Meanwhile, onto more important matters...

[Yonivore]

Surrender or Die! (http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/surrender-or-die.htm)


I am with 3-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team. I’ve run a few missions with them in Baghdad, and they have fought all over Iraq. This Brigade has much recent combat experience, and is expertly commanded. A person does not need to even meet the commanders (though I do each day) to know they are running a tight ship. The professionalism of 3-2 is particularly high, and they are very competent fighters who are maximizing their assets, including the incredible Stryker vehicles.
***

The combat in Baqubah should soon reach a peak. Al Qaeda seems to have been effectively isolated. The initial attack on 19 June achieved enough surprise that al Qaeda was caught off guard and trapped. They have been beaten back mostly into pockets and are surrounded and will be dealt with. Part of this is actually due to the capability of Strykers. We were able to “attack from the march.” In other words, a huge force drove in from places like Baghdad and quickly locked down Baqubah.

***

[T]he battle is going very well. A big fight seems to be brewing. As of about noon in Baqubah on the 22nd, there seems to be a lull in the fighting. A calm. This is about to get wet. At the going rate, al Qaeda in Baqubah will soon have two choices: Surrender, or die.

[ChumpDumper]

You have no need to know! (http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1798038&postcount=6)


I think the problem has been, to a large degree, that too many people who have absolutely no need to know have demanded to know how we are going to fight this war.

Either it is a just war and those who are charged with prosecuting it should be left to do so, or; it is an unjust war and those who believe so should work to stop it. Chewing over the particular strategy is not working toward either of those objectives.

[boutons_]

dubya's bullshit war for oil is still still-born from

1. the disbandment/de-Baathification of the Iraqi army and police.

2. vastly too few US military

==========================

Iraq Push Revives Criticism of Force Size

Baghdad Offensive May Shift Violence Elsewhere

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 23, 2007; A01

The major U.S. offensive launched last weekend against insurgents in and around Baghdad has significantly expanded the military's battleground in Iraq -- "a surge of operations," and no longer just of troops, as the second-ranking U.S. commander there said yesterday -- but it has renewed concerns about whether even the bigger U.S. troop presence there is large enough.

As the U.S. offensive, code-named Phantom Thunder, has been greeted with a week of intensified fighting in areas outside the capital -- areas that the U.S. military has largely left untouched for as long as three years -- the push raised fears from security experts and officers in the field that the new attacks might simply propel the enemy from one area to another where there are not as many U.S. troops.

Since President Bush ordered the troop increase in January, the military had focused on creating a more secure environment in Baghdad. "We are beyond a surge of forces," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno said yesterday in a briefing from his headquarters in the Iraqi capital. He did not directly address the size of the force, saying only that the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops over five months "allows us to operate in areas where we have not been for a long time."

Retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who in 2003 was among the first to call public attention to the relatively small size of the U.S. invasion force, said that the new operation shows how outnumbered U.S. troops remain. "Why would we think that a temporary presence of 30,000 additional combat troops in a giant city would change the dynamics of a bitter civil war?" he said in an interview yesterday. "It's a fool's errand."

An officer working in Arrowhead Ripper, the subsidiary offensive in Diyala province, said wearily, "We just do not have the forces in country right now to have the appropriate level of presence across the country."

Many counterinsurgency experts agree. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., the director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a national security think tank, said flatly that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, does not have enough troops. "I suspect General Petraeus is taking a risk here, but that's what commanders do," he said.

The issue of the number of troops has dogged the Bush administration and its generals since before the war began. Retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, told Gen. Tommy R. Franks in September 2002 -- seven months before the U.S. invasion -- there were not enough troops in the war plan. Most famously, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then the Army's chief of staff, told a congressional hearing a month before the assault that the plan did not call for a sufficiently large occupation force.

Yet some who were sharply critical of the Bush administration back then judge the situation in another way now. "I think it is different -- better planned, and tied to the operations in Baghdad," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash. He still maintains that the U.S. presence is at least 50,000 soldiers short but said that at least now "the troops we do have are being used economically and are being directed towards specific, important objectives."

Frederick W. Kagan, a military historian at the American Enterprise Institute who was involved in developing the plans for the recent troop increase, was more emphatic. "They have been very deliberate in setting conditions, including establishing both our forces and Iraqi forces in key areas and developing intelligence and trust relationships, including with some former insurgents, and these developments will facilitate the operation greatly," he said. "So I think that we have enough troops to get the level of violence down dramatically with this and successive operations."

But some officers in Iraq sharply disagreed with the assertion that the United States finally has enough personnel to bring security to the country. "I believe we have enough U.S. troops for this specific operation," said a U.S. military strategist there, referring to Phantom Thunder. "I do not believe we've ever had enough troops to do all of the tasks we should be doing in Iraq."

