Winning (and Losing) the First Wired War

Noah Shachtman writes "The Iraq war was launched on a theory: That, with the right networking gear, American armed forces could control a country with a fraction of the troops ordinarily needed. But that equipment never made it down to the front lines, David Axe (just back from his 6th trip to Iraq) and I note in this month's Popular Science. That's a problem, because the insurgents are using throwaway cellphones and anonymous e-mail accounts to stitch together a network of their own."

Re:On the terrorists ad hoc C3

[Aaron England]

My impression of the popularly elected government is that it is immensely fragile and that, for the majority of Iraqis, is essentially switching one strong Saddam for many small ones. Oh, and also their power and water don't work and they're shelled every now and then. I don't imagine that the Iraqi government will survive long in the power vaccuum when the US leaves. I hope I'm wrong, and I very well could be. It's hard to judge what things are actually like there there's so much noise.

They are immensely fragile, and so I think it wouldn't be appropriate to leave right now; we must beef them up first. I don't think it is accurate to say that we have replaced one strong Saddam for many small ones. They genuinely have a democracy and they have good representation amongst the different political/racial lines. I agree that the Iraqi government wouldn't last long now, but I believe everyday we are getting them closer to that point where they can stand on their own.

That they've been an immensely destabilizing influence? Which is really their goal. They obviously can't fight the US toe-to-toe, hence the adoption of the Maoist tactics.

But how effective has their destablilizing influence been? They wanted to scare the Iraqis into not voting, they have failed. They wanted to bring the country into a civil war with the Golden Mosque bombings and related attacks, they have failed. They are definitely a pain in our side, but it seems like they are a tolerable pain in our side because we continue to make progress in spite of their prescence.

Re:What do you mean by "control"

[johnfatz]

Finally you need to fill their bellies to kill their ambition (apologies to Lao Tzu). You need to keep them fed and comfortable so that they don't take action against you.

Gotta disagree with you here. Looking at my own country's history (Ireland), during the times when Ireland was poor and short of food it worked better for Britain. When a population is short on food and basic supplies, they are less likely to worry about ideological issues such as government and are more concerned about surviving. A famous Irish politition (Parnell) recognised this and instead of concentrating on getting home rule for Ireland he first worked on getting the right for Irish people to buy their land. When this right was achieved, the movement for home rule exploded. This movement grew to create a situation where Ireland was a free state approx. 50 years later.

So in suming up - keep 'em poor and they're to busy struggling to bother you!

Re:Signals Intelligence Gathering

[AuMatar]

Yup, aware of all that. I have no doubt we could break their codes given time. Thats something we don't have here- we have people communicating ON THE BATTLEFIELD. Battles don't take days or weeks, vs guerillas they take minutes and hours. In order for the information to do any good, you'd need the code broken within minutes. Not hours, not days, minutes. Thats not doable. You might be able to grab a few pieces of info on the future dropped, so its worth the effort of breaking later, but for the most part the interception is worthless. And if the enemy is smart, the code cycles so frequently that we won't get enough of a sample size to break it.

Now using the signal to triangulate to the enemy- that could be useful. And I'm sure they're working on that.

Amerika is building 14 permanent bases in Iraq.

[kop]

Amerika is building 14 permanent bases in Iraq.
http://www.google.com/search?q=14+permanent+bases+ in+Iraq/ [google.com]

Your leadership is keen to hold press conferences on it, but you are there to stay.
It is the only choice they have because there simply is no base for a US friendly regime in Iraq.
To keep control over their oil you will need military presence

Re:It should be

[fufubag]

Oh Really? So you are telling me that women/people in general living in some countries run by Islamic Dictators have all the same rights as women do in the Land of The Free? I hope you aren't trying to tell me that, because it simply is not true.

Here's just one article that proves you wrong: http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/iran/document. do?id=BC7ABDB06436BBB9802569A500714EF4 [amnestyusa.org]

Re:Also, Not to be contrarian or anything

[tomjen]

Loss does not depend on who many troops are lost - then UK would have lost the second world war before Hitler went into The Soviet Union.

Loss depend on not getting the objectives you want. And therefore the US has lost (remember - the cakewalk? Did that happen?)

Re:We can intercept it all, understand none of it.

