Words of wisdom from surprising sources

From Understanding Wood Finishing comes this little nugget of wisdom:

The real reason for secrecy is the necessity of concealing the fact that there is nothing to conceal.

I wonder if historians will look back onto our age and note that the war on terror was won, as much as it could be won by mid 2002 and we just kept on going. That would explain the decision to go into Iraq, that is to say the short term problem was solved for a while, so why not work on the long term problem?

Update - I mis-phrased this. It should read more like "we solved the problem, and then tried working on the condition with no avail."

Tuesday morning rapid fire

• Lincoln and the Jews - from the Federation of American Scientists
• The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk - the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe
• Two from Charlie Rose, specifically this interview with Petraus' main counter insurgency adviser David Kilcullenm and also with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater.
  

Tuesday night rapid fire

• Robert Kaplan on private military contractors
• John Robb on private military contractors - one thing he doesn't mention (and I don't think he has mentioned it before) is that there could be many, many problems with highly trained combat forces under no particular command, they would make quiet a crime crew. It's unlikely with the current stock of PMCs, but it might be with the next generation.
  
• Solar Power is becoming a vested interest
• For some reason validator callout extenders won't work with a custom validator with the standard Visual Studio code, but it works with this code.
• Nazi War Criminal was found in Metro Atlanta. Why must events like these be the only time Atlanta makes national news?
• Building a tree fort as an exercise in project management
• DNI on leaving Iraq
• A client of mine was in the AJC today, I did the Atlanta Arrangements site late last year.
• Secret Geek has a nice post on the Principles of Scale
• Tyler Cowen on income inequality. I wonder if anyone is actually worried about this. No one seems to be, but everyone thinks everyone else is scared stiff. One thing to bear in mind is that the bottom is fixed at zero
  

Thoughts on the surge and ethnic cleansing

While it's common now to hear reports of the surge working, I'm curious to know how much the drop in violence correlates to the ethnic cleansing that's been happening in Iraq for the past few years. All of the Iraqi on Iraqi violence is purposeful, i.e. designed to drive the Sunni out of Shia neighborhoods and vice versa. What if the militias and insurgents are just wrapping up the ethnic cleansing and there's no one handy to kill?

I imagine it's hard to find mixed neighborhoods these days, which would make the murders and bombings more difficult to commit. A good way to test the theory would be to see if inter-ethnic violence increases as extra-ethnic violence decreases. The recent tribal push against AQ is some evidence of that as without readily available Shia AQ has nothing to offer the Sunni tribes.

So many questions, so little data. I guess another way of putting it is "what if Iraq completed it's civil war while everyone was debating the meaning of "Civil War"? (note, I still dislike the term to refer to the conflict, Gang war is the better term.).

Thursday morning link rapid fire

• Fast Failure's and Google
• HDR in Photoshop CS III - I still haven't gotten that to work right, more at this site.
• Andrew Sullivan largely echoes me in what to do with Iraq.
  

Setting the bar quite low

Randy Barnett has an interesting article on libertarian opinion and the Iraq war in the Wall Street Journal. It had this little nugget of pessimism disguised as hope

They hope that the early signs of progress in this offensive will continue, so that American and Iraqi forces can achieve the military victory necessary to allow the Iraqi government to assume responsibility for protecting the Iraqi people from terrorists, as well as from religious sectarian violence. They hope this success will enable American soldiers to leave Iraq even before they leave Europe and Korea, and regain the early momentum that led, for example, to Libya's abandonment of its nuclear weapons program.

WWII ended in 1945, the Cold War in 1991, and Korea has been at truce, if not at peace since 1953. that means we would be in Iraq until 2040 at the earliest?

Three on Iraq

First, there is this depressing report on civilian casualties in Iraq. The numbers are all going the wrong way.

Second is this post from Ross Douthat about the long term impact of Iraq, and how similar wars have affected the US and the British.

Last is this post from the Belmont Club. I haven't read that site in quite some time (it's a weird combination of gloom and optimism), but Wretchard does do sweeping phrases well. To wit:

Al-Qaeda, like all the evil vapors of the world through history, inevitably comes to resemble its predecessors. Soldiers of the dark eventually find themselves wearing the same livery. Flowers bloom in myriad ways, but evil, like pornography, is repetitive. It marches to same dull beat that all the Lost of the ages have heard call. Poor men, these al-Qaeda, they who would remake the world in their ostensibly new vision only to find it had been templated long ago by some sad and ancient corruption.

