“The Mother of All Sieges” (Posted April 30, 2004)
We have agreed to let hopefully former Baathist
officers and soldiers clean up Fallujah for us:
Convoys of U.S. troops and equipment could be
seen heading out of parts of Fallujah, replaced by
Iraqi troopers in red berets under the flag that flew over Saddam's Iraq
Uh huh.
This is such a tremendous error that I cannot believe it. As
I concluded in a post on April
1st, delenda est Fallujah. What did we
do instead of destroying them? We let them walk away alive. And just as Saddam
proclaimed victory for having survived his ass whipping in 1991, so too will
the insurgents who are even now watching Marines retreat from their positions.
We had them by the throat and we let them go. It doesn’t matter that we killed
at a tremendously lopsided ratio. We failed to teach the lesson of what
resisting us means. Or rather, we did teach them what it means. And that’s the
problem. The enemy should be dead, crippled, headed for Gitmo,
or so scared that they almost made it into categories 1-3 that they head for
home and swear to their families and themselves that they will fight no more.
As Owens observed, this was a big
mistake:
The reason is simple: The fighters in Fallujah
do not seek peace. They want to drive the Americans out of Iraq. They are like venomous snakes: They will
kill us or our Iraqi allies if we do not kill them first. There is no
negotiating with them. They see such negotiations as a sign of weakness;
indeed, the fact that the powerful United States is negotiating with them permits the
insurgents to claim that they have prevailed over the most powerful military in
the world.
Certainly, no war is perfect and mistakes will be made. We
can afford to recover from mistakes. And who knows, maybe this will work.
But my gut feeling is that we made a terrible mistake.
The only way to compound our failure to crush Fallujah would be to storm Najaf—a
city we should let dangle until Sadr is tricked out.
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It isn’t enough to say that the press seems to be more
outraged at photographs of Americans humiliating
a few Iraqi prisoners than they got over 300,000 dead Iraqis found in
Saddam’s mass graves.
It isn’t enough to say that cruelty isn’t on the same order
of evil as plastic shredders for people, rape rooms, and children devoured by
dogs.
We are better than that and expect to be judged by standards
higher than Saddam-levels.
And not only is it shameful, it will get American soldiers
killed.
Those soldiers that posed with humiliated Iraqis might as
well have thrown a grenade into one of our command posts. Or
rammed an American checkpoint with a car bomb. Or set off a bomb in a
mall back home in America.
Those soldiers were sent abroad to defend us and they
brought danger and shame to us and to their fellow soldiers and Marines on the
front lines.
They must be publicly arrested and quickly tried and
punished. The chain of command must be investigated for their role in allowing
this outrage to happen. And through it all, we must judge them by our
standards. We can’t help how al Jazeera or Ted Koppel
will tell this story to the world, but we can make sure that we know what
standards we keep.
American soldiers are better than this.
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Much is being made of the fact that 10% of Iraqi security
forces defected; 40% sat in their barracks and refused to fight; and only 50%
fought with us. With 200,000 Iraqis providing the bulk of the manpower to defeat
the insurgents, this is a problem in providing sufficient density. Not critical
at this point and given we’ve been working on this for only less than a year,
not too bad really.
Let’s look at the other side. Back in March and April 2003,
the perhaps 500,000 Iraqis had maybe 10% of their strength fight and the other
90% melted away. Since I read that 75% of the Iraqis in the current
pro-American security forces were in Saddam’s military, perhaps 30% of the
pre-war Iraqi military eventually defected to our side. This Baathist record was after 25 years of Saddam’s rule.
All in all, our record is a lot better.
And our guys will get better as they are better equipped and
as they gain experience. Eventually we’ll be able to pull our forces to the
background.
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Some action is going on to get the talks with North
Korea going. The North remains
in Bizarro World:
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials say
communist North Korea disclosed it was
working on a secret program to enrich uranium for weapons, in violation of an
international agreement.
North Korea said it expected
to discuss a reward for freezing its nuclear plans but any breakthrough depended
on Washington.
