Seen on a professional forum, this article by Patrick E. Proctor, President, ProSIM Company. It was written immediately before the assault on Fallujah, and the “embedding” of journalists in US units.
There are three vital ways in which Iraq is COMPLETELY different from Vietnam.1. South Vietnam was being invaded by another country, that was openly at war with it. Iraq, by contrast, is at war with a radical ideology (violent Islamic fundamentalism), which is anathema to the history of the country over the past two hundred years. One could make the case that it is at war, covertly, with Iran, but I would make the counter-argument that the first time we saw a battalion of Iranian regular infantry in Iraq, it would trigger an invasion of that country. They, of course, know that, so it would never happen. So, while Iran might be supporting the insurgency, and feeding it with zealots, Iraq is NOT at war with Iran.
2. 80% of the people in Iraq (Kurds and Shiites) want, basically, what we want: Iraq to be a successful, prosperous democracy, and the US to leave.
(I base this on the fact that we have NEVER had problems with the Kurds, and we have successfully defeated the brief Shiia insurgency). If the DoD estimate of 20,000 people actively participating in the insurgency is to be believed, then maybe 25% of the Sunnis (and that is being generous) support the insurgency, philosophy, and only 3% of those actually take violent action against us or provide logistical support to those that do. That’s a net 0.08% of Iraqis. By contrast, in South Vietnam, there was a high degree of apathy as to the fate of South Vietnam. While there were those who were fighting for the same thing we were, the vast majority of the country was resigned to its eventual fate.3. The main effort in Iraq is the information war, and inside Iraq we are winning it. We have successfully transitioned authority to an interim Iraqi government. We have actually deferred or forgone military actions that would be tactically advantageous in deference to the strategic main effort of information warfare: supporting the interim government and increasing the legitimacy and responsibility of the Iraqi Army and Police. By contrast, in Vietnam, information warfare, as a concept, did not even exist. The main effort was killing insurgents, and, later, the North Vietnamese Army. The
resources and effort that went into this main effort dwarfed the “hearts and minds” campaign that was taking place in the country. There was never in instance, of which I am aware, where America deferred in ANY operation to the desires of the South Vietnamese government.This is not to say we have not made any mistakes in Iraq. In fact, I think that all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth we hear in this country is an indicator of the BIGGEST mistake we have made in this effort.
The strategic center of gravity of the United States, and, to some degree, the strategic efforts of any free country, is public support for its policies and actions. If the populace of a free country does not support its government’s strategic efforts, that country will fail. This is why a handful of evil zealots can go toe-to-toe with the most powerful country in the world. Let’s face it. The enemy is never going to defeat the US Army with car bombs and RPGs. But the true power of these acts does not lie in their tactical impact (which is insignificant), but in their strategic impact, which is profound.
Every dead soldier erodes public support for the war. It breeds more
hand-wringing defeatists that decry the futility of our efforts. And the worst thing is, the US military is, to some extent, making it EASIER for the enemy to hurt us.Right now, the vast majority of the press covering Iraq sits, fat and happy, inside the green zone, in plush hotels. They pay Iraqi cameramen to go out and get the most gruesome, horrific pictures they can find that day. The more gruesome, the better the pay. And those images get beamed back to the US, where they feed the impression that Iraq is chaotic and out of control.
All it takes is one car bomb a day.Let’s say, one day, that the US Embassy announces that the American media is right. Iraq just isn’t safe enough for reporters to stay in the green zone.
The only way to insure reporters are protected is to move them out of the green zone and back into an imbedded state in Army units. The 1/3rd of reporters that didn’t run screaming for the airport would get a much different view of Iraq. And that view would put car bombs and mortar attacks in context. Such a viewpoint couldn’t help but get translated to the American people.That’s my two cents.
Published with the permission of the author.
The latest and apparently last theory that Kerry and his media allies have settled on is to attack Bush’s execution of the War on Terror, including both the Iraq war and Afghanistan; the theme of the attacks has been that Bush is incompetent, which is taken now as received wisdom beyond challenge by fact. Go read Greg Djerejian’s long essay on this point, and yesterday’s shorter Wall Street Journal op-ed (for a similar analysis, see Dan Darling on the Washington Post’s effort to argue that the Iraq war and anti-Iran hardliners undermined the al Qaeda manhunt). Both contribute to a few of the key points that need to be borne in mind in evaluating the Bush Administration’s performance:
1. War is a difficult and complex endeavor, requiring the making of scores of decisions large and small. Many of those decisions are, by their very nature, made on the basis of severely incomplete information, fraught with uncertainty and likely to have lethal consequences if they go wrong - and often if they go right, as well. The military acronym SNAFU got that way for a reason. Bush, by leading the nation in wartime, is certain to make more mistakes, and with worse consequences, than any peacetime president.
2. The history of wars, in fact, is almost unbroken in the making of catastrophic misjudgments by even the best of wartime leaders. Certainly if you review the records of Lincoln, FDR and Churchill, three of the models of civilian leadership in war, they and their generals and civilian advisers made numerous errors that cost scores of lives, many of which in retrospect seem like obvious blunders. I’d like the critics who formerly supported Bush and have now abandoned him to at least admit that on the same grounds, they would have voted for Dewey in 1944 and McClellan in 1864.
3. More specifically to the issue at hand, in almost all cases, the decisions by Bush and his civilian and military advisers involved avoiding alternatives that had their own potential bad consequences, and the critics are judging these decisions in a vacuum. The decision to disband Saddam’s army and undergo a thorough de-Ba’athification is a classic example, cited incessantly by critics on the Left. But what if Bush had kept that army together, and they had acted in the heavy-handed (to put it mildly) fashion to which the Ba’athists were accustomed, say, by firing on crowds of civilians? Isn’t it an absolute certainty that all the same critics would be singing “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” accusing Bush’s commitment to democracy as being a sham and a cover for a desire to set up friendly tyrants to keep the oil pumping, that we’d hear constantly about how we’ve alienated the Iraqi people by enabling their oppressors, how we showed misunderstanding of the country by leaving a minority Sunni power structure in place over the Shi’ite majority? Wouldn’t we hear the very same things we hear now about Afghanistan, about using too few US troops and “outsourcing” the job, or the same civil-liberties concerns we hear when we turn over suspects for interrogation to countries without our restraint when it comes to torture? Don’t insult our intelligence and try to deny it.
The same goes for many decisions. More troops? We’d hear that this is a heavy-handed US occupation. I mean, we heard something like that when Giuliani put more cops on the street in New York, let alone a foreign country. Like most conservatives, my preference would have been to go hard into Fallujauh in April. But even if the alternative decision to hold off until there could be significant Iraqi participation in the assault was wrong, it was not an illogical one, but rather a decision made with the patience and foresight to consider the long-range political consequences in Iraq of differing military approaches.
