Unfortunately Today in Iraq seems dead. Folks from there, dancewater, friendly fire, if you need help to get it up again please let me know.
As I left in comments somewhere here today, the LA Times had a regular piece on Iraq that included deep down this sentence:
There has been a surge in bombings in Iraqi towns and cities as American and Iraqi forces have launched a crackdown on insurgents in the capital.
That involuntary description of The Surge certainly fits.
The surge of U.S. troops has been reported, though not widely distributed, to go up for now to 175,000 U.S. troops inside Iraq. One must add 100,000 contractors to that, though most of them are foreign cooks and janitors not U.S. managers (there is a slaughter coming for them – nobody will officially care when tens of thousand of Asian $1/day folks will try to run home.)
Outside of Iraq but nearby are another 100,000 U.S. troops – paper and pallet pushers. That is about the maximum that is sustainable without a draft and without stripping a few thousand irrelevant additional combat troops from South Korea and other possible hotspots.
So the U.S. is now about as committed on the ground as it gets, though Air Force capacity ex transport is still available in abundance (Iran – watch out for those.)
The U.S. surge had the temporary effect of moving some unfriendly folks out of Baghdad and into the villages around the city. Now resistance induced casualties of Iraqis, usually reported as sectarian fighting, have gone up again to 100+ a day.
There have been two recent attempts I have read about to overrun U.S. installations. There will be ten or twenty such attempts in the next weeks and some will succeed without any U.S. troops surviving. The Green Zone is btw under siege too.
The resistance trick to use chlorine trucks for bombs is quite nifty. It has no serious immediate combat value but two very serious degrading effects:
a. Some 4-star general will order every U.S. troop in Iraq to carry ABC-equipment all the time, adding some pounds to their already too high package weights during the Iraqi summer,
b. Many U.S. Captains will order their troops to stop and kill any chlorine truck driving around with the effect of denying any safe chlorinated water source to Iraqi civilians.
That’s how you breed resistance recruits while hampering your own force.
The unwillingness of the U.S. people to take casualties in their empire efforts will thereby defeat the empire attempts.
Maybe stupid and late, but better late than never and fine with me anyway – I have no need for any empire.
Al-Sadr has called for an Iraq wide demonstration for the 9th of April. He asked every household to raise the Iraqi flag as a sign against the occupation. You’ll not see those flags on CNN or Fox, but it certainly will have a wide effect in Iraq and the secondary effects will be broadcasted for their gore.
The time is becoming ripe for a Tet like effort by the resistance. Meanwhile, the people, including me, will be glued to their screens to follow some Waxman hearing or Kabuki performances of presidential candidates.