WILL AGGRO TACTICS IN IRAQ WORK?

The American counter-​​insurgency in Iraq is reach­ing new heights, the New York Times reports.
In Saddam’s home­town, Tikrit, “com­man­ders called in AC-​​130 gun­ships, A-​​10 attack planes and Apache heli­copter gun­ships, as well as Air Force F-​​16 and F-​​15E fighter-​​bombers with 500-​​pound bombs, the mil­i­tary said, in the largest bom­bard­ment in the area since President Bush declared the end of major com­bat on May 1.“
Meanwhile, U.S. forces called in air strikes “against tar­gets in cen­tral Baghdad for the first time since the Spring,” Channel News Asia notes.
Major General Charles Swannack, who leads the 82nd Airborne, says the stepped-​​up offen­sive “demon­strates our resolve, and we are not going to fight this one with one hand tied behind our backs.“
But the Salt Lake City Tribune notes that “a top-​​secret CIA assess­ment from Iraq, widely reported last week, has warned that such aggres­sive coun­terin­sur­gency tac­tics by the army could incite more Iraqis to fight the Americans.“
With their grue­some acts, terrorist-​​type insur­gent groups (think Hamas, or Peru’s Sendero Luminoso) tra­di­tion­ally try to pro­voke the gov­ern­ment into ever-​​more repres­sive responses. The more heavy-​​handed the gov­ern­ment is, the the­ory goes, the more the pop­u­lace is rad­i­cal­ized, and the more ripe for rev­o­lu­tion the area becomes.
Does that mean, then, the the U.S. offen­sive is play­ing into the bad guys’ hands? Do American mil­i­tary com­man­ders have any other choice?
THERE’S MORE: On the other end of the tac­ti­cal spec­trum, “the deci­sion to pull the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division out of the ‘Sunni Triangle’ city of Ramadi and to turn local secu­rity over to Iraqi offi­cers might be the most sig­nif­i­cant step since the U.S.-led occu­pa­tion began six and a half months ago,” Slate’s Fred Kaplan says. “If the Ramadi exper­i­ment suc­ceeds, it could serve as the road map to a respon­si­ble exit strat­egy. If it fails, it will dra­ma­tize the depths of our predica­ment, the utter lack of good options, the tenac­ity of the dare we say it? quag­mire that bogs us down.“
AND MORE: “The U.S. Air Force used some of the largest weapons in its inven­tory to attack tar­gets in cen­tral Iraq,” accord­ing to the Associated Press.
“A pair of 2,000-pound satellite-​​guided bombs were dropped late Tuesday near Baqouba, 30 miles north­east of Baghdad, on ‘camps sus­pected to have been used for bomb-​​making,’ said Maj. Gordon Tate, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division.”

November 19th, 2003 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.