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In 281 b.c, the Italian kingdom republic of Tarentum asked Pyrrhus, king of the Hellenistic nation-state of Epirus, for assistance against Rome. Pyrrhus landed on Italy with 25,000 men and entered into combat with Roman forces. His army defeated the Roman army at a battle near Heracleia, but when he realized that the Romans could easily replace their lost soldiers, Pyrrhus sued for peace. The Roman senate demanded that he withdraw from Italy before negotiating a peace treaty. Pyrrhus declined the demand and fought another battle at Asculum. His casualties were so great that he uttered the now-famous exclamation, “One more such victory and we are lost!”
Hence the term, “Pyrrhic victory.”
Belmont Club explains the new desperation among the Iraqi insurgents, and the bad tactical blunders they are making as a result. He cites a CBS news report about a recent attack on the American-held Abu Ghraib prison.
Last Saturday’s attack on Abu Ghraib in particular is a case study in how not to conduct guerilla warfare. Al Qaeda assaulted the prison complex from several directions with rockets, mortars, car bombs and small arms. The battle raged for two hours. No Americans were killed; 16 were slightly wounded, seven others hurt more seriously. Between 40 and 60 terrorists took part, and they admitted to ten killed, a KIA rate of 17-25 percent. The overall enemy casualty rate including wounded was probably over 50 percent. No prisoners were freed. Al Qaeda claimed the raid was a success, but a few more victories like this and theair insurgency will be over.
I was about to write that the Iraqi insurgents are fighting Pyrrhic battles, but then I remembered - Pyrrhus won the battles that ruined him. The insurgents are being destroyed and ruined in defeat.
See also Austin Bay, Bill Roggio and James Dunnugan.
Austin also comments on a battle today between Saudi security forces and al Qaeda terrorists in the town of Rass, 220 miles northwest of Riyadh.
The US-led attack on Saddam and Iraq’s emerging democracy have changed the “strategic calculus” in the region. The war’s “back home.” In May 2003 the Saudis had a major fight with Al Qaeda, and from what I’ve managed to piece together, they have been increasingly active in combating Al Qaeda. That’s good news, after a fashion. The Saudis home turf fight will be slow and brutal, a hideous, complex mix of civil war, tribal conflict, and religious war.
Remember, while Osama bin Laden has said that the United States is his main enemy, the “land of the two holy mosques,” Saudi Arabia, is his main objective.
UD: Thanks to Michael Edward McNeil for pointing out that Tarantum was actually a republic not a kingdom.
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An online news and commentary magazine concentrating on foreign policy, military affairs and religious matters.
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April 7th, 2005 at 7:15 pm
In the truest sense of the saying, it is far more likely that the “victory” of the US in Iraq will turn out to be Pyrrhic - for any of a number of reasons leading which would be the establishment of a Shi’a Theocracy closely allied to Iran.
No, not out of this current “administration” but looking forward say five years after the US finally remove their “control” from the area.
The first step? Surely the newly elected Prime Minister Jaffari!! Read href=”http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/”>Riverbend February 18 “Groceries and Election Results” for a few ideas…
April 7th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
Riverbend is hardly the best source of news from Iraq. That scion of Bath’ists is not to be trusted.
April 7th, 2005 at 10:51 pm
Interesting, Final Historian, that you do not dispute the facts; only assassinate the character.
Does Jaffari NOT have strong links with Iran in the past?
April 7th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
“Does Jaffari NOT have strong links with Iran in the past?”
Not any stronger than Byrd had with the Klan.
Keep hoping, there’s a one in ten thousand chance it will all fall apart.
April 8th, 2005 at 4:10 am
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3769861.stm
“The Daawa Party is one of the two biggest Shia political parties in Iraq.
Founded in the 1950s, it is the oldest of the Shia Islamist movements.
…
A senior Daawa figure, Sheikh Mohammed Nasseri, returned to southern Iraq from exile in Iran shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, as part of an attempt by the party to re-establish itself after years of clandestine existence. ”
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040811-030906-9371r.htm
“While on a visit to London to visit family and for medical reasons, Jaafari spoke to UPI correspondent Bassam Alloni.
He expressed fears of deliberate attempts to undermine Iraq’s relations with neighboring Iran and denied reports of infiltration of Israeli intelligence and Syrian armed opposition groups in Iraq.
