The media’s "spin" cannot alter the reality on the ground, and the fact is the US is getting beaten quite badly. They’ve locked-horns with a crafty enemy that has neutralized their advantages in terms of firepower and technology and limited their range of movement. It’s shocking to think that after 4 years of bloody conflict, occupation forces still control "no ground" beyond the looming parapets of the Green Zone. This is a stunning admission of defeat.
The benchmarks for winning a guerilla-type war are fairly well known. The occupying army must quickly establish security in order to elicit the support of the general population. That’s why winning "hearts and minds" is such a critical task. If the occupation is widely unpopular, then reconstruction and security become impossible, and the armed-struggle flourishes.
Now that 80% of the Iraqi people say that they want to see a rapid draw-down of American troops, we can be certain that victory, in any conventional sense of the word, is out of the question.
Without knowing the answers to these questions, the United States, with all its high-tech surveillance gadgetry, is just a lumbering giant stumbling around aimlessly. The dependence on rounding up and torturing "military aged men" (MAMs) to gather intelligence about resistance activities and networks has backfired entirely; galvanizing the public against the occupation and eroding America’s claim of moral superiority.
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