Quick link round

• Puzzles and Mysteries from ZenPundit
• The Captain America Syndrome at the Washington Monthly. - They don't actually call it that, but that's what they're talking about.
• This seems dirty, but it's mostly medical. Quite funny though.
  
• Yet more Stirling engines
  

Monday link roundup

• It's Wiretap the Internet Day - what have we come to in this country. Sigh.
• Entrepreneurial Adages - All quite true. in particular

  Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible -- small budgets give big focus

• Battlefield spy-bot - really cool
• Tribal Minds
• The indispensable Col. Patrick Lang has an outline of what a diplomatic solution to Iraq might look like. I would read all of it. Webbed version of the outline is here.
  

A nice short overview of Kurdistan

From Stephen DeAngelis, who is in Kurdistan right now.

Lou Dobbs is the perfect man of the age

By repeating the dumber parts of the conventional wisdom in a solemn tone he continues to be taken seriously. Case in point, his newest CNN.com column (he drags down the whole franchise IMHO) A call to the faithful. It's an adventure in the non sequitur. While lauding the separation of church and state he points to examples of church based groups having opinions on matters of pure politics, i.e. Iraq and immigration.

Neither of those are religious matters. If they were trying to implement Sharia, force church attendance, establish a state religion or mandate that government personnel had to be of a particular sect, or any sect, that would be one thing. But these are either pro/anti war choices, or pro/anti amnesty choices, which have no inherent religious significance. Religious people may care a lot about them of course, but so can a lot of people. He then quotes Romans 13, with

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

In a democracy, the governing authority is the people, and the above verse would seem to encourage public participation in the process. Dobbs would seem to want separation of people and state.

Two good reads

• From Col. Lang (on partial withdrawal)

  Iraq, (Mesopotamia) has always been held together (in various eras) by force and coercion. The enmity among the "Iraqis" is not a matter of misunderstanding, or a failure to communicate among themselves.
  

• From Michael Scheur (on George Tenet's book)

  But Tenet's resignation would have destroyed the neocons' Iraq house of cards by discrediting the only glue holding it together: the intelligence that "proved" Saddam Hussein guilty of pursuing nuclear weapons and working with al-Qaeda.

Sunday round up

• A nice graph of the internet
  
• If I believed in conspiracy theories, I'd believe in this one "I found Saddam's WMD Bunkers". The reason that no one in government is following up on them is that the US invasion forced the weapons into Syria, and the Bush administration didn't act on the information quickly. The Democrats don't want to move on it because it proves the main cause for the invasion. It's a bit too cinematic to be believed, but quite interesting.
  

A curious ommission

From this article in the NYT on attitudes on the Iraq war by age group, specifically

Forty-eight percent of Americans 18 to 29 years old said the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, while 45 percent said the United States should have stayed out. That is in sharp contrast to the opinions of those 65 and older, who have lived through many other wars. Twenty eight percent of that age group said the United States did the right thing, while 67 percent said the United States should have stayed out.
...
"We've experienced more than the younger people. Older people are wiser. We've seen war and we know."

Anyway, it goes on like that. One thing that was not mentioned was the fact that the time horizons are quite different. Someone 65 is looking at an outer range of 30 years more of life, whereas someone age 25 is looking at 60 more years of life. It's quite plausible that younger people might be more favorable to risky experiments with possible longer term benefits, the same way they like investing in risky stocks and mutual funds - to wit, they have more time to play with, so they can take more risks.

I'm not saying this is the reason for the disparity, but it's odd it wasn't addressed.

What I got wrong about the Iraq war

I was going to write this a while back, but here it is. I was on the fence about it at the time, but history did not to wait for me to reach a position.

What I was wrong about with regard to Iraq (2003 assumptions)

• I thought we would have over 10,000 military deaths by this point.
  
