The Nation | Blog | The Daily Outrage | 20,000 Dead-Enders | Ari Berman: "Virtually everything the US military has said about the Iraqi insurgency has been untrue. Maybe that's because--as a new report from the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA) shows--US military actions aimed at defeating the insurgency have served the exact opposite purpose by boosting its size and energizing its recruiting base.

Military assessments of the number of hard-core fighters quadrupled from 5,000 to 20,000 last July, as the number of attacks launched by insurgents jumped from 10 to 13 per day in early summer 2003 to 50 this May. Six hundred Iraqis have been killed since the new Iraqi government took power a month ago. 'The upsurge in violence during April and May indicates that neither the US military nor the nascent Iraqi security forces have managed to increase their capacity to control the country,' the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London concluded this week.

'A paradox haunts our counterinsurgency effort,' says PDA's Carl Conetta. 'US forces have succeeded tactically again and again, but insurgent activity remains four or five times as great as it was in early summer 2003. Public discontent is the medium in which the insurgents swim. And without it, could not persist.'"

(Via The Nation Weblogs.)