200,000 in the insurgency?

Thank you for the clarification. Other stories had the number at 40,000 guerillas, with the rest being active sympathizers. After the U.S finishes with Mosul, the numbers will likely go up.

Translation is difficult; I can think of several times when I’ve been working on something to do with a foreign language and have totally missed the sense of it because of not hearing a word. I’m guessing that someone didn’t hear the word “without,” and then the rest of the Anglophone media’s been going with that translation.

drivel…more drivel..

at least juan cole can call a spade a spade~

damn i miss Robert Fisks reports from iraq

Hadi Salih, International Officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, was assassinated yesterday.

Chris do you know much about the trade union leaders or movement in Iraq?

The The IFTU says Salih was murdered by those loyal to Saddam, but that doesn’t fully make sense to me.

At the risk of stating the obvious, isn’t it possible the 200,000 figure comes from a different interview with Gen Shahwani ?

If the General never actually claimed that (highly plausible) figure why were IG officials queueing up to deny it’s accuracy and condemn it as irresponsible? Heard them myself, on World Service, BBC Radio 4 and Five Live (in London). Not one challenged the fact he’d said it.

And this happened on the 3rd whereas the al-Sharq article was published on the 4th. Perhaps the General spoke out in a moment of candour and followed it with a retraction, to keep the folks happy?

Juan Cole is a good historian but certainly not a military man. To say that the insurgents have the US outgunned is ludicrously naive. To suggest that the insurgents were defeated in Fallujah losing 3000 is, too, off the mark. The US military has documented less than 100 enemy kias in that non-battle. Most of that 3000 had already gone to Mosul, Baghdad and elsewhere.

I would guess there are about 60,000 resistance fighters, a couple of hundred foreign fighters, several hundred thousand supporters/facilitators and several million sympathizers.

It doesn’t matter what the total is anyway. The fact is, we are losing the war badly and Bush is in lala-land. It’s only going to get a lot worse.

whats the point in dancing around the numbers The point is, there is a lot more of them than there need have been.

Peterbaldwin and Exo make a good point: The numbers are somewhat immaterial, as there are certainly more than enough insurgents to keep things chaotic in Iraq.

But my maing point of the post was to correct erroneous information that has propagated out through the blogosphere. It’s part of the nature of blogs to fact-check mainstream media as well as each other. I’d like to see the blogosphere be more self-correcting than an echo chamber.

Perhaps you would be better served to report your findings, rather than dismiss Juan Cole who has managed to have a daily column with a wide range of information. As Exo states, the number is not the issue.

That we are unable to make progress with the present administrations refusal to hear bad news IS the problem

More interesting than the number is the development - is the number growning? It looks like it, that there seems to be more people involved in the resistance and the political opposition to the US and coalitions, not to menition mr Allawis government, seems to be growing.

i think this whole election thing is to with anthor key step to bringing about the new world order….. i think that they want the rest of the middle east (preff Israel and the Palistians) to follow in the steps of iraq, so that the only way forwrd is throuhgt peace. if peace is reached in iraq, (which i think there never will be full peace) then the UN’s and the US is a step closer to have peace between the isralies and palastinans, thus to make Jeruheslem (gods most holyst place) an internationl state. Fully controlled By the UN and who is controlled by the ANTICHRIST

I appreciate you taking the time to point out this error, Chris. It doesn’t make the situation in Iraq sound any better but I agree it’s important to try and correct information errors as much as possible.

Simon, Simon, Simon.

The “New World Order” is the realignment of world geopolitical power after the fall of the Soviet Union (the cold war and its power structures being the “Old World Order”, so to speak)

We already have it. It’s not “coming”, and it’s not sinister, either.

(I’d not respond, and just assume you were trolling, except a number of people seem to actually be gullible and credulous enough to believe exactly the sort of thing you say.)

Doesn’t matter.

It could be 2,000,000.

Any organized military resistance will be smashed by air power.

