More on the Surge

Here is an amazing article on the surge planned by Bu$h - what makes it so powerful is that its author, former special forces solider Stan Geoff, knows a thing or two about war;

For those who are susceptible to the personification of war, that is, the reduction of whole populations to a single leader—as in, “we are going to take out Saddam”—I will remind readers that Sadr City is half men and half women, with 40 percent of the population under 14 years of age. A million children. Sadr City is approximately 33 million square feet. That is a population density of one child per 33 square feet—less than a 6-foot-by-6-foot room. The very smallest lethality radius from so-called precision weapons delivered by aircraft is about 20 meters.

Do the math.

In Fallujah, a mass evacuation was organized before the general assault on the city. The mandatory mass evacuation went through checkpoints in the American cordon sanitaire. While women and children and very old people were allowed out, all “military-aged males” were turned back into the city, which, once the assault started, became a free-fire zone, and those men were dealt with like the Jews of Warsaw. Thousands of people refused to evacuate for a variety of reasons. They were subsequently caught up in the general slaughter. This is the likely operational template for Sadr City.

There is another calculation associated with these kinds of “surge” operations: the aftermath. Muqtada al-Sadr has been effectively demonized in the U.S., but he is wildly popular and influential in Iraq, especially in southeastern Iraq, which has heretofore shown the least resistance to the Anglo-American occupation. In an attack on Sadr City, according to powerful rumors, Kurdish peshmerga troops will be used to do some of the fighting, an insane political gambit. If the Americans proceed with what appears to be a cruel and mindless plan (surely emanating from Dick Cheney’s lair) there will be a possibility of igniting the Mother of All Tactical Nightmares for the U.S.: a general armed Shiite uprising in the southeast.

A must read.