What is of far greater concern to U.S. commanders and analysts is that despite this broad strategic sense of when, and even on what scale, the new attacks would come, U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies have so far proven totally unable to prevent them. This appears to graphically demonstrate that U.S. forces in Iraq two years after occupying the country are losing the most important front in the war — the intelligence one.

In this sense, indeed, the position of the U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies, for all the overwhelming superiority of U.S. forces and firepower, is far inferior to that in Vietnam during the 1967-72 period. For the Phoenix counter-insurgency program did indeed inflict devastating damage on the political, undercover and intelligence forces or cadres of the Viet Cong. By contrast, U.S. forces and those of the new Iraqi government have so far signally failed to systematically penetrate the insurgent forces and significantly disrupt their organization.

Instead, evidence has been accumulating that extreme Islamist groups including al-Qaida have systematically penetrated the new Iraqi police and security forces and that they enjoy excellent and lethally efficient intelligence on their personnel. ~The Washington Times

Military affairs are not my specialty, but I am fairly sure that a war in which there is extensive superiority of intelligence on the other side is a war that cannot be “won” in any meaningful sense. Knowing more about the location, organisation and strengths of an enemy than he knows about you, as seems obvious, is decisive in determining the outcome of a conflict. It is already a given that this war will not end on conventional, state vs. state, second generation warfare terms. We unsurprisingly quickly won our conventional “second generation” war in 2003 and have been losing what William Lind describes as a fourth generation war.

Two very insightful points by Mr. Lind, excerpted from the Antiwar article linked just above, were these:

What “wins” at the tactical and physical levels may lose at the operational, strategic, mental and moral levels, where 4GW is decided. Martin van Creveld argues that one reason the British have not lost in Northern Ireland is that the British Army has taken more casualties than it has inflicted. This is something the Second Generation American military has great trouble grasping, because it defines success in terms of comparative attrition rates.

We must recognize that in 4GW situations, we are the weaker, not the stronger party, despite all our firepower and technology.

The geniuses in the War Party cheering section, whether in print, television or radio media, have consistently berated and mocked antiwar opponents for, among other things, being disgusted with the loss of both Iraqi and American life. They consistently almost laugh off American casualties as insignificant, which historically may be true, while pointing to the much larger number of insurgents killed. Surely, they laugh, this shows that the enemy is not really all that formidable at all and there is no imperative to leave anytime soon. But if Prof. van Creveld and Mr. Lind are right about Fourth Generation Warfare, the enormous disparity between Iraqi and American dead signals our eventual defeat.

As Mr. Lind argues later:

One key to success in 4GW may be “losing to win.” Part of the reason the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not succeeding is that our initial invasion destroyed the state, creating a happy hunting ground for Fourth Generation forces. In a world where the state is in decline, if you destroy a state, it is very difficult to recreate it.

This is the failure more of the political culture of the ideologues who cooked up the war than the military leaders who executed it, though it is my impression that both remain hypnotised by the mythos and imagery of WWII, “unconditional surrender” and the liquidation of the opposing leadership. After all, the logic is as straightforward as it is morally shallow. If “we” represent the forces of light, and they the forces of the darkness, then we can hardly fight to a simple, neat compromise, especially when we have such military supremacy to enforce our “will” on “them”; the “evil” enemy leadership has to be removed, not because this is the wisest thing to do for the post-war situation, but because this can be the only outcome of a war for erstwhile purification and liberation. A low, common, mob mentality (mass democracy) breeds the demands for total war and the totalitarian mentality that makes such war possible, this totalitarianism and total war breeds fanatics (neocons) and these fanatics are then helpless once they have waged a total war and annihilated the opposing state.

One suspects that their rather more intelligent predecessors in the late 1940s would have failed as badly as they are failing now, but for the capabilities and unanimous willingness of the occupied peoples to rebuild actively their destroyed states alongside the occupiers. Those nations for which the modern state is a recent, unpleasant imposition on more natural loyalties and affinities are the least interested or capable of rebuilding destroyed states, yet it is precisely among such people that we are endeavouring to create some half-baked welfarist social democracy.

The principled antiwar position is that the war should never have happened and, now that it has become an occupation, that the occupation should cease forthwith. That some of the more advanced military theory may end up supporting our arguments only underscores the rationality and intelligence of the antiwar position in this case.