• I thought the war would take about a year of heavy fighting.
• I thought it would be over after that year
• I thought the Sunni-Shia split would not play out as it has, rather that it would stay at or around the 2004 level
• I thought we would have much more negative blowback - for all of the shouting and protests, not much has really happened on that front
• I thought we would have found at least chemical weapons (in large quantities)
  
• I did not think that Kurdistan would turn out as well as it has
• I thought Turkey would have intervened in some form by now
• I thought al Qaida would have benefited more, it seems that they have been hurt (in terms of their ideological appeal) by the Iraq war (more on that later)
• I did not think that we would still have this many troops (fighting) at this point.
• I thought that there would be much more conventional combat, and much less of this gang warfare
• I thought that the Iraqis would have scored at least three major wins (surprise attacks in some fashion) in the scores of battles that have happened since the war began. They don't seem to have won any against American troops.
  

Tab clearing roundup

• Michael Totten goes to Kurdistan - phenomenal reporting.
• The Yazidi religion of the the Middle East, very strange and interesting.
  

The insurgency in Iraq

Check out this interview with terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann. It's a fascinating look at the current state of the insurgency in Iraq.

Response to Subadei

Subadei was kind enough to post about my earlier Iraq thoughts.

As the power vacuum created by US withdrawal is quickly filled by the Shia we'll see a down turn in sectarian violence not the ethnic cleansing many fear. Once they have political control of Iraq what do the Shiites stand to gain through annihilatory tactics waged against the Sunni minority? Such actions would certainly provoke Jordan and Syria as the refugee flood becomes a tidal wave. The Sauds are already waving their fists in response to Sunni deaths at the hands of Shiites and their perceived threat of Iran's growing influence.

Actually I don't see the Shia filling the power vacuum created when the US leaves. The Iraqi Sunni are quite adept at wreaking havoc and I think that would increase with the US gone. The threat we pose is political, whereas the Shia threat is existential.

I also think I misused the word "state" inaccurately. Most likely the three areas would be a Shia state in the South, a Kurdish one in the north, and a wild, violent region in the middle. I don't see the Shia (large, unorganized, and ununited) being able to impose a monopoly of violence against a more organized and much more united (smaller in size) Sunni region. Especially if the Saudis and AQ are able to make spoiling attacks and fund the warring factions.

Current Iraq thoughts

To update my many readers of my thoughts on Iraq, here they are.

Short and Medium Term Recommendation:

• Accept the fact that a multi-ethnic democracy with strong group loyalties and a medium to high population density that has no overriding equalizer, (i.e. a market economy, strong religion, nation of uprooted immigrants, cult like leader, animosity towards some other country or religion etc) is a very bloody affair.
• Let the country break apart into a very loose confederation, - There will probably be one to 3 Shia distinct regions in the South, 6-12 distinct Sunni regions and one distinct Kurdish region. Withdraw to the friendly areas, i.e. Kurdistan and probably a couple of Sunni areas and let the various sides fight it out. They're doing this anyway and there is no need for American troops to get caught in the crossfire.
• Accept the fact that there will be massive ethnic cleansing with the above option, much is happening already. Do as much as possible within some give time frame, say 10 months to let the ethnic cleansing be as bloodless as possible and not verge into genocide. This is going to happen anyway, many lives could be saved if we do it on our terms.
• Drop the 60s idealism (called nation-building/neoconservatism, or whatever baby boomer term you want to label it) and admit that what is happening in Iraq IS democracy, it's just bloody and ugly. Diversity only works if no one cares about the differences between people. Primary loyalties are primary.
• I think Robert Kaplan thought of this first, but the proper metaphors for the current Middle East is not WWII, but the Barbary Pirates and the Indian Wars. I.E. it's time to think small, and act small. Also, let the military get back to what it's good at, i.e. killing people and breaking things.
  
• Reward our friends and punish our enemies, but above all, be clear in our foreign policy. We would be well served by coming off of our high horse (bringing democracy, enlightenment, etc) and admitting that we're in pursuit of our own interest, just like everyone else. We've long believed our own hype about our own greatness. While largely true domestically (thank you founding fathers and your division of power) it is much less true internationally due to the way our system is set up. Most of the good things we do are diffused in the form of trade and a myriad of private charities. It's time to say less and to behave much more predictably. Cross cultural communication is hard enough without adding nuance and tone into the equation.
  