"The DPRK side will attend this meeting to discuss the
proposal 'reward for freeze'," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement
carried by the official KCNA news agency. DPRK is short for
the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The proposal involves the North freezing nuclear plans in
return for compensation.
Really, though, how can we blame them? We trained them to
think that they can get goodies for threatening us with nuclear destruction.
It will take a while to disabuse them of this long-held and
fed belief. Luckily, Pyongyang
might collapse before they learn that lesson.
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I’m used to some analysts saying that if we fight back, we
only make things worse by encouraging our enemies. We’re just supposed to sit
and take it I guess—and apologize ever more loudly over the din of explosions. Another
example:
Falluja is tribal territory, one that functions by tribal rules. There are
expectations of hospitality, practices for settling disputes and obligations of
revenge against anyone committing an offense against a member of the tribe. The
last — revenge — poses a big problem for the United States if negotiations with the insurgents fail
and the military steps up its assault on the city. The holdouts of the old
regime may be killed or captured. The foreign fighters may be dispersed. But
for every tribesman who is killed, the kinship group remains, obligated to
avenge his death.
So riddle me this, Batman, if the tribes are unable to break
out of the cycle of violence or whatever, how did Saddam maintain control? Is
it possible Saddam never killed any one of the tribes
members or another unnamed offense?
The wild men are not unbeatable. Even if some like to insist
they are.
Silly drivel is what it is.
Sometimes I wonder if there are comparable fools in the
ranks of the Islamists who argue that it is foolish to attack us since it will
just make us mad and recruit more Tommy Franks to kill them all. It should only
be fair. Why should we have all the idiots on our side?
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A sniper
in Najaf has picked off five of Sadr’s goons:
American
commanders were also closely monitoring reports from inside Najaf
said that growing anger of residents there against Mr. Sadr
and his militiamen, who have sown a pattern of lawlessness since launching an
uprising in the city earlier this month, had taken a startling new turn with a
shadowy group of assassins killing at least five Sadr
militiamen in attacks on Sunday and Monday.
I had been thinking that we should have snipers going after Sadr’s pretend army to scare the crud out of them. Seriously.
We had special forces in Baghdad
while we advanced on the city during the war.
So, who is picking off Mahdi Army
goons with accuracy that no Iraqi has demonstrated thus far?
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA29APR04C
I wondered whether Kurds or Islamists attacked in Damascus.
There is the third possibility, that Damascus
ordered the attack to appear a victim and reduce pressure on them. A Syrian
political analyst said:
"I think al-Qaeda wanted a
media explosion to send a message to the Americans that it can reach any
target, even highly secure countries like Syria," he told
Reuters. "This also aims to make Syria pay for its role
in the campaign against terror."
Uh, yeah. Their
campaign against terror? Nice
try, Sparky.
Still, with an Alawite minority
government, I still find it hard to believe that the Syrian government would
stage an attack even if it sounds fishy as to the target; and considering the
blatant phoniness of the explanation for it. They could actually spark an
uprising if people think a group is out there fighting the government.
More likely is the Strategypage thought:
Syria became more chummy with their Iraqi brothers after Iraq’s defeat
in 1991, and it is believed that much of money stolen
from the Iraqi people by Saddam and his henchmen ended up in Syria. Same with many Iraqi
weapons (including chemical and biological ones.) Syria and Iran are the only nations bordering Iraq that have allowed Islamic radicals to
freely cross into Iraq to fight with the coalition troops and government forces. While Iran has been convinced to tighten up border
controls, Syria remained defiant. Now it appears that some of those Islamic militants
decided that there was plenty of tyranny in Syria to fight, and no need to travel on to Iraq. The high mortality rate among militants
that go into Iraq might have something to do with this. Few of the fighters who entered Iraq to fight coalition troops come back alive.
So the Syrians may appear as easier targets.
Remember the main Islamist rule: killing Americans is best.
But any of the rest will do.
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V. D. Hanson has an excellent press conference experience that
President Lincoln could have faced had our press corps been around then.
Actually it was around then to be fair—just no 24-hour news cycle.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA29APR04A
Orson Scott Card has an excellent
article about the war. Just read it.
