Retired army colonel David Hackworth, who's gung ho but also a gadfly, has just posted a highly skeptical e-mail about the ambush in Samarra. The e-mail is signed, "A Combat Leader." Here's an excerpt:

...Hack, most of the casualties were civilians, not insurgents or criminals as being reported. During the ambushes the tanks, brads and armored HUMVEES hosed down houses, buildings, and cars while using reflexive fire against the attackers. One of the precepts of "Iron Hammer" is to use an Iron Fist when dealing with the insurgents.... The convoy continued to move, shooting at ANY target that appeared to be a threat....

The ROE under "Iron Fist" is such that the US soldiers are to consider buildings, homes, cars to be hostile if enemy fire is received from them (regardless of who else is inside. It seems too many of us this is more an act of desperation, rather than a well thought out tactic. We really don't know if we kill anyone, because we don't stick around to find out....

The belief in superior firepower as a counter-insurgency tactic is then extended down to the average Iraqi, with the hope that the Iraqis will not support the guerillas and turn them in to coalition forces, knowing we will blow the hell out of their homes or towns if they don't. Of course in too many cases, if the insurgents bait us and goad us into leveling buildings and homes, the people inside will then hate us (even if they did not before) and we have created more recruits for the guerillas....

...It does not take a George Patton to see we are using the wrong tactics against these people. We cannot realistically expect that Stability and Support Operations will defeat this insurgency....

The authenticity of this e-mail can't be verified, but a story in today's New York Times suggests (as do other news reports) that it may be on target:

...At the morgue, Adnan Sahib Dafar, 52, an ambulance driver, pointed to a dead woman on a steel tray. The woman, Mr. Dafar said, had worked at the city's big pharmaceutical factory and had walked into the crossfire between American forces and Iraqi guerrillas that began with an attempted ambush of an American military convoy.

"Is this woman shooting a rocket-propelled grenade?" he demanded, standing over the body. "Is she fighting?" There was only one other body, that of a gray-bearded old man, in the morgue....

"If I had a gun, I would have attacked the Americans myself," said Satar Nasiaf, 47, a shopkeeper who said he had watched two Iraqi civilians fall to American fire. "The Americans were shooting in every direction."...

...Outside the hospital, a small crowd of Iraqis gathered around a bus they said had been destroyed in the fighting and began chanting an old refrain: "Our souls and our blood, we sacrifice to you, Saddam."...

Sheik Khatan al-Salem, a Samarra town official with a decidedly anti-American bent, predicted that the battle on Sunday would ultimately prove to be something less than an American victory.

"Why is the resistance increasing now?" the sheik asked. "Simply because the Americans misbehave with the people."

"All their actions motivate the young people to do such acts, not because they love Saddam," he said. "They do not love Saddam. They love their country."

(Thanks to the Rational Enquirer for the link to the e-mail.)