Regards, Ivan
Posted on 03/29/2003 4:48:43 PM PST by MadIvan
Our military commanders and their civilian chiefs are constantly congratulating themselves over the extreme precautions they are taking to avoid civilian casualties and suffering in bombing Iraq. They can boast of their "targeteers" who are enjoined to focus on strictly military aiming points, avoiding "dual-use" targets such as the electrical supply, which was shut down in the first Gulf War of 1991 - but not this time. The civilians we mean to liberate would be inconvenienced, and some would be endangered, including babies in incubators. Yet electricity is specifically useful to operate any number of military devices from anti-aircraft radars and all fixed radios to the air-conditioning units that keep less hardy biological warfare agents alive and well.
The broader effect of an uninterrupted electrical supply is also significant in preserving Saddam Hussein's power to intimidate potential dissidents, boost the morale of his loyalists and force the population at large into displays of eager obedience, even devotion. Television and radio broadcasts are still being received all over the country, conveying the all too credible threats and sometimes beguiling promises of the regime.
More generally, also, the continuation of electricity helps to prolong Iraq's abnormal normality, in which more than half the population has never known any other ruler than the terrifying Saddam Hussein, lethal security chief since 1968, all powerful since 1979 if not before. Hitler's power lasted 12 years, but Saddam has held life and death powers over every Iraqi for 35 years. Given that the Bush Administration's goal is to overthrow him, the exclusion of electricity from the target list seems peculiarly self-defeating. As it is, although American forces are advancing upon it, sandstorms permitting, the regime's ability to control Baghdad's population is seemingly undiminished, precluding any immediate hope of a spontaneous revolt even in Saddam City, the huge slum of a million Shias, where Saddam is especially hated, by all accounts.
Even purely military targets cannot simply be bombed. Once dual-use targets are excluded, it is the turn of the "weaponeers" to impose their own exclusions. They first work out what it would take to destroy a target, anything from a smallish 500 lb bomb or cruise missile warhead to the common yet devastating 2,000-pounders, or even one of the scarce extra-large bombs of 4,000 lb and up. Next they calculate the weapon's radius of destruction around and beyond the target, and therefore its potential to inflict collateral damage on civilians, carefully differentiating between more contained blast effects on concrete or brick, and the broader threat of flying glass.
That rules out another entire set of targets judged too close to civilian dwellings, including Iraq's Ministry of Defence no less, which would be the equivalent of the Pentagon if Saddam Hussein had not arrogated to himself most of the powers of his defence minister. Still, even if the operational centres of military command are elsewhere, the ministry is the administrative arm that keeps Iraqi forces supplied and paid.
Finally the lawyers of US Central Command intervene and they can serve no purpose at all unless they find ways to exclude more targets. That is easily done, because, by way of indirect effects actual or possible, the destruction of any number of targets can be held to cause the deaths of innocent civilians. Bomb a bridge being used to send Iraqi troops to the front, and ambulances to the district's hospital cannot get through either; destroy trucks being loaded with ammunition, and leave the next load of water-purification chemicals undelivered. More straightforwardly, the lawyers rule out the bombing of Iraqi and foreign media facilities, including the Al Rashid and other hotels favoured by foreign reporters - whose basements are therefore safer than any bomb-proof shelter for command posts and even Saddam himself.
Were this a matter of ethics, there would be much to debate, but it is not. The prolongation of war caused by half measures kills many more people - including babies denied incubators and much else by wartime disruptions, as well as thousands of Iraqi conscripts compelled to fight and die by regime terror squads - than the restricted collateral damage of precision bombing ever could. The incomplete target list is a symptom rather of the deep ambivalence of the Bush Administration as it wages its entirely discretionary war by choice, in which shallow calculations of public relations masquerade as a moral stance.
Having started its war to eliminate the dictatorship of Saddam, the Bush Administration should do everything it can to do so as quickly as possible, even if television viewers must be denied those artichoke-coloured pictures of the Baghdad skyline under bombardment.
For Saddam's policemen and militia loyalists are still arresting, torturing and executing Iraqis - some as deserters or dissidents - while in Basra demonstrators in the streets have reportedly been massacred wholesale by mortar fire.
