This time last year, April 8th 2004 IIRC, was the day that all hell broke loose acros big chunks of Iraq, with insurgents from all factions coming out to raise hell. Sunni's forces in just north of BIAP ambushed a fuels convoy, and insurgents tried to storm the walls of BIAP as well. Sadr's Mahdi Militia tried to partition Sadr City into it's own little Shia enclave, and a larger force Mahdi's Army moved into action from Kut to Najaf to Karbala. Instead of heading south to Kuwait and home, 1st AD along with 2 ACR was extended for 90 days more to deal with that threat among others. This week should be pretty lively, and don't forget, Spc. "Matt" Maupin has been in captivity for almost one year, if he is still alive.

Hhhhmmmm...Maybe my history is a little clouded, since I was only in senior high school in 68, and living on an island in the western pacific, where there were lots of Navy, Marine, Coast Guard and Air Force personnel (and the B-52s) but....

This is nothing more than a larger scale attack, and in all fact, a suicide one at that. I guess these guys forgot the ruin brought on them in Fallujah (ah, how soon we forget!)

Tet was a country wide, coordinated assault, in a combined arms (as much as could be given the NVA had essentailly no air force to speak of, and only patrol gun/torpedo boats) manner, supported by the uniformed ground forces of a separate county.

Had the Iranian, or Syrian armed forces, joined in (and, oh, btw, let the "insurgents" take the burnt of the attack, so as not to be living trouble makers later on), then we'd have a Tet like deal.

In the mean time, just more martyrs, not more political pull.

On the other, in a non-military aspect, if the MSM starts howling how we are losing and how could they have attacked in the middle of Baghdad sort of lines, and then repeat them over and over, unitl the "opinion polls" ask "are we losing?" then we may have that attribute of the Tet experience.

We soundly routed/demolished/destroyed major units of the Viet Cong and NVA during Tet, but the press convinced the people that we lost because a few guys got into the US Embassy grounds (and we immediately dispatched them to the beyond).

It should be fun in the next few days to see what might "rather" be said about all this.

This is definitely the Jihadi Version of the Tet Offensive. The Jihadi's must have skipped the parts of Ho Chi Minh's book where Ho Chi Minh's "Human Waves" suffered 35,000 dead and another 60,000 wounded.

Why the ambiguousness about enemy casualties? Normally there has been a much more exact count. Did the enemy get their dead and wounded off? With Apaches roaming overhead? Something about this story has always sat strange with me.

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that these attacks have been uniformly unsuccessful. I don't just mean that they haven't captured any objectives -- Sadr's forces, a year ago, managed to hold several cities for a while -- but that they haven't managed even to hurt many people:

They had mass casualties, but only one that had to be flown out.

No one was hurt and there was no significant damage.

I'm just thankful that no American Servicemen or prisoners were killed in the action.

A big bomb that takes out an armored vehicle is a success of a sort, but if it only resulted in one severe casualty and no fatalities, it's not much of a victory. The US can build another armored vehicle for every one blown up. It's our soldiers we care about -- every one is, in his way, irreplacable.

My suspicion is that the insurgency is dealing with hastily trained recruits at this point, many of the hardened fighters having gone into the earth. Obviously some of the top guys are still around to plan these things -- the attacks are well planned and reasonably coordinated. But there don't seem to be talented enemy fighters on the line. And they're not surviving the encounters in sufficient numbers to become veteran units.

US forces have the benefit of training; they have the benefit of a vastly higher survival rate, so that the soldier becomes a veteran; they have the benefit of being able to rotate home, to rest and consider as a unit what lessons are learned. At this point, we can rotate Iraqi war veteran forces in even as we rotate the others out.

The war isn't over, as Hawk says. However, the enemy currently in the field is not the threat it once was. I don't see any trends that suggest it's going to improve. Our forces, by contrast, continue to get better.

Tactically the attack was a failure.

This attacl isn't even hitting the mainstream media to any large degree. There's other, "more important" news, to thank for that. And since no U.S. soldiers were killed, it is a non-event to the MSM.

So politically, the attack was a failure.

Even as a recruiting tool, I don't see how this is anything but a failure as well. For all the grand claims al Queda made about the attack, none are proving true (except that an attack took place.)

