UPI: Iraq Strains U.S. High Tech Army

[Barrett808]

Iraq Strains U.S. High Tech Army
by Martin Sieff
Washington (UPI) March 16, 2004

A year after the United States conquered Iraq with minimal casualties in a three week blitzkrieg, it remains bogged down there facing a guerilla war that has already killed more GIs than three weeks of combat did, with far worse in sight.

On March 11, yet another U.S. soldier was killed and two more injured when a homemade bomb went off in Baquoba in central Iraq, bringing the U.S. death toll in the country since the invasion a year ago to 554.

Earlier, on March 1, the guerrillas dramatically demonstrated the failure of U.S. forces to destroy or contain them when they slaughtered more than 180 people at Shiite religious ceremonies in Karbala and Baghdad. On March 11, Paul Bremer, America's chief administrator in Iraq, admitted that more major terror attacks were likely over the next two and a half months.

America's lean mean high-tech elite armed forces swept Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guards aside like dead leaves in March and April. But they now face a widespread, diffuse guerrilla resistance that Bush administration planners never contemplated and which they are still at a loss to deal with.

Far from aggressively hunting down isolated remnants of Saddam's old Baathist loyalists, as advocates of the war interpreted military operations in Iraq last fall, U.S. combat brigades there are now hunkered down in their bivouacs with Pentagon civilian chiefs pressuring senior military commanders to keep casualties down as much as possible during the election cycle.

(more)

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iraq-04i.html

[Jacobin]

1. This part says it fricking all:

Far from aggressively hunting down isolated remnants of Saddam's old Baathist loyalists, as advocates of the war interpreted military operations in Iraq last fall, U.S. combat brigades there are now hunkered down in their bivouacs with Pentagon civilian chiefs pressuring senior military commanders to keep casualties down as much as possible during the election cycle.

This administration and the mediawhores are simply beyond belief

edit: expletive

[bemildred]

2. And this one:

But they now face a widespread, diffuse guerrilla resistance
that Bush administration planners never contemplated and which
they are still at a loss to deal with.

[truthspeaker]

3. never contemplated - that is just amazing (in a very bad way)

I wrote about that in my blog yesterday. How can you invade and occupy a foreign country and not even contemplate the possibility of a guerilla resistance movement? And in this case the CIA had specifically warned of that very possibility.

[mike_c]

4. they were blinded by their own arrogance....

eom