The takeaway here as far as I'm concerned is not AQI's innovation; that was fairly predictable. In the absence of order, and in the presence of a real potential to achieve power (remember that for quite a while it seemed like AQI might get its own state in Iraq, at least to them,) people form into bands dedicated to the seizure of power through the systemic application of violence to others. It's our chimpanzee nature. You can see it everywhere, e.g., the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, postcolonial Africa, etc. As far as the circuit boards-I would be surprised if this technical expertise was native to AQ and not provided by foreign advisors, but that's irrelevant.

The takeaway in my mind is as follows: immediately after seizing a place from its original government, it's paramount to establish complete population control. Total database entry, real-time tracking (both leveraging the latest technology,) accountability hierarchies and draconian enforcement. No airspace can exist between the new government and its subject population, because human nature abhors a vacuum of power. I think Luttwak wrote about this.

Also, it is impossible to create free-standing native institutions immediately after a conquest; even advised by your forces they won't be trustworthy, and will not synergetically enhance your ability to control the population. The idea that the local forces will provide the manpower and the US forces will provide the guidance and the enablers fails miserably when the latter don't have direct and complete control over the former. The two examples in the article (the refusal of UAV assets by the Americans and the pilfering of the exploitable material by the Iraqis) are flip sides of this coin. This problem is inherent in the "advising" paradigm; I myself have, in 2008, had to search my Iraqi "counterparts" after a cell phone located on an insurgent during a raid disappeared post-SSE. Of course, we found the phone on one of them. The only solution is to take a page from the book of every truly successful colonial power and create mixed institutions with an American leadership with total control over the pay and discipline of a local substrate.

An excellent article by Buchanan from an intelligence failure perspective or success from an enemy's point of view. . .thanks for sharing.

I have no operational experience in OIF, so I can't comment further, but what I can say is that Buchanan may be correct that Mashhadani may have been a former Iraqi intelligence officer?

I know that some former Iraqi intelligence officers from both the Iraqi Intelligence Service and the Directorate of Military Intelligence had worked with own CIA in the 1980s, so it would stand to reason if they were still active, they would understand how we operate.

It would further seem Mashhadani got into our loop and knew how we might operate, and was aware of our movements, but conversely, we weren't prepared to do likewise. . .what a way to fight a war, by allowing phase two guerrilla war to develope under one's nose in such a short time!

.... of the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 I know of one group comprised mostly of regular - though well-educated Iraqis forming up into secure cells (learned from the Irish) and with sunbstitute leadership figures (learned from Hamas).

I wouldn't go as far as to say Mr Mashhadani was a latecomer but at the same time he wasn't in the vanguard. Many members of the armed forces and intelligence services were waiting to see what would happen and for the most part (obviously not in Mr M's case) did not come online until late 2003 or early 2004.

There was no real difficulty in learning about the methods of the US military: apart from the early routines of patrolling, resupply and responses to contact (which were openly observable) the troops did not behave in any way that was significantly different to the British in pre-Free State Ireland, the French in Algeria or the Israelis in Palestine. A little historical reading goes a long way and on the history of colonialist powers the Iraqis are well schooled. Later, as the US bases became established, there was significant operational intelligence to be gleaned by the infiltration of operators as workers. The Us was even paying for the service.

However, some of the main problems for the Americans in Iraq at the time were homegrown. In an effort to depict the opposition as criminals, former-regime elements and foreigners intent of denying the Iraqis their freedom (and in an attempt to persuade the American public that their armed forces were being used for noble purposes), there were significant propaganda efforts aimed at the American public but disguised as intelligence. Unfortunately, as the information passed through the system, that is what it became and that is what was acted upon. The results were predictable.

Then there was the policy of the CPA which, ignoring the history of occupations, decided upon a type of year-zero approach to nation-building. Instead of utilizing the ruling class they outlawed them leaving the occupiers blind and ignorant of the workings of the society.

