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Monday, March 28, 2005 |
 US Generals: Insurgency update. More foreign fighters, an ability to maintain 50-60 attacks a day, and an active presence over much of Iraq. More tomorrow.
8:32:21 PM 
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BBC. On Basayev. "Officially he is still fighting for Chechen independence, this is his slogan," explains Caucasus expert Alexei Malashenko. "But unofficially I think even he does not believe that is possible. I think we may compare his fight with the Basque resistance in Spain. Who believes in the collapse of Spain? Nobody. But the attacks continue." I concur.
5:55:16 PM
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General James Cartwright, Commander US Strategic Command runs a k-log (an organizational weblog). A poster at Sgt. Stryker got the scoop. He's using it to cut through red tape and bureaucracy.
“The metric is what the person has to contribute, not the person’s rank, age, or level of experience. If they have the answer, I want the answer. When I post a question on my blog, I expect the person with the answer to post back. I do not expect the person with the answer to run it through you, your OIC, the branch chief, the exec, the Division Chief and then get the garbled answer back before he or she posts it for me. The Napoleonic Code and Netcentric Collaboration cannot exist in the same space and time. It’s YOUR job to make sure I get my answers and then if they get it wrong or they could have got it righter, then you guide them toward a better way…but do not get in their way.”
5:43:38 PM
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Note to Instapundit. If you are looking for good news in Iraq, please don't refer to the debunked report of an Iraqi comando raid that killed 80 insurgents (no bodies found by US forces) and the Shia vigilante story (more ad hoc paramilitaries taking control). No good news there.
10:53:42 AM
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UPI. Drug sub. Colombian authorities have discovered a partially constructed submarine allegedly built to haul cocaine, El Tiempo reported Saturday
9:27:22 AM
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Interestingly, the Pentagon is slowly starting to realize that the boiling Iraqi insurgency is closely connected to criminal activity (this shift likely manufactured the story in the Times below). More is available from the Washington Times:
A Pentagon official said the more that intelligence agencies analyze the insurgency, the clearer it becomes that a large part is criminal, not nationalistic.
"We have always realized there was a criminal element in the insurgency that wasn't driven by devotion to Saddam. The numbers may be higher than we first estimated," the official said.
I suspect that the Pentagon parses this as a weakness. This insurgency and other global insurgencies continue to confound and confuse our analysts. For more, see Guerrilla Entrepreneurs.
7:40:47 AM
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NYT. The kidnapping business in Iraq. Scattered anecdotal evidence suggests that the epidemic of kidnapping, especially of children, is a force like no other in driving from Iraq the educated professionals who are critically needed for the rebuilding of the country. As stoic as Iraqis often are about the perils they face in their daily lives, kidnapping contributes to the national sense of instability and fuels mutual distrust - particularly because many kidnappings rely on people close to the target who pass information on net worth, daily habits and other matters of interest to hostage takers.
Technology makes it easier:
A profusion of mobile phones and SIM cards - memory chips for the phones - sold throughout Iraq from small and often unregistered shops made tracing calls from sophisticated kidnappers all but impossible, Colonel Faisel said. And he said that for all their help, American military and intelligence officials in Iraq had been slow to share surveillance technology that could aid the Iraqis in nailing the callers.
A highly decentralized business:
At least three different groups of kidnapping entrepreneurs became involved in his case, he said, the one that kidnapped him, another that guarded the container, and a third that tortured him periodically with steel-bristled brushes. The third group bargained with the first group to "purchase" him. See the Dark Side of the Long Tail for more.
7:20:58 AM
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© Copyright 2005 John Robb.
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