The story now in Iraq is the grow­ing resis­tance to the Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion, not weapons of mass destruc­tion. As casu­alty reports con­tinue their grim drum­beat, the death toll rose to 201 Amer­i­can troops killed since the war started March 20, with the two G.I.s found dead yes­ter­day part of five troops killed since Thurs­day. In all, 24 Amer­i­can troops have died in attacks since May 1, when Pres­i­dent Bush declared the major hos­til­i­ties over. (Sixty-three have died in non-combat related acci­dents with 39 of those deaths com­ing since May 1.) George over on War­blog­ging has a good sum­mary of the recent deaths.
Sad­damists and crim­i­nals who cling to the spec­tre of Saddam’s return are likely fuel­ing this resis­tance. Oh, and Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists, for­eign Arab fight­ers and Iraqi nation­al­ists, as well.
“It was pre­dictable,” said Iraqi polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Saad al-Jawwad [in the Guardian.] “To any man or any woman or any­body who’s liv­ing in despair what could he do? He has noth­ing left but to carry arms and defy the peo­ple who are here occu­py­ing his coun­try and doing noth­ing for him or his fam­ily. Where is democ­racy? Nonex­is­tent. Where is sta­bil­ity? Nonex­is­tent. Where’s elec­tric­ity? Where’s water?“
Mean­while, SecDef Don­ald Rums­feld denied the U.S. was fac­ing a guerilla insur­gency. “I don’t know that I would use the word,” he said, when asked if the occu­pa­tion was becom­ing a guer­rilla con­flict. He noted that the attacks con­sisted of 10 – 20 men, with no large for­ma­tions involved.
Uh, aren’t small, dis­or­ga­nized cadres of insur­gents, mak­ing hit-and-run harass­ment attacks kind of the def­i­n­i­tion of guer­rilla war­fare? As Strat­for points out:

The more con­cen­trated the force and the more cen­trally com­manded, the eas­ier it is to defeat. Suc­cess­ful guer­rilla move­ments are inher­ently “disorganized” — if by orga­ni­za­tion, one means a com­mand struc­ture that is vul­ner­a­ble to attack. They cer­tainly don’t aggre­gate into large units and rarely need to coor­di­nate attacks. It is the very lack of coor­di­na­tion that makes them unpre­dictable and dif­fi­cult to defend against. They adopt a basic doc­trine, such as attack­ing con­voys, pipelines and elec­tri­cal infra­struc­ture. Then small units carry out these oper­a­tions on their own initiative.

Blam­ing the attacks on crim­i­nals com­pletely glosses over the fact that the attacks, regard­less of who is mak­ing them, are inher­ently polit­i­cal acts; they are attacks on an occu­py­ing power.
Strat­for points out that if this is indeed the begin­ning stages of a guer­rilla war, regard­less of whether Rums­feld says it is or isn’t, it looks like the United States has been ill-prepared to deal with it despite last night’s launch­ing of a counter-insurgency oper­a­tion, dubbed “Sidewinder,” aimed at cap­tur­ing who­ever is behind the grow­ing attack on U.S. troops. Already, 60 peo­ple have been cap­tured as a show of force.
in Wash­ing­ton, offi­cials con­tinue to insist there’s no cen­tral com­mand to the bur­geon­ing Iraqi intifada, but troops on the ground are con­vinced it’s orga­nized. “Some­where in Diala province, some­thing hap­pens every night,” said Capt. John Wrann [in the Guardian], refer­ring to the province north­east of Bagh­dad where much of the oper­a­tion was tak­ing place. “It’s got to be a coor­di­nated thing.“
But, like so many post-war events, Oper­a­tion Sidewinder has an ad hoc feel to it. Not the oper­a­tional details, which by nature have to be devel­oped to respond to rapidly chang­ing threats, but the very need for it. One gets the dis­tinct impres­sion that the U.S. never planned at all for the pos­si­bil­ity of an insur­gency.
Rums­feld seems to be argu­ing that the lack of a com­pre­hen­sive mil­i­tary strat­egy to deal with this isn’t a prob­lem if it’s crim­i­nals and other no-goodniks mak­ing trou­ble, not guer­ril­las in the midst of Amer­i­can troops. Crim­i­nals are a prob­lem for the police and soci­ety, not the mil­i­tary — or so the think­ing at the Pen­ta­gon goes. (Which is ironic, con­sid­er­ing the cur­rent blur­ring of the lines between the crim­i­nal and the mil­i­tary jus­tice sys­tems in the United States.)
But the bot­tom line is that Rums­feld & Co. never planned for a guer­rilla war because they lis­tened too much to the Iraqi National Con­gress, which gave them ridicu­lously rosy sce­nar­ios. I seem to remem­ber a war sold as a “cakewalk” — at least accord­ing to Sharif Ali, a spokesman for the INC, said on Aug. 8, 2002.
“All of Iraq has suf­fered for many years from the oppres­sion of Sad­dam Hussein’s regime, and there is not a sin­gle per­son out there in Iraq that will fight for or defend him, and there­fore, we have full expec­ta­tions that they will turn against Sad­dam Hus­sein. And that is one mes­sage we are giv­ing the admin­is­tra­tion,” Ali told the National Press Club that day.
And not to pull an “I told you so,” but, as I wrote back on Jan. 12, 2003,