One good point he makes in this article is about the
supposed failure to destroy Saddam in 1991 when our troops were within striking
range of Baghdad:
And Iraq always required
exactly the solution that we have been imposing for the past year. This is why
President Bush's father did not
take out Saddam when he had the chance back in 1991: without Saddam's
repressive regime, every would-be dictator in Iraq would have made
his play for the top spot then, just as they're doing now.
So we couldn't get rid of Saddam until we had
the national will to stick with the job until a strong government with popular
support could fill the power vacuum.
It is often said we made a terrible error in holding back.
I’ve never agreed although our need to destroy Saddam in 2003 led me to waver
in this assessment. Boy, it sure would have been nice to have gotten rid of
Saddam in 1991 and avoided all our problems now.
But in 1991, we would not have had the motivation provided
by 9-11 to see us through some tough times in suppressing the fanatics who
would have resisted us after a 1991 fall of Baghdad.
Maybe we could have won in 1991-1992, but it is hardly a
given as some assume now. It is quite possible that we would not have had the
fortitude to stick with a counter-insurgency then and
would have just gotten out of Iraq,
leaving Saddam free to build WMD.
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Like I’ve been saying, crush the Fallujah
resistance to demonstrate we will not be screwed with; and kid glove the dimwit
Sadr to keep him from becoming a martyr and losing
our support amongst the Shias. Remember, I know even
I’d be angry if the Islamists killed hundreds in Paris.
The French may be SOBs but they’re Western SOBs after all. It’s nice to see two articles in one day
backing my assessment on what to do in the two cities.
From an American military guy
in Iraq:
We are struggling to tip toe through the tulips in Fallujah
when it is no longer possible to do so. Fallujah
should already have been an object lesson that if handled decisively and
quickly would make further operations in the south unnecessary. We have lost
the equivalent of two marine infantry companies precisely because of our
over-reliance on light infantry again. Sad for the parents' whose sons have
died valiantly, but needlessly. Now, we are poised to
sacrifice whatever good will remains in the Shiite population by making war on
a cleric who until recently was a minor player. If we go into Najaf, we will enrage Shiite Arabs, Persians, Pathans and Punjabis unnecessarily. I sincerely hope we
just quietly withdraw from Najaf and finish the
problem in Fallujah instead. Fallujah
is a better place to make clear what will happen to anyone who threatens or
challenges US authority. We should leave the firebrand cleric to his superiors in
the Shiite hierarchy.
When
all options have risks, however, we have to take risks. And the risks will
differ in different situations. At this point the risks in Fallujah
of either a compromise deal or a long siege are worse than those of a full and
rapid conquest. The U.S. Marines should go in and kill or capture the mainly Sunni insurgents.
Now a symbol of Sunni resistance, Fallujah might
become a symbol of their defeat.
In
Najaf the calculation now points in the opposite
direction. Rather than attack a city beloved by Shiites still largely
sympathetic to us, we should accept the offer from the firebrand Motoqba al-Sadr to surrender to
an Islamic third party for interrogation by the Iraqi judge who issued the
murder warrant against him. That would avoid one major threat to good U.S.-Shia relations, namely a bloody conflict with Shia militias, and remove another, namely al-Sadr himself, from the center of
events.
In
both cases, however, we are adopting the worst possible response — namely,
issuing bold threats but taking weak actions or even doing nothing. And this
paralysis stems largely from indecision in Washington itself where a series of local conflicts prevents
the U.S. from pursuing a consistent Iraqi policy.
The longer we let Fallujah drag on
in stalemate, the more the neutrals doubt we are determined to win. Najaf we can let go longer like a hostage situation
confident that the locals grow increasingly upset that the outsiders loyal to Sadr are disrupting their lives.
Are we doing more than we know in Fallujah?
Are we dividing the resistance as they split on responding to negotiations? Are
we showing the locals the joys of rule by the thugs in hope that the friendlies in the city will ask us to crush the resistance?
Are we locating the resistance to better go after them when we strike?
I don’t know. But I’ll feel better when we just crush that
snake’s nest. The ceasefire is not tenable. How can we patrol in anything less
than platoon strength when so many enemy can mass to
attack? We’ve been lucky that we’ve smashed up the attackers when they violate
the ceasefire. But one day they’ll do what they did in Ramadi
and kill a dozen Marines.