Jaafari was born in Karbala in central Iraq in 1947. He studied medicine at the University of Mosul and joined the Islamic Daawa Party in 1974, later becoming the group’s official spokesman.
Forced to leave Iraq after ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein banned the Daawa Party, Jaafari sought refuge in Iran and resettled in Britain in 1989 where he remained until the end of Saddam’s rule in 2003. ”
OK, so I can see quite clearly from this that Jaffari is a Ba’athist and has no connections with Iran, and that the Ba’athist Party was a Shi’a organisation.
Yeah, right.
Dream on, your sweet dreams of right wing propaganda…
April 8th, 2005 at 7:01 am
I think Phyrric victory is still appropriate. As long as the MSM keeps portraying them as “insurgents” instead of mercenaries, thugs and murderers, they are still winning on some level.
April 8th, 2005 at 7:45 am
Fascinating:
Democracy in Iraq is a conservative “dream,” theocracy a liberal one.
The times, they are a changin’
April 8th, 2005 at 7:52 am
Probligo, do you not know how to read? Final Historian said that riverbend was a baathist, not that Jaafari was a baathist. And even Islamists can be democrats. Case in point, Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey. Iraqis want security, prosperity and democracy (in that order), not sharia. This has been clearly proven in several opinion polls done in the last few months. You’re obviously hoping for failure and misery for Iraqis to “prove your point”. It’s you who needs to get his head out of the propaganda trough.
April 8th, 2005 at 8:04 am
Tarantum was actually a republic not a kingdom. One of the problems with Pyrrhus’s incursion was that he subverted the independence of the free Greek cities of southern Italy — the very people he was called over to assist.
April 8th, 2005 at 8:27 am
LD57,
“I think Phyrric victory is still appropriate. As long as the MSM keeps portraying them as “insurgents” instead of ”
At this point, it doesn’t matter what the MSM believe,
it is what the Iraqi people believe. “Terrorist Confessions”
is Iraq’s most watched TV show.
April 8th, 2005 at 10:19 am
I think Historian’s caution re Riverbend is wisely placed, not because of her assumed familial connections but more properly because demonstrated ability to accurately reflect and/or predict previous events of significance is pretty poor. Regardless of any Ba’athist connection, she has reliably been a voice of doom and gloom, predicting imminent civil war and widespread national chaos for two years now. She predicted disasterous failure at the polls, failure in Falluja, failure in Najaf, … Choose any topic or event in Iraq and she has predicted the worst, and usually been wrong. I certainly wouldn’t place any bets on her advice, especially not about the people of Iraq rolling over after five years of freedom and giving in to a theocracy.
April 8th, 2005 at 10:26 am
Sounds more like Fort Steadman when Lee attacked the Petersburg line in 1865. A huge effort by the Confederates was hardly noticed by most of the Union forces.
April 8th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
“”We won’t make the new constitution based only on the Quran [the Islamic holy book]. It is true that the majority of Iraqis are Muslims, but we will try to take many constitutions from around the world and use them as references for us to bring the best for Iraqi people. Women will have their rights and if there are women with competency and specialisations to take high places in the government, it will be a pleasure for us.
“”
Jaffari
I think there is a basic misconstruction of the Daawa Party, its members, the disires of members, its leaders and so forth. The Daawa party is in part religious because, parties have traditionally been formed around religious groupings as per Muslim-Arabic history. Religion is more embedded as a mode of expressing political desires than in the west but does not necissarily relate to religious dominance of the discourse. That issue was essentially settled in the 3rd caliphate. And though religious rule has reared its head time and again throughout the muslim world, it generally only lingers for several decades - sometimes longer.
In any respect, Jaffari’s relationship with Iran has less to do with his perceived desires to establish a shia dominated religious Iraq asit has to do with Iran’s desires (at the time) to harbor
anti-saddam elements.
I think there is a hope on the part of many in the west to see a shia dominated government
come to power and install sharia law just so they can say “look it failed, we warned you.”
This is a dastardly hope. it is also naive and racist to think that that would necessarily .
be the case. For some reason, people believe there is some genetic predisposition amongst arabs towards acceptance of and desire for autocratic religious rule. Arabs, as many people, have free will,can form thoughts all their own and even have unique desires that conflict with their governments, religions and social setting. As any people do.