A steady stream of US bodybags returning home, is not a concern of this administration.

Nor is any other “bad news” like infrastructure, or security problems. Or civilian deaths. Or negative world opinion.

As long as the conflict continues, oil-prices will remain volotile, and the Hubbert Peak of Oil Production will not be allowed to glut the market, and screw the oil companies (as production ramping did in the early 1980’s). As long as the conflict continues, Arms Dealers (foreign and domestic) will continue to make money.

As long as the conflict continues, Bush gets to remain a “War President” and can continue to wipe his behind with the Bill of Rights.

Perpetual Conflict is the ideal goal of the War Profiteer. As long as we maintain air superiority, the situation will be “in control” enough for their purposes.

Think it’s bad now, wait for Febuary, just going to get worse, and until the Shiia take to the streets there will be no peace, and probably not even then. Nope this is FUBAR and going south.

In my opinion, no country in the world should NOT pay any more attention to this war on muslim. How many fighters they have to face is entirely the problem of their own. The world should know that the plane crashing into pentagon during the 911 morning has no Arabs. The politicians keep recalling the horror of 911, but, in my opinion, the 911 story has nothing to do with the world.

With so many people killed in the earthquake, some governments are still pressing for debt repayment. With so much spent on war on muslim, so little was spent on allievating the suffering of the earthquake surviviours. It is simply unfair.

Being a member of scientists’ community, I will work hard to make sure none of my efforts fall into wicked people’s hands. I am not the only one having such an attitude. Period!

The first time I read something about these 200’000 insurgents, was there in the Turkish Press.

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?ID=35545

Abstract :

“Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter. “

and further :

“”I believe General Shahwani’s estimation, given that he is referring predominantly to active sympathizers and supporters and to part-time as well as full-time active insurgents, may not be completely out of the ballpark,” said defense analyst Bruce Hoffman who served as an advisor to the US occupation in Iraq and now works for US-based think-tank RAND Corporation. “

I agree with what is said here.

Ooops, I forgot to mention the source of the report issued by the Turkish Press : it was a wire of Agence France Presse and I’ve just heard that they had mostly Iraqi journalists in Baghdad.

I AGREE

I read the interview in Arabic somewhere or another and irrelevant of the exact number of insurgents, I’m pretty sure the General said that in any case they exceeded the number of soldiers currently in Iraq.

We have to remember that Saddam’s forces, though weakened by a decade of sanctions and the Gulf War still probably numbered over several hundred thousand at the time of the invasion in March of 2003. They are now out in the hinterland, not in POW camps where they should be, and I would guess that most of them would still be committed to the antioccupation effort.

Many of them are now in the police, the Iraqi Army and Natioanl Guard, and securtiy forces. These “volunteers” cannot be turned loose because they cannot be trusted nor can they be coerced to kill their fellow countrymen; most are just desperate, collecting a paycheck . That’s maybe another 70,000 who are closet AIFs and should be included in the total. The calls for more training of these soldiers is a simple-minded illusory solution to an intractable problem - how to turn patriots into traitors - mission impossible.

To Peter Baldwin,

I’ve read that the former Iraqi army amounted to about 400’000 men. What I can’t understand is why the US tried to occupy Iraq without counting on them. From past readings I remember that the US intelligence was in contact with several high ranking officers who were persuaded not to fight against the US assault. There were a lot of them who were ready to turn themselves to the “New Iraq”, but right after the war, the US decided that she didn’t need their services; first error. Than Bremer went further, disbanding the whole former Army.

Patrick Seale has an interesting opinionated column in Dar Al Hayat : for him the rebuilding of the former Iraqi army is part of a durable solution in Iraq, along with a departure of the US military during 2005 and a serious negotiation between the different composants of the Iraqi society, before going to the polls.