Long Term Recommendations

• Get out. The Coase theorem applies to the Middle East just like everywhere else. We're buying our oil now and we'll be buying it in the future. And contrary to popular belief, it will be less important in the future. Plus, it's quite likely the Kurds will be very pro-western and peaceful. Their primary loyalty is not divided and it's not against us.
  
• Be honest in our dealing with Israel - we don't have that many common interests, but we are friends - it's less like the US and the USSR in WWII and more like the US and Japan in the present day (excepting North Korea)
  

Consequences of The Above

• Lots of blood will be shed - but it will be shed anyway. The key is minimizing it
• People will be uprooted and new vendettas will be started that will last for centuries.
• The Sunni and the Shia factions of the Middle East will have a battleground to fight their proxy wars, much like the Nazis and the Soviets had a battleground in the Spanish Civil War. Then again, they have that now.
  
• American troops will be used in raids and attacks in the loose confederation of what we'll still call Iraq.
• Turkey will be quite angry - but that is manageable and can be minimized by the use of carrots and sticks.
  

I'll have my post on what I was right and wrong about (regarding Iraq that is) later.

Thoughts?

Best characterisation of Iraq

From Winston Churchill "An ungrateful volcano"

via Andrew Sullivan on BloggingHeads

Sunday rapid fire

• RFID Digital Door Lock - this looks very cool, a totally key less lock system.
• The RFID Superstore
• MyPhotoPipe.com - a very large format printing service, run by a blast from the past
  
• What would Genghis Khan do in Iraq - an interesting article The Mongols also immediately executed the caliph and his sons on charges that they spent too much money on their palaces and not enough defending their nation.

More Iraq

One oft-repeated trope about Iraq is that Iran and Syria don't have any interest in an unstable Iraq. Why? While I'm sure that is not their ideal situation, I'm sure that a vibrant pro-Western democracy would be worse in their opinion.

Also the possible strategy of doubling down (a "troop surge") is doomed to failure. The Iranians and Syrians can trade off lives and money at a very favorable ratio to them for the foreseeable future.

However this is a moot point. Enough highly motivated factions are in Iraq to make the eventual breakup a certainty. What we should be doing is facilitating the breakup instead of denying it.

Semantic annoyances

It's annoying that Colin Powell calling Iraq a civil war is news. When there are two wars going on the media decides to make media pronouncements news stories. Pathetic.

More annoying is that the current conflict doesn't bear that many resemblances to a civil war as they are usually defined, and a lot resemblances to a traditional gang war. Come to think of it, that's probably the most useful way to think about it.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Saddam Hussein sentenced to death by hanging

For more on the latin, try this.

More Iraq

Coming Anarchy has an excellent post on the future of an independent Kurdistan. It fits in nicely with my thoughts about the coming partition of Iraq. I think that will be upon us before we realize it's even on it's way. To wit, who will want to be the last Shia in a Sunni area, or the last Sunni in a Shia town?

My brain is fried, what I mean to say is the the rate of segregation will increase over the coming year.

Semantics

I've always rejected the notion of Iraq being in a civil war due to the notion that a civil war requires two clearly defined sides and usually territories, be it Davis and Lincoln or Lenin and Kerensky.

While the two defining concepts in Iraq, Sunni and Shia, are clear, the fighting seems to be split up into 14-20 (from what I've read) different parties. Also, the fighting does not seem to be for control over the country, but rather ethnic cleansing of the classic variety, that is removing one group from a particular chunk of land.

What do you call that? It's not quite anarchy, malignant diversity? Failure of integration? What?

Two things that have surprised me

• The Israel-Hezbollah war hasn't restarted yet.
• For all the conflict in Iraq, the government hasn't fallen, nor are there several competing governments.
  

Interesting article about service in Iraq

From the Washington Post

Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 "person-years" in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.
...
The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000 -- 39 percent of that of troops in Iraq. But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.

The death rate of American troops in Vietnam was 5.6 times that observed in Iraq. Part of the reduction in the death rate is attributable to improvements in military medicine and such things as the use of body armor. These have reduced the ratio of deaths to wounds from 24 percent in Vietnam to 13 percent in Iraq.