Instead of a nice, clean occu­pa­tion that results in the first Arab democ­racy … I pre­dict the United States will have years of guerilla insur­gency from nation­al­is­tic Iraqis (some of the fiercest nation­al­ism in the Arab world), the dirty job of sup­press­ing Kur­dish and Shi’ite inde­pen­dence move­ments and Sunni power grabs, the prob­lem of al Qai’da slip­ping across the bor­ders (with the help of Iran and sym­pa­thetic Saudis) into the coun­try to strike at Amer­i­can troops and med­dling in Iraq’s inter­nal affairs by Turkey, Iran, Saudi Ara­bia and Rus­sia. And don’t for­get the resent­ment in the region that will occur when the United States begins exploit­ing the Iraqi oil fields for its own purposes.

The real­ity on the ground doesn’t gibe with Rumsfeld’s beliefs, and Strat­for sums it up thusly: “Rums­feld and U.S. intel­li­gence did not expect to be fac­ing a guer­rilla war fol­low­ing the fall of Bagh­dad, and there are no coher­ent plans in place for fight­ing one. There­fore, there is no guer­rilla war.“
And if Rums­feld truly believes this — and there is a prece­dent for Rums­feld ignor­ing facts that don’t fit with what he believes — Strat­for wor­ries that the gueril­las have a mas­sive advan­tage and that Rums­feld is in fact buy­ing time while he works on Plan B, what­ever that is.
Con­cern­ing WMD — Remem­ber Those?
All this focus on the Iraqi intifada has caused the Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion, the rai­son de guerre, to fade. No one, it seems, in the United States par­tic­u­larly cares that they’ve not been found, and any scrap of evi­dence is increas­ingly lept upon with breath­less hype that starts to sound more than a lit­tle des­per­ate. The mate­ri­als men­tioned in the story found date from the before the 1991 Gulf War, when the Amer­i­cans knew Sad­dam was work­ing on nuclear weapons. The sci­en­tist who buried the bar­rel, Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, sat on this stuff for 12 years and never got the call to start up the ol’ ura­nium enrich­ment pro­gram. Why not, if Sad­dam were intent on bring­ing the civ­i­lized world to its knees and dom­i­nat­ing the Gulf?
Before this war, I was con­vinced that Sad­dam had weapons of mass destruc­tion — not nukes, but likely bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal arms. After all, he had them before, and used them against the Ira­ni­ans and the Kurds in 1984 – 1988 (along with the com­pli­ance if not the bless­ings of the West.) And he had plenty of oppor­tu­nity to develop them, with the United Nations weapons inspec­tors out of the coun­try since 1998.
So I thought there was some­thing there. But I didn’t think he had them in any quan­tity that ren­dered him an exis­ten­tial threat to the United States, nor did I think he would coop­er­ate with Al Qa’ida. I didn’t think the threat from iraq rose to a level that required a war, and I didn’t trust the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to fol­low through with an enlight­ened “lib­er­a­tion.“
Well, as it turns out, peo­ple who thought this way have been proven cat­a­stroph­i­cally cor­rect, with one excep­tion: It looks like there were no weapons of mass destruc­tion at all. Some evi­dence may still be found, of course, but it is increas­ingly obvi­ous that any pro­gram to be uncov­ered was nowhere near the level of devel­op­ment the White House said it was. Can any­one of rea­son­ably sound mind argue to me that weapons so well hid­den or pro­grams in a state of such abeyance could be an immi­nent threat to the United States?
So if there were no weapons, why didn’t the Iraqis say so and avoid an extremely unpleas­ant war, as for­mer chief weapons inspec­tor Hans Blix once mused? Well, actu­ally, they did. All through­out the fall and winter’s diplo­matic cage death match the Iraqis claimed they had noth­ing. And look what it got them: invaded.
War sup­port­ers usu­ally say now that happy, lib­er­ated Iraqis were the rea­son for the war and that the WMD don’t mat­ter. To which I reply: Stop chang­ing the damn sub­ject. There are obvi­ously a fair num­ber of Iraqis nei­ther happy nor par­tic­u­larly lib­er­ated, so those post-war ratio­nal­iza­tion don’t hold much water.
So if there are no weapons of mass destruc­tion and Iraqis increas­ingly nos­tal­gic for the “good ol’ days” of secu­rity, sur­veil­lance and sec­u­lar­ism are killing Amer­i­cans troops, why are we in Iraq?