Any comments ?

http://tinyurl.com/6yde7

Christiane,

That intelligence about mass defections was probably just tactical disinformation directed at the enemy to degrade morale. Saddam’s pre-war strategy was to resist conventionally for eight days and then go guerilla, which is apparently just what he did; the US militaryadmitted last month they believe it was Saddam’s original plan to fight a guerilla war of attrition.

So the fall of Baghdad was a ruse that Tommy Franks fell for. Munitions, armaments and supplies were hidden in the countryside prior to the invasion. The Iraqi Army never surrendered but instead went underground, and, thinking they had won a conventional war, the Coalition never pursued them. Instead they celebrated victory, and Bush made a fool out of himself and America but doing that aircraft carrier landing, photo-op stunt.

Blaming Bremer for disbanding the army is a convenient buck-passing excuse that has been repeated so many times it is considered irrefutable truth, but how could Bremer disband an army that was scattered throughout the country and had not surrendered to coalition control? They were never under his command and control. The announcement was meaningless but sounded good, like they were in full control of the situation when in truth they had been faked out.

Many of those soldiers formed the nascent guerilla resistance or joined the interim government forces.

God Bless the Iraqi Resistance…

The problem I found while over there was that the military has no idea how many are in the insurgency at any one time. When Saddam was preparing for the war he put an AK in every household. When Bremer was put in charge one of the first things he did was to authorize the people keeping them, not that he could have taken them from the people in the first place. Thus, the number of people willing to shoot at you on can vary day to day accounding to the relationship between the people and the local military and police commander and what is the new of the day from what ever source you trust. Therefore at one place and time where every able bodies man is angery and willing to support the insurgency and given a different place or different time, sometimes as little as a week only the outer fringe of the community is willing to fight. Sometimes the relationship can be good with the police and terrible with the Coalition or the other way around.

Even if the figure of 200,000 was exaggerated, the reality that we are on the brink of losing this war is not. Here’s a quote from the pro-war Stratfor military group, taken from Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

“The issue facing the Bush administration is simple. It can continue to fight the war as it has, hoping that a miracle will bring successes in 2005 that didn’t happen in 2004. Alternatively, it can accept the reality that the guerrilla force is now self-sustaining and sufficiently large not to flicker out and face the fact that a U.S. conventional force of less than 150,000 is not likely to suppress the guerrillas. More to the point, it can recognize these facts: 1. The United States cannot re-engineer Iraq because the guerrillas will infiltrate every institution it creates. 2. That the United States by itself lacks the intelligence capabilities to fight an effective counterinsurgency. 3. That exposing U.S. forces to security responsibilities in this environment generates casualties without bringing the United States closer to the goal. 4. That the strain on the U.S. force is undermining its ability to react to opportunities and threats in the rest of the region. And that, therefore, this phase of the Iraq campaign must be halted as soon as possible.”

They recommend withdrawing U.S. forces to the periphery of Iraq and letting the inevitable civil war take place in the center.

It’s looking grim. Our overstretched military and its mismanagement may be coming back to haunt us.

Yesterday Juan Cole explained how he got that 200,000 insurgents figure .

http://www.juancole.com/2005/01/us-kills-as-many-as-12-innocents-7.html

Well, why do you think the White House is ignoring the realities over there? Just check out their web site (you can see what I mean here: www.drewblog.com )

Thought-provoking comments by Hitchens in Slate yesterday:

Two Elections

Why Iraq’s vote is not like Palestine’s.

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Monday, Jan. 10, 2005, at 9:09 AM PT

Might there be any point in comparing and contrasting yesterday’s Palestinian election with the upcoming Iraqi one? Yes, indeed there might.

