Why the Americans can't follow through in Iraq

[...] American blunders won't stop. It's not just that the Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Translate" policy means that Rummy and Company have been defenestrating Arabophone translators just for being queer (three times more than previously thought), so we don't have enough folks who speak the local dialects in Iraq. No, it's in part because the fundamental U.S. strategy for beating the Iraq insurgency is based on a total misunderstanding of what that insurgency is all about, how it's organized, and what it's composed of.

That's the subject of a terrific original piece on TomDispatch, "'Going to War with the Army You Have': Why the U.S. Cannot Correct Its Military Blunders in Iraq," by NYU's Michael Schwartz. With a ton of useful links in his sharp-eyed piece, Schwartz goes a long way to demolishing the current White House/Pentagon claim that the Iraqi insurgency has a centralized command and control structure constructed by an alliance between Ba'athist and Saddamist recalcitrants and the administration's current hobgoblin, the odious Abu Massab al Zarqawi (a claim that our easily manipulated mass media have largely transmitted uncritically.)
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Excerpts from that TomDispatch article:

[In] the week when the American death toll crept over another grim mark almost without notice and, just this Friday, four American soldiers were reported killed in Anbar Province and a fifth in a vehicle accident, oil and gas pipelines also went up in the northern part of Iraq; politicians dithered and negotiated and argued over a future Iraqi government that may have little power and less ability to rule the country; while, as a BBC headline had it, "Iraq insurgents seize initiative"; one of the most devastating car bombs of the war hit a gathering of potential police recruits in Hilla; a judge, his son, and a trade unionist were among the assassinated; suicide bombers hit the Ministry of the Interior; numerous Iraqi policemen and army troops as well as recruits and potential recruits were slaughtered; more roadside bombs killed American soldiers; uncounted civilians died; America's detention centers in the country, themselves incubators for insurgents, were reported to be bursting with prisoners; the contested oil city of Kirkuk grew yet more combustible, given Kurdish demands, Shiite desires, and Turkish threats ("Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has said that ‘in case of fighting in Kirkuk, Turkey cannot remain a spectator'); and in a bizarre twist which caught something of the madness of the situation (though it is also a commonplace for Iraqis), as the week ended, a kidnapped Italian journalist, freed by her captors, and in a car driving towards Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport to return home, was wounded and an Italian intelligence officer with her killed by quick-to-shoot American troops, potentially tossing Italian politics and a close Bush ally in the "coalition of the willing," Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, into turmoil; and finally, an NPR journalist, Deborah Amos, threw up her hands and declared that, between escalating dangers and American military control over reporting, the state of Iraq was essentially an unreportable story for American journalists.

"Going to War with the Army You Have"
Why the U.S. Cannot Correct Its Military Blunders in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz

[...]

[Why] hy does the U.S. military relentlessly build its anti-insurgency strategy around the idea of decapitating the leadership of the Iraqi resistance? The answer lies just beneath the surface of Donald Rumsfeld's now infamous statement, "You go to war with the Army you have."

[...]

For example, when a flood of automobile buyers began to demand fuel-efficient cars during the first oil crisis in the early 1970s, the American automobile industry did not have the capacity to produce such vehicles. Instead of investing vast resources in developing that capacity, it tried to use its superior marketing skills to win Americans back to luxurious gas guzzlers. That is, the Big Three "went to war with the army they had" and convinced themselves that they were facing a marketing problem. The results: a permanent crisis at General Motors (during which it lost world leadership in the industry), a fundamental restructuring of Ford, and the demise of Chrysler.

And this is exactly the idiotic approach that Washington, including Congress, has been taking. The 9/11 Commission's conclusion, as argued on the floor of Congress, was that America needs to put out more PR around the world about the good things we are doing. Figure on your tax money for that bottomless pit of worthless advertising.

The American army is also fighting with the army it has. This army is the best equipped in the world for advanced conventional warfare -- with tanks, artillery, air power, missile power, battlefield surveillance power, and satellite imaging to support highly mobile, well equipped, and superbly trained soldiers. No supply route is safe from its firepower, and no conventional army would be likely to hold its ground long against an American assault. But the most intractable part of the resistance in Iraq is fighting a guerrilla war: they do not have long supply lines and they rarely try to hold their ground.

Guerrilla armies hide by melting into the local population. (Everyone knows this, including, of course, American military men.) To defeat them, an occupying force must have the intelligence to identify guerrillas who can disappear into the civilian world; and it must station troops throughout resistance strongholds in order to pounce upon guerrillas when they emerge from hiding to mount an attack. American military strategists know this, too. But these lessons -- painfully drawn from Vietnam -- can't be implemented by the army that Donald Rumsfeld sent to war.

The Americans, in fact, have neither of these resources.

[...]