisory wages for the past five years barely beating inflation. Over the past generation, wages for the typical American have barely moved, and family incomes are only increasing due to higher intensity of work. There are more duel income families today than thirty years ago despite insignificant changes in total take-home pay.
What wage and income gains that have been achieved in an environment of high productivity gains are not being evenly distributed. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that in 2003, the overwhelming benefits of an mediocre economic expansion went to the top 0.1% of the population.
The long term trends, again according to the CBPP are almost as skewed as this one year picture:
Over the past twenty five years then, the trend has been going against the typical American who is not part of the top five percent. These trends have accelerated in the past five years of the Bush mis-administration, but they are underlying currents of uncertainty and risk aversion as taking risks to get ahead have become much more expensive for a lower probability of advancedment in this time period than in the immediate post-war time period.
On top of these macro side issues, there has been a series of policy and societal reorganizations that have increasingly led to a transferrance of risk and uncertainty from large organizations and governments towards the individual. The most notable has been the explosion of the 401(K)/403(b) defined contribution tax advantaged savings plan with the concurrent fall of the defined benefit plan. This trend is continuing, as Andrew Samwick notes that the most recent pension bill coming out of Congress further weakens defined benefit plans. The push for Health Savings Accounts and the privatization of Social Security are two other policy initiatives that seek to transfer risk off of society and onto the individual. Finally, the increase in ARMS as encouraged by Allen Greenspan transfers interest rate risks off of institutions and the broader market and onto marginal borrowers.
These trends are hammering the middle class and the young(ish) and have been for the past twenty five years. Under times of stress, either absolute or relative, the tendency is for groups to seek simplicity even if that includes high levels of cognitive dissonance and mental gymnastics. For these reasons, I think that the politics of insecurity have increased in America over the past twenty years despite the relief that was provided by the end of the Cold War.
Underpants Gnomes in Iraq
Jim Henley makes a wry observation that the US strategy for a democracy domino theory for Iraq was planned with the same logic as the Underpants Gnomes business model and therefore it has the same level of success:
You may recall that the next steps in the Grand Strategy were
2) All the other Arab countries (plus Iran) decide they want to be just like Iraq.
3) No more terrorism!
I still think there’s a flaw in the logic somewhere.
The current situation in Iraq is a mess, and that is not because Western reporters are reporting only bad news, it is because that is the fundamental facet of reality at this time. Again as Jim Henley notes Iraq has become a quasi Hobbesian state:
Not quite a war of all against all, but a war of most against most. The native Sunni resistance sometimes fights with and sometimes against the foreign terror element; the Army sometimes fights Sunni insurgents and sometimes Iraqi police; the police sometimes “fight” (in the sense of execution-style killings) Sunnis (insurgents and otherwise) and sometimes the Army; the militias (when not in police or Army uniforms) sometimes fight Sunnis and sometimes, probably, each other; the Americans fight any of the above depending on what this week’s plan is.
Right now there is quite a bit of press about how the Badr Corps and its political wing, SCIRI have infilitrated the the Interior Ministry which is the Iraqi national police and internal security agency. There has also been a lot of reports on the influences of the Mahdi Army death squads. These reports seem to suggest that the problem is solely a policing issue, and that the Iraqi Army, which is under more direct US supervision than the police and has been the recipient of longer and more intensive training is acting as a national unififying force and is accepted as such by most parties.
However there are problems to this story line. The first problem is the decline in the number of fully ready combat battalions in the Iraqi Army, from three last summer, to one last fall, to none this month. The somewhat good news from the Iraqization process is that the US is handing off a significant increase in battlespace responsibility but so far the Iraqi units are not doing a good job of maintaining or increasing whatever minimal level of phyiscal security that pre-existed.
But that problem would theoretically be just a training, logistics, and time problem. As Iraqi units get more experienced they would get better. However life, again is not that simple. The Iraqi Army is still fundamentally a reflagged group of Shi’ite militias, and Kurdish peshmerga units that got new uniforms and better supply lines. It is not a national army, but three seperate forces that only have buy-in from their respective communities. Eric Umansky has more:
For the first time, I can across some actual stats on it, and I suspect you’re not going to be to be hearing them in the president’s progress reports anytime soon. Here’s what strategy guru Anthony Cordesman concluded:
Only two of the 10 divisions as yet have something approaching sectarian and
ethnic balance, and even this is weak. About 60% are Shi’ite dominated, and 20%
are Kurdish influenced.