Take Fallujah! Isolate Najaf and push our friends in Iraq
to deal with that fool Sadr.
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The Jordan
plot is highlighted by CNN:
Jordanian
authorities said Monday they have broken up an alleged al Qaeda
plot that would have unleashed a deadly cloud of chemicals in the heart of
Jordan's capital, Amman.
There is uncertainty about whether the chemicals were really
intended to be a chemical attack or whether it was to make a better explosion.
But it certainly shows that the Islamists are willing to
kill just about anybody they can reach. Those darn Crusading Jordanians.
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Following the Kurdish riots of late we have this
in Syria:
Gunmen attacked a former
United Nations office in a diplomatic quarter of Damascus,
setting off a battle with police that pelted nearby buildings with bullets and
grenades.
So. Was this a Kurdish attack in
revenge or was it an Islamist attack to unseat the Alawite
(who many Moslems don’t even think are real Moslems) minority government?
If the latter, the Syrians are finding that fanning the
flames of Islam in neighboring Iraq
can burn them very badly indeed. With all the talk of the supposedly difficult
position we are in, consider Syria’s
predicament: either Iraq
becomes a pro-American democracy that undermines Syria
or Islamists gain ground in Iraq
and spill over into Syria
to undermine the Syrian government.
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I remain convinced we will find the smoking gun of chemical
weapons in Iraq.
This
story, (via Instapundit), reminds me of the
discoveries of mass quantities of “pesticides” during the invasion of Iraq
that seemed to me to be evidence of chemical stockpiles. Lots of bug sprays are
just nerve gas for insects, after all. I kind of forgot about these discoveries
since they were ultimately ignored. But this article brings it back. Especially
significant:
When
coalition forces entered Iraq,
"huge warehouses and caches of 'commercial and agricultural' chemicals
were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical
specialists," Hanson writes. "What was surprising was how quickly the
ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on
the significance of these caches."
Caches
of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the
expectation of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that
is precisely what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells
Insight, "they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare
program very quickly." Kay and Duelfer came to a
similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new
facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch
production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice.
At
Karbala,
U.S.
troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a
very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums
were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to
reporters - with unpleasant results. "More than a dozen soldiers, a
Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with
symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says.
"But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story,
nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into
nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken
to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about
the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of
pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site'
was also colocated with a military ammunition dump -
evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."
That
wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles,
Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji,
where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United
States
from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division
found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass
spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin - a nerve agent.
Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a
mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site.
"Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the
ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says.
"It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps
insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the
conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'"
At
Taji - an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District
of Columbia
- U.S.
combat units discovered more "pesticides" stockpiled in specially
built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon
drum. Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the
canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and
Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. "They were labeled as
pesticides," he says. "Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides
stored in ammo dumps.
Again,
this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a
mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But
subsequent tests by the United
States
disputed that finding. "If it wasn't a chemical agent, what was it?"
Hanson asks. "More pesticides? Dish-washing
detergent? From this old soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from
putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to
the enemy."
The
discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the problem: Finding
real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the image the media and the
president's critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq's weapons ought
to look like.
A
senior administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting
from Iraq
as well as the earlier reports from U.N. arms inspectors refers to another
well-documented allegation. "The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of
VX," a powerful nerve gas, but claimed they had never weaponized
it. The U.N. inspectors "felt they had more. But where did it go?"
The Iraqis never provided any explanation of what had happened to their VX
stockpiles.
What
does 3.9 tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large garage,"
the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of
VX gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that
still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of California.
The mortar rounds are something I really didn’t think of in
this context either. I figured that they were Iran-Iraq War era so only
relevant to the WMD hunt by the fact that Coalition troops sat on them for
months before discovering them. I should have considered this angle. Just what
the heck was that liquid if not chemical agents? Really, it makes no sense that
this would have been declared nothing. What is going on?
