More Positive News in Iraq

William S. Lind writes in Military.com about something I've been meaning to bark about as well: The Iraqification of the conflict. The concept is simple enough that even Rumsfeld can talk about it without sounding truly bizarre: replace US soldiers with Iraqi security forces (you'll have to scroll down/link to the next page--title is Defense Dept. Briefing with Sec. Rumsfeld & Gen. Myers). However, as Lind points out, you get exactly what you pay for in this instance.
Here's an excerpt:

A third indicator [of where the war is heading] comes from a widely-reported incident where an American battalion commander threatened an Iraqi under interrogation with his pistol and now faces criminal assault charges for doing so. The charges themselves are absurd, since the Iraqi was not injured and the information he provided prevented American soldiers from being ambushed. Here, the indicator comes from the identity of the Iraqi. Who was he? An Iraqi policeman....

Guerillas and, even more, Fourth Generation elements deal with state security forces primarily by taking them from within. They will also attack members of the state forces and their families, as part of punishing collaborators. But taking them from within is even more effective, because when we think the members of the state forces we create are working for us, we let them in positions where they can do real damage. Only too late do we discover where their real loyalty lies.

Even USAToday is capable of seeing what's going on:

The key problem is that Iraqi guerrillas simply have more and better sources than the coalition. U.S. military officers worry that the Iraqis who work for them, such as translators, cooks and drivers, include moles who routinely pass inside information back to insurgents. In at least two cases, Iraqis have been fired on the suspicion that they were spies.

A former senior director in the Iraqi intelligence service says the Americans are right to be anxious.

"The intelligence on the Americans is comprehensive and detailed," says the Iraqi, who insisted on not being identified and spoke to a reporter in a private home rather than at a restaurant or hotel to avoid being observed. He says Iraqi guerrilla forces get detailed reports on what is going on inside the palace grounds occupied by Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, Bremer's staff and the Governing Council. Again on Tuesday, guerrillas fired mortar rounds into the "Green Zone," the heavily secured area of central Baghdad that includes Bremer's headquarters.

What did Cheney say back in March? Something like, "I believe we will...be greated as liberators." Yeah, that's right.

And, to close with another excerpt from Lind:

As we create more and more Iraqi armed units, and try desperately to hand the war over to them, don't be surprised if they refuse to play our game. They will tell us what we want to hear to get paid, and then do what benefits them. Often, that will just be seeing and hearing nothing as the resistance forces go about their business. Sometimes, it will be shooting Americans in the back. It doesn't take many such shootings before we have to treat the Iraqi forces we have ourselves created with distrust, pushing even those who want to work with us into our enemies' arms.

One other indicator: a friend recently noted to me that the rapidly improving techniques we see from the Iraqi guerrillas bear a striking resemblance to those used by the Chechen guerrillas against the Russians. Might it be that we are not the only ones to have a coalition in Iraq?

How long do you think it will take before Bush forgets about "the Iraqi people?" He's already forgotten about bin Laden, and Hussein is beginning to recede from his dim-bulb, rudimentary mental processes. Weapons of Mass Destruction will be removed from the lexicon, leaving racism, pure and simple, as the ultimate justification for the war. Trent Lott would be proud.