In other words, 80 percent of Iraq’s army is
dominated by one group or another–and those are the forces we’re optimistic
about.Background: That quote comes from a “paper” Cordesman sent out via email but hasn’t posted on the Web. And no there weren’t any footnotes or source listed.
This is inline with the reporting by Peter Galbraith that the Iraqi Army was segmented by ethnicity at the battalion level.
“…the army reflects these divisions. Of the 115 army battalions, sixty are made up of Shiites and located in southern Iraq, forty-five are Sunni Arab and stationed in the Sunni governorates, and nine are Kurdish peshmerga, although they are officially described as the part of the Iraqi army stationed in Kurdistan. There is exactly one mixed battalion (with troops contributed from the armed forces of the main political parties) and it is in Baghdad. While the officer corps is a little more heterogeneous, very few Kurds or Shiites are willing to serve as officers of Sunni Arab units fighting Sunni Arab insurgents. There are no Arab officers in the Kurdish battalions, and Kurdistan law prohibits the deployment of the Iraqi army within Kurdistan without permission of the Kurdistan National Assembly.
We are playing a shell game based upon numbers based on fantasies of local legitimacy. The Sunni Arab battalions are not integrated into the greater command structure and are not seen as trustworthy by anyone, including the local Sunni populations and the national government. The Shi’ite battalions are seen as extensions of the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades, much like the police are seen as better paid politically and ethnically connected thugs, and the Kurdish units proudly proclaim their peshmerga status.
The Underpants Gnomes have a superior plan of making money, than the United States has of tamping down on a civil war and leaving Iraq in both one piece and better off.
P-G moving towards accountability
I learned today via 2 Political Junkies that Jack Kelly is no longer the national security columnist for the Post-Gazette, but from Mr. Kelly’s blog, this is the new situation:
The reason is I’ve been fired as the national security writer. I’ve been forbidden to write news stories about national defense.
This isn’t as bad as it sounds. As most of you have doubtless noticed, I’m still free to write about national defense in my column, and management now tosses a few bucks my way to do reporting on defense in my column. Also now, my column takes precedence. I now get three days to write the two columns I write each week, and am a straight news reporter for two. Before, I was a columnist two days a week, a straight news reporter for three.
He is now the Fitness reporter for the Post Gazette as well as a national security columnist. This demotion has occurred because Media Matters was able to effectively call bullshit on one of his many factually challenged tirades, more specifically about Katrina where he adapted the line that diseaster relief was hard work and it was a liberal media conspiracy that President Bush and his administration were doing a poor job at it.
I applaud the Post-Gazette for instituting some accountability measure on Mr. Kelly. However I am disappointed in the measure that they chose. I have found Mr. Kelly’s defense work when he is not editorializing to be of a high quality and well written. I doubt that I will read his work on the P-G Fitness section but that is because I don’t read that section anyways. The problem that the P-G is responding to is Mr. Kelly’s detachment from reality and his attachment towards being a propagandist for the Republicna Party on the editorial pages. However they dimish his reporting responsiblities while not changing his editorial responsibility. This does not flow from the complaint that has been brought forward.
I have long found Mr. Kelly to be extremely uninformative and a waste of space on the editorial page because he is merely a mouthpiece for whatever piece of neo-con truthiness that needed to be catapulted over the wall that week. He seldom provided interesting and accurate information in his columns and repeatedly and personally attacked critics who raised factual questions about his underlying assumptions. I was the recipient of one of those fun tirades during the fall of 2002 at a Carnegie Mellon symposium when I quietly and politely engaged him about the ehtnic breakdowns of Iraq after an informative discussion at McConomy Auditorium.
Most importantly, on the issue of his supposed expertise, national security, he has been consistently wrong — just see his colum history on Iraq where he has propounded that the liberal media is the sole reason for Iraq being a mess, and that things are going swimmingly, to Syria being the recipient of Hussein’s WMDs in the days before the invasion, to the repeated claims that the insurgency was going to collapse in 2005. He is not adding to the public debate by introducing controversial and verifiable assertions that are proven true to future events.
