Monday, July 24, 2006

As I've noted before, somehow land mines aren't considered a big problem when they're deployed against Americans:
"The other unexpected development was the realization that IEDs were nothing new. They had been used before, especially in Vietnam and World War II (by the Japanese in the Philippines), but with much less success. That's because Iraq was unique in ways that made the IED a widely used weapon. The primary reason for that was the inability of the Iraqi terrorist to deal with American troops head-to-head. When they tried that, Iraqi casualties were lopsided and very bad for terrorist morale. IEDs eliminated most of the risk to the attackers. The Iraqi terrorists, backed by ample supplies of Baath Party cash (stolen oil money), lots of technically adept, but unemployed (they had worked for Saddam) Sunni Arabs, and ample supplies of explosives (Saddam had bought huge amounts of munitions), it was possible to make lots of IEDs. So what if the Americans avoided 90 percent of them, the remaining ten percent still produced plenty of casualties. Attempts to repeat this use of IEDs elsewhere, like in Afghanistan, have failed. The same conditions were not present, as was the case in previous wars where IEDs showed up."