The second war followed quickly on the heels of the first. The question, of course, is whether what followed was a deliberate plan by Hussein's government or a spontaneous reaction to the utter disaster of the conventional war. The answer is unknown, but the result is not. In essence what happened after the collapse of conventional organized resistance was the beginning, after an interval of relative calm, of a guerilla war, classic in style and tactics. Small groups of lightly-armed insurgents--mixed Iraqi and non-Iraqi soldiers--started to mount hit and run attacks on American and British forces. They wore civilian clothing and, at the beginning, did not operate in large units. They did not hope to hang around and wipe out their targets. Instead, they simply wished to inflict a few casualties and then melt back into the civilian population. Layered on top of this was the use of suicide attacks, usually with cars. They could not hope to defeat coalition forces in open battle, but they could hope to inflict casualties, and to destroy any budding trust between American troops and the Iraqi population.
So proved to be the case. Building slowly but continuously, insurgent forces managed to inflict a steady stream of losses on the United States, mostly in ones or twos, but occasionally, as in the shooting down of a Blackhawk troop helicopter, substantially more. Most particularly effective from the insurgent perspective were roadside bombs--so-called Improvised Explosive Devices. Placed along the routes taken by American forces, they were manufactured out of whatever Iraqi forces had available and triggered by a range of different mechanisms. Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles were largely immune to the effects, but thin-skinned vehicles such as trucks, tankers, and Hummvees, were not. The bombs not only wounded and killed American soldiers, but threatened the logistics chains holding together American forces in Iraq. Though they were unlikely ever to cut the Americans off from each other, the resulting shortages and difficulties put the American forces unexpectedly on the defensive.
Fighting back was easy. Fighting back effectively was not. It was easy to inflict casualties on the insurgents, easy to step up roadside security, and easy to figure out ways to defend American forces against attacks. Unfortunately, the insurgents learned and improved in response. Those who did not were usually killed by American forces, which imposed a stringently Darwinian process on the guerilla campaign. In addition, and worse, other forces in Iraqi society saw the resistance and came to believe both that the occupying troops were vulnerable and that they were incapable of providing security. Ba'athist groups centered around Hussein's hometown of Tikrit and Shi'ite elements in the city of Najaf, loyal to the young Imam, Muqtada al-Sadr, were the largest and best organized, but others appeared as well. In addition, the American use of heavy firepower, especially in urban areas, the lack of quick elections, and continuing inability to provide basics such as clean water and electricity, began to build a sense of resentment and resistance to the occupation. Nationalism proved once again that it remains the strongest allegiance in the modern world, as Shi'ites and Sunnis, whose religious hatred goes back more than a millennium, nonetheless cooperated in resisting American forces.
This war is following a classic Maoist trajectory: small-scale attacks by small-scale forces at the start, building to larger and larger efforts by larger and larger forces.[1] At the beginning of the war, American and coalition forces controlled the vast majority of Iraqi territory. Insurgent attacks were few in number and small in ambition. Now, roughly a year after the start, American and coalition forces do not control substantial portions of Iraq--Najaf and Fallujah being particular examples--and the forces arrayed against them are much larger and more organized. American casualties, despite the handover to the interim Iraqi government, have increased in the past few months, major portions of the Iraqi population are deeply suspicious of the American presence, and Iraqi security forces cannot be relied on to fight, or even, if the arrest of a senior member in those security forces is an indication, to not help the insurgents. Mao would be proud: deny first control of Iraq to the coalition, convince the native population to support or at least not actively fight the insurgency, and inflict casualties. Expand second the fighting, establishing redoubts of territory as relatively safe havens for the forces of resistance. Next is to step back up to conventional warfare, opposing coalition forces in full-scale battles. The last is unlikely to happen: American superiority in firepower is simply too great.
But we're not going to be there forever, and in the meantime, a third war has broken out.