Sketchbook Saturday
I had a meeting today at a coffee shop with a man that wants me to draw some cartoons for a satirical project he’s working on. He paid me for a couple of cartoons, due next Saturday. When I left the meeting, headed for the library, this man in the sketch was playing his guitar on the pedestrian mall. He is the first street player of the season that I’ve seen . He wasn’t your usual “Simon and Garfunkel Bridge Over Troubled Waters” run-of-the-mill folkie, though (not that there’s anything wrong with it). This guy was ripping through Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning”, fingerpickin’ on a National Steel like there’s no tomorrow, so I gave him some folding money.
This is how we taoists tithe…
Meanwhile, I’ve also been asked to collaborate with Don over at The Satirical Political Report. Don is writing some pretty funny stuff, and I’m looking forward to working with him. Go check out his site for a good laugh.
Thanks also to RadRobot over at the Drawn! Forum for the help with the Blogger Template changes. Yes, that’s Hunter Thompson singing a Steely Dan parody in the header.
This Will Make Your Head Explode
The Pentagon plants a news story claiming it will review it’s policy of planting news stories.
Time for Liberals to "Get Real"!
Now that we’ve dissected the latest problems in Iraq, and Dugan has given Bush/Rove another whacking but good, and we’ve celebrated Mr. M’s latest contribution to the liberal base, I say it’s time to turn our attention to the real issues of the day — which teams will win tonight’s NCAA tournament games.
Here are my quick takes.
There’s alot of speculation about LSU offing Duke. Don’t believe it.
West Virginia has the best shot at an upset against Texas. Believe it.
Memphis faces upstart Bradley. It’s Memphis in a tight one.
THE GAME OF THE NIGHT is the finale pitting UCLA vs. Gonzaga. UCLA will win on a big play in the last 30 seconds.
God, I can’t wait for next weekend when I make my annual pilgrimmage to … not Mecca … not the Vatican … but to Vegas. Yeah, baby!
The Metamorphosis
“The MetaWhore Faust Is” To Be Continued…
Arvin Hill informs me about Oglala Sioux Warriors preparing to fight the oppressive state government of South Dakota.
Blondesense on the American Taliban
Rainbow Demon is back, with more on The American Taliban
Ron has a piece about Sibel Edmonds trying to get the judge in her case recused.
The Heretik rates this new material 5 Kafkas, and one Solzhenitsyn
political, political cartoons, cartoons, satire, Bush, Rove, Karl Rove, parody, Kafka, The Metamorphosis, Beckett
Camryn Tailor
That’s the first and middle name of my newly born daughter. I know I’ve been AWOL for some time, but I thought I would pop in to announce that Camryn was born at 2:18pm this afternoon. 7 pounds, 2 ounces. Anyway. Sorry for the absence, and I hope my hiatus doesn’t last too much longer.
M
Iraq Civil War
You say “Sectarian Violence”, I say “To-mah-to”…
The Carpetbagger on The Denver Three, by way of The Progressive Blog Digest
Scrutiny Hooligans discussion with rightwingers
political, political cartoons, cartoons, satire, Bush, Iraq, Iraq Civil War, Iraq sectarian violence
Seeing a classmate misuse his education
Everyone here knows what I think about the Forrest City/Harrah’s numbers for their Station Square application. They worse than worthless. I could potentially excuse this as an honest mistake to favorably shade the numbers if I did not know one of the main communicators and consumers of that study personally.
From this morning’s Post Gazette I saw the following quote in the Belko article:
Abe Naparstek, director of development for Forest City Enterprises, said the developer decided to pay for a full-page advertisement in last Sunday’s Post-Gazette to get its message out to the people of Pittsburgh
“We feel we have a great story to tell and we think that is a good way to tell it. There’s a good part of our story that hasn’t been covered by the media — number of jobs, wages, the fact they’re union jobs, the ability to generate more property tax revenue [than other competitors]. These are messages we want to make sure the public understands,” he said.
I know Abe, he was a classmate of mine in grad school. And I know a decent chunk of his course load as we had several classes in common including our final group project. I know his skill set and his training, and therefore I have to conclude that he is completely and totally full of shit. Those numbers went by someone who should be able to do the same analysis that I did last week, and produce at least a WTF reaction.
