A Soldier's Dad Takes Issue with ICG Iraq Report

Soldier’s Dad takes issue with an ICG report that asserts that the US Military still does not know the enemy it faces in Iraq. In Soldier’s Dad: International Crisis Group Misses the Point, he reminds the slow, trudging nature of the fight being taken to an enemy that is certainly not misunderstood.

So that leaves a war of “exhaustion”. In order to win a war of “Exhaustion”, you need to make the price of surrender cheaper than the price of continuing fighting.

Publicly advertising the various subgroups and motivations of such sub groups, and the level of violence they may or may not have committed makes it difficult to offer palable surrender terms.

If one watches closely, the statements of MNF-Iraq. Terms of surrender are not going to be offered to AQIZ. The vast majority of the violence is publicly attributed to AQIZ. The violence of various other groups is consistantly “not accentuated”. Which sub-group belongs to which broad category, Terrorist, Saddamist, Rejectionist is left undefined.

This leaves the cost of surrender, or “reconciliation” of the various sub-groups minimal, to both the sub-group, and the Iraqi Government.

Earlier in the day yesterday, he pointed to a chart showing Iraq attack distribution by province, and noted how attack frequencies have abated, a trend that, in part at least, also seems to fly in the face of the ICG report which claims the US ground forces do not understand the enemy they have been facing (and steadily defeating through adaptive tactics) since the summer of 2003.
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