4. Many of the decisions at issue here, from specific ground commanders’ decisions to secure particular sites to Tommy Franks’ call on Tora Bora, were decisions principally made by people lower in the chain of command, many of them in the military. This is not to say that Bush, as the head of that chain of command, is not ultimately responsible to the voters for those decisions; he is. But it is to remind people that they are not second-guessing solely the judgments of a small coterie of the president and civilian advisers, but the entire chain of command. Tom Maguire makes this point explicitly with regard to Tora Bora:
[I]f the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff chose not to overrule his subordinate, why should Bush? This . . . actually strenghtens Bush’s case - the issue was identified, alternatives were weighed, and a decision was made. We all wish the right guess had been made, but I, at least, am glad that the decision making team was aware of the issues and the alternatives.If Kerry is campaigning on a promise to make the battlefield decisions and always make the right ones, good for him. Say Anything, John.
5. Much of the criticism has focused on the idea that Bush needs to admit more errors, and that Kerry would be better at recognizing and admitting mistakes. Djerejian zeroes in on an argument made by David Adesnik and Dan Drezner:
[P]eople like Drezner and Adesnik are asking: maybe Kerry’s a gamble—but at least he’s not a proven train wreck. While Adesnik think “accountability”, in the main, is the issue that has gotten waverers on board for Kerry—the real core grievance appears to be best reflected, instead, in this Adesnik graf that Drezner approvingly links too:
As a professional researcher, I think I simply find it almost impossible to trust someone whose thought process is apparently so different from my own.
In theory, I am sure that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld all believe in evaluating the relevant data and adjusting their decisions to reflect reality. Thus, when I say that I object to the way that this administration makes decisions, I am saying that I do not believe that it has lived up to the intellectual standard it presumably accepts. [emphasis added]
Let’s put all this in plainer English, OK? What Dan and David are saying, I think, is: When this Bush team effs up (and they have effed up a lot), are they able to (on a bare-bones constitutive level, say): a) even recognize they have effed up and b) then move to redress the eff up?
As an initial matter, admitting mistakes, especially in wartime, is overrated, particularly if that means (1) admitting a decision was wrong before you have all the information to reach a final conclusion about it, or (2) making a public self-analysis that gives useful information to the enemy. How often did Churchill, battling daily to keep up the fighting spirit of the British, go on the radio to say, “sorry folks, I blew it again and got a bunch of people killed”? I tend to think that Bush made a big mistake of this kind when he conceded the point last summer on the inclusion in the State of the Union Address of British charges that Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa; as it turned out, the Brits stood by their report, and Saddam really did send an envoy there to do precisely that.
The more important point in wartime is the ability to recognize what’s not working and change tactics or, if appropriate, strategies. Djerejian cites several examples of Bush doing precisely that, most notably with the firing of Jay Garner but also extending to expanding the number of troops on the ground.
In any event, where, I would ask, is the evidence that Kerry is better at admitting mistakes than Bush? This is a guy who brought all sorts of political grief to himself by stubbornly refusing for three decades to admit that he was wrong to repeat false charges, under oath and on national televison, that smeared his comrades in Vietnam as guilty of pervasive war crimes. Has Kerry admitted he was wrong to oppose nearly every aspect of the foreign policy strategy that President Reagan pursused to great effect in the closing and victorious chapter of the Cold War? Has he admitted he was wrong to oppose the use of force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991? Maybe I missed something, but I don’t even recall him admitting he was wrong for trying to slash the intelligence budget in the mid-1990s following the first World Trade Center bombing. Indeed, one of the most common threads throughout Kerry’s behavior in this campaign has been his unwillingness to take any personal responsibility for mistakes, from blaming his speechwriters for things that come out of Kerry’s own mouth to picayune things like blaming the Secret Service when he falls down on the slopes. As Jonah Goldberg notes, Kerry’s “liberal hawk” backers may argue that the decades of bad judgment in Kerry’s past are rendered inoperative by September 11, but Kerry’s stubborn insistence that he hasn’t changed in response to September 11, and that he had the right answers all along even when he wrote a book in 1997 that barely mentioned Islamic terrorism, gives the lie to the notion that Kerry is a model of self-reflection. Even the man’s own supporters can’t seriously defend the proposition - on which many of them heaped well-deserved scorn during the primary season - that Kerry has been consistent from the start on whether Saddam was a serious threat that justified a military response. Yet there Kerry stands, insisting to all the world what nobody believes, that he hasn’t changed his position. Preferring Kerry to Bush because Bush won’t admit mistakes is like preferring fresh water to salt water because salt water is wet.
In any event, will Kerry somehow change, grow in office, shed a lifetime of bad judgments and blanching at the use of American power, suddenly stop valuing diplomacy as an end and the status quo as the highest virtue? Just because Bush changed in office means nothing. First of all, Bush was a guy who had already proven his willingness to change and admit his problems when he quit drinking, had a religious awakening and basically overhauled his whole approach to life in his forties; Kerry can show no similar example of a willingness to change. And Kerry is now in his sixties, six years older than Bush in 2000, and while Bush may count September 11 as a life-changing event, Kerry had already had his, in Vietnam. Kerry’s foreign policy world view was set decades ago, both by the example of his diplomat father and by Vietnam. The fact that Kerry has been malleable and vascillating over the years, clear a pattern though that may be, is no reason to think that he will suddenly re-examine his approach to accept the need for the United States to lead a continuing effort to overturn the corrupt, rotten and deadly status quo in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
6. The final charge is that Bush’s errors would be forgiveable if he had done more, earlier, to explain the risks and burdens of war to the American people. Of course, this has nothing to do with the execution of the war, but political leadership is important, and in many ways it’s much more the president’s job than is the decision to use X number of troops to seal off a particular location. First off, the charge that Bush argued the war would be easy is refuted by virtually all his speeches, in which he said over and over and over again that we were in for a long haul, and there would be difficult times ahead. Of course, that has long since become obvious from events, and in any event we really were not in a position before the war to know precisely how it would all play out. But I will agree that he never gave a Churchillian “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech specifically about Iraq, and that many hawks in and out of the administration underestimated in their public arguments the difficulties of a post-conquest insurgency (then again, many doves told us that we’d be bogged down with thousands of casualties taking Baghdad). Of course, the war itself, up to and through the fall of Baghdad, was as much of a “cakewalk” as a real life shooting war against a substantial enemy can ever be; the problem is simply that we didn’t broadcast the coming insurgency (which, by the way, would have had the effect of greatly encouraging the insurgents).