I think what we have found is significant as it is. Taking
out Saddam’s regime was both morally right from the mass graves we’ve found and
in our national interest from destroying a regime intent on aggression,
terrorism, and acquiring nuclear weapons. We’ll find stockpiles that will not
be ignored.
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The UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is just a Baathist apologist and why we should trust the man to do
anything to benefit us or the Iraqi people is beyond me. This is what he
says about the Fallujah fighting:
"When you surround a city, you bomb the
city, when people cannot go to hospital, what name do you have for that?" Brahimi said. "And you, if you have enemies there,
this is exactly what they want you to do, to alienate more people so that more
people support them rather than you."
Surround it? Why yes we did. The better to
keep new thugs and weapons out and to trap the insurgents inside to kill them.
Bomb it? Are we Russians? We used air power and firepower
sparingly. The low level of civilian casualties is unusual for city fighting
and comes from the unique care that we take to avoid killing innocents.
People can’t go to the hospital? Well if the enemy would
stop violating the laws of land warfare and refrain from using ambulances to
transport fighters and weapons, we’d let the people go to hospitals.
What name do we have for this? Why I’ll tell you, you
duplicitous SOB, it’s called taking an enemy-held city.
And how are we doing exactly what they want us to do? Why is
fighting our enemies and killing them in large numbers always what they want us to do? Why is it always best to just let
them kill us and terrorize the locals into submission without lifting a hand to
stop them? Why would standing aside while they get out the plastic shredders
get the thugs to say, “Damn those clever Americans!
They let us capture a city without killing us in large numbers and retaking the
city! Curse their clever infidel strategy!”
Refusing to crush our enemies in Fallujah
is alienating people. They think we don’t want to win. I’m beginning to wonder
if they’re right.
All in all, Brahimi is an
untrustworthy man representing an untrustworthy body.
Keep the UN from getting any real authority in Iraq.
We have enough problems.
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Our friends in Europe like to note,
whenever we point out that they aren’t helping us in Iraq,
that they have stepped up in Afghanistan.
This theater, they say, is the only real front in the war on terror unlike the
mistake in Iraq.
The Spanish were insistent on this point.
So what do they say when we ask the colossus that is the EU
to contribute more than the paltry few thousand that now guard Kabul
and its suburbs? Why, with little
enthusiasm, of course:
NATO allies agreed months ago to expand the mission and set
a target of sending peacekeeping teams to five more cities in the north and
west of Afghanistan by late June.
However, nations have been hesitant in coming forward with
troops for the costly and potentially dangerous operation.
Mind you, these are sovereign states able to decide where
they will commit their militaries. I just wish they’d spare me the bull that
they’re only holding back in Iraq
because of the so-called unilateral nature of our invasion.
When they have to be cajoled into provided troops in
relatively quiet Afghanistan,
where they claim they are with us enthusiastically, explain to me again how we
could have convinced them to join us in Iraq?
And by “them” I mean of course the French, their German poodle, and the Belgian
hand puppet.
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I just finished a post recently that mentioned an old
teaching assistant of mine at Michigan.
I said that I thought he joined the Navy.
So of course I read an
article today with a Navy commander of the same name quoted!
The
ESG concept sports a highly mobile, self-sustaining force able to conduct
expeditionary missions from humanitarian and disaster relief to combat
operations, according to Cmdr. Bradley Martin, the amphibious squadron’s chief
of staff, who presented the briefing in Sasebo.
Same Bradley Martin? Could be. If so, glad to see an old TA doing well. He was
good then. I imagine he still knows his stuff.
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We will find chemical weapons in Iraq.
Eventually. We are still
looking:
A workshop believed to be producing chemical
munitions exploded in flames Monday moments after U.S. troops broke in
to search it, killing two soldiers and wounding five.
Yes, the chemical weapons could have been smoke grenades,
but this hardly seems likely. I’ve worried for a year that the Baathists buried chemicals and that they’d hit us one day.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA26APR04A
The panic in some of the media over the recent Fallujah and Sadr revolts was
just amazing to me. It frightens me to think of what might happen with a real
setback. Though the attacks were far, far less potent than the Tet offensive in 1968 and quickly contained with the troops
on hand, the cries of despair over this event amaze me.
