Posted on 04/14/2003 7:19:15 AM PDT by dead
SURELY there has never been a war like it: so compressed, so minutely covered, short-lived by the standards of past wars, but seeming to last an eternity. Finally, however, with Saddam Hussein gone, American and British troops are wrapping up a job which, in truth, started 12 years ago.
Some talk of a historical triumph that will unlock a new and happier era for the entire Middle East. Others tremble at the prospect of exactly the reverse. But some survey the smouldering battlefield and wonder if somehow, despite the overthrow of a tyrant and all the destruction, we are not pretty much where we were before the shooting started.
Only two things may be said with certainty of this Gulf War: that it is a pivotal moment in the way this planet organises, or disorganises, its affairs; and that never in the field of human conflict have so many talked so much nonsense in so short a time.
"Let the words I utter today be sweet and tasty, for I may have to eat them tomorrow," Mo Udall, the late Arizona congressman and celebrated wit, once observed. Over the past 3½ weeks, positive banquets of false predictions have been force-fed back to their authors.
When the war opened with that strike in the early hours of 20 March on the "target of opportunity" in southern Baghdad, we even hoped for an instant that it might be over before it had begun, with a precision strike that had killed Saddam and his closest henchmen at one fell swoop. The next day American armour, carrying its complement of "embedded" correspondents super-charged with adrenalin, raced across the desert as the serious bombing of "regime targets" in Baghdad got under way. The fighting had started and, with not an enemy to be seen, would surely be over before the reporters got their shirts dirty.
All of a sudden, things seemed to stall. The city of Basra and the port of Umm Qasr were assumed to be pushovers; instead they put up stubborn resistance. As the 3rd Infantry Division and the US Marines 1st Expeditionary Corps swept north, guerrilla raids and suicide attacks multiplied; who were these Fedayeen whom no pundit had ever mentioned?
At that point, inevitably, you started to notice the V-word. The US was being sucked into another Vietnam, some said, even though that war lasted 10 years, and this one hadn't even been in progress for 10 days - such are the distortions of 24-hour television news coverage, and the perils attendant in a country accustomed to instant satisfaction.
"This enemy wasn't the one we wargamed against," noted Lieutenant General William Wallace, the commander of US ground forces in Iraq. Even Donald Rumsfeld's jutting jaw seemed to sag a little, though the Pentagon continued to insist that everything was on track, and that the war plan was "brilliant". And in a few days it once again appeared precisely that. The advancing columns found a second wind and brushed aside vaunted Republican Guard divisions to reach the gates of Baghdad, and in the space of 48 hours, "sustained reconnaissance" missions metamorphosed into the capture of the city.
Less than three weeks after President Bush declared "Let's Go!" in the White House situation room, Saddam Hussein's bronze statue was hauled from its pedestal in Firdos Square. His regime was gone - and the doubters slunk back into their lairs.
"We Must Not Gloat" was the watchword in official Washington. But the White House was ebullient, and Rumsfeld of Arabia consigned Saddam - along with Stalin, Hitler and Ceaucescu - into the litter bin of "failed dictators". And what of those doomsayers who predicted that in its death throes, the regime would attack Israel, launch chemical and biological weapons against the troops, and torch the Iraqi oilfields? "Just plain wrong", as the Secretary of Defence might put it.
Euphoria, however, lasted all of 24 hours. By Friday, looting was sweeping Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, in an anarchy which seemed to take those masterful military planners in the Pentagon completely by surprise. As mobs rampaged through the capital, and a returning cleric on whom many hopes of national reconciliation rested was murdered in the holy city of Najaf, talk of smooth passage to an ordered, democratic and peaceful Iraq seemed ludicrous.
In a few days, however, the rioting might have subsided; General Jay Garner, the man supposed to run the so-called Interim Iraqi Authority, might be firmly in the saddle; and the doubters may again be forced into retreat.
There rests this not-quite-won war. At the time of writing, the vice is tightening around Saddam's family stronghold of Tikrit. The dictator's exact fate is unknown, and no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found - though they were ostensibly the reason for the invasion. But the most obvious lesson of the past three weeks has been hammered home around the world: where modern warfare is concerned, the US is in a class of its own.
Not that Iraq provided much opposition. its forces far weaker than in 1991. America, however, is far stronger, especially in the more important field of technology - whereas barely 10pc of its munitions were precision-guided in Gulf War One, this time only 10pc were not, thus giving US commanders the capacity to strike with unimaginable speed.