In the end, that’s what this argument is all about - not the difficulties of war, which are well-understood, but simply a political argument about the use of speeches to predict the unpredictable. Moreover, on that ground, again, there’s no reason to think Kerry would be better; after all, Kerry is the guy who won’t even admit to this day that his war vote was a vote for war. Kerry’s the guy who wasn’t able to predict that his campaign would have to prepare for attacks by people who’d been holding a grudge against him for 30 years.
No, Bush hasn’t been a perfect war leader, but show me who was. He’s had tough calls to make, and unlike Kerry he can’t shift with the wind without consequence. Progress has been frustrating at times, because our overall enemy - the forces of terror and tyranny, of radical Islamism and fascist gangsterism - have recognized that an American victory in Iraq would be a defeat for them in the war on terror. You know that, I know that, they know that. But that just makes it all the more urgent to stick with a guy who believes in the mission, and who has proven that he will keep on trying new approaches until the job is finished, rather than looking for the door.
I’ve updated my June 2002 piece on Winds of Change.NET, explaining “What Is 4th Generation Warfare?.”
The concept is still every bit as relevant today, as “4th Generation Warfare” and its associated concepts remain critical to understanding the Global War on Terror. Winds of Change.NET has your primer, plus some additional links I’ve fixed/added to help flesh out the concept.
Before 9/11, we almost always knew how to win a war – even the people who weren’t in favor of fighting it.
Plenty of people thought we should have just let the Confederate states go their own way in 1861 – but even they knew that if we beat General Lee on the field and occupied enough of the South, that the CSA would cry uncle and quit.
The First World War? Same story. Before President Wilson asked Congress for a war declaration, pro-German sentiment was pretty evenly divided with pro-English sentiment. But once war was declared, everybody knew – drive on to Berlin, and the world would be made safe for democracy. Except the Germans called it quits before the Anglo-Franco-American allies even crossed the frontier, so WWI never quite ended for the Germans. And that brings us, naturally, to the Second World War.
Not a whole lot of pro-German sentiment here for that one, unless you count some of the really fringe members of the America First brigades. (If I need to refer to them later, we’ll call Charles Lindberg, Joe Kennedy & Co. the “Proto-Buchananites.”) Even after Pearl Harbor, there were still a few pacifists in the country, however – but somewhere in their hearts, they knew the war would be won once we had soldiers occupying Berlin and Tokyo.
And so it went. We did those things, we won those wars.
Nuclear weapons and our first-ever defensive alliances complicated matters. Did we win in Korea, by simply holding the line? Or should victory have been defined as reuniting all of Korea under a friendly government in Seoul? Or, since the Chinese proved to be our real foe after Inchon, should we have considered anything less than deposing the Beijing regime to have been something less than victory?
Well. Fighting the Chinese in China would have led to a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. In 1953, we would have won that, too – but is a win still a win when after dozens of nukes have hit us? Some days, the closest you can get to victory is simply not having to fight.
Then there’s Vietnam, which was Korea writ on a much larger scale. We won the battles, as everyone knows, but we lost the war. Or did we? Vietnam was a series of battles in the larger Cold War. Sure, we lost South Vietnam, but we still won the larger war. Former lefty Robert Kaplan argued that fighting in Vietnam was a tragic necessity. Had we not proven ourselves willing to fight for South Vietnam, we could very well have lost our NATO allies without the Reds ever having fired a shot. Was Vietnam a win? A loss? A tragic necessity? All of the above?
As I said, nuclear arms and defensive alliances complicated things for us greatly. Our alliances forced us into wars we couldn’t quite win (because of the nuclear threat), in order to avoid greater losses in future wars (which would have run even greater nuclear risks). Or, to put it in the kind of language I prefer to use when discussing politics, the Cold War sucked.
If you think war has become complex, peace is messier still – and always has been.
Nobody ever knows what the peace will look like. Let’s use our examples from earlier. Even as late as Appomattox, who could have predicted the KKK, Jim Crow, or Radical Reconstruction? No statesmen in 1914 knew that the war they were about to unleash would result in 20 million deaths, Russian Communism, or Nazi Germany. World War II? If you can find me the words of some prophet detailing, in 1940, the UN, the Cold War, or even the complete assimilation of western Germany into Western Europe. . . then I’ll print this essay on some very heavy paper, and eat it. With aluminum foil as a garnish.
NOTE: That’s what gets me about all the complaints that President Bush “didn’t have a plan” to “win the peace” in Iraq. Oh, blow me. Nobody ever has a plan for the peace. Or if they do, it will prove useless. “No peace plan survives the last battle” is the VodkaPundit corollary to Clausewitz’s dictum that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.
By now, you probably know where I’m going with this little history lesson: How do we define victory in the Terror War, and what will the peace look like.
Let’s get the second part out of the way first.
What will the peace look like? I don’t have a damn clue. And neither do you. And if you meet anyone who claims to know, feel free to laugh at them really hard. So hard, you get a little spit on their face. Sometimes, justice can be small and spiteful – ask a meter maid. Anyway.
When peace comes, it could look like whatever Mecca, Tehran, Damascus, Riyadh, Pyongyang, Khartoum, Kabul, Cairo, etc., look like after being hit by big city-busting nuclear warheads. Or it could end with the entire Arab and Muslim world looking like the really well-manicured bits of Connecticut. My best guess is, somewhere in-between. But that’s only a guess.
NOTE: It’s a sad state of affairs (their affairs, not ours) that the first scenario, no matter how repugnant and unlikely, still seems more likely than the second scenario, no matter how virtuous.
Now that we know that we don’t know how we’ll win, that leaves the question (and the oxymoron): How do we win?
Ending the rule of the Taliban didn’t end the war. Ending the rule of Saddam didn’t end the war. We could depose the dictators in every dictatorship, and still not be done with this mess. Our enemy isn’t a nation. It isn’t a leader. It isn’t, despite the misnomer “War on Terror,” a war on terror.
What we’re fighting is an ideology.
First off, let’s brush aside the Loser Notion that if we kill terrorists, we’ll only breed more terrorists. So what? Every dead terrorist is, well, dead. And we can always build more bombs and make more bullets. For 30 years now, the US Army has trained to fight in a “target-rich environment.” Bring’em on.
Now that we have defeatism out of the way, let’s get on with defeating the enemy. “But the enemy is an ideology,” you’ve been told, “and you can’t fight thoughts with bullets.”
Yes and no.
Some people forget (because they backed/worshipped/served-as-useful-idiots-to the other side) that we have fought an ideology before, and – we won. The Cold War was, above all else, an ideological conflict. It was the Great Civil War of Western Civilization. On the one side, you had Western Capitalism, and on the other, International Communism. Obviously, things weren’t that cut and dried. The US certainly doesn’t (to my constant dismay) enjoy a laissez-faire economy, and the European NATO countries even less so. And despite a totalitarian regime, even the Soviet Union tolerated a little samizdat capitalism. Nevertheless, with the exception of France, countries took sides and stayed there.
