So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?

by Ray McGovern
Consortiumnews.com
October 6, 2007

Who's afraid of the Israel Lobby? Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat – Conservative, Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again – and not only on Capitol Hill.

Seldom has the Lobby's power been as clearly demonstrated as in its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War:

* Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best to sink it and leave no survivors;

* The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and

* By that time 34 of the Liberty's crew had been killed and over 170 wounded.

Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a forty-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching this live wire. Even more telling is the fact that the National Security Agency apparently has destroyed voice tapes and transcripts heard and seen by many intelligence analysts, material that shows beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.

The Ugly Truth

But the truth will come out – eventually. All it took in this case was for a courageous journalist (an endangered species) to listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the president on down, off the hook for suppressing – even destroying – damning evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.

The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on interviews with those most intimately involved. A lengthy article by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled "New revelations in attack on American spy ship." To the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year: "Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of deadly 1967 incident."

Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of the incident and cover-up for a very long time and have tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today. It has proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian Dog-Bites-Man article published than an article with the importance and explosiveness of this sensitive story.

A Marine Stands Up

On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield, Missouri. A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The study had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly. When the draft arrived, however, shouts of "Leper!" were heard at the Atlantic. The monthly wasted no time in saying thanks-but-no-thanks, and the leper-study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American publishers. Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March 2006.

I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of courage as well as scholarship. That's what I told the questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:

First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and the so-called "neoconservatives" running our policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now calls the "enduring" military bases in Iraq, which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the U.S. to dominate that part of the Middle East.

Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the Lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter-bombers and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill its entire crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy, and the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it could – literally – get away with murder.

I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty? And so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack on the Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on the gentleman nearest me.

Ramrod straight he stood:

"Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir."

Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us what happened.

"Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, Sir."

You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues, and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967. He was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest – and most easily identifiable – ships in the fleet with antennae springing out in all directions.

Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8. After the air attacks including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three sixty-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at the Liberty's starboard hull. Lockwood had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame. The torpedo had struck dead center in the NSA space.

The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning. Three were still alive; one of Lockwood's shipmates dragged one survivor up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one-by-one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the hatch. This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.

At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard – even after almost 40 years.

What Else We Know

John Crewdson's meticulously documented article, together with the 57 pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in his book Body of Secretsand recent confessions by those who played a role in the cover-up, paint a picture that the surviving crew of the USS Liberty can only find infuriating. The evidence, from intercepted communications as well as testimony, of Israeli deliberate intent is unimpeachable, even though the Israelis continue to portray the incident as merely a terrible mistake.

Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who was the Navy lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, named by Admiral John S. McCain (Sen. John McCain's father) to "inquire into all the facts and circumstances." The fact that they were given only one week to gather evidence and were forbidden to contact the Israelis screams out "cover-up."

Captain Boston, now 84, signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8, 2004 in which he described himself as "outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.'" Boston continued:

"The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew...Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded – a war crime...I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure of sinking a ship of the U.S. Navy is open to speculation. One view is that the Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a move. Another theory: James Bamford, in Body of Secrets," adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis were well aware.

As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the Israelis involved and ask, no? The important thing here is not to confuse what is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the purpose behind it, which remains a matter of speculation.

Other Indignities

Bowing to intense pressure from the Navy, the White House agreed to award the Liberty's skipper, Captain William McGonagle, the Medal of Honor....but not at the White House, and not by the president (as is the custom). Rather, the Secretary of the Navy gave the award at the Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the acrid Anacostia River. A naval officer involved in the awards ceremony told one of the Liberty crew, "The government is pretty jumpy about Israel...the State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal."

Adding insult to injury, those of the Liberty crew who survived well enough to call for an independent investigation have been hit with charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.

Now that some of the truth is emerging more and more, others are showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent email, an associate of mine who has followed Middle East affairs for almost 60 years, shared the following:

"The chief of the intelligence analysts studying the Arab/Israeli region at the time told me about the intercepted messages and said very flatly and firmly that the pilots reported seeing the American flag and repeated their requests for confirmation of the attack order. Whole platoons of Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now says they do not exist, then someone ordered them destroyed."

Leaving the destruction of evidence without investigation is an open invitation to repetition in the future.

As for the larger picture, visiting Israel this past summer I was constantly told that Egypt forced Israel into war in June 1967. This does not square with the unguarded words of Menachem Begin in 1982, when he was Israel's prime minister. Rather he admitted publicly:

"In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."

Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and mounted provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a response that could be used to justify an expansion of its borders. Israel's illegal 40-year control over and confiscation of land in the occupied territories and U.S. enabling support (particularly the one-sided support by the current U.S. administration) go a long way toward explaining why it is that 1.3 billion Muslims "hate us."

Federalism, Not Partition

By Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Leslie H. Gelb
The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 3, 2007; A23

The Bush administration and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki greeted last week's Senate vote on Iraq policy -- based on a plan we proposed in 2006 -- with misrepresentations and untruths. Seventy-five senators, including 26 Republicans, voted to promote a political settlement based on decentralized power-sharing. It was a life raft for an Iraq policy that is adrift.

Instead, Maliki and the administration -- through our embassy in Baghdad -- distorted the Biden-Brownback amendment beyond recognition, charging that we seek to "partition or divide Iraq by intimidation, force or other means."

We want to set the record straight. If the United States can't put this federalism idea on track, we will have no chance for a political settlement in Iraq and, without that, no chance for leaving Iraq without leaving chaos behind.


¿ First, our plan is not partition, though even some supporters and the media mistakenly call it that. It would hold Iraq together by bringing to life the federal system enshrined in its constitution. A federal Iraq is a united Iraq but one in which power devolves to regional governments, with a limited central government responsible for common concerns such as protecting borders and distributing oil revenue.