1) What this story points out is that the insurgency had its base in local Iraqi Islamists that were present in the country before the U.S. invasion. In fact, there were Islamist cells forming under Saddam, some of which turned violent. Saddam was trying to keep track of these groups with various levels of success. These men were throughout the Iraqi society, government, and military. When the invasion came and the government, fell these were the people that took up arms. So part of the narrative of the insurgency got it wrong. It wasn't just the foreigners coming in, and it wasn't just the disaffected Sunnis. It was Islamists already working largely covertly within Iraqi society, many with military, government, intelligence backgrounds that were the actual core of the insurgency.

2) Tom, I think you're wrong about the Bush administration. It might have seemed like they wanted a total revolution in Iraq, but they actually didn't. The administration itself back in Washington didn't want any responsibility for the running of Iraq, and until 2007 was unofficially focused upon withdrawing as quickly as possible, but the security situation would not allow them.

It was Bremer who wanted to transform Iraq and screwed up royally while trying to.

The picture presented in the main post here is consistent with the conviction some Americans developed at the time that intelligence failures in Iraq were, in no small part, a product of the unwillingness of both the Bush administration and the American military to see what they did not want to see.

The Bush administration committed itself to an evolving narrative of success -- first of "Mission Accomplished," then of mopping up operations against "dead-enders," later of "freedom on the march." I fear the American military command bought into this narrative -- or feared the career consequences of disputing it, or both -- to a degree that compromised its ability to preempt the insurgency before it established itself or to disrupt it afterwards.

Both the administration and the military formed a picture, one radically different from the reality of Iraq. I do not doubt for a moment that civilian and military officials had differences about what they sought to achieve, or that these differences mattered. I am less sure than Tom Ricks that the differences mattered more than the shared reluctance of both civilian and military Americans in Iraq to see what was actually in front of them.

Now, having said all that, I think I ought to add that part of the evolving American narrative, so self-deceptive in its entirety, was quite accurate. The Sunni Arab insurgency did really intend to deny freedom to the majority of Iraqi people. Many of its operatives do appear to have had a background in and commitment to the security services of the former government; it appears likely that growing Islamism among these operatives predated the invasion and may not in fact have been discouraged by Saddam's regime, which adopted a more outwardly pious Sunni Muslim orientation after the Gulf War. The agenda of the Sunni Arab insurgency went well beyond ending the occupation, as many thousands of Shiite Iraqis discovered; it produced a counter-agenda on the part of the Shiites that led to spectacular pogroms against Sunni Arabs in Baghdad and elsewhere.

The point is that the overall fatuity of the Bush administration's narrative of success shouldn't be used to put a gloss on a counter-narrative of Iraqi resistance to oppressive foreign occupation. The Iraqi insurgency, in its methods and objectives, was as savage and vicious as the Saddam government that supplied so many of its operatives. It inspired equal ferocity on the part of its Iraqi victims. It seems appropriate to me to remember this during a period in which another one of these damned narratives has taken over public discussion of political change in other Arab countries. It is almost always wise to be skeptical of stories that tell us what we want to hear.

Special Forces soldiers knew after the capture of Baghdad in 2003 that insurgents would fight until the US retreated because the Iraqis counterattacked. With what mighty weapon did the Iraqi insurgents challenge the mightiest, most mechanized war machine in world history? They used donkey carts. They mounted rockets on the back of donkey carts and fired the rockets into the green zone. It comes straight out of the book "Ancient Armies of the Middle East" by Osprey Publications. Plate 1 shows a Sumerian king in a donkey cart pointing his spear at the enemy while his driver handles the reins. The Iraqi insurgents told the US that Iraq had fought wars for 5,500 years and would not surender to the US military. Iraqis have also said that they regard Americans as cowards who hide behind their armor and air power because Americans are afraid to fight like men because the cowardly Americans might get hurt. If insurgents kill a few Americans, the rest will run away. This is what US dependence on machines tells all insurgents. It may not be correct, but the insurgents believe it. The reality is that casualties, expenses, and lack of an end causes reevaluation and a desire to end conflict without victories. That's why I advise adopting the War Powers Resolution as wise policy advice. The US can invade, destroy enemy forces, overthrow regimes, set up new regimes, impose a peace treaty, and leave in the 60 to 90 days provided by the War Powers Resolution. The new regime may not last forever, but any surviving former leaders that take power won't want another war and will change enough to suit our needs, so its acceptable. Had we left Iraq in the middle of June of 2003, we would have had a victory instead of a long, slow, disastrously expensive insurgency.

