is the opposite of what your opponent expects. They expect us to engage them in urban warfare where our troops would be very vulnerable to ambush. What we're seeing might be a better approach.

First, there are the snipers. They've been very busy.

The marines won’t release any numbers of sniper kills (except that the top scoring sniper in Fallujah had 24 kills as of late April), but it is known from emails coming back that the marines use snipers, and sniping tactics (for non-snipers), extensively. Part of this is to comply with the Rules of Engagement (ROE) that call for minimizing civilian casualties. Most often, the marines only use a lot of fire power when they are ambushed (there is no better way to deal with an ambush than to blast your way out of it). But most of the Iraqi gunmen are killed by single shots, usually by the trained snipers, after the snipers and their commanders had carefully set up sniper firing positions that covered areas they knew Iraqis liked to travel through. UAVs and lots of scouting, plus questioning of prisoners, reveals the Iraqi routes and makes them deadly to use. This has terrorized the Iraqis, which is exactly what it is intended to do. The army and marine snipers particularly like to work at night, when their night vision and thermal imaging equipment enables them to shoot accurately in the darkness. This further reduces the chance of civilian losses, and increases the terror.

It's very demoralizing when the guy sitting next to you suddenly drops dead. Then, there are pinpoint attacks by things like Hellfire missiles and cannon fire from AC-130s. It's also demoralizing when the people next to you blow up.

You only go in in force when you have no other choice. An air strike only makes good sense when you have a known target.

Sure, we could very easily bomb the city to rubble. Would that make the situation throughout the rest of the country and region better or worse? There are some pundits who claim that because we took extraordinary efforts to keep civilian casualties to a minimum, the Arab Street doesn't respect us as much as they would if we went in using full Roman mode. While their culture is quite different from ours, I still have a hard time buying that line of reasoning. When the Luftwaffe was killing some 40,000 British civilians during the Blitz, their resolve hardened. The operative phrase, according to Churchill, was "Give it 'em back!" And so they (and we) did. Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Munich, and just about every other German city were bombed to rubble. That wasn't enough to get the people to quit the fight, and it made the German soldiers fight with renewed intensity because they knew what their families were going through. I have a hard time believing that going in full bore and inflicting mass civilian casualties would soften Iraqi public opinion.

And then, there's this. If true, perhaps the citizens of Iraq are being to get tired of all this and are starting to take matters into their own hands.