NYT: Insurgent Tet Offensive Shows the War Cannot Be Won

24 terrorists dead, seven wounded and captured. But it's a very disturbing sign:

20 - Iraqi insurgents ambushed an American military convoy in daylight outside Baghdad on Sunday, igniting a battle that left 24 of the attackers dead and 7 wounded, American military officials said. The unusually bold assault appeared to be the largest by insurgents against an American target since the Jan. 30 elections.

Six American soldiers were wounded in the ambush, in Salman Pak, a town 12 miles southeast of the capital, said Capt. Patricia Brewer, a military spokeswoman in Baghdad. The attack hit a patrol of the 18th Airborne Corps as it was driving through town, officials said.

At least seven people were reported killed in insurgent attacks elsewhere in Iraq on Sunday, including an American soldier patrolling near Kirkuk in the north and a senior police commander overseeing an anticorruption unit in Mosul, also in the north.

Details about the Salman Pak ambush were vague, but the audacity of the insurgents, on the second anniversary of the start of the American military campaign that toppled Saddam Hussein, showed that the guerrilla war still burns fiercely here, long after President Bush proclaimed major combat operations over and despite a high turnout among Iraqis in the Jan. 30 elections. As the violence persists and as the winners of those elections continue to haggle over a new government, the optimism from the vote is quickly fading among ordinary Iraqis.

If they kill our soldiers, it shows the war cannot be won.

If we obliterate three platoons of their terrorists, it also shows the war cannot be won, because the "audacity" of the attack is just, well, so audacious.

Heavens. A few more paper victories like this and America is done for as a nation.

Thanks to AndrewF.

posted by Ace at 01:17 PM

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