The most stunning example was last Monday's attack on a villa in the Mansour district of Baghdad, which some think killed Saddam Hussein. US intelligence received word that the Iraqi leader might be there and a B-1B bomber patrolling hundreds of miles from the capital was alerted. The aircraft changed course; the co-ordinates of the target were fed into its computers, and just 45 minutes after the initial alert two 2,000lb bombs speared into the complex and exploded. This was warfare as never before practised, in which the desire could become the deed almost instantaneously.
"Shock and awe" was how the Pentagon dubbed the heavy bombing of Baghdad. But viewers never saw images of what was arguably the most pulverising and deadliest use of American power, as air and ground forces linked, transferring in a split-second battlefield data to destroy Republican Guard tanks and units, often even before they realised they were under threat.
American forces moved with a speed that kept Iraqi defenders permanently off-balance. This conflict has already set a benchmark for 21st-century warfare, giving the lie to the old maxim that an invading force had to outnumber defenders by a ratio of three to one to cancel out the latter's inbuilt advantages. Technological superiority (aided, it should be said, by the ineptitude and bewilderment of the Iraqis) put paid to that.
However, to reach into the trusty arsenal of Churchillisms, the conclusion of this war will not be the end of Iraq's agony, nor even the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. The truths which existed when the first US and British troops went in exist today. Iraq was, is and will be a desperately difficult country to remake, in an extraordinarily unstable region. Nor does military victory hide the fact that the UN, transatlantic relations and perhaps global stability have been dealt terrible blows by the Iraqi crisis. Washington must now show qualities the Bush administration is normally pretty short on - patience and magnanimity.
The initial omens are not good. Having spurned Washington by denying its bases, Turkey has served notice it will tolerate no attempt by the Iraqi Kurds to create their own state. And anyone who believes the creation of a stable government will be the proverbial cakewalk should consider the murder of two Shia clerics at the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, and the political uproar when the British unveiled a "sheik" designated to take a semblance of charge in Basra.
Many of us who opposed the war did so because we believed the risks to regional stability outweighed the potential gains. Nothing so far has changed that judgment; indeed Turkey's behaviour, the current chaos in Iraq and the American sabre-rattling against Syria only confirm it.
And while the war has come and almost gone, the shambles of what is optimistically called the "international community" persist. Can the UN regain a semblance of authority, after the paralysing divisions on the Security Council before the conflict? Will those divisions spill over into trade wars and financial quarrels, complicating global economic recovery? Can the EU heal its wounds? Can the US on the one hand, and France, Germany and Russia on the other, mend fences - or will Gulliver say "to hell with it", less inclined than ever to permit the Lilliputians to tie him down in treaties and multilateral organisations? Reconciliation is a two-way street. Ultimately it all depends on how America chooses to conduct itself.
(©Independent News Service)
|
|
|
 |
Donate Here By Secure Server
FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
|
|
|
|
This display was won at Ft Benning and tens of other bases and was won ten and twenty years ago. The ignorant writer thinks, like most dictators and leftists that you can “buy” results. A little bit, but mostly you earn them, something socialists and baser thieves never understand.
We have work to do, and it gives them a hobby to keep them out of our way.
But the fond belief in Washington - and the one on which this war was largely sold - that the advancing GIs would be greeted as liberators, as they were in occupied France in 1944, has already been shown to be an illusion.
Never, surely, in a modern war has not victory itself, but the manner of victory, been so important. Yet the pictures are not of garlands of flowers thrown by a grateful local citizenry upon the invaders' tanks. They are of shattered buildings and weeping civilians.
The Dick Cheneys, the Richard Perles and others who believed (on the basis of what information, it is not clear) that Saddam's Iraq would collapse like a card castle once serious military pressure was applied
It always was a bit of a pretense, a point of view which distilled to "you give us money and troops and we'll dictate how to employ them, and lecture you about your own moral inferiority in the bargain." That sort of con game requires the willing participation of its victims, and that willingness is no longer present. When that happens the con game folds.
You're right that he doesn't expect it to happen. He's just putting it on the record so that every unfortunate future event can be blamed squarely on the backs of the American Administration that didn't take his never-wrong advice.
Tell a lie often enough..................
Wallace's actual quote, as reported in a New York Times correction was "The enemy is a bit different than the one we wargamed against."
This moron author should sit back, enjoy a pint of Guinness and STFU.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.