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.
Rumsfield will always be tarred by wanting, on Sept. 10. '01, to transfer $600 million from counter terror to missile defense, of all the useless boondoggles we fund.
And he still hasn't shown he knows what he is doing.
Too many people on FR go all glass-eyed just because the guy has a colonel carrying his briefcase.
Walt
Nobody, absolutely nobody, in this administration ever tried to sell this as a cakewalk, and these "journalists" know it.
Huh, do you mean they aren't?? Sheesh, I'd better stop listening to ABC and stop reading the NT tIMES.
I saw that video. Laughed my [insert name of favorite body part here] off. Funniest thing I've seen in a long time.
This is the important stuff. The rest is a load of negative, agenda-driven drivel. Why even give time to this BS? Dead enemy bodies are dead enemy bodies. We were not suddenly struck dumb after 1991 and after Somalia. At the moment the Medina division of the Iraqi Republican guards is being pleasantly chewed up, now at apparently 2/3rds effectiveness heading towards 50%.
Scott Ritter has an Irish cousin?
Yeah, we're desperate, clueless, and have a moron as Secretary of Defense. That's a different perspective, for sure.
This guy has his analogies mixed up. He should have said the US is planning on running up the score in a game that was over as soon the second half started.
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