Insurgents Display New Sophistication
The Washington Post reports that Iraqi insurgents have apparently been tracking the movement of the US 1st Infantry Division units sent south from the Baghdad area and arranging for bridges to be blown up ahead of them.
“”The dropping of the bridges was very interesting, because it showed a regional or even a national level of organization,” Pittard said in an interview. He said insurgents appeared to be sending information southward, communicating about routes being taken by U.S. forces and then getting sufficient amounts of explosives to key bridges ahead of the convoys.”
Neither is this very encouraging:
“In a separate ambush east of Najaf, a group of fighters suspected to be part of Sadr’s militia let a group of six U.S. armored vehicles pass their position, then placed obstacles across the highway behind them, cutting off their line of retreat. The armored vehicles were forced to move forward across a bridge. While they were on the bridge approaching a police checkpoint, Iraqi fighters, some of them wearing police uniforms, began firing on them. No U.S. troops were hurt in the incident.”
Meanwhile, some kind of record in stupidity was set by the CPA spokesman, Dan Senor, when he stated that they were “listening to the silent majority”. You couldn’t make it up. It’s worrying that the best men the United States could find seem to be provincial PR execs who have never previously left the country, but I suppose there is a tradition for this. (Didn’t Harry Truman think that Stalin was just like a now-obscure party boss in Kansas City?) In the old saying: Luck will do for skill, but not consistently..