POWELL: WE ARE LOSING

From Salon's War Room comes a report of what will appear in the new edition of Newsweek:

Secretary of State Colin Powell has privately confided to friends in recent weeks that the Iraqi insurgents are winning the war, according to Newsweek. The insurgents have succeeded in infiltrating Iraqi forces "from top to bottom," a senior Iraqi official tells Newsweek in tomorrow's issue of the magazine, "from decision making to the lower levels."

This is a particularly troubling development for the U.S. military, as it prepares to launch an all-out assault on the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, since U.S. Marines were counting on the newly trained Iraqi forces to assist in the assault. Newsweek reports that "American military trainers have been frantically trying to assemble sufficient Iraqi troops" to fight alongside them and that they are "praying that the soldiers perform better than last April, when two battalions of poorly trained Iraqi Army soldiers refused to fight."

If the Fallujah offensive fails, Newsweek grimly predicts, "then the American president will find himself in a deepening quagmire on Inauguration Day."

Well that's not good!

One might argue that the very fact that we have to go on the offensive in Fallujah this far into the effort -- at a time when people like Richard Perle were predicting that statues of Bush would be erected by the Iraqi people -- is an implication that we're in a quagmire. After a drink or two, Powell would certainly agree.

But here's the thing: What the hell is our offensive in Falljah going to accomplish? Certainly we're trying to flex our muscles by sending our troops there in droves, but really, how will that help? The insurgents and others who took over the town will largely vanish into the shadows, we'll take over the town without eliminating the insurgent problem, and then what? We keep a permanent elevated military presence there? Put thousands of troops in a place that's heard nothing but anti-US propaganda for months? We might as well put signs on the back of the troops' unis that say "IED me".

We can't do what Israel does, that being send in troops to kill a bunch of people on a list, and destroy some buildings, then largely pull out, because that will not alleviate the problems we already have there.

We can't play by 1980's Syrian "Hama rules" (flattening the entire place as a warning to everyone else) because, unlike authoritarin Syria, the "reason" we're in Iraq is to promote democracy, something that doesn't go well with turning cities into parking lots. Since it would be Americans doing the flattening (since we can't trust our Iraqi troops for the reasons Powell mentions), and many Iraqis are likely to view our actions through the lens of our relationship with Israel, fucking up Fallujah would seem to them a bit too Deir Yassin-ish of us for their tastes.

See why we're fucked?

Neocons: More tank, less think. Damn them.