< The Americans need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill will of the Iraqi people, and they have only 150,000 available. Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of “war lite,” is responsible for that. Yet still these rascals get away with it. >

Actually, to be honest, there are about 300,000 troops and contractor/mercenaries in Iraq working for the Pentagon.  See http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-private4jul04,0,5808980.story?coll=la-home-center

Most analysts, particularly on the left, conveniently omit this information.  Of course, the other side of the coin is that, despite having twice the usually reported number of “troops” in Iraq, we haven’t done any better.

LOL Thanks Ernest for pointing out this simian oversight.

Michael, it’s “guerrilla warfare” not “gorilla warfare.”  I hate to think that we would drag other primates into this mess.

IE Gorilla warfare…TE Lawrence was right! He ought to have known since he himself was an expert at it. It didn’t hurt being an expert on the crusades, archeology and military history either. By comparison we have an illiterate, draft dodging AWOL in wartime calling the shots. The only thing George Bush is expert at is posing for Gary Cooper style photo opts and lying to the American people.

Fighting a war against a motivated and adequately-supplied guerilla force who are inhabitants of a certain area is going to be very difficult, to put it mildly.

By using “asymmetric warfare,” or unconventional guerilla tactics against the stronger opponent, the indigenous guerilla force can inflict a lot of damage.

Examples obviously include the American Revolution against the British and the Vietnam War (though the American revolutionary forces and the North Vietnamese also had a conventional army).

The Iraq situation seems similar to these two conflicts in some ways.

Food for thought in the article ...

“Americans felt turning points on Vietnam, Iraq in ‘70, ‘07”

PopulistAmerica.com (Populist Party of America)
July 14, 2007

http://www.populistamerica.com/americans_felt_turning_points_on_vietnam_iraq_in_70_07

It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passively sympathetic ... Granted mobility, security ... time, and doctrine ... victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.”

I wonder if Lawrence’s words of “2% active” could apply to Bush administration supporters/plotters who planned a coup with the ultimate takeover in the form of martial law after a terrorist attack. We should be wary.

General Patraeus has read Lawrence see pg. 1-3 http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf , no one in the Bush administration has.As the invasion unfolded I had the same question as he: how does this end? The surge is not General Patraeus’ plan it is the adminstration’s plan. They decided on the surge before October 2006 then carried on a charade pretending to mull options. General Patraeus was then selected to lead and ordered to carry out their plan.
Do Bush and his advisors know anything of history or war? Compelling evidence they do not was revealed in the Kerry-Bush debates. Bush saw the problem in Iraq this way: “They made it too easy, they didn’t fight us.” What did he expect, Custer’s Last Stand? Has he heard of “Art of War” much less read it? Did he think all the insurgents were ex-Iraqi military who unfortunately survived due to their stong instinct of self preservation? If the failure to wipe out the Iraqi army was the root problem why did he have it disbanded? Why would he expect a “cake walk” and a fight to the last man?
Insane is the only word that explains the architects of this invasion.

Great article.

Bush the president has his head up his arse now as he did as a history major, or is it all a grand illusion, a comprehensive part of the smoke and mirrors?

An anonymous French critic of years past remarked that rulers “never learned the lessons of history and never forgot any”.

If one is brutally frank in stating this so be it. It took the Jews, a semitic people several decades to achieve what they claimed was God’s gift to them albeit at the expense of a fellow semitic people that are at present in a revolutionary mode from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans.

Their quest may in all probability take them as much time as it took the Jews/Zionists to establish Israel and if one were a betting man the money would be on them rather than on the Coalition of the Willing or NATO or any other crusade model.

Firsk’s views and comments about the Middle East reflect an understanding based on having lived in the region for years as well as being devoid of arrogance.

Truthdig is commended for including commentaries by reputable and experienced correspondants.

