Huh? What are you talking about? They didn't have anything planned except for the most typical, routine tactics. Even puny little Grenada resisted our invasion.
They did not plan for resistance at all. They expected merely to pummel the standing army into oblivion, march into Baghdad and the other cities through a cascade of champagne and rose petals, fire the entire Iraqi administration from top to bottom, issue decrees that the gratefully liberated natives would jump to implement, and start pumping out oil.
Well, I guess the best that can be said for next time America goes to war is those types of delusions won't be a factor.
My phrasing is confusing, so here it goes again:
The Iraqis didn't have anything planned except for the most typical, routine tactics. Even puny little Grenada resisted our invasion.
The Pentagon did not plan for resistance at all. They expected merely to pummel the standing army into oblivion, march into Baghdad and the other cities through a cascade of champagne and rose petals, fire the entire Iraqi administration from top to bottom, issue decrees that the gratefully liberated natives would jump to implement, and start pumping out oil.
You've swallowed the lefties propaganda!
Please go back and reread the history of WWII. The invasion of Europe is replete with blunders, miscalculations, failed opportunities, and unheeded warning signs.
In other words, hindsight is always 20/20.
Another consideration that Tommy Franks had to deal with was the very real possibility that Saddam still had stockpiles of chemical artillery & mortar rounds. If he chose to dismount his infantry close to the initial line-of-departure to deal with the Fedayeen he was running the very real risk of getting his troops slimed. We have found some old chem ordnance, probably left over from GWI, but Gen. Franks could not have known then that there were so few chem weapons.
A thinking opponent is going to hand you a series of dilemmas -- a bunch of darned-if-you-do/darned-if-you-don't decisions. The Fedayeen were there to force the US to dismount & disperse; failing that, they were to focus their attacks on supply convoys and refuse combat with combat battalions.
This information is being printed by the NYT because it fits their template for the War: that Rumsfeld/Cheyney/Bush interfered with or prevented proper planning for dealing with the insurgency, period. They only present the factors that fit that picture.
Whining that the US military successfully invaded Iraq, a nation of 25 million people, and stormed through to Baghdad, against an army that supposedly was the most formidable in the region, without "planning for" subsequent resistance and random terror attacks, is like whining that a doctor successfully cured someone's cancer without "planning for" their subsequent acne.
May be next time we go to war you should lead the military campaign.
That was the Cubans.
Yes they resisted but not for long.
Well, I guess the best that can be said for next time America goes to war is those types of delusions won't be a factor."
This is dishonest. President Bush said over and over and over again that it would be "LONG........ AND........... DIFFICULT. " Stop making up your own "facts."