Iraqis have no familiarity with federalism, which, absent an occupier or a dictator, has historically been the only path to keeping disunited countries whole. We can point to our federal system and how it began with most power in the hands of the states. We can point to similar solutions in the United Arab Emirates, Spain and Bosnia. Most Iraqis want to keep their country whole. But if Iraqi leaders keep hearing from U.S. leaders that federalism amounts to or will lead to partition, that's what they will believe.

The Bush administration's quixotic alternative has been to promote a strong central government in Baghdad. That central government doesn't function; it is corrupt and widely regarded as irrelevant. It has not produced political reconciliation -- and there is no evidence it will.


¿ Second, we are not trying to impose our plan. If the Iraqis don't want it, they won't and shouldn't take it, as the Senate amendment makes clear. But Iraqis and the White House might consider the facts. Iraq's constitution already provides for a federal system. As for the regions forming along sectarian lines, the constitution leaves the choice to the people of its 18 provinces.

The White House can hardly complain that we would force unwanted solutions on Iraqis. President Bush did not hesitate to push Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari out of office to make way for Maliki, and he may yet do the same to Maliki.

The United States has responsibilities in Iraq that we cannot run away from. The Iraqis will need our help in explaining and lining up support for a federal solution. With 160,000 Americans at risk in Iraq, with hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and with more than 3,800 dead and nearly 28,000 wounded, we also have a right to be heard.


¿ Third, our plan would not produce "suffering and bloodshed," as a U.S. Embassy statement irresponsibly suggested. And it is hard to imagine more suffering and bloodshed than we've already seen from government-tolerated militias, jihadists, Baathists and administration ineptitude. More than 4 million Iraqis have fled their homes, most for fear of sectarian violence.

The Bush administration should be helping Iraqis make federalism work -- through an agreement over the fair distribution of oil revenue; the safe return of refugees; integrating militia members into local security forces; leveraging the shared interest of other countries in a stable Iraq; and refocusing capacity-building and aid on the provinces and regions -- not scaring them off by equating federalism to partition, sectarianism and foreign bullying.

To confuse matters more, the administration has conjured a "bottom-up" strategy that looks like federalism and smells like federalism -- but is, in reality, a recipe for chaos.

"Bottom-up" seems to mean that the United States will support any group, anywhere, that will fight al-Qaeda or Shiite extremists. Now, it always made sense to seek allies among tribal chiefs to fight common terrorist enemies. But to simply back these groups as they appear, without any overall political context or purpose, is to invite anarchy. Nothing will fragment Iraq more than a bottom-up approach that pits one group against another and fails to knit these parts into governable wholes.

Federalism is the one formula that fits the seemingly contradictory desires of most Iraqis to remain whole and of various groups to govern themselves for the time being. It also recognizes the reality of the choice we face in Iraq: a managed transition to federalism or actual partition through civil war.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Leslie H. Gelb is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The IED problem is getting out of control. We've got to stop the bleeding

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007; A13

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- By the late summer of 2002, as the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington approached, an American victory in Afghanistan appeared all but assured.

A pro-Western government had convened in Kabul. Reconstruction teams fanned out through the provinces. U.S. and coalition troops hunted Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants in the mountains along the Pakistani border.

Among the few shadows on this sunny Central Asian tableau -- besides the escape of Osama bin Laden -- was the first appearance of roadside bombs triggered by radio waves.

There were not many. U.S. forces would report fewer than two dozen improvised explosive devices of all sorts in Afghanistan in 2002. But the occasional RC -- radio-controlled -- bombs were much more sophisticated than the booby traps with trip wires typically seen by American troops.

A triggerman with a radio transmitter could send a signal several hundred yards to a hidden bomb built with a receiver linked to an electrical firing circuit, which in turn detonated an attached artillery shell or a scavenged land mine.

That receiver included a slender box about three inches square housing a modified circuit board resembling a long-legged spider. The Spider Mod 1, as the device was dubbed, would remain a weapon of Afghan bombmakers in various iterations for more than five years -- and an emblem of defiance against the world's only military superpower.

Captured Spider devices were shipped to the United States for forensic examination. Maj. Gen. John R. Vines, commander of the U.S. task force in Afghanistan, had a sense of what his troops were up against. "What can we do to protect our forces?" he asked his subordinates. "I'll take a 30 percent solution. That's better than zero."

Even that modest request seemed daunting. U.S. soldiers and Marines had no mobile electronic countermeasures capable of disrupting RC triggers by blocking the radio signal.

Bomb squads -- known in the military as EOD teams, for explosive ordnance disposal -- carried a feeble jammer called the Citadel, which created a stationary protective "bubble" around technicians defusing a device. But the few Citadels in service could not be mounted on vehicles to protect patrols and convoys, and they were too weak to provide protection beyond a few yards.

Special Operations units employed electronic countermeasures, and the Secret Service used powerful mobile jammers to shield presidential motorcades and other prominent targets. Yet such gadgets were few in number, much in demand and highly classified.

That left the Navy as a solution. For decades, electronic countermeasures had been a vital part of airborne combat for Navy fliers. Submariners also considered it a "core mission," as did surface ship officers. "It's how I deal with cruise missiles coming at me," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington.

After a yellow Mercedes-Benz truck stuffed with explosives killed 241 U.S. troops in Beirut in October 1983, the Navy began investing in a top-secret program in counter-RC technology. That led to a family of jammers, known as the Channel series, intended to protect ships arriving at foreign ports where RC bombs could be hidden in the docks.

