Looking for Battle, Marines Find That Foes Have Fled

From the Washington Post courtesy of Eschaton:

The Marines were in the middle of Operation Matador, an assault designed to flush out and capture or kill foreign fighters who had come to Iraq to join the insurgency against the U.S. military and the Iraqi government that it supports. Severing the insurgents' network north of the Euphrates River, commanders said, would cut off the supply of guerrillas, guns and money that was moving from Syria into northwestern Iraq and being passed along for attacks in Baghdad and other cities.

But from the outset, as Marines swept west in what would be a week-long operation, scores of foreign fighters had fled ahead of them, residents of towns farther east told the Marine commanders.

And

"Where the [expletive] are these guys?" Maj. Kei Braun exclaimed in frustration.

It was noon Friday. The Marines had swept Arabi and found only frightened Iraqi families hiding in their homes. They had found more bombs in the roads, but no enemy to fight.

Marines said many of the foreign fighters fled west into Syria or to Husaybah, a lawless Iraqi border town where foreign fighters and local tribesmen have battled each other this month for control, shooting it out in the streets with AK-47s and mortars, American officials say. But the Marines lack the manpower to go into Husaybah.

Click here for the rest.

As New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh observed in his recent interview with Democracy Now, the Iraqi insurgents don't fight on the battlefield; they use bombs, assassinations, and stealth: these weird operations undertaken by the US military are not likely to find them, and the top brass most likely knows that. So just what are these raids about? Who, exactly, are the "insurgents" comprising the body counts that the Pentagon reports to the press? Hersh doesn't mince words. He believes that the bodies, for the most part, belong to innocent Iraqis caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that these raids are much more about making Iraqi citizens afraid of American power than they are about actually capturing and killing rebels. In other words, America is behaving like the Sith dominated Empire of the Star Wars films:

TARKIN: The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.

TAGGE: That's impossible! How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?

TARKIN: The regional governors now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.

I never thought I'd see the day.


The spirit of American freedom and democracy.

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