So I picked up Ronald Spector’s After Tet to
read. I have a few dozen unread books standing in line and figured this was as
good a time as any to read it.
I’m not finished yet, but other than showing that April 2004
should not even be compared with February and March 1968, what struck me
relates to the transformation of our Army. We are evolving it into a post-Cold War
mobile strike force able to travel the globe and then rip apart conventional
enemies with speed and precision. The capture of Baghdad
and the take down of the Baathist regime in three
weeks is a prototype of this hyper war. The problem is that so many Baathists and their subcontracted gangs survived the large
unit war to carry on the irregular war this spring. We hope to demonstrate our
superiority in battle and discourage them. We even negotiate rather than
unleash our military on the remaining thugs.
The question that creeps up in my mind after reading Spector is what if shock and awe—so effective against an
organized army similar to our own—doesn’t shock the true believers? How do we
beat those that aren’t easily discouraged?
The description in After
Tet of the North Vietnamese is frightening. Spector describes a North
Vietnam where young men knew they would die
in battle with Americans. They tattooed “Born in the North, to die in the
South” and sang songs about their fate. The government never reported
casualties and the news was always of victories. The wounded were not sent home
but shipped off to isolated locations. The elite and those with money were able
to keep their kids out of the army, of course. Yet the rest of the young men
knew their fate.
The soldiers sent south felt like foreigners in a strange
land and never expected to go home. Their initial training wasn’t even that
rigorous. Indoctrination combined with strict and continuous supervision to
look out for defeatism kept the soldiers fighting. Fighting made the survivors
more effective. The scary thing is that despite the prospect of near certain
death, the North Vietnamese soldiers remained confident of victory. Even though
the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were turned back with heavy losses in Tet, the average surviving soldier and their successors did
not think of it as a defeat. And though we were not war criminals as some have
asserted even recently, the North Vietnamese believed we were brutal and a
hundred times worse than the French who came before us. The Vietnamese never
broke under our bombardment despite their heavy casualties, unlike the Chinese
in Korea who
were on the verge of collapse under pressure from constant American firepower
when the ceasefire went into effect in 1953. The North Vietnamese simply
expected to win.
So will our nimble and precise Future Force win against
enemies that cannot be discouraged? Against some enemies, we must be able to
kill them in large numbers without mercy and without respite. Those that cannot
be discouraged must be killed. Will just-in-time logistics for precision
munitions wielded by light troops fighting heavily outnumbered as a networked
force be able to kill in the numbers needed once we transform? Transformation
does not automatically mean we are seeking bloodless victory. But I fear that
many will confuse information dominance with actual victory in battle and war. Already,
we seem like we hate to kill our enemies almost as much as we hate to inflict
civilian deaths. How will we kill enemies who cannot be beaten but only killed
when networked precision reigns? When we recoil from killing even our enemies?
The one comforting thing to note is that killing in large
enough numbers will discourage even true believers eventually. The Chinese in Korea
had no sanctuary for their armies while the North Vietnamese could pull units
out from under the pounding of American firepower into sanctuaries safe from
our power. This was probably the key to the NVA’s
resilience compared to the near run thing for the equally fanatical Chinese. If
American units can fully use our killing power, we can break our enemies. We
just have to make sure we have killing power after transforming.
The damnedest part of today’s problem, however, is that the
example of Fallujah shows we may have effectively given
our enemies sanctuaries inside Iraq when it is within our power to deny them safe
havens to recover and come back to fight again.
If our enemies are born in Fallujah
to die in the Sunni Triangle, then we need to destroy Fallujah.
And do it now.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA25APR04B
Friends
are becoming neutrals. We can’t afford to have neutrals become enemies.
According to American military people:
But
most worrisome, commanders say, is that the insurgents' terrorist tactics —
from street fighting in Falluja to the car bombings
in Basra this week — have successfully intimidated Iraqis to the point that
many are withdrawing their support for the allies and shifting to the
uncommitted camp. They are not necessarily joining the fighters, but many no
longer cooperate as freely with the allies. Some informants have dried up,
officers said.
