Counting insurgencies

The Post and The Times both look at the ongoing -- in fact, intensifying -- insurgency in Iraq.

The Post looks at the proliferation of extremist Islamist sites tallying "martyrs" in Iraq and finds that a large and growing percentage are coming from Saudi Arabia.

"Ah," you say, "Dear Leader's dare to 'bring em on'," using Iraq as "flypaper" is working. Terrorists that could be attacking us, on our own soil, are blowing themselves up in Baghdad. Victory in the Global War on Terror (GWOT)." Um...well... if by "us" you mean Crown Prince Abdullah, and "our own soil" you mean the Saudi peninsula, then I guess you are right.

Many of the suicide bombers appear to have been novices in warfare, attracted by the relative ease of access to Iraq and the lure of quick martyrdom. "This is not al Qaeda's first team," said Hammes of the National Defense University. "These are the scrubs who could never get us in the States."

The Times, meanwhile, looks at the insurgency and finds far less certainty than the Post's story would imply, and far less intelligence as to who -- and why -- the insurgents are.

Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21 people.

This surge in the killing of civilians reflects how mysterious the long-term strategy remains - and how the rebels' seeming indifference to the past patterns of insurgency is not necessarily good news for anyone.

It is not surprising that reporters, and evidently American intelligence agents, have had great difficulty penetrating this insurgency. What is surprising is that the fighters have made so little effort to advertise unified goals.

Counter-insurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency; if, as in China in the 1930's or Vietnam in the 1940's, it is taking insurgents a few years to organize themselves; or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation.

"Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate, there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare. The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he continued. "And there's a name for these guys: Losers."

"The insurgents are doing everything wrong now," he said. "Or, anyway, I don't understand why they're doing what they're doing."