By 2002, some of these devices were considered obsolete and had been consigned to a warehouse shelf. But Navy specialists in Indian Head, Md., 30 miles south of Washington, reconfigured a jammer they called Acorn, which neatly matched the frequencies used by the Spider Mod 1 in Afghanistan. In November 2002, 45 days after the first plea for help from Afghanistan, several dozen Acorns began arriving at Bagram Air Base.

Army EOD experts distributed each device, mounting the gray box and antenna on Humvees and Special Forces sport-utility vehicles. Instructing soldiers in the nuances of wave propagation and other electronic mysteries proved challenging; one device reportedly was installed on a water truck that never left the base. Successful jamming meant troops had no way of recognizing that they were even under attack by a radio-controlled IED. Acorns could also interfere with radios and other electronics.

Still, Vines's "30 percent solution" was more than fulfilled. As one retired Navy captain later recalled of Acorn: "We expected it to last six months before the bad guys figured it out." Instead, more than 2,000 Acorns eventually outfitted the force in Afghanistan where, like the Spider, it would remain a fixture on the battlefield for the next five years.

* * *

While U.S. forces parried the fledgling IED threat in Afghanistan, secret planning for the invasion of Iraq had accelerated. Little thought was given to roadside bombs as a serious obstacle to the American juggernaut. But U.S. strategists feared that Saddam Hussein would destroy his own oil production facilities rather than let them be captured. Scorched-earth tactics by retreating Iraqi troops in 1991 had turned Kuwait's oil fields into an inferno.

U.S. intelligence in early 2003 reported that wellheads in southern Iraq had been wired for detonation, and that Iraqi forces probably had the ability to use radio-controlled triggers to detonate those demolition charges. Jammers would be needed to secure the fields.

Even as the Navy converted Acorn into a battlefield countermeasure, Army engineers at Fort Monmouth, N.J., were working on their own mobile jammers. First in a laboratory and then in field tests, they modified an old system called Shortstop, originally built in 1990 as a footlocker-size gadget to confound the proximity fuses in incoming artillery and mortar shells.

By intercepting and modifying the radio signals emitted by such fuses, Shortstop tricked the shells into believing they were approaching the ground, causing them to detonate prematurely. Shortstop had been completed too late for use in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and it was deployed to Bosnia only briefly. A Pentagon inventory showed that the Army had almost 300 systems in storage.

With different computer chips and a cleverly modified ham radio antenna, Shortstop made an admirable jammer. The wife of one Fort Monmouth engineer collected miniature kitchen witches that inspired a new name for the device: Warlock Green. After final fixes in California, five Warlocks were shipped to Kuwait in time to accompany the invasion forces plunging into Iraq in March 2003, according to a senior officer involved in the effort.

The countermeasure proved unnecessary. Not a single oil well was rigged for radio-controlled detonation. Some oil facilities were sabotaged, but the damage was less grievous than feared.

Yet the Army jammer had found a home on the battlefield. As Shortstops were transformed into Warlock Greens -- each device cost about $100,000, according to a contractor involved in the program -- they were shipped in large Rubbermaid storage cases to Afghanistan, where a technician laminated his business card onto the devices so soldiers knew whom to call for help. Others would be packed up, driven to the Baltimore-Washington international airport in a rented van and flown to Iraq.

By late summer 2003, almost 100 Warlocks had been deployed, according to an Army document that said IEDs were "increasing in number and complexity at an alarming rate." Another Navy jammer, originally designed to protect four-star flag officers, also began arriving in the theater -- first six, then 30 and eventually 300.

If no one foresaw that within four years more than 30,000 jammers of all sorts would be in Iraq, a few suspected that something big had started. "We're going to need a lot more jammers," Col. Bruce Jette, who commanded the Army's Rapid Equipping Force at Fort Belvoir, told a Fort Monmouth engineer in August 2003. "And eventually we're going to need a jammer on every vehicle."

***

Bombmaking by definition required explosives, and in that commodity, as in oil, Iraq was richly endowed. "The entire country was one big ammo dump," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would observe this past March. "It's just a huge, huge problem."

The problem was also huge in 2003. Yet U.S. strategists, who before the invasion failed to anticipate an insurgency, also drafted no comprehensive plans for securing thousands of munitions caches, now estimated to have held at least 650,000 tons and perhaps more than 1 million tons of explosives. "There's more ammunition in Iraq than any place I've ever been in my life, and it's not securable," Gen. John P. Abizaid told the Senate Appropriations Committee shortly after taking over U.S. Central Command in July 2003. "I wish I could tell you that we had it all under control. We don't."

To forestall looting, U.S. forces tried spreading putrid substances across the dumps, as well as cementing artillery rounds together or burying large caches. "We're now finding people tunneling 30 feet down and carting the stuff away," an analyst noted earlier this year. Sloshing diesel fuel across the dumps and lighting it, among several haphazard "blow and go" techniques, often simply scattered the rounds. More than a year after the invasion "only 40 percent of Iraq's pre-war munitions inventory was secured or destroyed," the Congressional Research Service reported this summer.

Tens of thousands of tons probably were pilfered, U.S. government analysts believe. (If properly positioned, 20 pounds of high explosive can destroy any vehicle the Army owns.) The lax control would continue long after Hussein was routed: 10,000 or more blasting caps -- also vital to bombmaking -- vanished from an Iraqi bureau of mines storage facility in 2004, along with "thousands of kilometers" of detonation cord, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

In the summer of 2003, pilfered explosives appeared in growing numbers of IEDs. Main Supply Route Tampa, the main road for military convoys driving between Baghdad and Kuwait, became a common target. Three artillery shells wired to a timer west of Taji, discovered on July 29, reportedly made up the first confirmed delay bomb. Others were soon found using egg timers or Chinese washing-machine timers.