Which socio-political system was left standing after 45 years of conflict? Oh yeah, baby – despite what you hear on American campuses, the West won. We won completely. We knocked their dicks in the dirt. The bad guys gave up, in the end, without even firing a shot – like Saddam Hussein in his hidey-hole.
How did we do it? How did we endure 45 years of conflict? How did we win? In the end, it came down to one simple thing:
We proved the enemy ideology to be ineffective.
We fought Communism for almost 50 years, and we would have fought it for another 50 – had that ideology not been too incompetent to keep up the fight. Islamism isn’t Communism, however, so the means of fighting it have to be different.
Communism, when it took us on directly, found we were willing to stand up for ourselves and our allies (no matter how undesirable some of those allies were). Korea was ugly and inconclusive. Vietnam was even uglier, and didn’t go our way. But in each case, we sent the same signal to Moscow: Push us or our friends around, and we’ll fight. No one can say for sure that the 1st Air Cavalry Division’s actions in Vietnam kept the Soviets from sending their tanks west to the Rhine – but it sure kept them guessing. And that, in part, was the point.
Communism promised a better life here on earth, but failed to deliver. Selling the Commodore 64 at a retail price of $300 was enough to prove that Communism had failed in comparison to capitalism. The Stealth Fighter just drove the point home.
Meanwhile, not much changed here at home. We lurched from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon to Ford to Carter to Reagan – and that entire time, we not only kept up the fight (more or less), but we didn’t change any of the fundamental precepts of our civilization. In fact, thanks to the Civil Rights movement and the anti-draft protests, we came ever-closer to achieving our ideals.
We can out-produce you. We are willing to fight you. We are unwilling to become you. Add those three things together, and we proved that Communism was ineffective. They lost, we won, get over it.
Islamism isn’t Communism, obviously. Out-producing the Islamic world isn’t hard – subtract the oil, and Finland provides more exports than the entire Arab world. But Islamism doesn’t promise a better life here – it promises a better afterlife. Therefore, we aren’t going to dissuade our enemies by producing a $50 iPod, or even a billion-dollar stealth bomber.
Killing our enemies isn’t enough, because death is what they seek. If there were a million terror-sponsoring nations, we could invade them all and never make any headway in any essential sense. So that’s out, too.
What we are is why they want to kill us – so even if the US were to become my libertarian wet-daydream fantasyland, it wouldn’t help us win the war.
With all that in mind, I’ve identified three keys to winning this war:
1. Take the initiative.
2. Fight when we have to, even if we can’t win.
3. Remain what we are.
Take the Initiative
If 9/11 taught us anything, it’s that we can’t sit back any longer. Proactive measure are needed, and probably (sadly, tragically) for the foreseeable future. Had the Soviets engineered a 9/11-type attack on American soil, and had we failed to respond in greater measure, then the Cold War would have been lost. A nation unwilling to respond to attack on its own principal city, can hardly be counted on to defend the cities of its allies. Germany would have been reunited, all right – under a Communist regime.
Islamists can’t be deterred the way the Soviets were, and that means we have to be proactive. And that means taking the fight to the enemy, before he can take the fight to us. Doing so doesn’t preclude further 9/11-style attacks on us. But it does mean, at the very least, reducing their frequency. More importantly, it also means keeping our standing as a vital nation. At this stage in the game, failing to be proactive would mean losing whatever allies we have left. (Are you listening, John Kerry?)
Taking the initiative also means discarding fair-weather allies. If France and Germany would rather scuttle NATO than stand by its most important member, then NATO must whither. This is, as I think I’ve already demonstrated, a fight for our very existence. Allies who fail (or refuse) to recognize that aren’t real allies – and should no longer be treated as such. The UN was never an ally, and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
Taking the initiative is why – despite all the WMD talk – we invaded Iraq. We had to topple the Taliban, because the Taliban was directly linked to 9/11. We had to invade Iraq, because Iraq is directly linked to what is wrong with the Arab world. And unless the Arab world is fixed – either by setting up decent governments (I hope), or by nuclear castration (my nightmare), or something in-between – then this war is not yet over.
Fight When We Have To, Even If We Can’t Win.
The Battle of Pearl Harbor was a lost cause. Korea was nearly one. And Vietnam, given the constraints described above, was almost certainly a losing proposition.
But we fought in those places.
We fought at Bull Run, too. And we fought at Kasserine Pass, and Manila, and Bastogne, and Hue, and on Flight 93. We even won at a couple of those places, even though cause seemed lost.
But we fought.
And that’s the whole point. Going into Afghanistan is October of 2001, we went in without knowing if we could win. We went in, severely outnumbered, trying a brand-new doctrine (forced on the Pentagon by that idiot, George W. Bush) in a nation known as “the graveyard of empires.” But Afghanistan was the sanctuary and training ground of those who hurt us so badly on 9/11. Had we not fought there, the War would have been over, scarcely before it had begun. So we went. And we won. But victory was no foregone conclusion. We went anyway.
Whether we can win (by establishing something resembling decent government) in Iraq is still an unanswered question. But, as I argued in the previous section, we had to go into Iraq and at least try. There is a sickness in the modern Arab world, and it must be cured. Iraq is our attempt at curing it without killing the patient. The prognosis for the patient is still unclear – but, so far, our resolve is crystal clear. But, like a oncologist, we had to go in no matter what the risks.
There will be other battles we may have to face, no matter how dubious the outcome. Will Iran be next? Will we finally lose patience with the Saudis? Will we find evidence that Syria, or Yasser Arafat’s West Bank cronies are now in charge of Saddam’s old chemical weapons?
I don’t know. And nobody knows where such battles might lead us. But, if we want to win this war, we can’t be afraid of fighting any necessary battles.
Remain What We Are
You don’t defeat the enemy by becoming him. We didn’t beat the Soviets by establishing our own Five Year Plans, and we won’t beat the children of oppression by becoming oppressors.
We might stop an attack or two by militarizing our borders, but what would we lose? We’d be three, maybe four, short steps above the dictatorships we so rightly despise. And we’d be this much closer (hold your thumb and index fingers very close together for visual effect) from breeding our own homegrown crazies, just like they breed them Over There.
We might stop an attack or two by inspecting every single cargo container coming into our country – but the economic repercussions would kill more people than a dozen 9/11s.
