Word: guerrillaism
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...highest-ranking officer at the front was honest in assessing one of the most unsettling battlefield surprises: Iraqis are resisting vigorously. And they're doing so in ways that seem to have caught Washington off guard--that is, by embedding paramilitary forces behind the front lines to engage in guerrilla tactics that can't win the war but can dangerously drag it out. If the Pentagon's plan was to fight from the "inside out"--a lightning drive on Baghdad to decapitate the regime and then liberate the rest of the country--Saddam has counterattacked from the outside...
...Fedayeen were schooled to become a ruthless instrument for quelling dissent. Skilled in torture and assassination and willing to die for Saddam, the Fedayeen are perfectly suited to their dual mission behind enemy lines. They have always operated outside the law, so they don't flinch at adopting guerrilla ruses damned by the Geneva Convention. They're willing to turn their AK-47s on Iraqis to keep them from surrendering. British officers say the Fedayeen are forcing the unwilling remnants of Iraq's 51st Infantry Division to continue the fight at Basra...
...armed conflict, guerrilla tactics can be an equalizer. They are weapons, China's Mao Zedong once wrote, "that a nation inferior in arms and military equipment may employ against a more powerful aggressor." That's precisely the situation in which Iraq now finds itself. The coalition rules the skies over Iraq--Saddam's tiny air force hasn't once scrambled its jets since the start of fighting--raining down Wagnerian fury on cities and armies. In open combat, Iraq's armored divisions are being annihilated by allied forces. In such circumstances, it is natural for the Iraqis to resort...
...Fedayeen will run with their tails between their legs." If war planners worried about the paramilitaries at all, they assumed the trouble might come in Baghdad. The CIA says it distributed a classified report in early February to policymakers warning that the Fedayeen could be expected to employ guerrilla tactics against U.S. rear units. These Washington intelligence analysts now complain that their views were softened as the report moved up the chain of command. The intelligence was there, an official told TIME, but "I have no idea how much attention they paid...
Adam and his friends were guerrillas--though the word wasn't commonly used until some 40 years later, when Spanish peasants harried Napoleon's army in the Peninsular War. Indeed, the Columbia Encyclopedia notes that guerrilla tactics have been called "the great contribution of the American Revolution to the development of warfare." In this early part of the conflict in Iraq, Saddam Hussein's forces have borrowed heavily from that old American innovation. Now, before you send off enraged e-mail, I'm not suggesting any moral equivalence between the Minutemen and Saddam's thugs. But it is surprising that...