The usual caveats apply of course, but it's an interesting read.

War quote of the moment

From Marginal Revolution:

...Thomas Ricks' says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed. I have no quarrel with that. What dismays me is that anyone expected any different. All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies. War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale. The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.

I've always thought that the odds of the government getting some large conspiracy right were much smaller than the odds of them getting some basic assumptions wrong. The complaints of "Bush didn't get the war planning right" crowd is baffling too. How else was it going to look. In many ways Iraq is much better managed than any of our other wars, only better lit. How else is it going to look?

An undercovered story

Deaths fall for U.S., rise for Iraqis
U.S. military deaths during the past month have dropped to an average of about one a day, approaching the lowest level since the insurgency began two years ago, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. military data.

The decline in U.S. deaths comes as Iraqi casualties are the highest since the U.S. military began tracking them in 2004.

I've noticed this from ABC's This Week coverage as well, though they don't give the numbers over time. It would be interesting to see a chart of democide in Iraq (I'm counting the insurgency as a prospective government for the purpose of this post); I would wager it's roughly stable year to year. After so many decades of being a police state, Iraq contains a sizable number of people for whom killing is their only skill.


And while we're on the topic, check out the WikiPedia entry on Democide. It's an informative read on mass murders by governments over time, going back to the Mongols.

Interesting from the Belmont Club

Whilst perusing Wretchard's thoughts on the current state of Iraq

Philip Bobbitt argued in his book, the Shield of Achilles, that Napoleon's strategic revolution consisted in fielding armies so large that any sovereign who opposed him would, in matching the size of his force, be compelled to wager the entire State, and not simply a wedge of territory in confronting him. Napoleon's campaigns were designed to kill enemy armies -- and thereby enemy states. What Napoleon failed to realize in his 1812 campaign against Russia was that the Tsarist state was so primitive that the destruction of its army simply did not mean the corresponding demise of its state. Like the proverbial dinosaur of pulp fiction, Russia had no central nervous system to destroy and lumbered on, like the bullet-riddled monster of horror stories, impervious to the Grand Armee. What Russia had on its side was chaos as epitomized by its savage winters.

Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states.

Most of what I've read actually suggests that Napoleon's brilliance was in organization of his armies, not his actual command or tactics. In Russia, he was captured by not seeing a qualitative difference between Russia and the rest of Europe. Unlike the Nazi Germany, (who did see Russia accurately, but bungled the strategy) the problem was that he did not conceive of Russia properly.

Needed - software that helps in conception via clever use of 3D motion graphics.

Thursday rapid fire

• Telegraph fun
• Bluegrass everywhere but here
• It washes, dries and irons! All in one device.
• The Yahoo Ajax blog.
• More Ajax I need to get around to understanding.
• An interesting article about Saddam and WMD. It's odd how no one seems to be interested in what happened to the WMD. While it's been proven they're not there, the details of the removal are absent.
  

Quote of the moment

From Tucker Carlson's blog

If Bush ends up being right about Iraq, it will be through luck and accident and God's grace, not through any skillful calculation of his own. Success there will make him a great president the way Powerball makes crackheads rich: they have the money to show for it, but they're not fooling anyone.

I don't quite agree with this, largely in that I don't think the current endeavor is something that can be done well. It's quite the zinger though.

Baby Boomer nostalgia

Rather than focusing on the good, though moot, objections to invading Iraq, or useful strategies for withdrawal, Anna Qunindlen writes her variant of the standard column comparing Iraq to Vietnam. Needless to say she doesn't mention the American occupation of the Philippines as another, more accurate comparison.

There's no need to read the column, it's just like all the other baby boomer nostalgia pieces. One telling part was

They should remember one of the most powerful men the party ever produced, Lyndon B. Johnson, and how he was destroyed by opposition to the war in Vietnam and bested by those brave enough to speak against it.

At least Johnson had the good sense to be heartbroken by the body bags. Bush appears merely peevish at being criticized. Someone with a trumpet should play taps outside the White House for the edification of a president who has not attended a single funeral for the Iraqi war dead.