We might stop an attack or two by nuking every Islamic city from Tangier to Islamabad – but, come morning, we’ll have to look ourselves in the mirror. What that means is, just because you don’t agree with the millions and millions of antiwar Americans, doesn’t mean you may discount completely their opinions. Want a civil war in your own country? Then start nuking other countries indiscriminately.
Defeating terror can, I hope, be done without becoming terrorists, ourselves. But the war is young, and we didn’t nuke Hiroshima until Japan was already almost entirely beaten.
Taking the initiative, fighting where we must, remaining free – those are the keys to victory.
If we show our enemies that they aren’t the only ones who can take the initiative. . .
If we show our enemies that we are willing to fight them, even when the odds are slim. . .
If we fight and fight and fight, without ever giving up those freedoms we’re fighting to defend. . .
. . . then we will have proven, no matter how long it takes, that their ideology is ineffective. We won’t just take it. We won’t retreat. We will not change.
We will have proven that their way is the way of death; our way is the way of life.
How it will all play out is anyone’s guess. But I do know this much. Anyone who claims we should just suffer attacks on our homeland, or retreat before all hope is lost, or surrender our liberties when those freedoms are what we live for –— the only thing that person offers you is the same thing offered you by our enemies:
Defeat.
Stick to the game plan. We can win.
<b?Note: The following editorial was posted by “DennisThePeasant” at Roger L. Simon’s blog comment’s section. I am posting it here with permission, because it is excellent.
Those who are calling Iraq a disaster have the wrong criteria, and Vietnam comparisons are only appropriate in the nature of some of the internal conflict in the US.
If you accept the premise that the War On Terror is a necessity and that the forces of Islamic Totalitarianism cannot be dealt with via the Police/Crime Model, then the inescapable conclusion is that the invasion of Iraq is a complete and total success.
After 9/11, the first and foremost problem facing the United States was quite simply, “How do we force our enemies to engage us on terms most favorable to us?” The Jihadists purposefully designed a strategy to enable their forces to engage the United States in an asymmetrical fashion, thus attempting to neutralize overwhelming U.S. advantages in men, material, striking power and mobility.
The U.S. faced exactly the same problem in Viet Nam, and Gen. Westmoreland, hamstrung by the Johnson Administration’s bizarre rules of engagement, failed over the course of years to design a strategy that allowed the U.S. to engage on terms that allowed our advantages to be utilized to maximum effect.
In fact, it took Gen. Giap’s Tet Offensive to actually create the conditions for the U.S. to engage under favorable terms, and the result was a complete military defeat of the Viet Cong and North Viet Nam’s Army regulars (Gen. Giap has said so in several different interviews). The U.S. could not defeat the Communists because they could not force them to fight sustained engagements on terms that allowed the U.S. to maximize its’ military advantages.
The genius of the Iraq Invasion is that it immediately took the initiative away from the Jihadists and handed it to the U.S. military, thus neutralizing the Jihadists ability to wage asymmetric war at the times and in the places of their choosing. For political reasons understood by all in the Middle East, the Jihadists have no other choice than to stand and fight on U.S. terms at the time and place dictated by the U.S.. This is because they cannot allow an Middle Eastern democracy, created, nurtured and sanctioned by the U.S. to exist. The had to fight in Iraq first and foremost, and not because they wanted to, but because they were forced to.
Similarly, the settling, very early in the conflict, of a date for creation of an Iraqi government forced the Jihadists to enter into a conflict at the time of our choosing. U.S. forces were in place at the time of the setting of that date, the Jihadist forces were not. It would be a fare bet that the Jihadists have been forced to field a weaker force than they would have had they the additional time to recruit, train and arm their forces.
Thus, the Iraq War has solved the single most difficult problem that faces a army of overwhelming power going up against a guerilla force…how to force the guerillas to fight on the army’s terms. George Bush’s “Bring it on” was not false bravado, it is the expression of a Commander-In-Chief’s complete understanding of what was necessary strategically to enter the War On Terror under conditions favorable to the U.S. rather than the Jihadists.
It should also be remembered that if there is the possibility of ‘quagmire’ in Iraq, the risks fall equally on the Jihadists and the U.S.. Quagmire in Iraq is a two-way street. Despite the fanaticism we have seen from many in their ranks, their sustained appeal to Arabs in the Middle East is very much a function of their military success. Martyrdom may appeal to some under any conditions, but history has shown (even in the case of Japan’s Kamikazes) for the vast majority martyrdom has no appeal if it is viewed as being in furtherance of a hopeless cause.
The longer the U.S. has forces in the field, killing Jihadists at rates that far exceed their own casualties, the greater the probability that the Jihadists have difficulty in sustaining their operations. The Arab World may have looked at 9/11 as a Jihadist success, but with casualities mounting and no battlefield or political success to speak of, it is doubtful Iraq can be viewed to date by Arabs as a Jihadist success.
Beyond that, U.S. occupation of Iraq has removed all Arab leverage on the U.S. with regards to basing troops in the region, and has put about 1/5th of known oil reserves under the physical control of the U.S.. Again, decreased Arab leverage in the long run.
Simply put, there is no possibility of the U.S sustaining an actual military defeat in the field in Iraq. Period. The only way the U.S. can “lose the war” is to choose to lose the war. As with Viet Nam (and just about the only meaningful parallel with Viet Nam I can find in Iraq), this choice will be a politcal one, rather than a military one.
Azure is the journal of the Shalem Center (where Michael Oren is a senior fellow). This extensively footnoted article by Yagil Henkin is from the most recent issue. Henkin discusses lessons learned about urban warfare from the IDF operation in Jenin (while meticulously refuting the accusations of "massacre"), and gives additional examples from Chechnya, Serbia, and Somalia. If you find military strategy interesting, or if the problem of civilian casualties in war is of concern to you, this is a must read.
Gregg Easterbrook looks at the consequences of the unrivaled power of the United States:
Stealth drones, G.P.S.-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; antitank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition forces are during battle - the United States military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military is even close to the United States. The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.
Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner.
Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence.
Iraq: On Outskirts Of Baghdad, U.S. Commanders Reflect On Battlefield Successes - (Radio Free Europe - Radio Liberty)
Thus, while press reports spoke of U.S. troops being "held up" in southern Iraq, Watson says the reality was that U.S. ground troops had advanced as far as they could without putting the main body of U.S. troops in range of Iraqi attacks. The objective was to provide accurate targeting information for U.S. air strikes against positions of the Iraqi Republican Guard.But - I thought it was a quagmire?This correspondent watched a series of military feints to the south of Baghdad, which military planners said were designed to draw Iraqi forces away from the capital and out into the open desert and highways, where they could easily be targeted by U.S. air and artillery strikes.