[1] Mao Zedong, [u]On Guerilla War[/u] (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
American Revolution
Opening Battles
1775
The conflict in Iraq has been, in reality, three overlapping wars. They have been fought with different weapons, by different people and sides, and with different strategies and tactics. But because they have all occurred in a place called Iraq and seemingly all have involved the same rough sides, we have missed the necessary methods to analyze and fight them.
The first war was the easy one. Starting in March 2003, it was a conventional war of the type the United States has trained for and fought continuously for the last century. The American military is--at the moment--unrivaled in the planning and execution of such a war. Such was March and April. A simple but ingeniously conceived war plan was greeted with near overwhelming success. First came the disinformation campaign. The Iraqis were convinced that any American assault would start with an extensive bombing campaign. Only after the "shock" and "awe" part of the campaign had ended would the ground warfare start. In reality, there was no shock and awe campaign. Instead, the propaganda was aimed at convincing Iraqi units and commanders to keep their heads down.
While they were waiting for the bombs, large armored columns--Army, Marines, and British--accelerated across the start lines in Kuwait and up the highways of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. After a short delay, airborne units dropped into the Kurdish north of Iraq (in the place of the 4th Infantry Division, unable to use Turkey as a base for attack into the north because of the diplomatic mishandling of the Turkish). The tactical and strategic surprise essentially enabled coalition forces to reach Baghdad before the Iraqis could react effectively. There were difficulties in defending the extended supply lines against irregular assaults from Iraqi light infantry--the fedayeen--but for the most part the attacks went about as well as expected. Upon reaching Baghdad, the Army and Marine Generals had expected to use the armored columns as blocking elements while light infantry cleared the capital, block by block. But, inspired perhaps by Israeli success at using tanks in urban areas in the West Bank and Gaza, elements of the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized), were sent on a "Thunder Run" on April 5th, driving their M1A1 Tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles directly down Highway 8 to the Baghdad Airport, directly through the center of the Iraqi defenses. The Iraqis were unable to stop them, or even inflict any serious casualties, though the defenders themselves suffered heavily.
The success led the Americans to repeat the "Thunder Run" on April 7th, but this time they headed into downtown Baghdad, captured one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, and remained where they were, in a sense hollowing out Baghdad from the inside. The Iraqi military collapse that followed was rapid and complete. Iraqi forces melted away, with many simply throwing down their weapons and going home. Others, it became clear later, retreated to fight another day, in another way. It was the end of the conventional operations, and the end of the war for which America planned.
It was not the end of the war, however.
Double-spaced, 12 pt font
1 inch margins all around
Footnotes & Bibliography in Turabian Style
Header with last name and page number
250 words/page
Rough Draft=2500-3750 words
Final Copy=3750-5000 words
Steve
Christina
Jess
Zack
Jimmy
Monica
Angela
Joy
Chris
Kelly
Greg
Tom
http://earlyamerica.com/review/winter96/enlargement.html
http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/african/2000/lynching.htm
History 308: French and Indian War
Map of the French-Indian War
French-Indian War
Map of Colonial Expansion:
Colonial Wars
http://library.osu.edu/sites/guides/turabiangd.html
History 308 Assignment Sheet—Paper 1
PAPER IS DUE SEPTEMBER 16TH
What to do:
You should choose one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and figure out why he signed the Declaration. To do that, you will have to research his life: who he was, why he was chosen by his state to represent it, what he said at the meetings leading up to the writing of the Declaration, and how that played a role in signing it.
New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton.
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No more than one person per signer.
Form: Your paper should be 3-5 pages. It should use citations. If you are a non-history/political science/social studies major you may use either MLA or Turabian Style for your citations. If you are a history/political science/social studies major, you must use Turabian style.
The paper must have a bibliography with at least five sources. Only two of these sources can be web sources. If you do use web sources, you must explain to me in a sentence or two after the bibliography entry why you think that this is a reliable web source. If you do not, or if I don’t find the explanation convincing, it will affect your grade.
