Like
the German army driving on Moscow in the vast campaigns of 1941, the great,
awesome strength of the U.S. Army in Iraq is its exceptional training, equipment,
firepower, and fast-moving tactical capabilities. But also like the Wehrmacht
in 1941, it is vastly outnumbered in a huge, alien landscape with horrendous
weather conditions threatening its cohesion and equipment if it cannot get
the job done within a few weeks or months.
Therefore the drive on Baghdad, like the drive on Moscow
in the fall of 1941, can be likened to a gigantic karate blow aimed with
breathtaking daring and speed at the heart of an enormous, but far slower
moving centralized totalitarian system. And the sooner it can be delivered,
the better.
The Germans lost their first and best chance to knock
out the Soviet Union when Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler fatally slowed and
weakened the central drive on Moscow to net enormous but strategically
peripheral victories to the south in Ukraine.
He did so over the warnings of his greatest offensive
panzer general, Heinz Guderian, that everything had to be staked on the
drive to Moscow.
U.S. commanders have not made that mistake and recognize
the importance of taking Baghdad. But they face a different problem. Although
the invasion of Iraq was carried out by a force of 300,000 troops — vastly
up from the 60,000 that Department of Defense civilian planners originally
thought would be enough to do the job — senior U.S. commanders in the
field have already repeatedly acknowledged that it is still far too few
to do the job they are faced with.
For the war plan was drawn up on the confident assumption
that vast elements of the Iraqi population and even army would defect
from Saddam almost immediately, and that simply has not happened. Only
one limited uprising has been reported within the besieged port city of
Basra and contrary to U.S. hopes so far, it has not been effective. Neither
has it spread, though that may yet happen.
Nor did the much-touted initial U.S. bombardment knock
out Saddam’s communications and control system, as was confidently expected.
Indeed, it does not seem to have knocked out anything. For, as Michael
Gordon reported tersely in The New York Times on Thursday: “The air
campaign that the Pentagon promised would ‘shock and awe’ Saddam Hussein’s
government appears to have done neither.”
On the contrary, U.S. leaders have admitted they were
taken by surprise by Saddam’s willingness to decentralize and delegate
operational military control his field commanders from the very beginning
of the war. This meant that even insofar as he himself was isolated and
under bombardment in the early hours of the conflict, his forces in the
field were operationally unaffected.
This flexibility and resilience took U.S. planners by
surprise, as they had stereotyped Saddam as both incompetent and an inveterate
centralizer. But he is neither and the record clearly shows it. During
the eight-year Iran-Iraq War from 1980-88, Saddam, while utterly ruthless
in maintaining the unquestioned loyalty and obedience of his field commanders,
already granted them wide operational discretion, just as his hero and
role model, late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, did to the victorious generals
of the Red Army during World War II.
Nor, despite Bush administration hype to the contrary,
was the “shock and awe” bombardment the most that the U.S. Air
Force was capable of. On the contrary, as Washington Times military correspondent
Rowan Scarborough has reported, and as military sources have confirmed
to UPI, senior Air Force generals were extremely unhappy that they were
not allowed to mount a softening up air campaign of comparable intensity
and duration to the highly successful one that launched the 1991 Gulf
War, even though the military mission in this war was a far vaster one.
Now, even President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld have changed their tune and are stating publicly that
the war will be a longer one, and so far, they have avoided even predicting
when the end will be in sight.
This is sobering indeed. For we stick with our assessment
of recent days that the best hope for U.S. victory without horrendous
casualties remains a rapid one, if that is at all still possible.
American media pundits alike were misled by the long,
easy stream of rapid victories against minor or incompetently directed
enemies that the United States has fought and won over the past 20 years:
in Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo
in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001.
But no easy winning streak lasts forever, in baseball
or war. Now, for the first time in 30 years since Vietnam, the United
States has a real war on its hands.
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