Radio-controlled triggers tended to be simple and low-power, using car key fobs or wireless doorbell buzzers -- Qusun was the most common brand -- with a range of 200 meters or less. Radio controls from toy cars beamed signals to a small electrical motor attached to a bomb detonator; turning the toy's front wheels completed the circuit and triggered the explosion.

U.S. troops dubbed the crude devices "bang-bang" because spurious signals could cause premature detonations, sometimes killing the emplacer. Bombers soon learned to install safety switches in the contraptions, and to use better radio links.

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind highway guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of guardrail.) Emplacers often used the same "blow hole" repeatedly, returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again and again. But early in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

Coalition forces tended to concentrate at large FOBs -- forward operating bases -- with few entry roads. "Insurgents seized the initiative on these common routes," according to a 2007 account of the counter-IED effort by Col. William G. Adamson. "The vast majority of IED attacks occurred within a short distance of the FOBs."

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys routinely began stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents planted easily spotted hoax bombs to halt traffic, then detonated explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would most likely pull over.

By the early fall of 2003, IED attacks had reached 100 a month, according to a House Armed Services Committee document. Most were a nuisance; some proved stunning and murderous. A large explosion along a roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a 70-ton M1A2 Abrams tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two crewmen. Even more horrifying was a truck bomb at 4:45 p.m. on Aug. 19 that demolished the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the U.N. special representative and 22 others.

Day by day, as Adamson would write, "the concept of a front, or line of battle, vanished" in Iraq, giving way to "360-degree warfare."

***

IEDs had quickly moved to the top of Abizaid's anxieties at Central Command. A Lebanese American who spoke Arabic and who had studied as an Olmsted scholar at the University of Jordan in Amman, the four-star general had seen for himself the aggravation that roadside bombs caused Israeli forces in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Two weeks after taking command from the retiring Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Abizaid publicly described resistance in Iraq as "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," a blunt appraisal that reportedly irked the Pentagon's civilian leadership. But the amount of unsecured ammunition in Iraq, particularly in Sunni regions, alarmed him. So did the realization that many Iraqi military officers -- unemployed and disgruntled after the national army was disbanded in late May -- possessed extensive skill in handling explosives.

Abizaid hoped that American technical savvy would produce a gadget that could detect bombs at a distance, "a scientific molecular sniffer, or something," as he put it. "We thought the problem would spread," Abizaid later reflected, "but it didn't appear overly sophisticated." Underestimating the enemy's creativity and overestimating American ingenuity, a pattern established before the war began, continued long after the capture of Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. ground commander in Iraq, told Pentagon strategists that he hoped to minimize the military's "footprint" in Iraq by maintaining an occupation force that was two-thirds motorized and only one-third mechanized. "What I don't want is a lot of tanks and Bradleys," Sanchez said, according to a senior Army commander.

That meant mounting most troops on Humvees, few of which were built to withstand bombs or even small-arms fire. Soldiers had begun fashioning crude "hillbilly armor" for their vehicles from scrap metal. Even factory-built armored vehicles had been designed to resist projectiles fired at a distance, according to a senior Army scientist, and not against point-blank explosions in which steel fragments and blast overpressure -- from gases hotter than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit forming in 1/10,000th of a second -- struck simultaneously.

Production of the stout "uparmored" Humvee started in 1996, but as a specialty vehicle for military police and Special Forces; an average of one per day had been built before the war, according to congressional documents. The entire fleet of uparmored Humvees in the theater in 2003 totaled 235, the Army chief of staff would later report.

With no master list of where uparmored Humvees were deployed, logisticians searched U.S. motor pools around the world. Seventy were found in Air Force missile fields in North Dakota and elsewhere, according to a former senior officer on the joint staff, but it took a four-star order to pry them away for duty in the Middle East.

Protecting individual soldiers was a bit simpler. In June 2003, the Pentagon decided to outfit every trooper in theater with tough interceptor body armor. By December, eight vendors would produce 25,000 sets a month, according to congressional documents, and by April 2004 all U.S. military personnel in Iraq had received high-quality protection. The documents show that Congress has appropriated more than $4 billion for body armor so far.

But as summer yielded to fall in 2003, the final defense against roadside bombs often fell to a few hundred EOD technicians, whose informal motto -- "Initial success or total failure" -- suggested the hazards in what was known as "the long walk."

Summoned to neutralize a suspected bomb, a tech donned a cumbersome, blast-resistant outfit that resembled a deep-sea diving suit, with a transparent face shield and extra padding to protect femoral arteries, genitals and the spinal column. The robots then available to "interrogate" a device were crude and few in number, forcing the tech to conduct the examination himself.

"All you can hear is the fan in your helmet, your heart beating and your breathing," recalled Sgt. First Class Troy Parker, who served in Iraq in 2003. "And you're wondering if this is the last walk you're ever going to take."

Sometimes it was. On Sept. 10, 2003, in Baghdad, Staff Sgt. Joseph E. Robsky Jr. was trying to disarm an IED when an apparent RC-trigger detonated a mortar shell packed with C-4 plastic explosive. Robsky, 31, would be among more than 50 EOD technicians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the late summer of this year.

Within hours of his death, a call went out to assemble all EOD robots in Baghdad at the international airport for an inventory, according to a senior Navy EOD officer in Iraq at the time. They found 18 robots, and only six of them worked.

***

By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who included his two sons and a nephew, but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is getting out of control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've got to stop the bleeding."

A Lebanese American West Point graduate like Abizaid, Cody was the son of a Chevrolet dealer in Montpelier, Vt. Stocky and intense, with thick hair the color of gunmetal, he had fired the first shots of the Gulf War in January 1991 while attacking an Iraqi radar site as commander of an Apache helicopter battalion. His appetites ran to hard work, New York Times crossword puzzles, Red Man chewing tobacco, Diet Coke and two-pound bags of peanut M&Ms, which he could eat in one sitting.