The first thing I would want to notice is this. The Palestinian people have a much more justifiable grievance against Israel than even the most alienated Sunni slum-dweller has against the Coalition in Iraq. The Arab citizens of former mandate Palestine live, at best, as second-class citizens in Israel. At worst, they live in vile refugee camps in other states. In the middle, in Jerusalem and Gaza and the West Bank, they experience occupation and colonization and annexation. More than that, they have been told that their very presence is an inconvenience, since the land was awarded by God to the Jews. President Bush in his most devout moments has not claimed Mesopotamia as holy to Americans. It’s often said rather glibly that the Palestinians have missed numerous chances for peace (and I couldn’t agree more—see my obituary for Arafat), but it should not be forgotten that for years the leading politicians of Israel refused to deal at all with the PLO, and that some of them refused even to recognize the existence of a Palestinian people in the first place.

Faced with different forms of occupation and dispossession, Palestinians opted for different tactics. Some of them, in Israel “proper,” elected serious MPs to the Knesset, usually men of leftist and secular backgrounds. Others, in the territories, pursued various strategies of civil resistance, very often non-violent as in the case of the highly mobilized first intifadah of the early and mid-1980s. Still others, exiled permanently, resorted to kamikaze-type attacks on Israel but also to attacks on civilians and, most opprobriously of all, to indiscriminate attacks on the citizens of other nations. Many of the criminals in the latter category were paid agents or clients of Arab dictatorships, as was Arafat himself. Sheer disaster began to loom when, under the influence of militant Islam, the kamikaze style was imported especially to Gaza and took the form of suicide-murder, often in Israel itself as well as the occupied areas. But that did not begin to happen until the occupation had persisted for more than a quarter of a century.

Contrast this with Iraq, where the contras of the old regime, and their imported jihadist allies, went straight for violence as a first resort and behaved as cruelly and indiscriminately as they knew how. The offices of the United Nations, of the Red Cross, of senior clergymen, of civilian dissidents and educators, and of newspapers were blown up using city diagrams and secret police information as well as the arsenal of a collapsed regime that had been found guilty under every version of international law. No attempt was made to claim that violence was an inescapable option after a long denial of legitimate protest: The killing had been planned before the first interim government had even found a voice, and it targeted Iraqi and Kurdish democrats from the very beginning. The tactics, and the personnel, were and are taken directly from the program and the cadres of a former despotism and from the enthusiasts for the Taliban and al-Qaida.

Reports seem to suggest that almost 70 percent of the Palestinians turned out to vote. Given the gruesome local exigencies, and the grudging way in which the Israelis allowed freedom of movement, this cannot possibly translate into a 30 percent endorsement of the call for a boycott by Hamas and by Islamic Jihad. One might award them 20 percent at best: roughly the proportion of Sunni Muslims in Iraq who don’t want to have their future (or anyone else’s) determined by ballot. Should one have postponed a Palestinian vote until these violent rejectionist forces were all “on board”?

What about the Palestinians in diaspora who don’t have a say? Good question. But then, what about the 4 million Iraqis and Kurds who have been forced to live outside their country? The current election process allows them to register and to vote overseas: I haven’t heard any of them saying that their first-ever chance to vote should be postponed in order to please the bombers and beheaders, who don’t seem that easy to gratify, anyway.

Then you might notice another thing. Dr. Mustapha Barghouti, whose candidacy has barely been mentioned in our press, seems to have achieved a rather creditable 20 per cent of the Palestinian vote. In spite of the grim pressure for “unity” behind Fatah, and in spite of numerous Israeli restrictions on his campaign, Barghouti carried the flag for a secular civil society. His family (of which the better-reported Marwan Barghouti is a distant member) has long been associated with the Palestinian Left. Who would have guessed, given the routine and cliched culture of our media, that there was even such a force still present under the rubble? (See my obit for Edward Said.)

Two years ago, there was about one suicide-murder every week either in Israel or the territories. So great was the emotional impact of this that some people entirely gave up their reason. You could hear it said on all sides, by various well-meaning know-nothings and celebrities, that the phenomenon was a product of “despair.” What rubbish this was: Anyone who troubled to read the propaganda or view the videos could see that it was the consequence of a sinister religious exaltation, consecrated to “martyrdom” and to an ultimate, fanatical concept of “victory.” Now these bombings have diminished, even dwindled. Why is that? No more despair?

