sirenianshores

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraq’s military Wednesday reported significant reduction in violence a month after launching a coalition crackdown in the war-racked capital.

The numbers of deadly attacks, assassination attempts, bombings, mortar strikes and kidnappings have dropped since the operation’s mid-February launch, said Iraqi Brig. Gen. Qassim Atta.

The number of civilians killed in Baghdad in the past four weeks was 265, compared with 1,440 killings from mid-January to mid-February, said Atta, a spokesman for the operation. (Effects of crackdown)

Atta also reported that 94 terrorists were killed in the February-March period, compared with 19 in the January-February time frame.

Do they not get what is going on? Of course the levels of violence are down. The insurgents have decided not to play along with Bush’s game plan. They only fight on their terms, not the Bush Administration’s.

The insurgents in Iraq are doing what every group of rebels has done in all of these conflicts: when their enemy advertised the fact that they were going to hammer them, they simply sidestepped the blow by packing away their guns and staying at home. The insurgents will continue to hide until the enemy leaves or reduces their troop levels. Then they will resume their fight as they did before the surge.

That’s what George Washington did with the British - he largely kept his army intact while avoiding fights with the British that he knew he couldn’t win.

The Vietcong did the same with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, where they refused to fight the US forces head-to-head in conventional WWII style battles.

The IRA did that in Ireland against the British. We used to call it ‘putting the pike in the thatch because there will be another day’

The partisans did that with the Germans in World War II

The so-called ’surge’ only has about another six months to run its course. After that the US will begin cutting its losses and pulling out. At that point it will have been five years of the US not winning in Iraq - no politician will able to afford afford to prolong the war any further without any tangible demonstration of progress. Naturally after the US loses the war in Iraq, the Republicans will try to offload the responsibility for their failure to the Democrats and liberals. Rather than face up to their own responsibility for their incompetent handling of the war, they will try to claim that they were stabbed in the back by the Democrats through lack of sufficient support. The actual reality is both the Democrats and the American public have given Bush and his party everything they asked for during the last 4 years or so in the hopes of making progress in Iraq.

Post 9-11, from 2001 to 2005, Bush had the support of the majority of the Democratic leadership for all of his military campaigns. As much as the Democrats may regret it now, their voting records in support of the Bush administration cannot be changed. Instead of graciously accepting their support, Bush squandered it for his own party’s short-term political gain by exploiting the war on terror as a wedge issue to gain votes.

Now nearly 4 years later, the situation in Iraq is worse than it ever was. Somehow I doubt very much if the American public is going to wait another much longer for the Republicans or the Democrats to get it right. At most, they probably have one year to go before the public demands a withdrawal from Iraq. In effect, both parties will have to obey the public’s wishes whether they like it or not.