There are some revelations from a recent Time magazine piece. Revelations that tell us a great deal actually. First the obvious:
The U.S. is ceding huge swaths of territory to shaky provincial governments that have to face increasingly powerful Shi'ite militias very much alone.
Small contingents of U.S. soldiers enter Karbala and Najaf only for brief visits with local officials these days, and much of the rest of southern Iraq has no American troops at all.
The U.S. Military can't sustain its current deployment, much less this 'surge'. Secondly, even the Pentagon has figured out we are the targets. They did learn the lesson of Al-Anbar even if the Bush administration won't admit it.The article also talks about those dreaded Iranian's:
U.S. soldiers are wondering if handlers from Iran's elite security forces have begun schooling and organizing fighters in the very areas American forces nominally control.
Of course it never occurred to anybody that maybe the people who have 3 or 4 years experience with insurgency against the worlds most formidable force would be the ones doing the teaching. Its the Iraqi's who have things to teach the Iranians, not the other way around.
Regardless, lets see what happens to the violence levels in the south in the coming months.
-- time.com
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