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.
Agreed. After watching that Iragi version of MTV last night I asked my wife to, when the time comes, remind me to save the last bullet for myself.
And it's been less than 2 weeks since St. Paddy's. Half the natiion is still drunk.
Welcome to life in the post Atari age, I guess.
Let's check on things in 8 months, and if it is bogged down then, then we can say things are taking too long.
Hint to the media: we built a million dollar media center just for this initiative. We didn't do that thinking it would only be used 8 days.
Boy, you can say that again! Those Patriot missles have been a total waste of money, for sure < /sarcasm>
If you'll check, you'll see that the programs that Rumsfield wanted to buck up on 9/10/01 had nothing to do with Patriots, but were for defense against ICBM's.
Ignorance is a thin blanket.
Walt
Yeah, we're desperate, clueless, and have a moron as Secretary of Defense. That's a different perspective, for sure.
Did you just miss the fact that we are sending 100,000 + more guys?
It is ludicrous to think this is going the way the Pentagon planned.
Rumsfield has not -yet- shown that he is master of his job.
Walt
That's interesting. Can you recall where you saw that?
Walt
Hindsight is 20/20, so I wouldn't be so quick to criticize him for that. I've known for some time that the biggest long-term concern in the U.S. government is how we are going to deal with Islamic nations with fully-functional nuclear arsenals, including Iran, Pakistan, and -- get this -- France.
The author of the cakewalk quote, Ken Adelman, was on NBC's Today show, and explained his comment to the perky one.
It seems this comment was made 16 months ago and was in rebuttal to the critics that were predicting that the end of the world would happen if we invaded Iraq. An impromptu rebuttal to dire predictions such as a backlash of terrorists attacks on American soil, nuclear war, etc., by doomsayers of the day, precipitated the 'cakewalk' comment.
'Cakewalk' was an extemporaneous comment and not meant as a hard analysis of the campaign.
OMG Saddams vaunted Republican Guard is surrounding Washington!!!
< /chicken little>
It is ludicrous to think this is going the way the Pentagon planned.
I fail to understand how it is that you somehow know that sending another 100,000 troops was not part of the plan? Don't you understand that politics dictated that only a certain number of troops can be staged in Kuwait? Besides the fact that the country is extremely small, staging a larger number of troops in Kuwait would have made diplomacy prior to the war than it was. Although it probably wouldn't have mattered, since France complety RUINED THAT!
Naw -- they must've been running a tape of Michael Moore's Oscar tirade...
Geez -- I can't believe this line was still available after 49 replies... :^)
Hindsight is 20/20, so I wouldn't be so quick to criticize him for that.
We're paying Rumsfield to preclude the need for hindsight. He is supposed to do things right the first time. He's only human, but just because he is SECDEF and annointed of President Bush doesn't make him infallible. He hasn't done anything really good at all yet.
Walt
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