Strategy Page gives us a look at a new development in the war in Iraq. A couple of brief extracts:
The puzzle of the growing, at least in the number of people killed, anti-government attacks shows a lot of the key people, especially the money guys, operating across the border in Syria.
So the government has told the coalition to do whatever it takes to suppress the Baath Party and its supporters. This could get very ugly, because it means sending in raids with orders to take certain people "dead or alive." Family members will be arrested and held hostage (a traditional Iraqi, and Middle Eastern, technique for getting fugitives to surrender). Specially trained Kurdish and Shia Arab police SWAT teams will be used for a lot of this, supervised by American Special Forces. Raids like this, carried out by American troops, have been going on for over a year, but the Iraqi government has now authorized the use of a much larger list of suspects.
In the past, only people who were obviously guilty were sought. But now, the known allies and kinfolk will be rounded up. This will be seen, and reported by the media, as "war on Sunni Arabs." Well, not quite. It will be war on a minority of the Sunni Arab community. The war will extend into Syria, where the attacks will be made by Iraqis or Syrians hired for the occasion. There are a lot of hired guns in that part of the world. There might even be a smart bomb or two going off in the middle of the night, in the middle of Syria. And the Syrians, knowing the alternatives, may feel compelled to ignore all of this. Who wants to go to war to defend Saddam's war criminal buddies.
The reports from both January 7th and January 9th at the Strategy Page will interest anyone following the war against the Iraqi Baathists.