Long ago, Karl von Clausewitz, the supreme theoretician of war, explained why every attempt to prettify its essential violence with inconsistent acts of moderation, every refusal to use maximum force when it can be purposeful and no mere rampage, adds to the human costs of war by extending its cruelties and deprivations, and even more by delaying the arrival of the desired peace that is the only possible goal of any rational war.
Soon enough American troops in Baghdad, and in lesser degree British forces in Basra, will have to confront the permanent and universal tactical advantages of any urban defence. One is the infinity of barriers to visibility and direct fire created by an infinity of walls, which largely nullifies the advantages in range, precision and concentration bestowed by superior infantry and tank firepower, while reducing most forms of air power and artillery to a downright marginal role - especially if the avoidance of civilian casualties remains the dominant priority.
Another advantage of the defenders is the fragmentation of forces that high-rise buildings impose on attackers, if they cannot simply be bombed out. Infantry and armour control the space around them with their observed firepower, but they can only do so in two dimensions. If troops must secure high buildings floor by floor, it might take an entire battalion to clear a couple of ordinary office blocks. With only 30 battalions or so in the entire US offensive so far, or perhaps 40 when the latest reinforcements arrive, as against hundreds of tall buildings in central Baghdad alone, the arithmetic would imply a very slow, very bloody conquest.
But if the psychological hold of the regime on its subjects can be broken, quite another arithmetic would apply. As it is, only a small percentage of all Iraqis in arms overrun till now - certainly less than 5 per cent - have fought back in any way. They have moreover done so in clumsy and ineffectual ways in most cases, because the skills and experience of Saddam's most loyal followers, his secret policemen, Ba'ath party enforcers and tribal militia "martyrs", are best suited to terrorise defenceless civilians, rather than to fight well-trained soldiers.
Very likely, that small percentage could be further reduced by using the strongest possible tactics right at the start of any urban warfare - demolishing tall buildings, for example, rather than fighting through them floor by floor - as well as by denying all use of mass media to the regime by cutting electricity. Again, not only American and British soldiers would avoid injuries and deaths but also far greater numbers of Iraqis. If the Bush Administration does not have the stomach for that, preferring to endanger Allied troops (including Captain Jonathan Luttwak US Army) rather than accept the odium of bad publicity from scenes of ruined buildings and the inevitable civilian casualties that go with them, it should not have chosen to start a war in the first place.
What is already happening in this war is not encouraging. A soldier or Marine - American or British it is just the same - comes under fire from a sniper in Umm Qasr, Nasiriyah, or any other place for that matter. It is always said correctly enough that every episode of combat is a unique event, a non-repeatable conjunction of terrain, weapons, tactics and, more important, of skills, combat discipline, unit cohesion and general morale on both sides. Yet these days every episode of combat is exactly the same in two all-important ways: no American soldier may be killed without grave repercussions up the chain of command all the way to President George W Bush, and no enemy civilian may be hurt to prevent that soldier from being killed.
Actually, the very phrase is obsolete, for we keep being told that Iraqis at large are not our enemies at all, but rather our future democratic friends that we must liberate. All this is very nice but what about that soldier or Marine who comes under fire? Can he call in attack helicopters with their rapid-fire cannon and missiles? Can he ask for the close air support of fighter-bombers or even the big bombers of the US Air Force? Or, more prosaically, can the standard remedy of past wars be used, to blast out the sniper with artillery or tank gun fire? It depends, of course. Certainly yes in open country with no visible civilians round about, certainly not if the firing is coming from a farmhouse or apartment block full of civilians - even if the sniper has already killed fellow soldiers or even if he is holding up the entire unit's advance.
At some other time in some other place, our soldier or Marine may himself agree that civilians should never be harmed in combat, but in his immediate predicament he cannot just ignore the huge contradiction that leaves him exposed to deadly fire. His enemies can use any and all weapons at hand, but he cannot have the support of even a tiny fraction of America's enormous firepower. Is he therefore doomed to die? Of course not, because he is not in Normandy 1944, or in the wars of Korea or even Vietnam, when it was still accepted that in war soldiers and perhaps many of them must die.
