BRING IT ON:

2 pictures emerge of militants' power (Thanassis Cambanis, October 18, 2004, Boston Globe)

"I think it's wrong to call this a nationalist insurgency. They aren't nationalists," said US Army Brigadier General John Defreitas III, deputy chief of staff for intelligence of the Multinational Force-Iraq. "I don't see anything positive that's being offered by the former regime elements."

But at Sunni mosques across Baghdad on Friday, and across the western Anbar Province where guerrillas have operated freely out of headquarters in Fallujah and Ramadi, clerics exhorted Iraqis to prepare for a showdown in Fallujah with US and Iraqi government troops that most Iraqis view as imminent and inevitable. Since Thursday, US forces have escalated operations around the city, bombing suspected insurgent targets, closing roads into Fallujah, and seizing rebel checkpoints on its outskirts.

"God has chosen Iraq to be the graveyard of the Americans, just as he chose Afghanistan to be a graveyard for the Russians," cleric Abdulsalam al-Kubaisi said at Friday prayers at the Mother of All Villages Mosque in the capital.

Defreitas discussed the insurgency in an hourlong conversation at the Iraqi Presidential Palace, which now serves as the US headquarters. The official dismissed insurgent threats to wreak mayhem on Iraq's government and its economic infrastructure if US forces launched a full-scale invasion of Fallujah.

"There's no way the insurgents can stand the power we bring to the table," said Defreitas, the top US military intelligence officer in Iraq. "They will be defeated."

A senior military intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said US forces stood to gain if insurgents chose to fight in Fallujah, rather than melt into the surrounding countryside.

"Let them mass because then they are definitely going to fulfill their jihadist dream of going to heaven, because they're going to die pretty quickly," the official said.

Defreitas said the insurgency had much less power than the Iraqi public thinks, as evinced by what he described as successful US-led clearing operations intended to reestablish government control in the so-called Triangle of Death, an area south of Baghdad rife with insurgents and bandits, as well as in the Sunni Triangle city of Samarra.

"I think we're at a tipping point," he said. "I think the insurgency has been strengthening over time. But I think the current strategy is having an effect on the insurgency. It's slowing it down."

The hardest part of fighting insurgents is finding them--if you can get them to come to you, as at Tet, you win fast. Convince enough of them this is the "final battle" and it will be.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 18, 2004 7:33 AM