[cold fjord]

You didn't really capture the gist of the report [washingtonpost.com], so I'll excerpt:

The report credited Radio Sawa with attracting a large audience in key Middle East countries but said the station, which has an annual budget of $22 million, has been so preoccupied with building an audience through its music that it has failed to adequately measure whether it is influencing minds.

Two independent panels of Arab-language experts hired by the inspector general's office gave the programming a mixed review, saying it did not match al-Jazeera in terms of quality and that parents would prefer that their teenagers not listen to Radio Sawa because its broadcasts contained such poor Arabic grammar. "Radio Sawa failed to present America to its audience," one panel concluded.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors has vehemently protested the report, questioning its methodology and assumptions in a 49-page pre-publication rebuttal.

Of course, there is more.

Re:Is the war really being lost?

[debruce]

These aren't the refugees you're looking for. [nytimes.com] Nothing to see here. Move along.

...when six armed men stormed into their sons' primary school this month, shot a guard dead, and left fliers ordering it to close, Assad Bahjat knew it was time to leave.

"The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq," said Mr. Bahjat, standing in a room heaped with suitcases and bedroom furniture in eastern Baghdad.

In the latest indication of the crushing hardships weighing on the lives of Iraqis, increasing portions of the middle class seem to be doing everything they can to leave the country. In the last 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country's estimated middle class.

The school system offers another clue: Since 2004, the Ministry of Education has issued 39,554 letters permitting parents to take their children's academic records abroad. The number of such letters issued in 2005 was double that in 2004, according to the director of the ministry's examination department. Iraqi officials and international organizations put the number of Iraqis in Jordan at close to a million.
...
Mr. Abdul Razzaq, who will move his family to Syria next month, where he has already rented an apartment, said a fistfight broke out while he waited for five hours in a packed passport office to fill out applications for his two young sons.
...
"At the beginning we said, 'Let's wait, maybe it will be better tomorrow,' " Mr. Kubba said.

"Now I know it is time to go."

Cites for article's claims?

[Dire Bonobo]

> There's an interesting article ("The Real Iraq") I was reading today by Amir Taheri, about how the
> realities he finds in Iraq are different from what the media portrays. He also discusses a number
> of signs which cause him to believe conditions in Iraq are getting progressively better
> (especially compared to what they were pre-war).

This article indeed paints a very different picture of Iraq than the one we usually hear about, but some of its claims cite little or no corroborating evidence. It motivated me to a little digging on my own, though, to see what the situation is. Unfortunately, the reports I could find often contradict the article. For example, the article asserts:

"To the contrary, Iraqis, far from fleeing, have been returning home. By the end of 2005, in the most conservative estimate, the number of returnees topped the 1.2-million mark."

By contrast, in December 2005 the UN Refugee Agency noted: [unhcr.org]

"Some 20,500 refugees returned from Iran and Saudi Arabia with the support of UNHCR. Parallel to the organized return movements, the Iraqi Ministry of Trade recorded the spontaneous return of some 270,000 refugees to Iraq after May 2003."

That's only about 300,000 rather than 1,200,000. In fact, that same UN article states:

"UNHCR estimates that nearly one million Iraqis (of whom some 98,000 are registered refugees) are living in the countries immediately surrounding Iraq, and a further 350,000 Iraqis (of whom 166,000 are registered refugees) are living further afield."

Even assuming that doesn't count the 300,000 already returned, that's only a total of 1.65 million Iraqis residing or formerly residing abroad, of whom the article asserts 75% have returned to Iraq by "the most conservative estimate".

More importantly, though, that doesn't even take into account the reportedly-vast numbers of Iraqis fleeing Iraq. From a report entitled "Iraqi Refugees Overwhelm Syria": [washingtonpost.com]

"Syrian officials say 700,000 Iraqis from various ethnic, religious and economic backgrounds have arrived since the U.S.-led invasion, far more than in any other country in the region."

There are several other highly-questionable assertions in the article (e.g., Iraq is again a major oil exporter that will fulfill its OPEC quota of 2.8Mbpd by the end of 2006; the US Department of Energy reports [doe.gov] that Iraq doesn't even have an OPEC quota, and is producing at best 2.0Mbpd as of May 2006 [doe.gov]) and enough politicization and bias that, much as I'd like to believe what the author is saying, "The Real Iraq" is not a credible piece.