Our soldier or Marine is in Iraq 2003, where the Bush Administration and Tony Blair for that matter must pay a stiff political price for each combat death of this discretionary war in our post-heroic age. So long as families still commonly had several children, so long as some commonly died anyway because of endemic childhood diseases, combat deaths were fundamentally accepted as normal, instead of being viewed as extraordinary outrages. It is not therefore because of any decay in patriotism or - if one believes in such things - of any decadence in the nation's character, but rather the inevitable consequence of our changed demography, by which the emotional capital of most families is invested in just one male child, whose death is a limitless tragedy. That is why it was not television imagery that made the Vietnam war what it was, contrary to a thousand legends, but something altogether less superficial, at a time when a growing population was already composed of ever smaller families increasingly possessed of only one male child.
The absolute proof is in the exactly parallel response of Soviet society, which was traumatised by the casualties of the Afghanistan war even in the absence of any televised scenes of carnage at all. A total number of casualties over a period of 10 years inferior at some 14,000 to those of many a single day of past Russian battles - had a most powerful impact in spite of censorship and dictatorship because it arose from the deepest level of society, the family. First, it imposed prudent if not downright evasive tactics, then years of outright military passivity which we now know were ordered by the Kremlin to avoid casualties, then finally Gorbachev's withdrawal. The Bush Administration is full of seemingly determined people. It remains to be seen if they are more determined than the tough old Bolsheviks of the late Soviet Union.
So what happens next, with our soldier or Marine under fire who may neither be killed nor kill freely? Nothing, mostly. If that sniper is well ensconced among civilians, he must be waited out if he stays where he is, if his position cannot be circumvented. British immobility around Basra exemplifies this outcome, a negation of the purpose of war. None of this has been a crippling limitation for the American forces so far in their fast advance to Baghdad, in which most islands of resistance were best by-passed anyway, so long as there was another road for the essential columns of fuel trucks coming up just behind (ammunition supply is no problem with so little combat).
But what will happen when Baghdad is reached? Unless the regime collapses in a last retreat to Tikrit, as one must fervently hope, American troops entering the city will encounter snipers, random shooters and would-be ambushers who will certainly be ensconced among civilians. Nor can they all be circumvented without subjecting the city to the agony of protracted siege that would combine the horrors of repression by roving terror squads - as in Basra already now - with those of starvation. The answer that Clausewitz would offer is to use maximum force as purposefully aimed as possible. It remains to be seen if the Bush Administration will be consistent by authorising tactics as forceful as its strategy.
Edward Luttwak is Senior Fellow of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Regards, Ivan
This "gentleman's war" (from the allies perspective) does seem to prevent place us at a disadvantage and endanger our precious troops. How many more lives will we forfeit to accommodate world opinion?
Anyway, I think Luttwak's right, and not just in terms of this one campaign. I think our other enemies will see our forbearance as weakness. There is always a political dimension to war, but in this case I think our chief political concern should be to make ourselves feared, not to make ourselves loved.
"World Opinion" hates us already, and our pussyfooting around doesn't seem to be making them hate us any less. Screw 'em.
Our forces should be permitted to kill the enemy, wherever he is found.
Long ago, Karl von Clausewitz, the supreme theoretician of war, explained why every attempt to prettify its essential violence with inconsistent acts of moderation, every refusal to use maximum force when it can be purposeful and no mere rampage, adds to the human costs of war by extending its cruelties and deprivations, and even more by delaying the arrival of the desired peace that is the only possible goal of any rational war.
The absolute proof is in the exactly parallel response of Soviet society, which was traumatised by the casualties of the Afghanistan war even in the absence of any televised scenes of carnage at all. A total number of casualties over a period of 10 years inferior at some 14,000 to those of many a single day of past Russian battles - had a most powerful impact in spite of censorship and dictatorship because it arose from the deepest level of society, the family.
I hope he is dead on on that one. If so, a nation of only-child families cannot wage war. Thus, China's one-child policy assures that China will never be a problem . . .
IMHO the US should simply secure the oil infastructure, start producing at a sustainable but high rate, buy all the output, and pay royalties to every adult Iraqi in US dollars. Those in liberated areas, that is . . .Enough money to feed the population. Those that aren't liberated, have huge incentive to get liberated.
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