I don’t think the attacks have caused our friends to become
neutral. I think our failure to crush the Fallujah
revolt has frightened our friends. We’ve made them doubt that we are in Iraq
to win. We were smashing the thugs and we then just stopped! They didn’t stop
us. We stopped. And our enemies have accused us of war crimes though civilian
casualties have been remarkably low because of our care in fighting. We then negotiated
with stone cold killers. How does that look to Iraqis afraid of being the neck
part of the old Sunni stomping on necks game?
I argued for the “bandaid off fast”
rule for Fallujah. We should have guarded against
popular sentiment being forged against us by quickly destroying our enemy so
that the irritant would not last long. If we are to be accused of atrocities,
why not fight hard and win fast? Instead we’ve let this fester with our enemies
still alive to violate the ceasefire that we pretend exists. They continue to
accuse us of “besieging” Fallujah and harming
civilians. Unusable weapons are turned in and in only small numbers. In the
end, we’ll have to attack. This could have been wrapped up already.
The statement following the above quote in the article is
unclear. Is this an opinion of the author or the above-mentioned commanders?
If
there is an American offensive at Falluja, or
especially one at Najaf in the south,
anti-Americanism could escalate, jeopardizing the American hopes of winning
back the undecided.
I agree that an American offensive in Najaf
would be unwise. This is a Shia holy site and we need
the Shias on our side. We need to send in Iraqis to get
that Sadr bully boy. Americans should only be sent in
support of the Iraqis. Sadr has little support so why
give the newly neutral a reason to join him in misguided Shia
solidarity? It is too late to bitch too much that we should have arrested or
killed Sadr long ago. Let him wither and push our Shia friends to get Sadr.
But what of this Fallujah
assertion? Why would anti-Americanism be fanned long-term by crushing
Sunnis? Yes, there is a certain shame effect on the Shias
of Americans destroying even the hated Sunni Baathists.
Look at the relief and shame over the destruction of the Saddam regime and
Saddam’s capture.
Yet if we win quickly, we can move on to helping Iraqis and
the shame will dissipate in time. Notice that we’ve kept Iraqis friendly to us
even as we’ve fought Baathists and Islamists over the
last year and even as the thugs slaughtered Iraqi civilians in horrendous
attacks. Our support is weakening recently only as we’ve refused to crush the
latest uprising against us. Had we crushed it, friends would have stayed
friendly. Neutrals would have edged to the winners. And enemies would either be
dead or wandering off to neutrality rather than join the dead.
Winning is the key to winning back the undecided. Dithering
has been key to losing them.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA25APR04A
The CPA press
conference somewhat eases my mind that de-Baathifaction
is the official process and that the exceptions are reasonable.
This article
highlights why I am nervous that de-Baathification
will not be resolutely implemented:
The reverberations of the Coalition's decision to rehabilitate Saddam's
support network will be long lasting and will lead to the deaths of Coalition
soldiers. "Death to the Baath Party"
banners hang throughout southern Iraq. Anti-Baath
passion runs high among the vast majority of the Iraqi people. Eighty percent
of the Iraqi population is not Sunni Arab, and the majority of the Sunni Arabs
also welcomed liberation from 35 years of Baathist
dictatorship. Many Iraqis see the U.S. as abandoning them yet again. We risk
losing the silent majority. Iraqi Shia, most of whom
viewed America as a liberator, will curse us for abandoning them to their
oppressors. The sense of betrayal runs deep: Shia remember how the British government disenfranchised them
following World War I. After decades of oppression, Iraq's Shia want assurance. Democracy provides it; rehabilitating Baathism does not. We risk driving Iraq's 14 million Shia
into the arms of the Iranian government, which will claim to be their
protector.
We can’t betray our friends and neutrals by letting our
enemies into government. The Shias won’t
understand—even if the State Department and our Sunni allies in the rest of the
Middle East want this—if they see “former” Baathists in positions of power with our backing.
De-Baathification is not a
mistake. It is a necessity to win. Keep in mind that if we ever lose the Shias we really will need a lot more troops—another 150,000
at least plus one-for-one replacements for whatever Shia
security forces defect or quit in that case.
