The Spectator.co.uk

Neither Fear Nor Respect:

The London Spectator has an interview with Lieutenant Colonel Jim Stockmoe, the senior Military Intelligence officer in Tikrit. He's a jolly fellow:

"Here's a funny story. There were three brothers down in Baghdad who had a mortar tube and were firing into the Green Zone. They didn't have a baseplate so they were storing the mortar rounds in the car engine compartment and the rounds got overheated. Two of these clowns dropped them in the tube and they exploded, blowing their legs off."

Abandoning the lifeless carcasses and smouldering wreckage of the car, the third brother sought refuge in a nearby house. The occupants were less than impressed, related Stockmoe, slapping his thigh. "So they proceeded to beat the crap out of him and then turned him over to the Iraqi police. It was like the movie Dumb and Dumber."

There have been so many examples of such incompetence that Stockmoe, who leaves Iraq this week after a year as the US army's 1st Infantry Division's senior military intelligence officer, has been doling out unofficial Darwin Awards in honour of the most side-splittingly useless insurgents.

Created in 1993 by a Stanford University student, the official Darwin Awards commemorate those who "contribute to the improvement of our gene pool by removing themselves from it in a really stupid way". According to Stockmoe, Iraq's gene pool is in better shape each day.

With a few more examples of 'an increasingly hapless insurgency,' the article explains the reason:

Stockmoe has a serious point, and a close look at insurgent attacks since the Fallujah offensive in November reveals that while the numbers might have increased, they are becoming less effective. The nine election-day suicide bombers averaged about three victims each, a strike-rate so bad that Allah might soon start rationing the virgins to show his displeasure.... The gap between the rhetoric and the actions of Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the Jordanian Salafist who leads the most brutal strand of the insurgency, has grown ever wider since he lost his base in Fallujah and was largely restricted to the Sunni corridor that runs from Mosul to north Babil.

Fallujah not only deprived Zarqawi of his base, but broke the alliance that Newsweek is reporting in this week's edition.

There was bitter dissent when Zarkawi and other insurgent leaders fled Fallujah and left their underlings to fight. Fear of betrayal has led to smaller cells operating ever more independently, preventing an overall insurgent strategy from developing.

Remember the dissent to the invasion of Fallujah? "So what if we attack the city and kill a few local boys. The leaders will just escape."

Right. But here again, war critics are involved in cultural illiteracy. A Western military expects its generals to fight from the rear, to slip away behind the rear guard to fight another day. This holds for Western-style guerrillas as well as regular forces:

Crimson the roadside, the prison wall, the cave,
Proof of their valour! Go sleep in peace ye brave!
Comrade tread lightly, you're near a hero's grave,
Proud die the soldiers of the Rearguard.

Not so tribal braves, who expect their heroes to fight from the front -- or, at least, not to abandon their soldiers to die. Zarqawi's flight places him, not in the Legion of the Rearguard, but in the league of General John Cope.

Cope sent a challenge frae Dunbar,
Sayin "Charlie meet me an' ye daur;
An' I'll learn ye the airt o' war,
If ye'll meet me in the morning."

When Charlie looked the letter upon,
He drew his sword and scabbard from,
Come, follow me, my merry men,
And we'll meet Johnnie Cope in the morning....

When Johnnie Cope he heard o' this,
He thocht it wouldna be amiss,
Tae hae a horse in readiness,
Tae flee awa in the morning.

Fye now, Johnnie, get up an' rin,
The Highland bagpipes mak' a din,
It's better tae sleep in a hale skin,
For it will be a bluidie morning.

When Johnnie Cope tae Dunbar cam,
They speired at him, "Where's all your men?"
"The de'il confound me gin I ken,
For I left them all in the morning."

Now Johnnie, troth ye werena blate,
Tae come wi' news o' your ain defeat,
And leave your men in sic a strait,
Sae early in the morning.

What the Redcoats may have thought of this, the Highlanders were not impressed. They would have thought less yet, should one of their own have done the same. When Charlie left the field, it was because his army had been shattered at Culloden. The leaders' flight before the storm wins no hearts in old Fallujah.