The Smarter Darren Bernard

Hey kiddies! Never mind what we just said over and over and over again for the past two years or so, we were never about "staying the course", we are now about *adaptation* because, ya need to *adapt* to the enemy (cue Beavis-like chuckle).

But seriously, how badly is this gonna end?

BAGHDAD After three years of trying to thwart a potent insurgency and tamp down the deadly violence in Iraq, the American military is playing its last hand: The Baghdad Security Plan.

The plan will be tweaked, adjusted and modified in the weeks ahead, as American commanders attempt to reverse the dismaying increase in murders, drive-by shootings and bombings.

But military commanders here see no plausible alternative to their bedrock strategy of clearing violence-ridden neighborhoods of militias, insurgents and arms caches, holding them with Iraqi and American security forces and winning over the population and generating jobs with reconstruction projects, primarily programs underwritten by the Iraq government. There is no winning fall-back plan that the generals are holding in their hip pockets. This is it.

The Iraqi capital is, as the generals like to say, the center of gravity for the larger American mission in Iraq. The generals' assessment is that if Baghdad is overwhelmed by sectarian strife, the cause of fostering a more stable Iraq will be lost. Conversely, if Baghdad can be improved, the effects will eventually be felt elsewhere in Iraq - or so the American calculation holds. In invading Iraq, American forces started from outside the country and fought their way in. The current strategy is essentially to work from the inside out.

"As Baghdad goes, so goes Iraq," said Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the corps commander who oversees American forces throughout Iraq. snip

As a commentator on The News Blog puts it succinctly, it would be more accurate if you replace the words "center of gravity" with "last stand" and the word "work" with the word "fight".

The bad news is that they can't depend on the New Iraq Army to back them up, because, well, they make the ARVN look like the IDF:

So far, the plan has been short on resources, as well as results. The Iraqi Defense Ministry has supplied only two of the six Iraqi Army battalions that Thurman has requested. It is not just a question of numbers. Some in the U.S. military believe that the Iraqi Army may be more effective than the police and more trusted by local citizens. Yet several Iraqi battalions have gone AWOL rather than follow the orders to go to Baghdad, according to American military officials. In the case of these divisions, summoning them to the Iraqi capital was tantamount to demobilizing the units.

Sorry, but we just don't pay them enough.