I have long held that democracy is more likely to be well taken and recieved in the arab world than many other places just because of its culture. A major component of traditional arab tribal, mercantile and religious culture is compromise. Democracy is all about compromise.
I would say that the Iraqis will now come into their own.
daivs
April 8th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
It seems that the left is obsessed with the idea of theocracy in Iraq, perhaps because they feel this is the best outcome possible now since their hopes for victory for Saddam and Al Qaeda have been crushed. They have ever been fond of dictators, tyrants, murderers and thugs, as long as they aren’t friendly to America.
I’ve just finished ready [i]The Dragons of Eden[/i] by Carl Sagan, which is about the development of human intelligence, and while reading it, I had an epiphany. Toward the end of the book he gets into a lot of the biology of the brain, and about how the hemispheres control different functions. The right half controls emotions and the left controls logic, which is nothing new, but he cites many studies about how right hemisphere dominance, or left hemisphere deficiency, is prevalent among paranoid schizophrenics, (such as leftie moonbat conspiracy theorists), and how people who are right brain dominant are often irrational, emotional, and unable to see logic. I think that sums up the lefties quite nicely. See, it isn’t that they have a valid political viewpoint, they just need medicated.
April 8th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
probligo,
We heard the same thing about Japan and Germany and S Korea, long long ago.
There used to be a joke about Japan:
Japanese Man: “Have you read the new consitution?”
2nd Japanese Man: “No, has it been translated into Japanese yet?”
Many people assumed that Japan would quickly lapse back into imperial feudalism, based on some imagined defect in genetics or “Oriental character.” They thought the idea of a democratic Japan to be no more than a pipe dream.
April 8th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
Instead of “Pyrrhic,” may I suggest “Quixotic”?
April 8th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
“[Sagan} cites many studies about how right hemisphere dominance, or left hemisphere deficiency, is prevalent among paranoid schizophrenics, (such as leftie moonbat conspiracy theorists), and how people who are right brain dominant are often irrational, emotional, and unable to see logic. I think that sums up the lefties quite nicely.”
Soooo, (thinking cap lights up!) Is there any evidence that the concentration of *left-handed* people is any higher among the moon-bats? Or is left-handed-ness *not* related to brain-hemisphere dominance?… Just wondering….
April 8th, 2005 at 4:26 pm
As a word lover, I love to see the use of words that originated from a person’s (or character’s) name.
Not including things like Marxist, etc. But words like pyrrhic, quixotic (mentioned above), draconian, platonic and so forth. Thanks for highlighting this!
April 8th, 2005 at 6:07 pm
“[The Left] have ever been fond of dictators, tyrants, murderers and thugs, as long as they aren’t friendly to America.”
Just as The Right have been equally fond of dictators, tyrants, murderers and thugs, as long as they suited America’s foreign policy goals - is it so easy to forget the Shah and Somoza?
I think that the fears of an Iran-style theocracy in Iraq are overblown, but the disputes between Kurds, Shia and Sunni don’t appear to be going away anytime soon. The Kurds are not really interested in a free, democratic Iraq as much as they are in an independent Kurdistan, just as they have been for the last century. As long as the political scene encourages Kurdish ambitions for eventual sovereignity, they will support it; whether the Shia and Sunni will be content to see them depart in peace remains to be seen.
As far as the insurgency, I’ve been reading reports of its iminent demise for 2 years now, so I remain skeptical. It seems to have broad support in the Sunni Triangle, and I anticipate that it will continue to be running sore for some time to come. Attacks such as Abu Guarib are more symbolic than anything else - I doubt that the insurgents seriously expected to take the prison with 60 men. The attacks on Iraqi police, paramilitary and civil servants, OTOH, are far more serious, and the new government will need to demonstrate very soon that they can control the situation in order to maintain legitimacy.
April 9th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
Lay off the lefties, guys. The real ones, not the political ones.
I was snoring through a physics lecture at MIT one day when a sheet was passed around for an informal poll on handedness. Turns out the proportion of lefties there is 2 to 3 times higher than the national average (but all the desks are right-handed - go figure). And they’re not barking leftoid moonbats in the physics department. Nerds and geeks, maybe, but not moonbats. “Lefty” and “left-wing whackjob” are independent concepts.
Lefty