“What is clear is that the US has already suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq. A flagrant act of aggression in- tended to be a demonstration of un- trammelled US imperial power to im-
pose its will on the heart of the oil- producing Arab and Muslim world has instead demonstrated a fatal vulner- ability to “asymmetric warefare”. It’s also true that, as a senior US intelli- gence officer told the Washington Post this week, “The British have basically been defeated in the south”. Far from keeping rival militia from each other’s throats, over 80% of violent attacks in the area are directed against British troops.

“…More than any other single fac- tor, it has been the war of attrition waged by Iraq’s armed resistance – or insurgency as it is usually described in the western media – that has successfully challenged the world’s most pow- erful army and driven the demand for withdrawal to the top of the political agenda in Washington. Two years ago the US vice-preident, Dick Cheney,insisted the insurgency was in its “last throes”. ………but the guerrilla war against the occupational forces has continued to escalate. There are now over 5000 attacks a month, a more than 20-fold increase on four years ago, and the US and British death toll is rising. Opinion polls show there is a majority support for armed resistance across Iraq; in Sunni areas it is over- whelming