Future Changes I: We Will Be Overrun in Iraq

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.15.07]

[Note: In response to Aaron, this the first of 3 or 4 articles about the changes we’ll experience in the near future–the next 24 months. Will I be proved right? Time will tell.]

Within the next 24 months, our campaign in Iraq will fail and our army will be defeated. Why will this happen?

• Reason I: The Army knows how an insurgency must be defeated. But, that’s not the way they are being directed to proceed.
  

Released in December 2006, the US Army’s Handbook on Counterinsurgency states unequivocally:

Unsuccessful Practices
Place priority on killing and capturing the enemy, not on engaging the population.
Conduct battalion-sized operations as the norm.
Concentrate military forces in large bases for protection.
Focus special operations forces primarily on raiding.

Our forces are doomed to failure.

• Reason II: Our military will be shortly or are right now being faced with overwhelming force. Robert Fisk, veteran war correspondent, one of the world’s most experienced journalists covering the Middle East for the past thirty years made the following comments:
  

There was a very interesting comment from the British Ministry of Defense about a month ago…They said British troops are now in the most violent combat they’ve experienced since the Korean War. And British defense correspondents sort of put this up as a great sign…And I thought, hang on a minute, that’s not the point.

What happened in Korea? The Gloucestershire Regiment were overwhelmed by millions of Chinese troops crossing the Yalu River. We couldn’t stand up to the vast numbers of soldiers that were coming in from the north in Korea. They were just overrunning us, totally.

And what was happening, I realized immediately, in Afghanistan is that soldiers were being so totally outnumbered, they were having to retreat out of villages. In one case, I understand, twelve British troops in a school in a village were facing 300 Taliban and had to call in US air strikes to destroy the rest of the village to save themselves.

…one story…I know it’s a fact, because I’ve investigated it fully in Iraq — is that in the first battle of Fallujah…, there were twelve US Marines guarding the mayor’s office at Ramadi,…and they were attacked by hundreds of Iraqi insurgents, and that twelve-man US Marine unit was liquidated. They were totally eliminated. They were killed, all of them. They were wiped out.

…So the dangers you see that we’re now facing, very much — I don’t mean to make too facile a comparison — very much the same dangers that the crusaders faced with overwhelming force from the Muslim armies of the 12th century, is that the local populations are now so full of fury and anger against us that they are attacking us in their hundreds, overwhelming force.