Posted on 03/30/2003 8:11:41 PM PST by Pokey78
WASHINGTON
I never made it higher than corporal, but it doesn't take a military genius to figure out the strategy when you have air supremacy: break the back of the enemy's armor and its infantry before your big ground assault. A month's bombing worked in the last gulf war and a couple of weeks should "degrade" the Iraqi Army again.
Here is a baker's dozen of my snap judgments about this war:
1. Best gamble: jumping our guns a few days early in a daring bid to win all at once. Our air strike to kill Saddam and his gang may not have succeeded, but failing to try on the basis of a sleeper spy's tip would have been a great mistake.
2. Biggest diplomatic mistake: trusting the new Islamist government of Turkey. This misplaced confidence denied us an opening pincers movement and shocked the awesomeness out of "rapid dominance."
3. Best evidence of Saddam's weakness: his reliance on suicide bombers for media "victories." Individual self-destruction may or may not terrorize a civilian population but is not a weapon capable of inflicting decisive casualties on, or striking fear into, a powerful army. (It does vividly demonstrate the Baghdad-terrorist nexus.)
4. Most stunning surprise: the degree of intimidation of Shiites in southern cities by Saddam's son Uday's Gestapo. When Basra falls, however, fierce retribution on these thuggish enforcers by local Shia may send a message of uprising to co-religionists who make up a third of Baghdad's populace.
5. Most effective turnaround of longtime left-wing lingo: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's labeling of Uday's paramilitaries as "death squads."
6. Most profound statement from a military leader: Gen. Tommy Franks, refuting criticism of a "pause" in the ground war, said, "We have the power to be patient."
7. Most overdue revelation by the Pentagon: that Russia has long been smuggling sophisticated arms to Saddam's regime with Syria's hostile connivance. Who suppressed this damning data for a year, and to what end? And is the C.I.A. still ignorant of the transmission to Iraq through Syria of a key component in rocket propellant from China, brokered by France?
8. Most inexplicable weakness of our intelligence and air power: the inability to locate and obliterate all of Saddam's TV propaganda facilities.
9. Biggest long-run victory of coalition forces to date: the lightning seizure of southern oil fields before Saddam had a chance to ignite them. This underappreciated tactical triumph will speed Iraq's postwar reconstruction by at least a year.
10. Worst mistake as a result of State and C.I.A. interference with military planning: fearing to offend the Turks, we failed to arm 70,000 free Kurdish pesh merga in northern Iraq. Belatedly, we are giving Kurds the air, commando and missile support to drive Ansar-Qaeda terrorists out of a stronghold, but better planning would have given us a trained, indigenous force on the northern front.
11. Best military briefer: General Franks is less of a showman than the last war's bombastic Norman Schwarzkopf, but his low-key deputy, Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, is Franks's secret information weapon. Since Abizaid speaks fluent Arabic, why doesn't he hold a cool news conference with angry Arab journalists?
12. Most inspiring journalism: "embedding" is almost-full disclosure that puts Americans in close contact with local conflict, but the greatest war correspondent of this generation is not attached to any unit. He is John Burns of The Times, who is reporting with great insight, accuracy and courage from Baghdad and makes me proud to work on the same newspaper. (Among TV anchors, a lesser calling, the best organized are MSNBC's John Seigenthaler, CNN's Paula Zahn and Wolf Blitzer, and Fox's Tony Snow.)
13. Greatest wartime mysteries: What tales of special-ops derring-do await the telling? Who, in the fog of peace, will honor Iraqis inside Baghdad spotting military targets to save civilians? Will we learn first-hand of the last days of Saddam in his Hitlerian bunker? What scientists, murdered lest they point the way to germs and poison gases, left incriminating documents behind? Where are the secret files of Saddam's Mukhabarat, detailing the venal transactions with Western, Asian, Arab and Persian political and business leaders — and connections to world terror networks?
Snap judgments, these. Considered conclusions come after unconditional surrender.
I like the rapid fire format of this piece. Very economic.
Bravo.
Worth repeating.
"Much of the effort Iraq has made to depict American forces as "criminals" and "villains," in Mr. Sahhaf's phrase, centered on two incidents last week in which large numbers of Iraqi civilians were killed. On Wednesday, at least 14 civilians died when two blasts hit a stretch of workshops and apartments in north-central Baghdad. On Friday, 62 civilians were said by Iraqi officials have been killed, and 49 others injured, in an explosion beside a marketplace in the capital's northwestern suburbs. In both cases, Iraqi officials, and many survivors, blamed the American air attacks.
"Spokesmen for the United States Central Command headquarters in Qatar, directing the war effort, have said that they have no record of American aircraft having fired the weapons in either case, but that they will examine both attacks further in an attempt to fix the causes. They have also said that Iraqi forces may have fired ground-to-air missiles that malfunctioned and caused the deaths, or played some other role in the explosions, perhaps by planting bombs. Those suggestions have infuriated Iraqi officials, and today it was Mr. Sahhaf's turn to mock them.
"Had Iraqis played a role in the two explosions, he was asked at the news conference. His answer, in English, was characteristic of the polemics with which many of the most controversial issues are addressed.
" 'George W. Bush could be from Zaire!" he said, rocking with laughter. "This is silly. There is a logic, there is a common sense. But these liars, sometimes you are amazed. Are they a superpower, the Americans? I don't think so. Something is wrong, something doesn't match. When they are bombing Iraqi civilians and they say it is Iraqis who are doing it, this is so cheap, so shallow."
"He concluded: "This will change nothing. This American serpent, this boa, is stretched there, and we will cut it to pieces.' "
Great safire piece here.
The media have underplayed the significance of the PLF mope who got smithereened in the initial strike.
That pumpkin wasn't there for tango lessons.
The Saddam-Syria-Iran/PLO/PLF/Arafat cabal is yet to be exposed.
That might have been the plan initially, but with the early strike on Saddam it is possible we may have left the TV airwaves intact to see visual proof of Saddam being alive. (If I recall, didn't we knock out their radio stations early?). Once the executed Marines were shown on TV, we should have taken their TV capability out. We've tried, but they still are able to broadcast.
Actually the defeat was caused by the nationalist 'secular' opposition, reportedly after threats and intimidation from France. France told Turkey that if it cooperated with the United States, France would see to it that Turkey would be frozen out of Europe for a generation.
The opposition leaders involved reported that France used only threats, no promises. France is the real enema. Enemy, I mean.
Ditto that.
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