I don’t think that the slots parlors have a positive NPV from any of the proposals, but as Pitts Blog and Angry Drunk Bureaucrat have both pointed out, the relevant question is damage limitation. Damage limitation still requires good information, so at this point and given that I have not looked as deeply into the Isle of Capri plan, I am inclined to think that Isle of Capri is closer to reality than Harrah/Forest City, and therefore slightly more worthy of support. Isle of Capri is still most likely a net loser from a regional perspective, but it is less of a probable loser than Harrahs.
Backed by Big Money, Congress May Gut Identity Theft Laws
As I sit here writing this, my ATM/Debit Check card (from a bank of America that shall remain nameless) has been blocked. After receiving the official notice a few days ago, I hurriedly made other arrangements for my automatic payments, as for the Internet service I used to research this article and email it to my editor; modern life runs on digital money.
Of what crime was I guilty, to receive such punishment? I had the gall to claim an identity. Apparently, my account (and God only knows how many more) “may have been compromised at a third-party location.” I am reassured that my card is covered by “both zero liability and next day refunds guaranteed credit” (subject to dollar limits) but I am also told to carefully review my “statements and report any unauthorized transactions” … although I may be (and indeed am) “temporarily unable to access Online Banking” (The last time something like this happened, three years ago, I caught the problem online before the bank did, and before the rent check bounced … and I bounced out on the sidewalk). I await my new card, said to arrive within five business days … as of a week ago.
Sound familiar? Odds are you or someone you know has suffered the same or worse fate. According to the Federal Trade Commission, there are nearly 10 million identity theft victims each year; that’s about 19 every minute! Far from a victimless crime, identity theft costs the businesses, financial institutions, and consumers of America billions of dollars a year.
Earlier this year, the FTC levied the largest civil penalty on record — a $10 million fine plus a $5 million restitution fund — on ChoicePoint, a “data broker,” or credit-reporting service, used by over 50,000 merchants and landlords for credit checks on potential customers and tenants: In 2005, ChoicePoint became the poster child for lax identity protection, by allowing an organized ring of identity thieves to gain access to over 160,000 personal records; hundreds of individuals became victims of identity theft.
Remember, too, that the 9/11 hijackers left behind piles of credit cards in their rooms; identity theft is a weapon of choice — a “weapon of mass financial destruction” — for Al Qaeda terrorists worldwide.
So naturally, the federal government must be doing everything in its power to crack down on this crime wave, this threat to national financial security, to ease the burden upon us innocent victims of this crime that has turned countless lives upside-down (To paraphrase the Bible, it’s easier to pull a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to restore bad credit).
Don’t bank on it.
The ChoicePoint debacle was brought to public attention not by some federal regulation but by the strict identity theft laws here in California, which call for notifying victims of almost any breaches in security — not just those that the financial institutions themselves determine to be “reasonably likely to result in substantial harm or inconvenience to the consumer” (as the new federal legislation would mandate) — and which freeze the accounts of potential victims: As a representative of the Consumers Union has said, “We shouldn’t have to wait until an identity thief has already bought a Lexus in your name in order to have the right [to] protect yourself.”
The same sort of strict reporting requirements and account freezes are found in the anti-identity-theft laws in several other states that will be gutted like a dead fish by the legislation that was just voted out of committee last week by the House Committee on Financial Services.
And to me, that stinks like a dead fish. Actually, it is the smell of money, and lots of it.
In particular, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, fourteen of the twenty members of the House who receive the most campaign contributions from the commercial banking industry — whose interests are not served by letting the public know their security has been breached, let alone by making good on the losses — serve on the House Committee on Financial Services: Eleven Republicans, including the Chairman, Michael G. Oxley (R-OH), and three Democrats.
And the six remaining House members out of the top twenty getting the largest contributions from the commercial banking industry are hardly ill-placed to influence legislation: In addition to Henry Bonilla (D-TX), the first Hispanic Republican elected to Congress from Texas, the big bank money goes to Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Speaker of the House; Roy Blunt (R-MO), House Majority Whip; Tom DeLay (R-TX), indicted former House Majority Whip; Eric Cantor (R-VA), Chief Deputy Majority Whip; and David Dreier (D-CA), Chairman of the House Rules Committee.
