Last Throes

The New York Times finally picks up on a story that Knight Ridder Washington Bureau first reported over a week ago: Sunni insurgents in central Iraq are getting better at killing U.S. troops. How? By building a better Improvised Explosive Device (IED).

The insurgency continues to adapt to U.S. countermeasures faster than we can come up with new ones. Now that armored Humvees are finally getting to Iraq in significant numbers, the insurgents are starting to deploy IEDs with shaped charges capable of piercing such armor. And now that our forces are jamming radio signals to foil detonators made from cell phones and garage door openers, the insurgents are turning to infrared detonators that are impervious to radio jamming. Most disturbing of all, these adaptations aren't just keeping the insurgency lethal -- they are actually making it more lethal than ever before.

The result? IEDs now account for 70% of U.S. casualties, and the death toll from IEDs reached a new high in May and June. This, in turn, helps account for why the U.S. death toll is currently running at 2.13 per day in the period since the Iraqi elections -- as against 1.89 per day in the period between the "end of major combat operations" [sic] and the "handover of sovereignty" [sic]. All of which, in turn, helps explain why (as the increasingly indispensable Knight Ridder service also reported about a week ago) top U.S. military officers in Iraq are now openly saying that the insurgency cannot be ended by military means.

Maybe this is the kind of complication that the head of MI6 had in mind when he expressed his now famous worry that, "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." In any case, if these are, as the Vice President would have it, the insurgency's "last throes," I'd hate to see what the damn thing looks like in the full bloom of health.