One of Petraeus's nerviest gambles is that enemy fighters will not be able to move and disrupt other areas. The biggest concern for U.S. commanders is the big northern city of Mosul, where insurgents counterattacked the last time the U.S. military conducted an operation this size, in November 2004. That is especially worrisome because the United States now has only one battalion of about 1,000 troops stationed there, far fewer than were there then.

U.S. commanders are keeping a wary eye on that city. "That one U.S. battalion in Mosul is getting a lot of help from the [Special Operations Forces] community that is obviously not highlighted," the U.S. strategist in Iraq noted. "We're still concerned, but you have to accept risk somewhere."

In terms of the fighting, the question may be academic. "There isn't much more land power available for use in Iraq and Afghanistan," retired Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff, recently commented. "We are now 'all in' " -- that is, in poker terms, the U.S. armed forces have put all their chips on the table.

That view underscores the question of the reliability and combat effectiveness of Iraqi security forces. Essentially, any additional combat power is going to have to come largely from them, as will the capability to "hold" large areas outside the capital.

"The Iraqi security forces will be able to sustain and continue to improve their ability to maintain security," Odierno predicted. "They are staying and fighting. They are taking casualties."

But other officers report that the Iraqi forces themselves are not big enough and also have a mixed record in combat. Army Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who oversaw training and advising efforts there until this month, said in recent congressional testimony that Iraqi units are improving but "do not have tactical staying power."

"For the control and retain phases, we will need reliable Iraqi security forces in sufficient numbers," said Lt. Col. Douglas A. Ollivant, a senior Army planner in Baghdad. "There are clearly not yet enough reliable forces."

Iraqi security forces are "the weak link," said counterinsurgency expert Krepinevich. The Iraqi government is so factionalized that Iraqi forces remain largely ineffective, he explained: "This is the principal weak spot in our strategy -- and I'm afraid it may be fatal."

A senior commander in Iraq, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that U.S. plans do not call for holding cleared areas. Rather he said, the "Battle of the Baghdad Belts," as some in the military call the new offensive, is a series of raids designed to reduce attacks on the capital and thus support the main effort, which is to improve the security of Baghdad's population.

"This is about interdicting the accelerants of al-Qaeda," Odierno said yesterday. "I mean the truck bombs, the car bombs, the chlorine bombs that they try to do in order to harass the population and try to affect the confidence in the government of Iraq. These are the attacks that we are trying to prevent."

In their first week, the new operations have resulted in the capture of more than 700 detainees, the killing of 160 insurgents, and the uncovering of hundreds of weapons caches and bombs, Odierno said.

Terry Daly, a retired U.S. government expert in counterinsurgency, said that if Phantom Thunder is indeed a short-term aggressive action intended to kill insurgents who have attacked the capital and to remove their rural strongholds, then he thinks it is the right move. "This is not more of the same-old, same-old futile search-and-destroy, but rather an operational raid" to help improve security in Baghdad, he said. "As such it is skilled American generalship, which we haven't seen in a long time, and which looks good."

Even so, some insiders worry that the new push will still prove to be too little, too late. "We have lost the fight for public and political support, so no matter how successful we are militarily, we are being led to failure," said one U.S. intelligence expert involved in Iraqi operations.

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

[boutons_]

June 23, 2007

Militants Said to Flee Before U.S. Offensive

By JOHN F. BURNS, NYTimes

BAGHDAD, June 22 — The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004.

In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.

Some American officers in Baquba have placed blame for the Qaeda leaders’ flight on public remarks about the offensive in the days before it began by top American commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the overall commander in Iraq. But General Odierno cast the issue in broader terms, saying Qaeda leaders were bound to know an attack was coming in light of President Bush’s decision to pour nearly 30,000 additional troops into the fight in a bid to secure Baghdad and areas around the capital that have been insurgent strongholds. That included Baquba, which lies 40 miles north.

“Frankly, I think they knew an operation was coming in Baquba,” General Odierno said in a teleconference briefing with Pentagon reporters from the American military headquarters in Baghdad. “They watched the news. They understood we had a surge. They understood Baquba was designated as a problem area. So they knew we were going to come sooner or later.”

Still, he implied American commanders may have played a part by flagging the offensive in advance. “I think they were tipped off by us talking about the surge, the fact that we have a problem in Diyala Province,” he said.

In his news conference, General Odierno offered the broadest assessment yet of the multipronged American offensive around Baghdad that got under way this week, using the additional troops sent to Iraq as part of Mr. Bush’s troop buildup. Despite the flight of the Qaeda leaders from Baquba — a pattern that appears to have been replicated in other areas included in the new offensive, including Qaeda strongholds along the Tigris River south of Baghdad — he adopted an upbeat tone, saying the offensive held “a good potential” for reducing the Qaeda threat to the point that American force levels in Iraq could be reduced by next spring.

