Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Iraq: Civil War Specter Spurs New US Exit Plans
”From the moment American troops crossed the border 28 months ago,” Burns wrote, ”the
specter hanging over the American enterprise here has been that Iraq, freedom (Saddam) Hussein's tyranny, might prove to be so fractured...that would spiral inexorably into civil war.”
...the insurgency appears to be ”growing more violent, more resilient and more sophisticated than ever...
American senior military officer, Baghdad
”Now, events are pointing more than ever to the possibility that the nightmare could come true,” according to Burns, who noted that Shiite militias and Shiite and Kurdish-led army and police units were themselves taking increasingly aggressive counter-measures, including abducting, torturing, and executing suspected insurgents and their perceived sympathizers and defenders.
The second story, by two other Baghdad-based Times correspondents, quoted unnamed senior military officers reiterating two big frustrations that have been heard since July, 2003: that the insurgency appears to be ”growing more violent, more resilient and more sophisticated than ever,” and that prosecuting the war is like sowing dragons' teeth.
”We are capturing or killing a lot of insurgents,” one ”senior (U.S.) Army intelligence officer,” told the Times. ”But they're being replaced quicker than we can interdict their operations. There is always another insurgent ready to step up and take charge.”
Such assessments are spurring what rapidly has become a cottage industry -- particularly from the Democratic side of the political spectrum -- one fueled in part by the leak in early July of a British contingency plan that called for halving the number of U.S. and British troops in Iraq by the latter part of 2006.
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