Things are not going so well in Iraq for U.S. forces

In two vicious attacks last week, Iraqi insurgents killed 20 U.S. Marines in what President Bush called "a grim reminder" of the increasingly lethal tactics faced by American troops in Iraq.

[...]

Monday's ambush of six Marine snipers raised questions more troubling still. How, for instance, did a crack team of elite fighters on a covert mission wind up surrounded and unable to defend themselves long enough to summon help?

"They're awfully good, and the fact that a whole bunch of them were killed at once really could portend some bad things in terms of how the insurgents got the information they had," said Steven Metz, chairman of regional strategy with the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. "Is this a signal that they have some sort of inside information, or was it just pure happenstance?"

By week's end, there were more such questions than answers coming from the U.S. military, which has repeatedly acknowledged it has limited information on the size and capabilities of the Iraqi insurgency.

[...]

It was only last spring that the administration was suggesting that U.S. forces had gained the upper hand on an insurgency that Vice President Dick Cheney said in May was "in the last throes" of its existence. Even as he spoke, though, insurgents were conducting, on average, 70 attacks a day nationwide, a rate that remained remarkably constant throughout May, June and July.

  Military.com article

And the logical conculsion...

[S]ome American Generals see last week's U.S. losses as a tragic consequence of success because the killings took place in what they believe is the diminishing territory in which insurgents still enjoy the freedom to operate with some freedom.

[...]

"This is not an expanding insurgency," U.S. Air Force Gen. Donald Alston said in Baghdad last week. "What we're seeing is probably the opposite."

A contracting insurgency, like electrons squeezed through a wire, gives off heat, I suppose.

One reason the insurgency has grown so intractable, analysts say, is that Iraq, like Lebanon and the Palestinian territories before it, has developed a home-grown terrorist culture where little if any had existed before the war.

"Two years ago, the Iraqis did not know how to mount insurgent or terrorist operations and were heavily dependent on foreign jihadists to show them how to do things, how to make bombs, how to set up IEDs [improvised explosive devices, better known as roadside bombs], how to set up operational plans and do everything else for themselves," said Kenneth Pollack, an Iraq and military expert with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

"Today they have internalized most of those lessons," Pollack told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month, "and they are increasingly less dependent on foreigners for the know-how."

Update 1:30 pm: WIIIAI comments:

Duncan Hunter, the idiot who is chair of the House Armed Services Committee, is preparing the way for declaring victory and going home by defining success downwards even as he shows he is not cut out to be realtor: “There are always going to be insurgents in Iraq ... and there’s always going to be bombs going off and that’s the nature of that neighborhood.” Makes it sound like crabgrass.