Hughes drafted a sheaf of PowerPoint slides labeled "IED Task Force: A Way," which proposed forming a small unit with a Washington director and two field teams "designed to respond to incidents." To recruit active-duty Special Operations troops would take at least nine months, so with Cody's approval and a chit for $20 million, Hughes hired Wexford Group International, a security consultant in Vienna, Va. Two retired Delta Force soldiers soon arrived in room 2D468 of the Pentagon to begin assembling the field teams from a "black Rolodex" of former special operators.

To run his task force, Cody chose one of the Army's most charismatic young officers, Joseph L. Votel, then 45, who had just been selected for promotion to brigadier general. A tall, good-humored Minnesotan, Votel had commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. More recently, in Iraq, three of his Rangers had been killed near Haditha with a suicide bomb detonated by a pregnant woman; two other Rangers had died in a roadside bombing on Route Irish, near the Baghdad airport.

Votel expected the job of controlling IEDs to take six months, maybe eight. "And then we move on," he said. He moved his small staff into a shabby, malodorous corner of the Army operations center in the Pentagon basement and posted a sign on the wall: "STOP THE BLEEDING."

Even by Pentagon standards, the hours were brutal. Those who lived in the Washington exurbs typically rose at 3:45 a.m. to be at their desks by 5:30, where they remained until 9 p.m. or later. To avoid bureaucratic friction with other agencies, Votel advised: "Stay small, stay light, be agile, move quickly. . . . There's goodness in smallness."

About a dozen former Delta Force operators were hired as contractors for the nucleus of the field teams. Some would earn $1,000 a day while deployed, according to two knowledgeable officers. Cody sent them to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to interview soldiers wounded by IEDs, to learn "what they wished they had done" before being blown up.

To arm the teams, the task force borrowed rifles from the Old Guard ceremonial regiment at Fort Myer and drafted permission slips for the contractors to carry weapons in Iraq. Instead of standard Army pistols, the men requested the Glock 9mm. "Sir," Votel told Cody, "these guys want Glocks." Cody gestured impatiently. "So get them Glocks."

In his diary on Nov. 17, 2003, Cody scribbled: "We have to make sure our commanders and soldiers are not at the end of this process but are engaged throughout the process." Toward that end, Votel and Hughes flew to Baghdad to secure a small compound at Camp Victory and to explain the task force to senior officers in Iraq.

The intent was to train troops to recognize and counter IEDs, Votel said, and to "build an architecture between the theater and Big Army" back in the States. IED incidents would be documented in detail at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and notably effective tactics and techniques would be disseminated to units preparing to deploy.

Eventually, Votel added, the effort would move "left of boom" by attacking bomber networks before devices could be placed and detonated. In the IED battle, the task force was to help "protect, predict, prevent, detect and neutralize" -- known as "tenets of assured mobility" -- which Votel borrowed as his conceptual framework from the Army Engineer School.

"Why are you bringing me a 7,000-mile screwdriver to fix this from D.C.?" asked one skeptical general in Baghdad. "Nothing good ever comes from Washington." Still, most commanders welcomed the assistance.

The first seven-man field team flew to Iraq on Dec. 12, 2003. Several others were to follow, including one sent to Afghanistan. Working initially with the 4th Infantry Division, and shuttling between bases in unarmored Chevy Suburbans, the team members in Iraq advocated infantry basics: "shoot, move, communicate, clear routes, don't set patterns." Troops were advised to watch for wires and triggermen away from the road, to be unpredictable, to use a "porcupine approach" in patrols and convoys, with all guns bristling and flank guards deployed.

By February 2004, the number of IED attacks in Iraq approached 100 a week. About half detonated, a proportion that would remain relatively constant for the next three years. The bleeding had hardly stopped, but to Central Command it seemed to have stabilized.

The casualty-per-blast ratio was dropping. Troops quickly learned counter-IED survival skills. Some bombers were arrested or killed. On good days the number of attacks dwindled to single digits, and U.S. bomb fatalities in February totaled nine, fewer than half the number in January.

"It looks to me like we're winning this thing," Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the Centcom deputy commander, told Abizaid at their forward headquarters in Qatar. "We're kicking ass."

Abizaid gave a thin smile. "Stand by," he said. "They're just plotting."

***

On March 28, 2004, U.S. troops shut down the incendiary newspaper of Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric with a volatile following in the Baghdad slums. "All hell broke loose," a Centcom officer later noted. By late spring, IED attacks had nearly doubled, with bombers apparently drawn from the ranks of disaffected Shiites as well as Sunnis.

IEDs had become "the greatest casualty producer" in Iraq, Abizaid told Congress, surpassing RPG-7s, a rocket-propelled grenade. Insurgents increasingly promoted their deeds with videotapes released to al-Jazeera and other Arab media outlets. Spectacular explosions of Abrams tanks and other "icon vehicles," as U.S. officers called high-value targets, soon filled airwaves and Web sites.

For Joe Votel and his task force in Washington, the IED fight had become a complex exercise in phenomenology. How did blast and shrapnel interact at close range? How did bomber cells thrive? Why did jammers seem to work in some areas and not others? The six- to eight-month time frame he foresaw for controlling IEDs would require an extension.

