Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Enemy unable to wash the streets with blood

NY Times:

By increasing American troop strength in Iraq, banning all civilian car traffic and ordering a host of other security measures - some within standard military procedure and others distinctly not - American and Iraqi forces widely thwarted insurgents who had threatened to wash the streets with blood.

Even so, military officers acknowledged that the security measures could not all be sustained over time and that insurgents might still be capable of conducting a catastrophic attack.

But even on a day where as many as 44 people were killed and a hundred wounded by insurgent attacks, Pentagon officials and military officers said they had expected much worse. And they pondered whether their major offensive push over recent weeks had, in fact, knocked the insurgency back on its heels.

Some even cautiously ventured that election day had been a test for the insurgency, too, and it had been found unable to press a sustained, timed attack in the face of a concerted defense. And perhaps more importantly, it seemed unable to keep Iraqi voters at home through intimidation. The American military pushed its presence in Iraq from 138,000 to 150,000, the highest level since Baghdad fell, and one senior officer involved in the planning said insurgents had blundered in waiting too long to mount their own pre-election offensive.

US commanders should not have been that surprised at the ineffectiveness of enemy attacks. During the entire time of the insurgency the enemy has never mounted an effective attack against a defended position. While the election appeared to offer a target rich environment to the insurgents, it robbed them of two of their greatest assets, ambiguity as to the time and place of attack. Each polling place was defended with triple perimeters plus extensive overhead survelliance. Fox News repeadly showed video from the Predator drone that was used to capture the attackers of the US embassy.

The deadline of the election also had another effect on the enemy. It caused them to have to prepare for their planned attacks at a time when US forces were putting increasing pressure on its operatives, The cumulative effect of intelligence gathered with each capture tended to have an exponetial effect on the enemy's ability to operate. As I have said often in this space, the enemy did not have the capacity to attack the US ability to operate. In turn, the US forces focused on the enemy's ability to operate. It is hard to win a war when your operational forces are being rapidly attrited and your opponents forces are not being attrited in any significant way.