A much more accurate -- and more harrowing -- picture of the Iraqi insurgency was inadvertantly revealed last week by the investigation into the U.S. shooting of Italian agent Nicola Calipari. Thanks to the Pentagon's cack-handed technical ineptitude, reporters were able to restore censored passages from a PDF of the probe's final report.
Buried deep within the report is the news that "there were 15,527 attacks on coalition forces, largely American, from July 2004 to late March 2005. Some 2,404 attacks took place in Baghdad from 1 November to 12 March," Patrick Cockburn reports in The Independent. These findings -- issued before the recent onslaught of intensified attacks -- demolishes the conventional wisdom floated everywhere in the mainstream press about "the steam going out of the resistance."
In fact, there has been virtually no progress at all against the insurgency, despite the savage use of the "Guernica option" in Fallujah, the use of the "El Salvador option" in creating death squads, the massive, maniacal roundups of "suspects" (some 17,000 prisoners now crammed into Coalition holding pens -- more than twice the number held during the worst of the Abu Ghraib atrocities), the relentless bombing of civilian areas, despite even the ballyhooed rigging-up of a "sovereign" Iraqi government.
Even the preternaturally right-wing Washington Times declares that Bush's Babylonian Conquest is "back to square one." Martin Seiff makes the telling point that the new surge of attacks was thoroughly anticipated by U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq (men who can't afford to buy the perfumed bullshit Bush peddles for the yokels back home), but:
"What is of far greater concern to U.S. commanders and analysts is that despite this broad strategic sense of when, and even on what scale, the new attacks would come, U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies have so far proven totally unable to prevent them."
These gloomy assessments of the real state of the war in Iraq were confirmed last week by no less an exalted personage than General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In an appearance with Pentagon warlord Don Rumsfeld, Myers admitted that the insurgency was "right where they were about a year ago" -- in other words, before Fallujah, the death squads, the roundups, etc. Oddly enough, the general thought this stark revelation of deadly stalemate meant that "we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time."
Perhaps he's been inhaling a bit too much of that Bushist perfume.