I think you make the mistake - perhaps partly inspired by the habitual use of the word insurgency - to ascribe a broad ranging, mutual agenda to a phenomenon that was, in reality, pretty diverse and fragmentary.

Mr. Buchanan points toward this in his reference to a Basra connection. JAM and the "Sunni" groups fought alongside each other in Fallujah and Baghdad with some groups continuing their military alliance at least into 2007.

There were many reasons for fighting and the majority of organized violence (and I'm not talking about maximum casualties) was directed against foreign troops.

As far as the Islamists were concerned, Iraq is a Muslim country and although many of the groups formed up around the mosque it would be incorrect to say that they were, at the outset, Islamist. However, as time went by and further pressure was applied, many people became more deeply religious and many radicalized. But I saw the same happen in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo. Indeed, I saw Islamist fighters in Kosovo who I'd first met and drank with in Bosnia.

Islamism spread to Iraq just like it did around the rest of the Arab world in the 1990s. Saddam even picked up on this and began openly using Islam, something he would have never done before with his secular Baath Party to help prop up the regime in his 1993 Faith Campaign. Islamist cells were formed during this period within the country as a result. The militant Ansar al-Islam was started in Kurditan during this period as well. Many of these groups were based around the Muslim Brotherhood. The branch of the Brotherhood in Iraq was led by Ahmad al-Rashid who called for moderation within Iraq and jihad in foreign countries for acting unIslamic.

After the fall of the government in 2003 these cells and groups were able to act more openly in the power vacuum that ensued, and a lot of these people became insurgent cells or joined Abu Musaq al-Zarqawi. Some would also go onto form the Islamic Army of Iraq and the Mujahedeen Army in Iraq both of which said they started before the 2003 invasion. Islamism provided organization and ideology for the budding insurgency in the country right form the beginning.

There's the example of Omar Hussein Hadid of Fallujah. He became an Islamist in the 1980s. He began speaking up against Saddam, blew up a movie theater, and killed a Baathist in the 1990s making him go under ground. After 2003 he moved back to Fallujah and quickly formed an insurgent group there. By 2004 he was the leader of the Black Banners Brigade in Anbar, and in 2004 he became a member of the ruling council of militants that was running Fallujah.

Nibras Kazimi of the Hudson Institute and the Talisman Gate Blog has also pointed out that Iraqis within the country who are during research on the insurgency there found that its origins were domestic Islamists as well.

Based on all that I would say that Islamism was a growing force within Iraq before 2003, and grew afterward, and was one of the early organizing ideologies of the insurgency right from the beginning.

I'm not arguing against the existence of Islamists of both a Brotherhood and Salafist nature being involved at the ouset. What I am saying is that they were far from being the only members of Iraqi society who decided to carry on the fight. To suggest so leads to a belief - which I believe is Mr Kazimi's - that without Islamic extremists the American project for Iraq (and the next stage of controlling the Iranian political scene) would have been a roaring success. There were enough (politically) secular nationalists among the initial groups to throw the plan into disarray. That many became more radical as the war progressed is simply a process of the evolution of violence.

The IED's began to make an appearance in about October of 2003 - with component sourcing and collection efforts starting in about July and August. There were two reasons for the wish to create a stand-off weapon of this type: one was the known psychological impact (again, learned from the Irish experience) and the other was as an effort to reduce civilian casualty incidents created by the American response to direct contacts. Hit and run attacks that induced such a reaction were seen to be undermining both popular support and the ability to recruit. Needless to say, the IED campaign just took on a very different life of its own as each side ratcheted up the intensity of violence.

The bottom line I'm trying to get across here is that, to say it was the Islamists is to deny that the real problem was the society itself. That is what everyone involved failed to understand at the time - and many today still do not wish to acknowledge and accept.

