Escalation, "enemy body-count" (250-300), downed choppers ..

[DemoTex]

Bu$h announced his "surge" (escalation) and now enemy body-count seems to be all the rage. We are told, by an un-named Iraqi interior ministry official (through CNN), that Iraqi and U.S. forces have killed an estimated 250 to 300 enemy gunmen in the Shiite holy city of Najaf during heavy fighting on Sunday. The KIA enemy "gunman", according to the Iraqi official, were part of a contingent of about 600 gunmen, stationed outside the city, who planned to attack Najaf, take control of the province, and kill Shia clerics including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

So, Bu$hboy's new & improved War of Attrition is now going swimmingly well. The US and Iraqi forces killed as many as 50% of the enemy force outside of Najaf. If, that is, you are willing to take pathological liars at their word.

And then there is the helicopter issue. I see a pattern that might be connected to some numbers and letters familiar to helicopter pilots from our last war of attrition, to wit: 12.7, 23, 37, SAM, etc.

Any way you cut it, the war in Iraq has taken a turn for the worse. Let Mr. Cheney try to spit-polish that turd.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/01/28/iraq.main/index.html

Then:


Now:

[karlrschneider]

1. 600? Hmmm

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

[leftchick]

2. I remember that unique sound of the Huey

I heard it many years after the 1960s at the VA where I worked. Yes indeed Demo the war propaganda is in full swing with CNN playing stenographer and NO ONE questioning the Body Count numbers churned out by the pentagon. Damn if we are not reliving history in my lifetime.

:cry:

[Bonhomme Richard]

3. None of this "battle" makes any sense.

Why on earth would the "insurgents" put themselves in the position of fighting a stand up battle, in the open, with the US when they know they would get their asses kicked? Why risk casualties taking a town you couldn't possibly keep? It doesn't make any sense at all when they are doing plenty of damage with quick guerrilla tactics.
Something isn't right here.

[Karenina]

4. WHY are Americans in Iraq, killing Iraqis wholesale?

[Warren Stupidity]

5. My BS detector just exploded.

"600 gunmen, stationed outside the city, who planned to attack Najaf, take control of the province, and kill Shia clerics"

Huh? This is a Shia region. How exactly did a Sunni militia station itself outside of Najaf?

I had to look this up, here:

Najaf is within the Shia region. This report is total bullshit.

[Jackpine Radical]

6. Even if the body count numbers were accurate, so what?

Just like Vietnam--there is a nearly infinite supply of "them," and a lot smaller number of "us." The body counts sound impressive to us because we know how devastating the news would be here if 200 were killed in 1 day. However, anyone willing to take on the Imperial war machine has already decided that they are willing to sacrifice 10 or 100 for each one of ours they kill. As in Vietnam, the relative body count statistics do not predict the ultimate victory.

[Warren Stupidity]

7. The so what here is who and where.

The fact that this battle appears to have happened in Shia Najaf is a major development.

[doc03]

8. Just like the old Vietnam 10 to 1 body count formula!

[SoCalDem]

11. 1700 viet cong killed today and

two marines stubbed their toes :eyes:

[oblivious]

9. 3 choppers down in one week (I seem to remember the Soviets having this sort of problem somewhere.)

Gunmen in Najaf fired a missile at a U.S. helicopter, downing it near the city, Iraqi officials said.

Fighting in the city 100 miles south of Baghdad is still under way.

The helicopter incident comes just more than a week after a Black Hawk helicopter -- believed to have been downed by a shoulder-fired missile -- crashed in Iraq's Diyala province last Saturday, killing 12 U.S. soldiers on board. (Full story)

A helicopter belonging to the U.S. security firm Blackwater also went down in Iraq on Tuesday, after coming under heavy fire.

[SoCalDem]

12. Yep.. OUR RPGs & Shoulder-fired missles that we gave the mujihadeen

and one of the staunchest supporters of that whole reagan-wet dream? Dana Rohrabacher..

we supplied them, trained them, and now??

Dana :heart: Taliban


a MUST read
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/1196/9611008.htm
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 1996, page 8

Personality

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher: An Expert on South and Central Asia

by Shirl McArthur

Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher from California’s 45th District (Huntington Beach), spent two weeks visiting Afghanistan, with stops in Italy, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan at the end of August and the beginning of September. With the fall of the Afghan capital, Kabul, to the Sunni Islamist Taliban militia, and considering Rohrabacher’s outspoken criticism of current U.S. policy toward Iraq at a recent House International Relations Committee hearing, we felt it would be interesting to our readers to interview him.

Rohrabacher, a native Californian, will be beginning his fifth term in Congress in 1997. Previously he served for seven years as a speech writer in the Reagan White House. He is a member of the House Science and International Relations committees. Within the International Relations committee, his subcommittee assignments have included the Asia and Pacific subcommittee and the International Economic Policy and Trade subcommittee. Although the 105th Congress has yet to be organized, Rohrabacher expects to be on those same subcommittees.

