The Fromson File

Well, How About That? A lengthy frontpage article in the Thursday (April 19) New York Times quotes a Pentagon intelligence report that comes to this conclusion: Many of the bombings and attacks on American and other allied forces in Falluja have been carried out by some 1,500 to 2,000 “hardcore” insurgents “organized and often carried out by by Saddam Hussein’s secret service who planned for the insurgency before the fall of Baghdad.” The insurgents included “members of the Iraqi Special Republican Guard who melted away under the American-led offensive….” Last October 31, the FromsonFile included this item: "Perhaps then the attacks on U.S. forces actually may be the work of surviving elements of the elite Republican Guard that the Pentagon assured us was all but destroyed during the war." Fighting Culture, History and Tradition: In the same edition of the Times, see the Opinion page for a fascinating perspective on Falluja by Sandra Mackey. She points out that U.S. officials simply were ignorant of a town that not even Saddam Hussein could control completely. “What the Pentagon is neglecting (aside from his die-hards and foreigners promoting the ideology of Al Qaeda) is a third group, one that could prove more deadly to the occupation: the tribes of central Iraq. They are a tough lot with a long history of resistance to any outside authority.” Mackey reminds us that the people of the high desert north and west of Baghdad fought off Hussein, the British and Ottoman Empire. Read on and shake your head. A good deal of the blood-letting in Falluja might well have been avoided had some of the academic geniuses in the Pentagon like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz given more priority to history than ideology. You can not fault the U.S. Army or the Marines for the mess they’re in. They’re good men led by intelligent officers. But ultimately, they are doing only what they’re told to do by the men in the button down suits on the Potomac. You know, the ones really running the war in Iraq who dismiss the notion that there are lessons to be learned from Vietnam.