These so-called feints at Samawah, Najaf, and Hindiyah were seized on by the Iraqi Information Ministry as instances where Iraqi forces had boldly held off U.S. advances. Similar reports appeared in some Western media.
But military officials RFE/RL spoke with say it is now clear that the U.S. plan worked perfectly -- drawing much of the elite Republican Guard to defend positions along the main highways following the Euphrates River through the center of the country and further south to Basra.
I thought we were stalled, and our war plan was in tatters, and we had to start over again?
So ... none of that was true ?!
Has anybody alerted Peter Arnett yet ?
There's a considerable level of concern about the possible use of chemical or biological weapons by the Iraqis as we press into Baghdad. Though I'm convinced they have them somewhere in Iraq, I'm not inclined to believe that they'll use them. Nevertheless, the spectre of such horrible weapons should never be taken for granted. The fear of such weapons reminds me of the concern we had of atomic weapons back in the early '60s (we didn't call them "nuclear" back then).
However, there's another side to the chem/bio issue: how affective can they really be, and how much danger are coalition forces really in if they're used? We've all seen the images of gassed Kurds and we're horrified by the sights of those bodies. One must also remember that those people were sitting ducks with literally no protection and no warning.
Some weeks ago, I read a post by a retired Army serviceman explaining what field troops might expect in such attacks and what they need to do to lower the chance of injury and exposure. I thought ti would be timely for everyone to read, so here it is. This is a much different take on the issue then you'd might expect.
There's a subtle change in the news wind. Up until yesterday, a lot of questions were bandied about by the news media - rather notably in some cases - over the success/failure of the war plan. Overnight, things seem to be moving a different direction. Even just a quick perusal of the headlines shows some differences:
From UPI:
Analysis: Republican Guard's last stand
Analysis: Victory beckons U.S. troops
Commentary: Cracks in Iraq's resistance
From UK Telelgraph:
Fanatics forced into hopeless fight
From FOX:
Civilians 'Increasingly Willing' to Support Allies in South
From the Toronto Star:
Franks' military plan becoming clear: Phase 1 completed as general intended
What only yesterday seemd to be bogging down into quagmire is beginning to emerge as a classic case of indirect warfare. Like a pulling guard throwing a block to spring the running back, Coailtion forces pinned Saddam's troops in Basra and Umm Qasr, allowing the 3rd Infantry and the Marines to race across the desert behind them toward Baghdad in record time. Meanwhile, other troops secured the northern flank and captured airfields in the west to aid the logistical battle. The 82nd Airborne dropped in behind the front line troops to secure overland supplies. All of this manuevering takes time, and I believe was wrongly interpreted by the press as unanticipated resistance by the Iraqis or a lack of foresight by Coalition war planners.
But now the supply lines are secure, the Iraqi forces have been softened up, main battle units have caught up with their forward scouts, supply points close to Baghdad have been secured and the Coalition appears ready to begin the push into Baghdad. It's FAR from over. There will certainly be more casualities on both sides. It seems to me, however, the tide is beginning to turn, and the result does not bode well for Saddam.
United Press International: Analysis: No 'easy' victory in Iraq
There are a number of ways the aftermath of this war could turn out. Iraq could collapse in a few years because of infighting between the Shias, the Sunnis and the Kurds. The radical Islamists could lay siege to it with suicide bombers. Or it could prosper as a free country and an oasis of freedom in a part of the world that desperately needs freedom. I'll take door number three.
I doubt we'll ever abandon Iraq completely once the war is over. That's not to say we will leave troops there indefinitely; I certainly hope not. But we can sign a treaty with them that says as long as they respect human rights, we'll view an attack on them in the same way we view an attack on the United States.
The author of the linked article has a very different view. He says this will lead to generations of hatred for America by the Arab world. Maybe, but unlikely. Once the Arab world sees that the sky doesn't fall because a free country is in their midst and the Palestinian situation is settled they can go back to tormenting their own people and will forget all about us.
The reason the United States and Great Britain went to war with Iraq, we were told, was to remove a potentially unfriendly regime that could cause great harm to the West and to its neighbors. Given Iraq's predisposition of invading its neighbors and its inexorable desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction, for the sake of world stability, regime change became the order of the day.Our willingness to look the other way at terrorist incidents emboldened the 9/11 hi-jackers. I doubt they'll react the same way to a decisive victory by the U.S.But in so doing, the United States and Britain have unwittingly laid out the groundwork for even greater hatred which will, without a doubt, come back to haunt the West for many generations.
At the end of this conflict, or quite possibly even before the guns fall silent, coalition troops may indeed discover weapons of mass destruction stashed away in one of Saddam Hussein's many secret hiding places, deep beneath some Baghdad government building. Depending on how you look at it, this find would, or would not, justify the invasion of Iraq and the casualties this war caused. Casualties that should be measured not only in human lives, but also in damaged relations between the Arab and Islamic world, and the West.
However, at the end of the day what the United States -- who took the lead in this campaign -- is certain to find, is renewed hatred from much of the Arab world. It may well be that the Sept. 11, 2001-type attacks Iraq's invasion was meant to thwart only paved the way for more anti-American sentiments around the world.
The American public knows you made a tough call - the right call - in a terrible, fast-moving situation.
Original article by William Branigin, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, April 1, 2003, page A01, under the title, "The Fog of War - A Gruesome Scene on Highway 9 - 10 Dead After Vehicle Shelled at Checkpoint".
* * *
NEAR KARBALA, Iraq, March 31 -- As an unidentified four-wheel-drive vehicle came barreling toward an intersection held by troops of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, Capt. Ronny Johnson grew increasingly alarmed. From his position at the intersection, he was heard radioing to one of his forward platoons of M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles to alert it to what he described as a potential threat.
"Fire a warning shot," he ordered as the vehicle kept coming. Then, with increasing urgency, he told the platoon to shoot a 7.62mm machine-gun round into its radiator. "Stop [messing] around!" Johnson yelled into the company radio network when he still saw no action being taken. Finally, he shouted at the top of his voice, "Stop him, Red 1, stop him!"
That order was immediately followed by the loud reports of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of the platoon's Bradleys. About half a dozen shots were heard in all.
"Cease fire!" Johnson yelled over the radio. Then, as he peered into his binoculars from the intersection on Highway 9, he roared at the platoon leader, "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!"
So it was that on a warm, hazy day in central Iraq, the fog of war descended on Bravo Company.
Fifteen Iraqi civilians were packed inside the Toyota, officers said, along with as many of their possessions as the jammed vehicle could hold. Ten of them, including five children who appeared to be under 5 years old, were killed on the spot when the high-explosive rounds slammed into their target, Johnson's company reported. Of the five others, one man was so severely injured that medics said he was not expected to live.