En route to the Middle East, Rohrabacher stopped in Rome to meet with former Afghan King Zahir Shah. In Afghanistan, in addition to spending time in Kabul, Rohrabacher visited with Gen. Abdul Rasheed Dostam at his headquarters at Mazar-e Sharif, in the north. Dostam is now in a position to play a key role in Afghanistan. Although Dostam collaborated with the Communist government in the past, Rohrabacher believes that he wants to put the past behind him and be an important part of Afghanistan’s future.

A Disciplined Afghanistan

The potential rise to power of the Taliban does not alarm Rohrabacher, because the Taliban could provide stability in an area where chaos was creating a real threat to the U.S. Rohrabacher says that under the previous situation Afghanistan was becoming a major source of drugs and a haven for terrorists “an anarchistic state of narco-terrorism.” In contrast, the Taliban leaders have already shown that they intend to establish a disciplined, moral society.

Rohrabacher calls the sensational media reporting of the “harsh” imposition of strict Islamic behavior, with the underlying implication that this somehow threatens the West, “nonsense.” He says the Taliban are devout traditionalists, not terrorists or revolutionaries, and, in contrast to the Iranians, they do not seem intent on exporting their beliefs. Rohrabacher would have preferred to see a negotiated compromise among the various factions (but with no role for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) rather than a bloody confrontation. But in the absence of such a compromise, he believes a Taliban takeover would be a positive development.

An interesting speculation that we have not seen elsewhere was Rohrabacher’s pointing out that the Taliban are mostly Pushtuns from the Khandahar region of Afghanistan, and King Zahir Shah is also a Pushtun from Khandahar. Rohrabacher says that there is a major faction among the Taliban that supports the return of Zahir Shah, and Rohrbacher would not be surprised to see him return at some point if the Taliban establishes full control over the country. In this regard, during his meeting with Rohrabacher, General Dostam spoke in favor of the return of the King, and he has since made similar comments publicly.

Rohrabacher dismissed speculation from some quarters that a Taliban takeover would lead to increased Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, upsetting both India and Iran and leading to further instability in the area if either of those countries feel that Pakistan has gained significant control over Afghanistan. He said that Pakistan has learned, as did the British a century and a half ago, that no outside force can “control” the Afghans. He believes that India and Iran, as well as the new nations of former Soviet Central Asia, would soon enough learn that they have nothing to fear from a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

On another subject, at a hearing in late September of the House International Relations Committee on U.S. policy in the Gulf, Rohrabacher criticized the Clinton administration’s responding to Saddam Hussain’s violation of the northern “safe” areas by launching cruise missile attacks on Iraqi targets in southern Iraq. He questioned whether it made sense to act against Saddam in response to actions in his own country. Rohrabacher also asked Assistant Secretary of State Pelletreau whether he was aware that Gulf leaders were convinced that Clinton had acted solely for domestic political reasons, but he did not get a direct answer. In our interview, Rohrabacher said that he believes that America’s allies, whether in the Gulf or elsewhere, expect the U.S. to make tough decisions and act on them; but they also expect the U.S. to be a thoughtful nation, basing its decisions on solid military or geopolitical criteria, and taking into account the views of our allies, rather than acting from purely domestic political motives.

Rohrabacher has a reputation among Arab-Americans as being very strong on Muslim issues, supporting the rights of the Muslim populations in South Asia, the Central Asian republics, Bosnia and elsewhere, as well as the civil rights of Muslims in the U.S. However, some Arab Americans believe that he follows the Israeli line regarding Arab-Israeli issues. We asked for his reaction to this comment. He said he did not think it fair. He said he tries to follow a pro-American policy in the Middle East, neither pro-Israel nor pro-Arab. He believes the most pro-American policy is peace, and he will support whatever in his opinion furthers the cause of peace. He says, however, that U.S. policy must be based on realism.

Rohrabacher has not become deeply involved in Arab-Israeli issues, primarily because he believes he can be more effective by directing his attention to south and Central Asia. For example, he believes the U.S. has paid scant attention to the question of peace in Kashmir, and he is concerned about developments in the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. Because of that concern, he hopes that in the 105th Congress the Asia and Pacific subcommittee’s area will be expanded to include the Central Asian republics.

[B Calm]

10. Was it 15 US soldiers who died in vain yesterday?

[ngant17]

13. but "we don't do body counts"

seems out of character with this news of 250 enemy KIAs.

BTW here's some Viet Nam casualty stats out of Wiki:

NVA: 600,000 KIA
600,000 WIA

SVA (puppet Viet army):
250,000 KIA/MIA
1,169,763 WIA

USA 58,239 KIA
128,000 WIA

Yup, 10 NVA dead to 1 USA dead, that formula seems to have worked for them and worked against us.

The Iraqis allied to US probably won't take anywhere near the numbers of KIAs/WIAs that the SVA did, for various historical or sociological reasons.

I haven't read any estimates of Iraqi Resistance troop level strengths, and besides there are a lot of different enemy troops shooting at Americans in Iraq. There could be a 100-1 kill ratio and we'd still could be losing bigtime.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

14. Seems familiar...

You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
Ho Chi Minh