Two Comments

1. If Johnson was destroyed by opposition to the war in Vietnam, then how was he followed by two terms of Richard Nixon? Wouldn't a peacenik have been elected instead?
2. Funerals are for family, friends, and people who knew the deceased. They are not photo ops, political opportunities or anything else. Were Bush to attend one it would be dominated by the media and Secret Service and ruin a special sad moment.
   

Annoyances

I was looking at CNN.com today and came across the article "Report: More journalists killed in Iraq than Vietnam". I thought it interesting that CNN wasn't even willing to stand behind a finding of fact, hence they put the "Report:' in the headline.

Then I read the article, relevant quote

Since U.S. forces and its allies launched their campaign in Iraq on March 20, 2003, 66 journalists and their assistants have been killed, RSF said.

The latest casualty was a Reuters Television soundman who was shot dead in Baghdad on Sunday, while a cameraman with him was wounded and then detained by U.S. soldiers.

The death toll in Iraq compares with a total of 63 journalists in Vietnam, but which was over a period of 20 years from 1955 to 1975, the Paris-based organization that campaigns to protect journalists said on its Web site.

During the fighting in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995, 49 journalists were killed doing their job, while 57 journalists and 20 media assistants were killed during a civil war in Algeria from 1993 to 1996.

Note the separate but sometimes equal "assistants" in the math. They seem to have the figures available (journalists killed during the Iraq War so far) to do an apples to apples comparison but choose not to do so. Also they artificially limit the "fighting in the former Yugoslavia" to a four year period which strikes me as quite fishy as well.

On the whole shabby work from CNN.

The natural life cycle of American causes

They begin in tragedy and end in farce.

Joan Baez performs for Crawford War protesters.

While there are many actual events happening (see Michael Yon and a A Day in Iraq for more), here in America we concetrate more on aging baby boomer nostalgia, taking the form of listing ways that Iraq is similar to Vietnam (oddly never comparing it to the Philippines, where we also fought a Muslim insurgency.). We're also careful to take note of both opinion polls and posturing, specifically this article which had the quote:

The protesters at "Camp Casey" can claim some victory for forcing Bush to talk so extensively about the military deaths when he'd rather focus on indicators of progress in Iraq. The campers' call to bring the troops home now dominated news coverage out of Crawford this week while Bush stayed on his ranch with no public events.

A fixed date withdrawal deadline vs a benchmark withdrawal deadline? Can we live with Hyper-federalism or an Islamic republic in Iraq? How far are we willing to go to capture bin Laden, and what if we're wrong? What kind of error rate in military endeavors are we willing to live with?

All these things pale in comparison to such gripping matters as the exact verbiage of a speech and who is on vacation.

Something worth reading

I finally checked out the website of Michael Yon. He's a photographer and a former special forces officer who's rambling around Iraq not embedded with any American unit. The commentary is quite different than what one ordinarily sees (it's more a here's what I did today in Fallujah) and the quality of the photography is unmatched.

Memorial Day being an odd coincidence

I was looking at the referral logs for moodyloner.net and came across A Day in Iraq. It's a blog written by a soldier from Fort Benning (in Columbus Georgia) and his life there. Fascinating stuff with many pictures. A blog very much worth reading.

More thoughts on the Iraqi insurgency

Via Tom Palmer is this informative article "The Mystery of the Insurgency" which deals largely with the fact that the insurgents are concentrating on killing Iraqis in great numbers.

To me this seems to be no mystery. Police states produce killers and gangsters and to a man with a hammer the world is made of nails. What else are they going to do but murder and crime?

Iraqi Insurgency

Some very interesting reading; Tom Palmer refers to this WAPO article on the goals of the insurgency in Iraq, and it raises some interesting thoughts.

The article breaks it all down into 3 groups: al Qaida in Iraq, headed by Zarquai, hardcore Baathists, and non-hardcore Baathist sympathizers. It's all very good reading, most particularly the goals of the hardcore Baathists, which are to regain control of Iraq should the US leave. They thing they have the capability to do so based on their superior organization and ruthlessness.

All of which makes me wonder, the US death rate seems to be holding at around 15 or so per week, with a variance of 5 or so. However they seem to be coming in offensive action, not random murder, and the number of insurgents killed has been skyrocketing lately. Hopefully this is a good sign.