Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/07/2003 4:13:46 PM PDT by MadIvan
The war in Iraq seems to be drawing to a close in circumstances as mysterious as those that have surrounded its unfolding from the beginning. The chief mystery now is the whereabouts of Saddam and his entourage.
Saddam has disappeared. He may have fled the country. He may have left Baghdad to take refuge elsewhere in Iraq. He may be hiding underground in the city. He may - though the likelihood is now discounted - be dead.
Whatever his current situation, some of his supporters are still loyal and are fighting to defend what remains of his regime. Resistance cannot last long. Basra is now almost completely under British control.
The Americans are reducing the capital, district by district. In the outlying regions, the towns have either surrendered or are being occupied one by one. Saddam's Iraq has been defeated and will shortly have been purged of the Ba'ath Party apparatus.
Saddam's war plan, if he had one, must be reckoned one of the most inept ever designed. It made no use of the country's natural defences. All advantages the defence enjoyed were thrown away even before they could be utilised.
Iraq presents a considerable military problem to the invader, particularly one obliged to attack from the sea, as the British found in 1915-17. The point of entry, in the Gulf, is very narrow. Beyond, the terrain stretches away for 800 miles to the Turkish border and, although the central plain between the Tigris and Euphrates is almost as flat as a billiard table, the topography nevertheless presents major obstacles to an attacker making his way north at frequent intervals.
The key objectives are the cities, and most of them, Baghdad in particular, are protected by large water barriers. Saddam's correct strategy would have been to group his best forces in the south, to oppose the Anglo-Americans as far from the capital as possible, and then to conduct a fighting withdrawal up the valleys of the great rivers, leaving devastation behind.
The port facilities at Umm Qasr, Iraq's only deep-water harbour, should have been sabotaged at the outset. Then the bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates should have been blown in a step-by-step retreat, to keep the coalition out in the desert to slow its progress and to force it into the laborious and potentially costly procedure of emergency bridging.
The Americans had, presciently, brought several large bridging units with them, the best-equipped capable of constructing a ribbon bridge 800 metres wide, but they have not been required. Instead, the Iraqi defenders either abandoned the existing bridges intact or conducted the most feeble of efforts to deny them to the enemy.
Thus, instead of fighting to delay the American advance to Baghdad, Saddam allowed the two leading American formations, the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expedition Force, to arrive within striking distance of Baghdad very quickly indeed. Not only was space, the most valuable of all dimensions in an effective defence, surrendered without a fight.
So was the second most important, time. It is not only outside observers who have been bewildered by the Iraqis' military behaviour. So must also have been the coalition high command. The Iraqis have ignored every rule of defensive warfare.
They have also handled their troops in an illogical fashion. Saddam had on paper nearly 400,000 soldiers at his disposal, consisting, in descending order of quality, of his Republican Guard of six divisions, his regular army of 17 divisions and his paramilitaries, including the Fedayeen irregulars and the Ba'ath Party militia, totalling perhaps 30,000.
In orthodox military practice, the Republican Guard, less perhaps a portion held back for last-ditch defence, should have been committed first, to blunt the coalition onset. The regular army should then have been committed to reinforce the Republican Guard when and where it achieved success. The paramilitaries should have been kept out of battle, to harass the invaders if the regular defence collapsed.
Saddam has fought the battle the other way around. The regular army was committed first, south of Baghdad, and seems to have run away as soon as it saw that the fighting threatened to be serious. The Republican Guard was then brought forward to hold the approaches to Baghdad and has been devastated by American air attack, its armoured units in particular being offered up for pointless sacrifice.
The only serious resistance appears to have been offered by the units least capable of meeting the coalition troops on equal terms, the Ba'ath Party militia, effectively a sort of political Mafia equipped with nothing more effective than hand-held weapons.
Because the American and British units, but particularly the British, are concerned about how Iraq is to be reconstructed after Saddam's fall, they have shrunk from deploying their full firepower against the Ba'athists. They do not want to destroy urban districts or to cause casualties to innocent Iraqis, among whom the Ba'athists are sheltering. Hence a few thousand thugs have managed to sustain resistance long beyond the point that would be possible if the coalition had let rip.
