Screwed?

Juan Cole has written a post about our prospects for victory in Iraq entitled Sometimes You are Just Screwed. You can probably catch his drift just from the title, but many of the details are interesting.
The US military cannot defeat the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement any time soon for so many reasons that they cannot all be listed.

The guerrillas have widespread popular support in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, an area with some 4 million persons. Its cities and deserts offer plenty of cover for an unconventional war. Guerrilla movements can succeed if more than 40 percent of the local population supports them. While the guerrillas are a small proportion of Iraqis, they are very popular in the Sunni Arab areas. If you look at it as a regional war, they probably have 80 percent support in their region.

The guerrillas are mainly Iraqi Sunnis with an intelligence or military background, who know where secret weapons depots are containing some 250,000 tons of missing munitions, and who know how to use military strategy and tactics to good effect. They are well-funded and can easily get further funding from Gulf millionnaires any time they like.
The other side of the problem is that there aren't many US troops, and the troops we have don't speak the language, don't know the culture, and don't know the territory.
There are simply too few US troops to fight the guerrillas. There are only about 70,000 US fighting troops in Iraq, they don't have that much person-power superiority over the guerrillas. There are only 10,000 US troops for all of Anbar province, a center of the guerrilla movement with a population of 820,000. A high Iraqi official estimated that there are 40,000 active guerrillas and another 80,000 close supporters of them
Cole's piece is well worth reading, but I'm not sure that I buy his whole story. For one thing, he makes a point of the fact that the insurgents seem to be promoting a Shiite-Sunni civil war. If that happens, won't the Sunni be crushed or exterminated, especially if the Shiites have our aid?

Of course that's a pretty bleak prospect too. I suspect he's right in his analysis of our biggest weakness:
The quality of leadership in Washington is extremely bad. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and outgoing Department of Defense officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, have turned in an astonishingly poor performance in Iraq. Their attempt to demonstrate US military might has turned into a showcase for US weakness in the face of Islamic and nationalist guerrillas, giving heart to al-Qaeda and other unconventional enemies of the United States.
It's obvious that Rumsfeld et. al. drastically overestimated the importance of our technological superiority, but I suspect Cole is underestimating it. Of course even the best weapons don't help much if wielded by utter idiots.

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