Belmont Club: Pretty Pictures Illustrate Victory In Iraq

Sometimes you have to draw a picture to explain an important point to the dense ones!

Pretty Pictures

by "wretchard"

The Belmont Club, March 31, 2006

The situation in Iraq is sometimes hard to understand without drawing diagrams…. Let's consider the view of the Belmont Club: that the Sunni insurgency was basically defeated in January, 2006….

But my guess is that it's gone from battle-time (operating against insurgent forces) to purge-time (cleaning out hostile factions) and the emphasis has gone from facing the weaker enemy (the Sunni insurgency) to the stronger one: Iran.

I viewed the growth of the Iraqi Army and the campaign against the Sunni insurgencies lines of communications ("The River War") as having militarily defeated the Sunni insurgency. But there was a next phase. The political phase. Let's draw that picture….

Zarqawi's assessment, as I understand it, it is fundamentally identical to my own. The insurgency had no chance of defeating the US on the battlefield. However, if he could plunge Iraq into a sectarian conflict, he could yet win the political war where he had lost the military conflict.

Finally, let's look at the picture that is usually trumpeted in the popular press twenty four hours a day, which normally consists of the same stories—"today two American soldiers died, bring the number of deaths to" or "newly discovered memos show that in the days leading up to the war" or "defects in body armor have shown that"—with variations for dates. It is almost intentionally repetitive, designed to convey a narrative that has no sense; no beginning; no end. Graphically it looks like this…."


http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/03/pretty-pictures.html