Friday, June 13, 2003

Deja vu all over again

Micheal Gordon in Isvestia does some actual reportage (fancy that!).

The Next War

After American M-1 tanks rolled into Baghdad to depose Saddam Hussein, one of the central military questions was where the United States might fight next. Would American forces continue their march to Syria? Or would the Bush administration step up the military and political pressure on Iran?

Two months after the battle for Baghdad, we now know the answer: the next fight is in Iraq.

For the Americans, this is a campaign of raids, bombing strikes and dragnets, as American commanders try to isolate and destroy remnants of the old regime. It is more like a counterinsurgency than an invasion. The Americans' goal is to keep the pressure on and whittle down their foes until a new Iraqi authority is able to maintain order.

Geography is another factor. Iraq is a larger country and there are many hiding places. American forces are only now venturing west and north of Baghdad in substantial numbers. As the Americans fan out, they will increasingly encounter armed resistance. There is not new resistance. This is old resistance that the American troops here are only now taking on as they extend their reach in Iraq.

This is not a fight that allied commanders expect to settle with a single hammer blow. The American assessment is that much of the resistance is organized. That is clear from the signaling systems that enemy fighters use in towns like Falluja to notify their fighters of the approach of American troops, the leaflets that have been found promising rewards for Iraqis who attack American troops, the ambushes that Iraqi fighters try to set for American troops and the enemy camp in the west. But American officers do not believe that the assaults are controlled by a single enemy commander or organization.

American military commanders, in fact, seem to be trying to prepare the public for a campaign that could be prolonged and in which progress is not at linear as the expeditious march toward Baghdad.


Anyone seen hide or hair of this "new Iraqi authority"? Maybe they're with the WMDs and we'll get a two-fer?

And let's lay this "liberal bias" canard to rest right now. From the decidedly not liberal Joe Galloway at military.com:

If winning the war in Iraq was so easy why is securing the peace so difficult? After all, the same 190,000 American and British troops who blasted their way from the Kuwait border to Baghdad in just three weeks are still there.

But since the fall of Baghdad everything that could go wrong has.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld early on dismissed the wild scenes of looting and shooting as the sort of "untidiness" one must expect when a dictator falls and a new day dawns. If it was to be expected, why was there no coherent plan to deal with it?

Lt. Gen. David McKiernan says the 190,000 coalition soldiers he won the three-week war with is nowhere near enough to secure law and order in a nation the size of California with 24 million increasingly angry people.

When Army chief of staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki suggested to Congress last February that securing Iraq after the war might require "several hundred thousand troops," he was instantly slapped down by Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. They have suggested that 100,000 ought to be enough. Clearly it is not.

But if the slide into anarchy isn't halted quickly, no amount of American troops will be able to prevent fundamentalist Shiite Moslem leaders from stepping into the convenient vacuum and crafting an anti-American regime.


"Mission Accomplished" my Aunt Fanny. Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. These clowns don't even know they're lying, it comes so naturally to them!