"It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and I hope I never see it again," Sgt. Mario Manzano, 26, an Army medic with Bravo Company of the division's 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, said later in an interview. He said one of the wounded women sat in the vehicle holding the mangled bodies of two of her children. "She didn't want to get out of the car," he said.
* * *
[In Washington, the Pentagon issued a statement saying the vehicle was fired on after the driver ignored shouted orders and warning shots. The shooting, it said, is under investigation. According to the Pentagon account, the vehicle was a van carrying 13 women and children. Seven were killed, two were injured and four were unharmed, it said, without mentioning any men.]
To try to prevent a recurrence, Johnson ordered that signs be posted in Arabic to warn people to stop well short of the Bradleys guarding the eastern approach to the intersection. Before they could be erected, 10 people carrying white flags walked down the same road. They were seven children, an old man, a woman and a boy in his teens.
"Tell them to go away," Johnson ordered. But he reconsidered when told that the family said their house had been blown up and that they were trying to reach the home of relatives in a safer area.
"They look like they pose no threat at this time," one of the Bradley platoons radioed.
Johnson, a former Army Ranger who parachuted into Panama in 1989, fought in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and rose through the ranks, relented. He ordered his troops to tell the old man that the group could walk around the Bradleys.
* * *
The Fog of War
A Gruesome Scene on Highway 9
10 Dead After Vehicle Shelled at Checkpoint
By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 1, 2003; Page A01
NEAR KARBALA, Iraq, March 31 -- As an unidentified four-wheel-drive vehicle came barreling toward an intersection held by troops of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, Capt. Ronny Johnson grew increasingly alarmed. From his position at the intersection, he was heard radioing to one of his forward platoons of M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles to alert it to what he described as a potential threat.
"Fire a warning shot," he ordered as the vehicle kept coming. Then, with increasing urgency, he told the platoon to shoot a 7.62mm machine-gun round into its radiator. "Stop [messing] around!" Johnson yelled into the company radio network when he still saw no action being taken. Finally, he shouted at the top of his voice, "Stop him, Red 1, stop him!"
That order was immediately followed by the loud reports of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of the platoon's Bradleys. About half a dozen shots were heard in all.
"Cease fire!" Johnson yelled over the radio. Then, as he peered into his binoculars from the intersection on Highway 9, he roared at the platoon leader, "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!"
So it was that on a warm, hazy day in central Iraq, the fog of war descended on Bravo Company.
Fifteen Iraqi civilians were packed inside the Toyota, officers said, along with as many of their possessions as the jammed vehicle could hold. Ten of them, including five children who appeared to be under 5 years old, were killed on the spot when the high-explosive rounds slammed into their target, Johnson's company reported. Of the five others, one man was so severely injured that medics said he was not expected to live.
"It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and I hope I never see it again," Sgt. Mario Manzano, 26, an Army medic with Bravo Company of the division's 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, said later in an interview. He said one of the wounded women sat in the vehicle holding the mangled bodies of two of her children. "She didn't want to get out of the car," he said.
The tragedy cast a pall over the company as it sat in positions it had occupied Sunday on this key stretch of Highway 9 at the intersection of a road leading to the town of Hilla, about 14 miles to the east, near the Euphrates River. The Toyota was coming from that direction when it was fired on.
Dealing with the gruesome scene was a new experience for many of the U.S. soldiers deployed here, and they debated how the tragedy could have been avoided. Several said they accepted the platoon leader's explanation to Johnson on the military radio that he had, in fact, fired two warning shots, but that the driver failed to stop. And everybody was edgy, they realized, since four U.S. soldiers were blown up by a suicide bomber Saturday at a checkpoint much like theirs, only 20 miles to the south.
On a day of sporadic fighting on the roads and in the farms and wooded areas around the intersection, the soldiers of Bravo Company had their own reasons to be edgy. The Bradley of the 3rd Battalion's operations officer, Maj. Roger Shuck, was fired on with a rocket-propelled grenade a couple of miles south of Karbala. No one in the vehicle was seriously injured, but Shuck had difficulty breathing afterward and had to be treated with oxygen, medics said.
That happened after a column of M1 Abrams tanks headed north to Karbala in the early afternoon and returned a couple of hours later. Throughout the day, Iraqis lobbed periodic mortar volleys at the U.S. troops, and Iraqi militiamen and soldiers tried to penetrate the U.S. lines. Later, U.S. multiple-launcher vehicles fired rockets to try to take out the mortar batteries as AH-64 Apache helicopters swooped low over the arid terrain in search of other enemy gun emplacements.
It was in the late afternoon, after this day defending their positions, that the men of Bravo Company saw the blue Toyota coming down the road and reacted. After the shooting, U.S. medics evacuated survivors to U.S. lines south of here. One woman escaped without a scratch. Another, who had superficial head wounds, was flown by helicopter to a field hospital when it was learned she was pregnant.
Johnson said afterward that he initially suspected the driver might have been a suicide bomber, because he did not behave like others who approached the intersection.
"All the other vehicles stopped and turned around when they saw us," he said. "But this one kept on coming." Two days earlier, four 3rd Infantry Division soldiers were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives in his car at a checkpoint.
Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty, the 3rd Battalion commander, gave permission for three of the survivors to return to the vehicle and recover the bodies of their loved ones. Medics gave the group 10 body bags. U.S. officials offered an unspecified amount of money to compensate them.
"They wanted to bury them before the dogs got to them," said Cpl. Brian Truenow, 28, of Townsend, Mass.
[In Washington, the Pentagon issued a statement saying the vehicle was fired on after the driver ignored shouted orders and warning shots. The shooting, it said, is under investigation. According to the Pentagon account, the vehicle was a van carrying 13 women and children. Seven were killed, two were injured and four were unharmed, it said, without mentioning any men.]
To try to prevent a recurrence, Johnson ordered that signs be posted in Arabic to warn people to stop well short of the Bradleys guarding the eastern approach to the intersection. Before they could be erected, 10 people carrying white flags walked down the same road. They were seven children, an old man, a woman and a boy in his teens.
"Tell them to go away," Johnson ordered. But he reconsidered when told that the family said their house had been blown up and that they were trying to reach the home of relatives in a safer area.
"They look like they pose no threat at this time," one of the Bradley platoons radioed.
Johnson, a former Army Ranger who parachuted into Panama in 1989, fought in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and rose through the ranks, relented. He ordered his troops to tell the old man that the group could walk around the Bradleys.
As time passes, the realization is setting in for more people that war is hell. Civilians killed and injured. Fleeing refugees being murdered. Hospitals and ambulances used for enemy operations.
It's been this way in every war.