In particular, the Rules Committee is notorious for keeping legislation from reaching the floor of the House, in what longtime observers have found to be the most partisan chokehold on the democratic process in memory. As the Boston Globe reported in its groundbreaking investigation in October of 2004 (and things have gotten only worse), “the Rules Committee, the all-powerful gatekeeper of the Republican leadership, … has sidelined legislation unwanted by the Bush administration, even when a majority of the House seemed ready to approve it.”
But who would want this current legislation, H.R. 3997 (identical to S.2129, in the Senate), laughingly called the “Financial Data Protection Act of 2005″ (but I’m not laughing), just voted out of committee, to ever get that far? Who in their right mind would ever want passed what the U.S. Public Interest Research Group has called “the worst data security bill ever”?
Maybe those in big banking for whom it would become the best data security bill ever bought … at all our expense.
The First Casualty Of War (Flowers Sent to the Wake)
I received a nice e-mail from a Spc. Flowers at Centcom the other day requesting I link to their website. Now I don’t know if it was spam or an e-mail sent after an actual review of my blog. In any event, I googled Flowers and it turns out that he is part of a military program designed to address blogs critical of the military and to feed good news to others.
McNorton, Gehlen and Flowers seem to think there’s enough good news. In fact, they spend their days feeding stories of good news from Iraq and Afghanistan to military blogs such as MilTracker, formerly known as Camp Katrina, a site dedicated to telling the “good news about the U.S. military.”
The team also ask bloggers to link back to the CENTCOM web site, and when they run across incorrect or incomplete information in a blog entry, they provide a correction or more information. “We don’t go in there and get into a debate,” said McNorton. And they don’t go in to police the content of blogs. But they do report OPSEC (operational security) violations.
So here’s my question to Spc. Flowers … why does the military lie to us over and over again?
We heard the bogus leak that Zawahiri was killed in the Pakistani airstrike that actually killed numerous civilians including women and children (reminding me also of the premature reports of the death of Chemical Ali) and we heard the laughably low number of deaths being spun by General Casey in the days after the bombing of the Golden Mosque (lower even than the spin coming from Al Jafari who necessarily had to spin to protect his benefactor, the despicable Muqtada Al Sadr).
But today two fresh stories of the military’s propensity to lie are making the rounds.
The New York Times has the latest on the military’s lies and cover-up regarding the death of Pat Tillman. It’s an odious tale that deserves a full reading. Here’s the money quote from Tillman’s grief ridden father:
All I asked for is what happened to my son, and it has been lie after lie after lie.
Then there’s the latest uncovered lie which involves the possible slaughter of 15 unarmed Iraqis on November 19, 2005. The military initially reported the deaths as being the result of an insurgent’s bomb. Yet, this view was contradicted by eyewitness accounts that the dead were, in fact, killed by American gunfire. These accounts were followed up by Time magazine and there are reports of a video of the aftermath. Only now - when confronted by a mountain of evidence - does the military change its story. The initial account was wrong and, the military now claims, the deaths were the result of American gunfire but as “collateral damage” and not intentionally so.
But the MO always remains the same — lie first then only give up portions of the truth once you are forced to concede. More damaging in both situations is that the initial lies only serves to undercut the second story and fuel speculation that something worse actually took place.
It’s sad and disappointing that as American citizens we have to wonder when, if ever, the military can be believed.
So Spc. Flowers, if you are truly interested in ending disinformation, might I suggest you spend less time fretting about lil liberal blogs and more time preventing the lies being spewed from the mouths of your bosses.
But then again, we all know Flowers can’t do that.
Iraqization Pt. 4
Just want to take a slightly deeper look at this Guardian blurb about a prison assault in the north central part of Iraq. Looking at the implications are quite depressing.
Armed insurgents freed all the inmates of an Iraqi prison today in a raid that left at least 17 police and 10 attackers dead.
Favorable kill ratio for the attackers, which is a bit surprising given that they were the attackers against a fixed and presumably fortified position. Defenders in this situation should be able to inflict disproportionally high casualties unless there is either mass surprise or a massive firepower differential.
Up to 100 militants armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades stormed the judicial compound in Muqdadiya, a Sunni heartland about 60 miles north-east of the capital.
