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Monday, April 05, 2004 |
 Zeyad reports on what is going on in Baghdad right now:
No one knows what is happening in the capital right now. Power has been cut off in my neighbourhood since the afternoon, and I can only hear helicopters, massive explosions, and continuous shooting nearby. The streets are empty, someone told us half an hour ago that Al-Mahdi are trying to take over our neighbourhood and are being met by resistance from Sunni hardliners.
5:59:18 PM 
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Final report of the US Power Systems Outage Task Force on the 2003 blackout is now available.
4:35:56 PM
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AP. New poll by Kohut puts Bush's approval ratings at lowest level ever.
Four in 10, or 40 percent, approve of the way Bush is handling Iraq, while 53 percent disapprove. That's down from six in 10 who approved in mid-January, according to the poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
Bush's overall job approval is at 43 percent, a low point for his presidency, down from 56 percent in mid-January. In the new poll, 47 percent disapproved of Bush's job performance. Bush's job approval soared to 90 percent after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and remained in the 70s for almost a year after that.
Unfortunately, the invasion of Iraq may serve to emasculate our war on terrorism. It seems that my essay from early last spring is going to play out (here is the what it means section):
- The first iteration of the Bush doctrine will bog down. The war will be more difficult to fight than anticipated. Terrorist counter-attacks after the war is done will send US troops home in body bags. The costs of the effort it in Iraq will balloon to rapidly eclipse what we spent in Vietnam. The opposition to every US effort in the region will grow both internally and externally.
- Bush will run out of time and loose the re-election. As his father before him, Bush will loose the 2004 elections due to economic considerations. This will spell the end of the Bush doctrine.
- The new administration will find that it is now caught in a ME quagmire with few friends and several aggressive foes. The new administration will slowly attempt to unwind the situation by pulling out US troops and support for the new Iraq. There will also be an attempt to return to the multi-lateral track of terrorist containment with little success. Iran and N. Korea, effectively inoculated against US attack will continue to develop nuclear weapons with impunity. One day, in the next decade, one of those bombs will end up exploding on US soil.
4:23:32 PM
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Ed Cone reminded me of this post made over a year ago. It included this quote that is reminiscent of Fallujah:
Russian wounded and dead were hung upside down in windows of defended Chechen positions. Russians had to shoot at the bodies to engage the Chechens.
Given al-Sadr's control of much of Baghdad, plentiful armament, and ongoing support from Iran: we may still yet get our urban guerrilla war. In Iraq, overcrowded urban environments are the equivalent of Afghanistan's mountains.
4:10:10 PM
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WSJ Opinion. Good insight from Mark Bowden (the author of Black Hawk down) on Fallujah.
2:00:46 PM
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Jim, Ethan, and Joi push their benign version of the second superpower. I am not as sanguine on how the second superpower will develop. I also think my view is more realistic.
12:59:05 PM
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VOA. Sharon uses the highly contested US presidential elections as cover for a potential decapitation strike against Arafat.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in interviews published Monday, has indicated he is backing away from a pledge to President Bush not to harm Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
10:43:14 AM
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Jennie Bev has started an outsourcing weblog. Another analyst turned weblogger.
10:36:30 AM
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The al-Sadr disaster in Iraq is in large part due to the ad-hoc incrementalism of US policy. The slowly increasing pressure (the closing of his newspaper and the arrest of his close aide for murder) against al-Sadr telegraphed the US intentions. A better approach would have been to draw the organization into the open and take it on in one massive simultaneous attack. I wrote about this approach last week in Global Guerrillas.
These aforementioned missteps in approach belies this statement made today:
Senor and U.S. Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the deputy operations chief in Iraq, wouldn't answers reporters' questions concerning when al-Sadr would be arrested, or his whereabouts. ``There will be no advance warning,'' Senor said in the televised briefing.
How much more advanced warning could we give?
9:38:27 AM
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NYT. A revolt by al-Sadr's militia inflict 7 US combat fatalities (now 8) in Iraq.
The addition of al-Sadr's militias quadrupled the guerrilla forces in Iraq in one day. Iraqi guerrilla forces are now within striking distance (~1/4) of the number of guerrillas the Russians fought in Afghanistan. A bright spot is that al-Sadr's forces are still operating as conventional forces (militias) in an attempt to sieze territory. This will allow US forces to inflict substantial casualties on them until they go to ground. The downside is that US casualties may be high over this period despite the fact that US will win the engagements.
This is a very, very bad day for the US effort in Iraq.
9:24:16 AM
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NYT. I think this points to a need for more entrepreneurial thinkers in the US government:
Coit Blacker, a longtime friend and colleague of Ms. Rice at Stanford who is now director of that university's Institute for International Studies, said any blind spots she had upon taking office in January 2001 might have been rooted in the fact that she emerged from a generation of scholars trained to focus on great-power politics, with terrorism seen as a troubling but subordinate element.
"It wasn't until after Sept. 11 that most of us realized that for the first time in human history," Mr. Blacker said, "a nonstate actor, a group of religious extremists at the very bottom of the international system, had the capability to inflict devastating damage on the very pinnacle of the international system."
The difference in the mindset of non-state actors and nation-state officials is similar to the difference between that of entrepreneurs and big-co managers. Condoleezza, as smart as she is, appears to hold a classic big-co mindset (which explains her blind-spot prior to 9/11).
9:05:39 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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