The odd thing about this one, to me, is exemplified by the street scenes in Baghdad. The buses are still running. You see scenes from our advance on Baghdad and there is normal civilian traffic in the other direction. Life, for many Iraqis, is going on nearly the same as before our invasion.
That's what's so odd. And why so much of the hell of this war will be unusual. In other wars, civilian traffic was suppressed and discouraged. There were swarms of refugees that we had to force off the roads to move forward. The cities cowered under air attack, with traffic shut down.
We’re fighting for the liberation of Iraq and making every effort to keep the lives of the civilian population as normal as possible. In many ways, that’s admirable. I have two objections to it, however.
It puts our men and women at risk from the asymmetrical warfare of the Tikrit Thugocracy. By allowing non uniformed Iraqis freedom of movement, we open ourselves up to suicide bombings, and the other sorts of guerrilla style attacks that we’ve seen and will continue to see. All human life is valuable, but given the choice between an Iraqi and an American, I have to pick our guys every time.
The second objection that I have to the policy of minimizing disruptions to civilians is that I do not believe it is conveying the message we intend to them. We intend for them to see that our concentration upon the instruments of their oppression means that we are there to liberate them and that they have nothing to fear from us.
I believe that they are drawing the conclusion, however, that we are weak and incapable of defeating the current regime. They see our precision and concern as an inability to bring force to bear in concentration. Their knowledge and belief system only allows for an overwhelming crushing of an enemy. Anything less is weakness. While we endeavor to appear careful and selective, and to uphold the virtues the West values in warfare, we are actually conveying a strong sense of weakness to the Iraqis.
To appear as winners in their minds, we must behave as winners do in their culture. We must begin to portray our enemies as defeated, as losers, and ensure that the appearance matches the rhetoric. So far, it has not. We are inflicting a crushing military defeat upon the Tikrit Thugocracy but the average Iraqi has not seen that. It is a typical American belief that everyone thinks and believes in the same way that we do.
We do not share a common belief system with the Iraqis and we cannot operate as if we do. Nearly everything that drives their actions is different than those that drive ours. Their religion, their language, their history, their current circumstances are all different and that means that they will react to the same set of facts and options differently than we would.
Our tactics and our propaganda must change to reflect the people we are trying to reach, as well as it does the Western media and population that we need for support. So far it appears that the war is being fought for Western cameras and not for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Civilians will support all sorts of tribulation if they believe that the eventual outcome will be better. That is what we should be focused on.
I wrote previously (and others have mentioned it as well) about how Saddam is taking a page from the Palestinian playbook: putting unarmed women and children out front and then milking the inevitable casualties for PR. Trent Telenko discusses how Saddam is also working from the Stalinist playbook - specifically the use of prisoners as cannon fodder. (Cross-posted on Kesher Talk)
Re: Lessons from the Boer War
Date: 31 March 2003
Sir - As someone who has written a book on the Boer army and is researching British intelligence in the Boer War, I have noticed similarities between the Boer tactics and developing Iraqi tactics. These include guerrilla raids on supply lines, approaching allied troops under a white flag, the wearing of civilian clothing and blending in with the civilian population.
Other similarities include widespread sympathy in other countries for the Iraqi cause, coupled with an inability to actively intervene - in 1899, Britain was diplomatically isolated, but her military power made her unassailable - as well as a politically motivated peace movement in Britain.
We have not yet seen, as occurred in South Africa, thousands of foreign volunteers pouring into Iraq. Nor have we seen Iraqis formerly opposed to Saddam Hussein fighting against teh coalition forces, because their loyalty to their homeland is greater than their dislike of Saddam.
Such was the case with many Boer leaders, such as Gen Jacobus Hercules De La Rey, who initially opposed both the war and President Paul Kruger, but who fought skilfully against the British even after Kruger went into exile.
One wonders how the coalition would handle such a nightmare scenario, with Saddam killed in a cruise missile attack but resistance continuing under a charismatic younger general.
If the parallels noted above continue, how could the war develop? Iraqi bitterenders will continue the struggle, even after the fall of Baghdad. Operating from bases deep in the deserts, and almost certainly from across international boundaries, they could launch sudden attacks on coalition garrisons and supply lines.
These men could encourage or inspire former Iraqi soldiers who had given up the fight to rejoin the struggle. Therefore, as unpopular as it may seem, no prisoners of war should be prematurely released.
How could these groups be overcome? By mobile columns of special forces hunting out known guerrilla leaders and their men, and then calling in superior firepower to eliminate them. It will be an intelligence-led small unit campaign. Just like the tail-end of the Boer War.
From:
Anthony David Jones, Ashton under Lyne, Lancs
The invasion on Afghanistan was supposed to be the first test of how the American military would respond to terrrorism, but the existence of the Taliban and the willing guns of the Northern Alliance transformed the conflict into standard issue combat of one army versus another. Eliminating the Taliban equaled success in the minds of many, as the fate of Bin Laden remained murky and Al Qaeda cell members escaped to Pakistan, allgedly our ally in the region. Still, one could safely point to Afghanistan as a decisive military victory - mostly through the employ of special forces and not through more traditional armor.
But in Iraq, our strategy to date seems to have been set up to fight what was once a traditional military we annihilated in the Gulf War, but has morphed into a loose confederation of terrorists. In effect, the Iraqi Army has appropriated the tactics of Al Qaeda. Miltary commanders like Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks express shock and outrage at Iraq's terror methods, but I would have to say that their reactions are either phony or naive.
Our global enemies undoubtedly saw that the worst attack on America was not accomplished by traditional military means, but instead through terrorist methods. All indicators are that this is how wars will be fought from now on, not on the battlefield where one group of soldiers takes out an enemy group but instead where autonomous bands of terrorists strikes at opportunistic targets. The problem one encounters is that when a soldier removes his uniform and acts like a civilian, he muddies the waters considerably.
Tools of war have evolved to an almost ridiculously precise place in history, but all the surgical strikes in the world are for naught when your opponent uses the most mundane weapons (a car bomb, dynamite wrapped around his body) for maximum effect. There were hints to us in Mogadishu, and now Iraq is displaying the new form of warfare on a larger scale. It would be prudent for us to resist the charms of bigger and badder weapons contractors (who have the ears of both parties), and use special forces as a model for all of our military. For their sakes and ours.
Former three-star Marine Corps General Bernard Trainor says that the shock and awe "air campaign has failed failed and an anticipated uprising of Shiias has not occurred, thereby prolonging the Iraq war; in his words 'taking the bloom off the rose.' Trainor, who has criticized the level of U.S. forces in Iraq, warns that Iraqis are likely to set up a 'spider web' defense around Baghdad to ensnare coalition troops": an interview on the site of the Council on Foreign Relations.