Laying it Out

Georgie Anne Geyer is one of those shoe-leather reporters that has forgotten more about Foreign Affairs than the Stuffed Flightsuit has ever learned (and then forgotten as well).

She pretty much takes the the Administration's spin about Iraq to the Woodshed:

But in only the last two weeks, American generals and civilian officials are, in fact, admitting that they have their own similar Maginot Line problems. In Mosul, the Iraqi police force has "faded away." American generals speak of a "virtual connectivity" of the insurgents never seen before, as they use the Internet to pass along techniques, tactics and advice to one another. American generals now admit that almost all of them are Iraqis; we have created the Iraqi terrorists who were not there before.

Take only the astoundingly candid analysis, based in part on an interview with Gen. John Abizaid, the senior U.S. military commander in the region, by CNN's excellent Pentagon (news - web sites) correspondent, Barbara Starr, on television last Sunday.

Starr reported: "Senior U.S. military sources in the region tell CNN the city of Mosul has been wracked by violence for weeks. Local Iraqi security forces have virtually melted away, say those officials. One senior U.S. officer tells CNN, we have no Iraqi police force up in Mosul today.

"The problem in getting Iraqis to fight the insurgency may be deeper across Iraq. The military assessment now is that the U.S. miscalculated Iraqi tribal and religious loyalties and did not realize Iraqis are likely to fight only for their brethren ... So in cases like Mosul, they simply will not fight the intimidation of the insurgents, the U.S. now believes."

And remember, until now Mosul was one of our success stories!

Put aside the stunning fact that American officials could not figure out that people anywhere will fight for their families instead of for the foreign invaders; the recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies states that the numbers of trained Iraqi army and police are far below what is required. Only one example: As of Dec. 6, the Pentagon reported that 27,000 trained army troops were needed, but that only 3,428 were listed as "trained/on hand."

Or consider these other warning signs:

American generals now speak in interviews about the "cellular expansion" of the insurgents. They see a constant spread of new, small cells with no clear command and control links that can form quickly, exploit and sacrifice, rather than relying on hard-core or closed, secure cells and forces. The Independent newspaper in London estimates there were at least 190 suicide bombers in the last 12 months (one might pause to think that they had something they believed in to take such a terminal measure).

Officers and diplomats in the area are now changing their time limits. Some are saying that all of 2005 will be a very troubled year, that it will take five to 10 years, even under reasonably effective Iraqi rule, to bring any stability at all, and some are noting that insurgencies usually take 10 to 30 years to play themselves out. The able Gen. Abizaid himself says we are in the middle of a fight against "Salafist jihadists," or Muslim fundamentalists determined to recreate the supposed seventh-century paradise of the Prophet Muhammad himself. He compares it, revealingly, to the long and arduous fight against the utopian Bolsheviks in the 20th century.

"This was to be a satellite war," William Lind, the respected military analyst now at the Free Congress Foundation, told me, "a war laid out on a billiard table against an enemy who plays by our rules." Indeed, the military seems finally to have grasped the absurdity of this naive view and is beginning to stress foreign languages and cultural intangibles.

The truth no one really wants to deal with is that this war could very easily be lost by the United States. All the insurgents have to do is hang on another year. All we have to do is what the French and the British did in their colonies: Let themselves be exhausted and finally destroyed by their hubris, their delusions and their arrogant lack of understanding of the local people.

Our Maginot Lines today are our satellites, our huge bombers, our willingness to destroy a city such as Fallujah without even knowing who's there. Our Maginot minds refuse to see that the Germans sneaking around the French through Belgium to destroy them is disturbingly analogous to the insurgents in Iraq moving in cells from city to city and letting us think we are "winning."

We are being lied to, and we will continue to sow what the Bush Administration has reaped.

But, Geyer is pretty much no longer the mainstream source she used to be as a regular on the News Chat Shows before they became more scream fests and dominated by Tweety and Tweety-like personages.

So in other words our corporate media will find a way not to tell us we were fucked, are fucked, and will continue to be fucked.

There will always be amother celebrity pedophile or a murdered white pregnant woman to fixate upon.