Because the war has taken such a strange form, the media, particularly those at home, may be forgiven for their misinterpretation of how it has progressed. Checks have been described as defeats, minor firefights as major battles. In truth, there has been almost no check to the unimpeded onrush of the coalition, particularly the dramatic American advance to Baghdad; nor have there been any major battles. This has been a collapse, not a war.
Nevertheless, Air Marshal Brian Burridge, the British commander in the Gulf, has a point when he says the British media have lost the plot. He looks forward to a future stage of peacemaking when the young journalists who have been "embedded" in the coalition units will use that experience to propagate a new military reality for the benefit of the public at home.
The older media generation, particularly those covering the war from comfortable television studios, has not covered itself with glory. Deeply infected with anti-war feeling and Left-wing antipathy to the use of force as a means of doing good, it has once again sought to depict the achievements of the West's servicemen as a subject for disapproval.
The brave young American and British servicemen - and women - who have risked their lives to bring down Saddam have every reason to feel that there is something corrupt about their home-based media.
Regards, Ivan
Get set for the next Spin Cycle.
We didn't win the war because it wasn't a war. The embedded media are tainted and will "propagate [propagandize?] a new military reality for the benefit of the public at home."
-PJ
Opinion from inside the media echo chamber masquerading as fact.
Because the war has taken such a strange form, the media, particularly those at home, may be forgiven for their misinterpretation of how it has progressed.
Media backfilling and CYA...
Saddam's war plan, if he had one, must be reckoned one of the most inept ever designed.
Or…
The coalition's war plan must be reckoned one of the best ever designed.
The military saying, "the enemy has a vote" cuts both ways.
Hats off to Rummy, Franks and our brave, well-led, well-trained, well-equiped troops.
The Arabs get out there and beat their chests and use incredible hyperbole as they brag and inflate and puff themselves up about all the destruction they are going to wreak. That's what they believe they are SUPPOSED to do. But when the bullets start flying and reality collides with hyperbole, they cut and run (or die where they stand.)
The Coalition approach, in contrast, has been that of a straightforward but soft-spoken football coach who spends his pregame interviews emphasizing the difficulties presented by the opposing team. He doesn't want his boys to get overconfident, or think that it's going to be a cakewalk. So he sounds cautious, but at the same time states a quiet confidence that his team is up for the fight.
Arabs, hearing this, can't understand why he isn't bragging that he's going to line their heads up on the wall. They interpret this as a sign of weakness, when it is the customary reticence of a leader who doesn't want to seem overconfident.
Of course, the lefties wilfully misinterpret the coach's comments, but for a different reason. They really, really, really, want his team to lose, so they repeat and magnify and misquote the coach's comments to persuade themselves that it's going to be a "quagmire" or a "Vietnam". Their hyperbole has just collided with reality too. They just aren't going to be blown to bits because of it.
Yeah, like the heading of this article for starters.
The press wasn't satisfied with the justification for the war, they wanted the US prostrate at the feet of the UN. Without the UN blessing, no amount of Justification was good enough for them. Therefore they labeled their stories "Failed Diplomacy" and blamed Bush instead of "Old Europe".
Then they concentrated their coverage on the anti-war protestors instead of covering the successes of the war. Then they seized on a couple of minor comments about the supply lines to announce that we were in a "quagmire", that we were going to have to pause for 45 days, that our troops would die in the desert heat, and that we were "seriously undermanned" and that Rumsfield had prevented us from having "enough troops to do the job".
Then when we didn't even slow down and their was no pause, and the Iraqi's became confident and began celebrating, the press simply went back to normal programming instead of covering the success.
And now, the final insult to our intellegence. "This wasn't a real war". It couldn't have been. There was no quagmire. The US didn't kill thousands of civilians. It was too easy. They must not have put up resistance.
The wreckage of hundreds of blown up vehicles, 2000 dead Iraqi in Baghdad on Sunday alone, is not evidence of a real war. The thousands of precision bombs the Coalition dropped was not evidence of a real war. Over 100 dead servicement from the US and Britain are not evidence of a real war.
It wasn't the quagmire that the press said it would be. But where is the credit to the special ops. Where is the credit to the Administration that kept telling the press that this was a bad regime and the people would be glad to be rid of it.
When does the press stand up and say we were wrong. They allude to it in the last line of an article titled "this has not been a real war"
Regards, Ivan
Regards, Ivan
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