More than 500 mobile jammers had reached Iraq, but thousands more were needed. By late spring 2004, the task force had finally established a jammer strategy: get as many systems into theater as possible -- including Warlock Green, a sister device known as Warlock Red, and a Navy jammer called Cottonwood, which was removed from the Suburban in which it typically rode, installed in an armored vehicle and renamed Ironwood. Meanwhile, engineers would develop a single powerful variant that covered as much of the RC spectrum as possible.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a former paratrooper and Vietnam veteran from San Diego who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, watched the Army's response to IEDs with impatience. In February 2004, a committee memo to the service noted that "arsenals, depots, industry, and steel mills" were not at full capacity in making heavy plates for uparmored Humvees. House staffers visited the steel plants, extracting pledges to defer commercial work until almost 7,000 Humvee armor kits were finished in May, six months ahead of the Army's original schedule.

Hunter was particularly incensed to find skittish troops bolting thin steel and even plywood to military trucks traveling along Route Tampa and other hazardous Iraqi roads. In January, he had asked Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco to design an armored gun truck similar to those used in the Vietnam War, the sole surviving example of which he found in the Army's transportation museum at Fort Eustis, Va.

In March, a five-ton prototype, with steel and ballistic fiberglass protection added to the cab and truck bed, was shipped for testing to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

On June 4, Hunter appeared at the Pentagon's River Entrance with a freshly painted gun truck and placards, mounted on easels, listing its virtues. Cody and others from the top brass wandered out to kick the tires. No one wanted to buck the powerful chairman, but several paratroopers soon appeared to inform Hunter "how much they loved the Humvee better than these big things, how nice and small and agile it was," he later recalled.

Hunter was not dissuaded. Nearly 100 gun-truck kits would be sent to Iraq, at $40,000 each, and 18 to Afghanistan. Some soldiers sang the truck's praises, while others found it top-heavy and "something of a grenade basket," according to a senior commander in the 10th Mountain Division. Still, of more than 9,000 medium and heavy military transport trucks rolling through Iraq in late 2004, only about one in 10 had armor, according to GlobalSecurity.org. The convoys remained vulnerable.

A Vietnam-era relic would hardly solve the IED threat permanently. Several influential voices in Washington now questioned the Pentagon's approach. Retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the president of the Institute for Defense Analyses and a former U.S. commander in chief in the Pacific, complained to the joint staff about the lack of systematic, rigorous analysis of IED trends. "The Army is not dealing with the IED problem well, because it's not in their nature," Blair said. "They're used to taking off from the line of departure, capturing the enemy capital and having a victory parade."

Moreover, the emphasis on defeating the device, Blair added, was "like playing soccer and you're spending all your money and attention on the goalie's gloves. At that point, not only is this the last line of defense, but the ball is already in the air."

At Centcom, Smith also was frustrated by the lack of urgency. Four months after concluding that "we're winning this thing," he now had doubts about the national commitment to overcoming IEDs. "We have got to get at this thing in a different way than we're addressing it right now," he advised Abizaid in Qatar in June 2004. "We've got to have something like the Manhattan Project."

The allusion to the crash program that had built the atomic bomb in World War II -- an effort eventually employing 125,000 people and many of the nation's finest scientific minds -- appealed to Abizaid's imagination. Several days later he wrote a personal message to the Pentagon leadership asking for a "Manhattan Project-like" approach to IEDs.

"What the [expletive] does he think we're doing?" Cody snapped upon learning of the request. But the Centcom commander's plea could hardly be brushed aside. In a meeting with Cody and Votel, according to a participant in the session, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked whether the Army could meet Abizaid's request.

The Army believed it could, particularly if the service was made the executive agent for an expanded effort that involved the entire Defense Department. That meant getting the other services to relinquish money, personnel and bureaucratic control, an encroachment that quickly triggered alarms.

Meetings convened, exchanges grew stormy. The Navy and Marine Corps had pursued their own counter-IED programs, and the Air Force particularly resisted putting the Army in charge of a Pentagon-wide enterprise.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz believed change was necessary. Why, he had asked his staff, did it take so long for armor, jammers and other counter-IED materiel to reach Iraq and Afghanistan? "Where is all this stuff?" he complained. "When is it going to get to theater?"

The effort seemed fragmented and ad hoc -- "sucked into technology rabbit holes," as Votel put it. A survey by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk that spring had found that at least 132 government agencies were now involved in IED issues, from the FBI and CIA to the National Security Agency and the National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Va., according to an Army brigadier general.

The battle against IEDs exceeded the management capacity of a single service, Wolfowitz concluded. On July 12, 2004, he signed a one-paragraph order that transformed the Army task force into a joint task force. Votel would remain director, with cramped offices in the Army operations center. But he now reported to Wolfowitz rather than to Cody, and the task force would draw expertise from all services.x

Cody, who became the Army's four-star vice chief of staff in late June, accepted the decision graciously, even as he told one senior Army officer who now worked for Wolfowitz, "Don't forget where you came from."

Creation of the Joint IED Task Force would dramatically expand the U.S. effort. A $100 million budget in fiscal 2004 would mushroom to $1.3 billion in 2005. In subsequent meetings with industry executives and the national research laboratories, Wolfowitz declared that there was no higher priority.

Within the Defense Department, countering IEDs would be second only to exterminating Osama bin Laden.

"This is a major strategic effort," Wolfowitz told one group. "What can you put into it?"

The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007; A01

It began with a bang and "a huge white blast," in the description of one witness who outlived that Saturday morning, March 29, 2003. At a U.S. Army checkpoint straddling Highway 9, just north of Najaf, four soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division, part of the initial invasion of Iraq, had started to search an orange-and-white taxicab at 11:30 a.m. when more than 100 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive detonated in the trunk.

The explosion tossed the sedan 15 feet down the road, killing the soldiers, the cabdriver -- an apparent suicide bomber -- and a passerby on a bicycle. Lt. Col. Scott E. Rutter, a battalion commander who rushed to the scene from his command post half a mile away, saw in the smoking crater and broken bodies on Highway 9 "a recognition that now we were entering into an area of warfare that's going to be completely different."

