Posted on 03/28/2003 7:36:48 AM PST by dead
EVEN on Donald Henry Rumsfeld, that formidable and remarkably well preserved 70 year old who as Secretary of Defence is running the campaign in Iraq, the strain is starting to tell.
Outwardly, it is the pugnacious Rumsfeld of always, the steamrollering CEO who brooks no dissent. Look more closely, however, and the lines of strain are visible. The tiredness is evident in the eyes behind those rimless spectacles. And small wonder.
For he is the man in the hot seat as, eight days into the Gulf War of 2003, a once cocksure America is forced to face the possibility it may be months, not weeks before a war sold as a virtual cakewalk, may finally be over.
"Saddam has learnt from Gulf War One, and he's learnt from Mogadishu," Kenneth Pollack, an Iraq specialist at the Brookings Institution said yesterday, referring to the unhappy US military intervention in Somalia in 1993, which ended after dead American soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. "He's learnt that irregulars and paramilitaries can cause problems, using things like human shields. Maybe he watched the movie 'Black Hawk Down' over again," and Mr Pollack adds, "I'm only half-facetious."
Pentagon officials grudgingly admit that the resistance has been stronger and more tenacious than expected.
Admittedly, friendly fire apart, US and British casualties have been minimal. But the guerrilla hit-and-run tactics, coupled with the blinding sandstorms of the last two days, have slowed the advance.
Supply lines strung out for 250 miles or more on jammed, inadequate highways have been stretched to breaking point. This week, the US 3rd Infantry Division leading, the thrust to Baghdad, virtually ground to a halt, short of fuel and even food and water. Sheer exhaustion is also forcing a pause, in which to regroup, rearm and resupply.
Did Washington, seduced by the dream of a speedy and easy victory, put too few troops in the field? No, answer of course the architects of the strategy. "Our plan is brilliant," General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proclaimed as the first doubts began to stir. "We're on track, we're on plan. We think we have just the right forces for what we need to do now."
Esteemed experts beg to differ. There is just a hint of the Hail Mary play about Plan B. That last minute all or nothing American football game plan to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. As the Northern front opens with support from the Kurds much now depends on this last throw of the dice to decide what will be either a comprehensive sweeping victory or a long dragged out and even bloodier affair. They point out that the 250,000 troops deployed in and around Iraq are only half the force massed for Gulf War One - which moreover was fought in flat desert conditions ideal for US mechanised armour. The actual ground combat force is somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000.
The heavy forces in the field - the 3rd Infantry, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and the 101st Airborne (not yet fully deployed in Iraq) plus the British are not enough, they say - even given total US/British domination in the air. "We needed at least four divisions and the British. We've got three and the British and we're getting a harder war than expected," says Pollack.
Of the above elements, only the 3rd Infantry is a really heavy fighting force with tanks and armoured vehicles. Additionally, the withering air fire put up by Republican Guard units blunts the effectiveness of the deadliest US battlefield weapon, the Apache attack helicopter.
But the deficiency should be made up with the belated arrival of the 4th Infantry Division, which was supposed to have launched a second front from the north towards Tikrit, Saddam's family stronghold, and Baghdad itself.
That plan perished when Turkey refused to allow US ground troops to use Turkish bases. The 1,000-man paratroop landing in Kurdish-controlled Iraq on Wednesday is scant substitute for the 62,000 men the Pentagon wanted to mass along the Turkish border.
Now the 4th Infantry and its 30,000 troops are being deployed from Fort Hood, Texas to Kuwait, from where they will move north to reinforce the US force gathering to launch the decisive assault on Baghdad. The armada of ships carrying their armour has started to arrive in the Gulf from the Eastern Mediterranean.
The 4th Infantry should be combat-ready sometime early in April. At that point it will move north to the front, allowing secondary forces to be released to guard supply lines. All of which is reasonable enough - except that it wasn't in the original script.
More than any other in history this media-saturated war, with its unprecedented real time coverage from the front, has been a prisoner of expectations. Alas, expectations, exactly like financial markets, overshoot in both directions.
The optimism at the outset was excessive, fuelled by the likes of Dick Cheney, the vice-President, who predicted on national television that the Republican Guard would do what General Myers yesterday called "the honourable thing," and not fight at all. Until early this week, the mighty array of pundits and military specialists did not mention the word "Fedayeen."
Mr Rumsfeld warned yesterday: "We must expect that it will require the coalition forces moving through, destroying Republican Guard units around Baghdad, before you see the crumbling of the regime." But will that take weeks, or months? © Independent News Service.
If it fails, I guess we'll all have to learn to speak Iraqi (or whatever the hell they speak over there.)
BTW, I saw some highlights from Iraqi television on Fox yesterday. It was a music video of some fat guy with a rifle droning like a goat, while enveloped in gloria-gaynor-roller-disco video special effects. Mock Hollywood all you want, but I'm gonna miss American television if, (I mean "when" if this reporting is correct) we lose.
hawk
Is that who those people were? Damn - I thought it was a bunch of out-of-work carnies or something.
This is terribly misleading.
He is dealing with idiot reporters and polticians all day long. It isn't Saddam getting him down, but our very own self-serving bureacracy and the liberal media jackasses.
And yes, that video snippet they played on Fox News last night made the old early 80's version of "Dancing Queen" look spectacular by comparison.
You have no idea what that massive Irish media intelligence operation has uncovered that has cracked this case WIDE open! They probably have channels of TV that we haven't even seen here.
Don't know about y'all, but I'm running out to buy a copy of "Living Under a Dictator for Dummies".
Yeah, you got that right...
No, the original script was for the 4th to go in through Turkey a week ago. We have known all along that we would need them on the ground before the end.
This story is a pathetic reach. It is almost French.
SO9
I want one, just one of these guys to back the claim that the war was sold as a "virtual cakewalk" with quotes. From the administration, not other journalists or retired generals or from their neighbor who "really knows about such things".
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