We are all Qaeda now

By Libby

If you're paying attention to the rhetoric spun by our military brass in Iraq, it appears al-Qaeda has had a huge recruiting success in the country. As Glenn Greewald documents today, suddenly they're not fighting insurgents anymore. It's all Qaeda, all the time now. Nevermind that even Bush himself admitted not so long ago that the actual numbers of al-Qaeda forces were only a tiny percentage of the insurgency.

As for this latest offensive is working out, no matter how you define the enemy, well, it's not going all that great.

“Frankly, I think they knew an operation was coming in Baquba,” General Odierno said. ...“They watched the news. ..So they knew we were going to come sooner or later.”

Still, he implied American commanders may have played a part by flagging the offensive in advance. “I think they were tipped off by us talking about the surge, the fact that we have a problem in Diyala Province,” he said.

Yeah, that's what happens when you plan your tactics according to their political benefit to the president rather than the military advantage on the ground. To quote my favorite pundit, Yogi Berra -- it's deja vu all over again.

Addressing the problems facing American troops in Baquba, General Odierno played down the significance of the Qaeda leaders fleeing ahead of the offensive, saying American forces would hunt them down. “I guarantee you, we’re going to track down those leaders,” he said. “And we’re in the process of doing that. We know who they are, and we’re coming after them, and we’re going to work that extremely hard.”

Is anybody keeping track of how often we've heard those same words? It feels like hundreds of times in the last four years to me. And let's hear it for the same old signs of success.

“So far, within Baquba,” General Odierno said, “there have been many successes: four weapons caches have been found and cleared; three truck and car bombs have been captured and destroyed; over 25 deep-buried I.E.D.’s have been found and cleared, many of them pointed out by the local populace; and 10 house-bound I.E.D.’s have been destroyed — those are 10 houses that have been rigged with thousands of pounds of explosives to try and kill us as we enter.”

How encouraging. It only took 30,000 soldiers and huge air strikes to capture 10 empty houses. They found 4 caches with an undetermined quantity of weaponry, and 38 limited range bombs. Meanwhile all the head honchos of the newly renamed insurgency got away. I wonder how much it cost us in tax dollars for this "decisive" victory? I'm guessing close to a billion and frankly, I don't think we're getting our money's worth out of the deal.