Steve----yes there were any number of different groups involved at any given time after 2003.

What I am trying to say is that it was the Salafists who due to their working in the underground in Iraq after the 1991 Shia uprising who had the expertise/training necessary to come out straight out of the chute and into a full phase two guerrilla war.

As to the use of the IED--mashhadani had already started the sourcing of the RC components two weeks after the arrival of the US in Bagdhah---meaning coherent designs, field testing, sourcing and deploying.

It is extremely interesting to watch how he worked the various designs and how he even in very early 2004 had created a RC device capable of defeating a perceived US jamming capability.

Also the key is how well was he connected to the various groups that were emerging in 2003---if one watches the development of the JRTN--I would argue that in fact the IAI is now the JRTN.

Note that though on average and in total the insurgents have less brainpower at their disposal, they use it much more efficiently. If the guy using IEDs has an idea for a better design or TTP, he tries it out. If it works, it spreads like wildfire across the horizontal structure. On the other hand, your average American troop doesn't have the skillset or the authority to innovate much; his weapon is designed to work according to an algorithm (ideally, point and squeeze,) and unauthorized modifications are punished (I remember the conventional guys were getting crushed for Kryloning their weapons and helmets, to say nothing of deeper innovation.) Even if he does come up with something good and doesn't get crushed, odds are pretty good that it will stay within his unit.

It didn't use to be like this-GI's used to be infamous for jury-rigging effective solutions to battlefield technical problems, but as those problems have become more complex, the general population's technical abilites have shrunk due to the dumbing of the middle class by an avocational school system, and the tech has become designed against user improvements, things have changed. Between the end user and the engineer/manufacturer, there are several layers of bureaucracy.

I remember redeploying from downrange and contacting a company which made and maintained mission-essential vehicle-mounted and manpackable electronic warfare systems to provide some questions, feedback and suggestion. Though the system had been in use for years and was absolutely critical to high-level mission success, the company was ecstatic to hear from me; the only feedback they'd heard from "the field" was a Colonel who yelled at them for making the wire carrying handles for the vehicle-mounted system too thin, so they hurt the hands of the operators carrying them 20 meters to the Humvee from the storage area on base and for making the backpack of the manpackable system black as opposed to ACU colored, thus causing wardrobe malfunctions. The troops, conversely, have no idea how the guts of their systems look, both physically and in terms of the software that runs them, and wouldn't be able make improvements even if they were authorized. Obviously, the development-testing-fielding cycle of US tech is very long, running to years.

There are less engineers working for JAM and AQI, and the ones who are working for them aren't all that awesome, but the brainpower is used more efficiently; everybody knows how the systems they're using work, and can make improvements on the fly, using their ingenuity and commercial-off-the-shelf components as they see fit. For instance, Mashadani's IED and tradecraft expertise quickly took on a life of their own and became ubiquitous, with constant improvements being made from the bottom up.The development-testing-fielding cycle is very fast. As 3-D printing, integrated logic design, and production (Arduino, Sanguino, etc.) become cheaper and more ubiquitous, this asymmetry will only get worse.

My proposal: leverage the new fabrication technology at the troop level. Create a six month long coding course and a six month long digital fabrication course. Give all troops at the end of their first three years the option to attend one in exchange for two more years of service, or both for a three year reenlistment. Create a state of the art fab lab (as described in Wired magazine) in every battalion-you can do this for about the price of an MRAP with all the guts. Create an internet architecture for sharing design and code. Authorize and encourage innovation. Leverage the ingenuity, perspective and motivation of the guys on the ground to make lethal and lifesaving improvement to their kit. Even those who leave the military after their reenlistment will be a net gain to the country, as they take their skills into the civilian economy.

The reality is that casualties, expenses, and lack of an end causes reevaluation and a desire to end conflict without victories. That's why I advise adopting the War Powers Resolution as wise policy advice. The US can invade, destroy enemy forces, overthrow regimes, set up new regimes, impose a peace bet365 treaty, and leave in the 60 to 90 days provided by the War Powers Resolution. That many became more radical as the war progressed is simply a process of the evolution of violence.