There was a good op-ed on National Review Online today about this.

http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins200504060759.asp

As Austin Bay opined, the attack in Abu Ghraib could just about only have been for publicity purposes only, 'freedom fighters,' 'Abu Ghraib,' etc. Instead, they got nothing. I think they're starting to get a little desparate for some airtime, what with being squeezed out of the 5 o'clock news by the whole election thing.
Look for them to try something real kooky/scary (but sloppily) in order to regain the headlines.

Iraq may have been a training ground for terrorist that spread to the other parts of the world, but if they can't pull out some kind of moral victory in Iraq; and it increasingly looks like they won't, Al Queda is going to have some serious street cred problems. They might have to go for some softer targets, like France.

There's a great article about the Balad Ruz firefight at http://www.timesfreepress.com/iwwl/pitts040605.html

SFC Ski,

At the risk of quibbling, I must say that the day of the attack in Sadr City was April 4th, not the 8th.

Their Tet Offensive was last spring with the Fallujah uprising and the Sadr militia. It came close to having an effect on morale, especially here at home when we diverted our efforts from Fallujah to Najef and Sadr City and the rest of that neck of the woods.
I suspect it would have had a larger effect on morale here had it not been for the Milbloggers on the ground explaining why getting the renegade Shi'ites under control had to come before we had the luxury of stacking up piles of bodies in Fallujah. Revenge, while sweet has to take a back seat to long term strategy.
What is going on now looks like the last ditch efforts of those with nowhere to go. Ordinary Iraqis are getting the confidence to turn these clowns in, most of the surviving insurgents have enough blood on their hands so as to not have great faith in any amnesty. The foreign insurgents have no place to go except maybe Iran. The Saudis are actually fighting them, Jordan sure doesn't want them after that attempt to gas downtown Amman, the Democracy Babes would open a can of whoopass on 'em if they try Lebanon and the Syrians are diving under the table every time a car backfires thinking it's the first of many JDAMs.
They're screwed. All they can do is try to take somebody with them as they go. The tragic thing is that some will succeed.

"sixteen minor injuries from shrapnel who have been returned to duty"

I can see why you were worried about the November election, back in 'Nam John Kerry got a Purple Heart for his fiction writing while there was real fighting going on! But most of that fighting was done by 19-20 year olds, including some who were shake-and-bakes. Some things never change, still not too many Ivy Leaguers doing the fighting.

Well, I am only going by memory, but I know that on April 4th, things were pretty calm and we were getting ready to leave Baghdad, and on April 8th big pillars of smoke were rising into the sky from burning fuel tankers, Sadr supporters in black and green were running all over the place, and unidentified Iraqis were coming over the wall at BIAP, and by April 9th we knew we were not leaving.

I guess I will have to wait for the book to come out.

The latest attacks seem to be 'well coordinated' by terrorist standards insofar as they manage to field a respectable amount of men and weapons to create a real threat. But they are badly executed, very badly. I think we are seeing the results of Fallujah. It seems to me that while the big fish organizers managed to escape the net, the cream of the insurgency's experienced fighters was wiped out. I would say that what we would call their veteran NCOs have by and large been taken out, leaving a reasonably effective braintrust to rely on raw jihadis that immediately get their heads blown off without effective battlefield leadership. This is very good news. If we killed off the bulk of the veteran Chechans and Hezbullah grunts who were stiffening the rest, we may actually have produced a more effective result than nabbing Zarqawi and his ilk.

I think the attack on Abu Graib is interesting from a strategic viewpoint. Has anyone asked, "Why?"

There are 3,600 detainees in Abu Graib according to the above post, not to mention other Iraqi prisoners. Maybe... just maybe... we have someone inside whom the terrorists want released. Maybe we have one or more experienced terrorist commanders. Maybe we have someone even higher up whom, if we only knew who we had, could really spill the beans.

Remember, we HAD captured Zarquawi at one point, held him for a bit, and let him go. Maybe we have him, or someone almost as high, at Abu Graib. Maybe we KNOW we have him, and the terrorist higher-ups do too... but we don't tell because we want to extract as much intel as we can and crush the remaining cells, and they don't tell because they don't want to face the crushing morale disaster that acknowledging his capture would be.

It wouldn't surprise me if Zarquawi was killed in the next couple of weeks, and it wouldn't surprise me if he was 'killed' either.