Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Important new report describes the 'Confidence' of the Iraqi insurgents
I have just put a post up at Just World News about a new report on the Iraqi insurgents issued by the very serious and well-informed, mainly European think-tank, the International Crisis Group.
(That link goes to a Word version of the 36-page report. You can get the PDF version here, or the Exec. Summary here.)
I do a mid-length analysis of the report and its important findings over at JWN. So go and read it there! But the bottom lines, really, are these:
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(1) Since mid-2005, the insurgents have been displaying a new level of confidence in "the prospect of an outright victory and a swift withdrawal of foreign forces", and (2) The insurgent groups are not nearly as fragmented and disparate as I had previously understood them to be.For me, the second of these two conclusions means that finding ways to deal with the main insurgent groups identified (who are only four in number) in order to conclude an end to the fighting and a peaceful withdrawal of all foreign forces is more achievable than if (as I had thought) the insurgents were all still splintered and in a state of mutual competitiveness. One big question remains, though. If a fairly small non-governmental research organization like the ICG can produce broad, sober, and excellently documented analysis like this-- what about all the gazillions of my US tax dollars that go into so-called "intel collection"??? I should imagine the total budget the ICG used for this report was probably <$100,000. But in their text they are quite derisive (and mystified) about the US government's apparent lack of interest in actually trying to find out about the insurgents-- as opposed to, for example, coining silly, Bush-like nicknames for them like "Islamofascists"... Oh well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