Since that first fatal detonation of what is now known as an improvised explosive device, more than 81,000 IED attacks have occurred in Iraq, including 25,000 so far this year, according to U.S. military sources. The war has indeed metastasized into something "completely different," a conflict in which the roadside bomb in its many variants -- including "suicide, vehicle-borne" -- has become the signature weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan, as iconic as the machine gun in World War I or the laser-guided "smart bomb" in the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

IEDs have caused nearly two-thirds of the 3,100 American combat deaths in Iraq, and an even higher proportion of battle wounds. This year alone, through mid-July, they have also resulted in an estimated 11,000 Iraqi civilian casualties and more than 600 deaths among Iraqi security forces. To the extent that the United States is not winning militarily in Iraq, the roadside bomb, which as of Sept. 22 had killed or wounded 21,200 Americans, is both a proximate cause and a metaphor for the miscalculation and improvisation that have characterized the war.

The battle against this weapon has been a fitful struggle to regain the initiative -- a relentless cycle of measure, countermeasure and counter-countermeasure -- not only by discovering or neutralizing hidden bombs, the so-called fight at the roadside, but also by trying to identify and destroy the shadowy network of financiers, strategists, bombmakers and emplacers who have formed at least 160 insurgent cells in Iraq, according to a senior Defense Department official. But despite nearly $10 billion spent in the past four years by the department's main IED-fighting agency, with an additional $4.5 billion budgeted for fiscal 2008, the IED remains "the single most effective weapon against our deployed forces," as the Pentagon acknowledged this year.

As early as 2003, Army officers spoke of shifting the counter-IED effort "left of boom" by disrupting insurgent cells before bombs are built and planted. Yet U.S. efforts have focused overwhelmingly on "right of boom"-- by mitigating the effects of a bomb blast with heavier armor, sturdier vehicles and better trauma care -- or on the boom itself, by spending, for example, more than $3 billion on 14 types of electronic jammers that sometimes also jammed the radios of friendly forces.

For years the counter-IED effort was defensive, reactive and ultimately inadequate, driven initially by a presumption that IEDs were a passing nuisance in a short war, and then by an abiding faith that science would solve the problem.

"Americans want technical solutions. They want the silver bullet," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington, which now oversees several counter-IED technologies. "The solution to IEDs is the whole range of national power --political-military affairs, strategy, operations, intelligence."

The costly and frustrating struggle against a weapon barely on the horizon of military planners before the war in Iraq provides a unique lens for examining what some Pentagon officials now call the Long War, and for understanding how the easy victory of 2003 became the morass of 2007.

This introduction and the four-part narrative that follows are drawn from more than 140 interviews with military and congressional officials, contractors, scientists, and defense analysts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Washington and elsewhere. Most agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of the subject, or because they are not authorized to comment. Ten senior officers or retired officers, each of them intimately involved in the counter-IED fight, were asked to review the findings for accuracy and security considerations.

As U.S. casualties spiraled from dozens to hundreds to many thousands, the quest for IED countermeasures grew both desperate and ingenious. Honeybees and hunting dogs searched for explosives. Soldiers fashioned makeshift "hillbilly armor." Jammers proliferated, with names like Warlock, Chameleon, Acorn and Duke. Strategists concocted bomb-busting techniques, such as "IED Blitz" and "backtracking" and "persistent stare."

Yet bombs continued to detonate, and soldiers kept dying. The 100 or so daily IED "events" -- bombs that blow up, as well as those discovered before they detonate -- have doubled since the 50 per day typical in January 2006. The 3,229 IEDs recorded in March of this year put the monthly total in Iraq above 3,000 for the first time, a threshold also exceeded in May and June. "The numbers," one Army colonel said, "are astonishing."

In Afghanistan, although IED attacks remain a small fraction of those in Iraq, the figures also have soared: from 22 in 2002 and 83 in 2003, to 1,730 in 2006 and a thousand in the first half of this year. Suicide attacks have become especially pernicious, climbing to 123 last year, according to a United Nations study, a figure that continues to grow this year, with 22 in May alone.

Insurgents have deftly leveraged consumer electronics technology to build explosive devices that are simple, cheap and deadly: Almost anything that can flip a switch at a distance can detonate a bomb. In the past five years, bombmakers have developed six principal detonation triggers -- pressure plates, cellphones, command wire, low-power radio-controlled, high-power radio-controlled and passive infrared -- that have prompted dozens of U.S. technical antidotes, some successful and some not.

"Insurgents have shown a cycle of adaptation that is short relative to the ability of U.S. forces to develop and field IED countermeasures," a National Academy of Sciences paper concluded earlier this year. An American electrical engineer who has worked in Baghdad for more than two years was blunter: "I never really feel like I'm ahead of the game."

The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. "If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week," a former Pentagon official said.

"We all drank the Kool-Aid," said a retired Army officer who worked on counter-IED issues for three years. "We believed, and Congress was guilty as well, that because the United States was the technology powerhouse, the solution to this problem would come from science. That attitude was 'All we have to do is throw technology at it and the problem will go away.' . . . The day we lose a war it will be to guys with spears and loincloths, because they're not tied to technology. And we're kind of close to being there."

Or, as an officer writing in Marine Corps Gazette recently put it, "The Flintstones are adapting faster than the Jetsons."

***

Military explosives technicians learning their craft at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida are taught that the bomb triggering the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886 was the first modern IED. T.E. Lawrence -- of Arabia -- wrote in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" that roadside bombs, which mostly targeted Turkish trains in World War I, made traveling around "an uncertain terror for the enemy."

The bomb that destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the truck bomb Timothy McVeigh used to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995, the devices detonated on trains in Madrid in 2004 and in the London transportation system in 2005 -- all were IEDs.