I have to repaste this from some time in the past on here because I just feel it is right on:....I love this picture of the Saudi’s. They are not wearing western business suits and it’s not because they can’t find any that they like. Bush was photo’d holding the hand of one of these guys and talking nicey-nicey. These men have no delusions about who westerners are. No matter what color their ties are. I hope the guys we send there can actually converse in French, and not only about wine, because these guys can. But you know I only imagine Bush saying “Duh”, and Cheney snarling something, and Condoleezza acting out her queen of violence fantasies against men. And I do bet these guys deserve it and maybe she should give it to them right on right on… But let’s get real. Conquer the Middle East because we have satellite laser beams, big nuclear weapons, and we consume chillingly bazillions of gallons of oil, and have no “plans” to stop before it’s all gone forever. If we only had 300 good lawyers! Oh , right and 3,000 back up professionals who will do or die…then we can get it done in the green zone. It’s THEM OR US. Plan B: We print all the money in the world and it’s ours. We take it all with us when we blast off into outer space…all the white people! And live in peace and security on space stations around the stupid dumb earth that doesn’t want us because we are too paranoid about our gene purity for the race of mankind to survive in the future unless we fly away in our pale saucers.

white johnny

lilmamzer, I think this is the very first time you and I agreed.  “Fisk is one [of] the finest writers to grace the pages of Truthdig.”

So Daniel Pipes says that “Palestinian victimization is a supreme myth of modern politics.”  Pipes’s
account of reality is exactly how Bush would have corrupted reality if had been the U.S. President in the 1700s and was addressing the founding of America and the annihilation of 25 million indigenous American Indians in order to appropriate their land.
How can Pipes,  who knows Israel’s history thoroughly,  truthfully state something like that? Pipes knows absolutely what Israel’s celebrated war-hero Defense Minister Moshe Dayan knew when Dayan publicly stated (before 1967)  that: “The declaration of the State of Israel was at the expense of ethnically cleansing 513 Palestinian villages, creating over 700,000 Palestinian refugees, and expropriating their lands, homes and businesses in 78% of Palestine…THERE IS NOT ONE SINGLE PLACE BUILT IN THIS COUNTRY (Israel) THAT DID NOT HAVE A FORMER POPULATION (of Arabs).”
Israeli General Dayan spoke as if was proud of these wicked facts, and proud he contributed to achieve that “success.”  What exactly did the Palestinians do to deserve that “ethnical cleasining”? Pipes, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Rice, Rumsfeld, the Defense Minister of Canada, 90% of the U.S. Congress and probably 60% of Americans are just a minuscule few “of the world’s illusionists who believe they can ignore the facts of history by stating the opposite of the truth.” Their life (and professional motto - especially when it comes to Bush) is: “fake it, fake it, until we can make it.”  And with the help of America’s mass media also corrupt reality by carefully managing and manipulating the information they dole out to the hopelessly unconscious American public regarding the Palestinian “terrorists” and the “innocent Israelis,”  they will probably succeed in faking Middle East history - just as they successfully have faked American history. This is what our illustrious world leader’s believe is ‘progress” and “the civilizing the world.”
If these people and our world leaders are not demented then what are they? Dissemblers, con-artists? They certainly are not honest - to themselves or to others. Don’t these dissimulators believe what Franz Boas once said is righteous and should be rule rather than the exception to the rule? Boas said:  “The only thing that a man can do for humanity is to tell the truth, whether it be
sweet or sour.” Boas should have added the word “free” in there between “a” and “man” because it is obvious to anyone who is clearheaded that the American Congress and the world leader’s are not really “free” enough to state the truth about what has been going on in Palestine and the Middle East since “the declaration of the State of Israel….”

The late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, MD, wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence of Arabia.

Mack also participated in a research study about terrorism.

He also believed the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the Bush-Cheney administration was a grave mistake.

For more on this, see the article ...

“With knowledge of Iraq, terrorism and unusual phenomena, John Mack, M.D., speaks to us now”

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=3443

george bu$h doesn’t read and he’s proud of it! Could it be he doesn’t read because he’s too stupid?

I think perhaps the most tragic side effect of an overly populated world is that within that vastness of numbers exists a haven for a greater number of philosophically rabid idiots of which Pipes can humbly consider himself a resident. And if he were to look up and down the street of that vile gated community he might very well see neighbors such as Dick Cheney, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

Fisk is one the finest writers ever to grace the pages of Truthdig.

He knows who pulls the strings of the puppet in the White House.