Now comes stage two of the insurgency: the flag-waving fools are gone, and it's the survivors in control -- guerrilla evolution, survival of the practical guys who want to win instead of dying gloriously. You see the same pattern with insurgencies in Algeria, Chechnya, Colombia: the martyrs get killed off, and the cold-blooded guerrilla operatives take over.
These guys know that there's only one way to win a guerrilla war: blinding the enemy by killing his spies, his native police force, anybody who cooperates with him. That's what's been happening in Iraq for months now, and nobody understands it. All they notice is that attacks on US troops are down.
Of course they are; they didn't work. Killing US troops was the insurgents' Plan A: "If we put enough bloody GIs' bodies on US TV, the cowardly Yankees will run away!" It was a reasonable idea, considering we pulled out of Somalia after losing only 18 men. But what the insurgents didn't realize was that Americans had toughened up after 9/11. Casualties didn't faze us like they used to. By election time the Iraqi insurgents had killed 1100 GIs, but Bush still won.
Time for Plan B. Plan B is classic guerrilla doctrine: "the long war," where you attack the invaders' local allies, not the foreign troops themselves. The idea is, if you wipe out Iraqi collaborators, the US is just a blind giant. He'll stick around for a while, stumble over the countryside wrecking stuff, but sooner or later he'll get sick of stubbing his toes and go home.
So the insurgents are ignoring the hunkered-down, heavily fortified American bases and hitting the key, soft targets: the Iraqi police. And damn, are they killing a lot of those boys! On one day, May 9, 80 Iraqi police were killed. On average, five cops a day are dying. It's safer selling Bibles door-to-door in Peshawar than strolling through Baghdad in an Iraqi cop suit.
by guesstimating do you mean that many of his ideas aren't backed up by proven fact?
if so, i think much of his style might be guilty of this. But that's what makes it so useful:
he's got the experience, intelligence, and imagination to make some pretty damn good inferences (inductive) based on sometimes scant information.
In other words, he's very astute at reading inbetween the lines, and presenting a raw strategic/tactical perspective rather than snippets of sometimes distorted "mediaspeak"
what's so preposterous about that idea? (assuming i'm reading you correctly)
Over time, in a war, insurgents are weeded out, leaving the surviving ones.
Survival is partially a function of your abilities as a fighter, therefore it is more likely that those who remain alive are the ones that are better/smarter fighters.
I think the article explores this theme quite clearly.