Some Israeli hawks would say that “The Wall,” and some ruthless assassinations, and some better intelligence, have done the job. But few are willing to claim all the credit for these tactics. It is obvious that a strategic number of Palestinians have made the decision to “turn off” the supply of young immolators, at the very least for now. In some sense, evidently, it just wasn’t worth it. Many Palestinians, also, made eloquent statements against the sheer horror of the campaign. It turns out that numerous people do not really mean it when they say they prefer death to life. (We no longer know the name of the senior Hamas leader in Gaza, who these days seems to prefer a reticent anonymity.)

Now apply this to Iraq. I turn on my laptop in the morning and briefly clench my eyes shut because I am afraid of reading about the slaughter of a friend. Not just of an American or British serviceman friend, but of an Iraqi or Kurdish friend. Some mornings, the news has been awful. Last Tuesday it brought the tidings of the murder of Hadi Salih, the international officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, who was bound and gagged, tortured, and strangled with an electric cord. His politics were, I would guess from mutual friends, about the same as those of Mustapha Barghouti. In an election, he might well have cast his vote for a party that was against the Coalition. A somewhat “old-fashioned” kind of leftist comrade, in other words, but a huge moral and political superior of the fascists and theocrats who did him in. Now he will never vote. What will it take the affectless “anti-war,” soft-on-“insurgency” Left to see that this is all the difference in the world?

The so-called “insurgency” in Iraq does not have a tithe of the historic justification for the resistance in Palestine. Nor can it ever hope to speak, even by proxy, for an Iraqi majority. (To take just one overlooked example, the majority of Kurds are formally Sunni.) Its conduct is a continuation of a reign of terror that lasted three decades. Its victory would mean misery and death on a colossal scale. It and its murderers must and will be worn down, by sheer, adamant intransigence. The newly elected leader of the Palestinians has said to the suicide-mongers, in effect, Do not be the last ones to die for a mistake. This message will be driven home in Iraq, as well.

christopher hitchens is an asshole.

for one thing the two elections are neither there nor here..

no matter who “wins” the iraqi elections, there will be NO call from them for the U.S. to leave Iraq.

here is the cycle:

america states it cannot leave iraq until there is peace, blah, blah, government stability blah blah—

however as long as america is there and dropping bombs on cities….blah blah more death more collateral tragedy

where the hell is Robert Fisk?

Troll,

Fisk is back in Baghdad, he’s been finishing off a new book.

http://www.robert-fisk.com/

Click on the recent articles link, there’s new and recent stuff in there (including stuff from today). We’ll be getting some decent mainstream reporting out of Iraq now he’s back.

Javi

Excellent article from Fisk in the Independent today describing the general air of tension and nervousness surrounding Iraqi and American patrols. Signs on humvees warning other vehicles not to approach within 50 metres or overtake, masked guardsmen pointing their weapons at their own people, mile long queues disrupting and disrupted by the patrols. And also reporting on (yes!) a bit of good news from the US top brass: 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces can “fully” participate in elections.

On the debit side, these four areas contain at least 50% of the population. Doh.

Troll -get a life

14.33 min vid clip - Fallujah - The Fall and Fall Out - click exo>>>>

Excuse plug, but this needs viewing….go here if you would rather http://www.journeyman.tv/?cc=1

thanks Javi,

Chrisb—-no you get one…. and whatever you say about me, bounces off me and sticks to you like glue

I am a 7th grade English teacher in New Jersey. The class has just read your article in the Writing magazine. Collectively we have never heard of blogs, and we wanted get more information. We applaud your efforts as a journalist and wish you luck.

Below dated January 10, 2005 is a comment signed in as Vincent Foulk. I am Vincent Foulk and I did not write that comment nor does it reflect my views.