First, he said, American and Iraqi troops would need to sustain their crackdown long enough for Iraqi forces to move into neighborhoods cleared of Qaeda fighters and hold them. This is a pattern American commanders have tried unsuccessfully before, as in a failed attempt to secure wide areas of Baghdad last summer. But General Odierno said Iraqi forces were “getting better,” “staying and fighting,” “taking casualties” and adding an additional 7,500 soldiers to their overall strength every five weeks.

“If you ask me today, I think by the spring, or earlier, they will be able to take on a larger portion of their security, which means I think potentially we could have a decision to reduce our forces,” he said. But he quickly tempered his optimism, aware that top generals here have made repeated forecasts of a turnarounds in the war, only for the situation to get progressively worse. “You know, there’s so many things that could be happening between now and then, as we’ve all learned,” he said.

The forecast of a possible troop reduction by the spring of 2008 had strong political echoes, coinciding as it did with the date for beginning an American troop withdrawal that has been favored by some leading Democrats in Congress. It also coincides with the April 2008 date that American commanders in Iraq have said they have been given by the Army and Marine Corps leadership in Washington as the last point at which the current American force level of about 156,000 — augmented by the additional five Army brigades and Marine units deployed as part of the so-called surge — can be sustained, given staffing constraints.

Addressing the problems facing American troops in Baquba, General Odierno played down the significance of the Qaeda leaders fleeing ahead of the offensive, saying American forces would hunt them down. “I guarantee you, we’re going to track down those leaders,” he said. “And we’re in the process of doing that. We know who they are, and we’re coming after them, and we’re going to work that extremely hard.”

Before the Baquba operation, American commanders had said that one difference from previous offensives that had failed to net top Qaeda leaders would be the use of “blocking maneuvers” around the city to close off escape routes.

Although that appears to have failed, American commanders in Baquba said Friday that several hundred Qaeda fighters — about 80 percent of the recruits who were there when the offensive began Tuesday — remained in the western half of the city, and that there would be tough fighting to root them out for units of the 10,000-person force of American and Iraqi troops committed to the battle.

The force is one of the largest assembled for any operation outside Baghdad since the recapture of Falluja, and closely resembles, in its aims, the Falluja offensive of November 2004.

American hopes that the Falluja offensive would deal a mortal blow to Al Qaeda were thwarted when the leaders who fled the city moved elsewhere, and resumed the Islamic militants’ trademark pattern of suicide bombings and assassinations at a higher intensity than before. Since Falluja, Qaeda groups have shown a remarkable resilience in the face of relentless pursuit by the American forces, regrouping time and again after American offensives. Even Falluja has not escaped. American commanders said this week that, more than 30 months after the city was recaptured, Qaeda groups have reinfiltrated the city, mounting suicide bombing attacks, assassinating police and city council leaders and forcing a fresh American and Iraqi offensive this month that has been aimed at capturing or killing the Qaeda fighters.

After more than three years of saying publicly that they had all the troops they needed for the war here, American commanders have begun acknowledging in the past year that the ability of the Qaeda groups to establish new strongholds after old ones are destroyed — and to regenerate their leadership — has owed much to the fact that American manpower has been severely stretched.

But with all the additional Army brigades ordered into the war by Mr. Bush now in the field, along with additional Marine units, the commanders here now have more firepower than they have had at any time since the American invasion in 2003. With that, the American generals face what they have acknowledged to be the best, and possibly last, chance to persuade critics in Congress and a disillusioned American public that persisting in Iraq is worthwhile.

General Odierno, at his news conference, sketched the sweep of the new offensive. He said the main thrust was aimed at Qaeda strongholds in Diyala Province, with its capital at Baquba; at the Arab Jabour area south of Baghdad, where Qaeda groups have sent wave after wave of car and truck bomb attacks into the capital; in scattered training areas and safe havens west and northwest of the capital; and in Baghdad itself, where major American operations have begun in the past weeks in the districts of Adhamiya, Rashid and Mansour.

“So far, within Baquba,” General Odierno said, “there have been many successes: four weapons caches have been found and cleared; three truck and car bombs have been captured and destroyed; over 25 deep-buried I.E.D.’s have been found and cleared, many of them pointed out by the local populace; and 10 house-bound I.E.D.’s have been destroyed — those are 10 houses that have been rigged with thousands of pounds of explosives to try and kill us as we enter.” I.E.D., or improvised explosive device, is military jargon for a homemade bomb.

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Baquba, Alissa J. Rubin from Baghdad and Richard A. Oppel Jr. from Arab Jabour.

===============

So, Yoni, you still think the US is winning and kicking ass ?

Iraq is lost, the US should withdraw and let them have their civil war.

To whom is it not clear yet that the dubya/dickhead/rummy/neo-cunt/AEI/PNAC/Halliburton/oilco war for Iraqi oil is the largest, worst geo-political disaster in US history, with many more years of negative ramifications for the M/E, USA, world?

you're doing a heckuva job, dubya