British troops encountered 7,000 IEDs during 30-plus years of conflict in Northern Ireland, according to a U.S. Army ordnance officer. But what the British faced in more than three decades is equivalent to less than three months in today's Iraq. Indeed, "the sheer growth of the thing," as a senior Army general put it, is what most confounds Pentagon strategists.

"The IED is the enemy's artillery system. It's simply a way of putting chemical and kinetic energy on top of our soldiers and Marines, or underneath them," said Montgomery C. Meigs, a retired four-star Army general who since December 2005 has served as director of the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization, the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar effort to defeat the weapon. "What's different is the trajectory. Three 152mm rounds underneath a tank, which will blow a hole in it, are artillery rounds. But they didn't come through three-dimensional space in a parabolic trajectory. They came through a social trajectory and a social network in the community."

Unlike conventional artillery, IEDs have profound strategic consequences, because the bomber's intent is to "bleed us in a way that attacks American political will directly and obviates the advantages we have in military forces," Meigs added. Thousands of bombs have also made U.S. troops wary and distrustful, even as a new counterinsurgency strategy expands the American military presence among the Iraqi people.

Insurgents often post video clips of their attacks on the Internet, the equivalent of taking scalps. They also exploit the Web -- either openly or in password-protected sites -- to share bomb-building tips, emplacement techniques, and observations about American vulnerabilities and countermeasures.

For example, a 71-page manual titled "Military Use of Electronics Prepared by Your Brother in Allah" was posted on a jihadist Web site earlier this year. Comparable in sophistication to an introductory college electrical engineering class, the manual provided color photos and detailed diagrams on "remote wirelessly operating circuit using a mobile phone for moving targets" and "employing timers to explode detonators using transistors."

The lack of success in combating IEDs has left some military officials deeply pessimistic about the future. "Hell, we're getting our ass kicked," said a senior officer at U.S. Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We're watching warfare that's centuries old being played out in a modern context and we're all confused about it. The toys and trappings have changed, but asymmetric fighting, and ambush, and deceiving and outwitting your opponent, and using the strengths of your opponent against him, are ancient."

Others point to several heartening developments. The number of IED attacks declined in Iraq late this summer after five more U.S. brigades took the field as part of a troop "surge" ordered by the White House. American casualties from IEDs also dropped. Throughout Iraq, more than half of all makeshift bombs are found before they detonate.

Moreover, improved body and vehicle armor, as well as sophisticated combat medicine, mean that the proportion of wounded U.S. soldiers to those killed in Iraq is about 8 to 1, a survivability ratio much higher than in previous wars. Also, about 70 percent of wounded soldiers return to duty within three days, according to Pentagon figures.

"We've saved a lot of lives," Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England said in an interview last month. "We've had people killed and injured, but we've probably saved five or 10 times that number of people by preventing attacks, or capturing and killing [insurgents], or getting caches of weapons, or disabling them."

In 2003, almost every IED caused at least one coalition casualty. Now, Pentagon figures indicate, it takes four of the bombs to generate a single casualty. In addition to more aggressive attacks against IED networks, rather than simply defending against the device, various technological advances have shaped the battlefield.

The military, for example, now has about 6,000 robots, compared with a handful four years ago. And bombs detonated by radio-controlled triggers, which had become the most prominent killer of U.S. forces, today amount to only 10 percent of all IEDs in Iraq after the deployment of 30,000 jammers, with more on the way.

Still, as a "Counter IED Smart Card" distributed to American troops warns, "In Iraq, nothing is as it appears." The cycle of measure, countermeasure and counter-countermeasure continues.

Two particularly deadly IEDs now account for about 70 percent of U.S. bombing deaths in Iraq: the explosively formed penetrator, an armor-killing device first seen in May 2004, and linked by the U.S. government to Iran, and the "deep buried," or underbelly, bomb that first became prominent in August 2005.

Grievous as the IED toll has been on U.S. and coalition forces, the impact on Iraqis is greater. The Pentagon considers an explosion to be "effective" only if it causes a coalition casualty; this reflects a judgment that the strategic impact of an IED derives from its ability to erode American will, which in turn is predicated on casualties suffered by U.S. troops or their non-Iraqi allies. By this yardstick, the suicide truck bombs that killed more than 500 civilians in northwest Iraq on Aug. 14 of this year are considered "ineffective"; so, too, the IED on Sept. 13 that killed a prominent sheik in western Iraq whom President Bush had publicly praised a week earlier for his opposition to al-Qaeda extremists.

But few military strategists doubt that Iraq's future depends on reducing IED attacks of all sorts. "If you can't stop vehicle-borne IEDs from being detonated in public spaces, you can't build a stable society," a Navy analyst said.

No one is ready to declare the dip in the number of bombs this summer to be an enduring decline. Insurgents appear "able to put out more IEDs to maintain that constant level of death-by-a-thousand-cuts," a senior Pentagon analyst said. "We have not seemed able to put an upper bound on that number."

And there is another mostly unspoken fear. With approximately 300 IED attacks occurring each month beyond the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan -- a Pentagon document cites incidents in the Philippines, Russia, Colombia, Algeria and Somalia, among other places -- the question occupying many defense specialists is whether the roadside bomb inevitably will appear in the United States in significant numbers. "It's one thing to have bombs going off in Baghdad, but it will be quite another thing when guys with vests full of explosives start blowing themselves up in Washington," said the Navy analyst. "That has all sorts of repercussions, for the economy, for civil liberties."

For now the device remains an indelible feature of the Iraqi and Afghan landscapes. "The enemy found a seam," said an Army colonel. "I don't think they knew it was a seam, but it just happened."