This could explain some of the casualty favorability for the insurgents; they were able to mass a company sized assault force with medium and heavy weapons, assemble it and plan a fairly complex operation. This force was able to be assembled without it being informed upon nor being hit as it concentrated by US airpower or artillery.
The assault began after the attackers fired a mortar round into the police and court complex, police Brigadier Ali al-Jabouri said.
Officials said all 33 prisoners had been freed and 10 of the attackers killed in the early-morning battle, along with at least 17 police and a courthouse guard. Another 13 policemen and civilians and 15 gunmen were wounded in the attack.
Multi-phased operation, and the net win for the insurgency manpower pool is +8 to +23 as well as reinforcing morale and motivation to fight as motivation to fight increases when an individual knows that their buddies, team, unit etc has their back. This reasoning partially motivates the massive US investment in combat search and rescue capabilities for looking for shot down pilots; you’ll fight harder, and take a few more reasonable risks if you think that you have back-up when the shit hits the fan.
After burning the police station, the insurgents detonated a string of roadside bombs as they fled, taking the bodies of many of their dead comrades with them, police said.
A fairly well disciplined force is indicated as insurgents collected of their dead and wounded. This implies high unit cohesion and decent operational security awareness. Also the string of IEDs shows the ability of the insurgent assault force to plan at least a three phase operation — mortars, infantry close quarter battle, area denial munitions employed to cover the retreat after a successful raid. This is not an operation planned by idiots. Finally, the ability of the insurgent force to cover their retreat with IEDs implies that the surveillance/patrol capability of US or Iraqi government forces near the judicial compound is minimal for planting IEDs takes time if they are to be effective.
Remnants and scattered dead enders don’t operate in company sized units. They don’t assault fixed and fortified positions and inflict better than 1:1 casualties on the defenders. Remnants don’t plan and competently execute multiple time sensitive phases within a single operation.
Request for Recommendations
I have a sudden motivation to learn a lot more about China in the next couple of weeks. I know I have a set of very well informed readers in a wide array of subjects, so there has to be a couple of you guys who can give me the titles of books and magazines that I should be reading on the recent history of China — 1978 to this morning is the time frame I am interested in.
Operation Swarmer
Doug at Comments From Left Field
Newshog on Operation One More Last Throe
Don Davis Outlines Rummy’s Iraq Civil War Plans
Tao of Politics on Who’s Stealing the Strawberries!
Quietly Making Noise points to Calvin Trillin
Why Are We Back In Iraq? wants to know why Rummy is laughing
political, political cartoons, cartoons, satire, Bush, Iraq, Operation Swarmer
Swarmer
I am just stealing the last half of a good post from Cernig on Op. Swarmer:
the words of Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi interim foreign minister, who said the attack had been necessary to prevent insurgents from forming a new stronghold such as they had established in Fallujah and you see how much spin Abizaid is attempting.
1500 troops, 200 armored vehicles, 50 aircraft. That’s no small effort. Then add in the method - helicopter assault. They may have been training Iraqi airborne troops (unlikely, the Iraqis don’t have enough helicopters of their own to make it worthwhile) or maybe trying to increase the element of surprise - but for 40 years the major reason the U.S, has used helicopter insertion has been that the roads have become too dangerous to use.
So here’s the scenario - an almost Fallujah-like concentration of insurgency forces which requires half a brigade to subdue. An area that cannot be approached by road without taking serious casualties from IED’s and ambushes and tipping of the targets because locals are so much on their side.
It’s been three years. This kind of situation shouldn’t be happening any more by any rational standard of “success” in fighting an insurgency. To still be holding operations like this now is a definition of “lost”.
As I noted yesterday at my place, the US has tried handing over security to Iraqi forces loyal to the Baghdad government three times already, most recently in the late November-January period. Right now if the US is launching a brigade led assault to the Samarra suburbs, there is most likely someone in CentCom drawing up plans and praying that the 4th time is a charm.
The other thing to note is how much this operation directly contradicts any attempt to win hearts and minds by thoroughly engaging with the locals and working in squad to platoon size groups as the primary operational level. This is a major brigade size surge effort, and we don’t see those that often. The most recent was the 3rd ACR going into Tal Afar. This is a big unit maneuver that is inconsistent with oil spot counterinsurgency.