Now that’s a nuanced solution to our Sunni/Islamist
problems, eh?
And for Pete’s sake, crush the Fallujah
resistance—fast—before we look like a bunch of wusses
for letting our enemies get away with murder. Coupled with the possible
perception that we are letting our enemies back into government service, the Shias might conclude that we are trying to put the Sunnis
back into power. And don’t think the Sunnis won’t fan those embers of a rumor.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA24APR04C
Although I expect our next short-term target to be the Horn
of Africa region (and it had better hurry up before yet another time prediction
collapses), I think Iran
is the next up on the Axis of Evil. I’ve thought this for a long time. Perhaps
prior to the Iraq War even. It’s hard to remember and I don’t have the energy
to review all my posts for references to Iran.
I expect the spring of 2005 since we will be in a troop rotation in Iraq
with more troops on hand in case. I suspect we’ve been working on a coup by
friendly Iranian military units with contacts throughout Iranian society also taking
place to line up support.
Why do I think this? No real reason other than the fact that
Iran is on the Axis of Evil, I believe the President remains committed to
preventing hostile states from getting nuclear weapons, I think the eventual
failure of diplomacy taking place now will convince even semi-serious Europeans
that Iran will not cooperate, and then there is the guess that Iran will have
nukes by the end of 2005 to go with their missiles.
So, this from the
President (via Caerdroia)
is interesting:
President
Bush told newspaper editors in Washington yesterday that Iran "will be dealt with, starting through the United Nations" if
it does not stop developing nuclear weapons and begin total cooperation with
international inspectors.
As the article notes:
The language was reminiscent of comments Bush made about Iraq long before the war, and to admonitions he
has issued to Syria. Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, was part of the "axis of
evil" in his State of the Union address in 2002.
If the President isn’t going to take care of this threat,
what reason does he have for re-election? Anybody could do nothing.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA24APR04B
Strategypage goes over some
myths about Iraq.
Highest on my list is the discussion of troop strength. I’ve
written consistently that the chorus of voices calling for more troops are just
plain wrong. I rarely see anything that agrees with me. I wouldn’t say that I
was starting to doubt my assessment but I have been uncomfortably alone on my
limb wondering if I was missing something. Strategypage
writes:
The U.S. Army doesn't have enough troops to handle
current combat operations!
Although combat commanders feel that "too much ain't
enough" when it comes to troops, they learn how to go with what they got.
The last two weeks of violence in Iraq were suppressed with available combat
troops, and more were called for in case the violence returned on a grander
scale (an unlikely event, as more became known about who was behind the current
attacks on Iraqis, foreign aid workers and coalition troops). For example,
three battalions of marines dealing with Fallujah,
and available troops were able to suppress the al Sadr
militias within two weeks. Sending more troops won’t help with the basic
problem; gathering intelligence. That requires people who speak Arabic and have
police experience. More American troops won’t solve that problem, more trained
Iraqi police will.
Exactly. The guys on the ground
will always want more troops. Who would turn down help? And we managed with the
in-country troops to contain the violence quickly. The 20,000 troops being held
over are insurance and they probably weren’t absolutely needed but since they
are still there, keep them just case. The 10,000 troops to be identified to go
in are extra insurance. I doubt they will go in at all. My amateur number
crunching seemed fine and I want Iraqis in the forefront.
The article discusses others that I agree are myths. But
one, that it is a myth we need to expand the Army, is one with which I
disagree. Sure, the article is right that the military thinks it will win Iraq
before new troops can be recruited, trained, organized, and equipped; and then
the military will have to pay for the new troops when Congress might not be
inclined to fund them. But I’ve felt two divisions more are needed prior to the
war. Now, I think we’d be better off with using the same number of troops needed
for two divisions to instead build separate brigades and battalions. Since our
divisions will be acting like corps with high-tech brigades supported by our
superb air power and able to dominate areas that divisions used to control, we
can plug in these smaller units into the divisions when needed. This will be
faster than training new divisions. I’ll risk the funding issue. This will be a
long war not just restricted to Iraq.
But read it for a good take on the so-called problems and
errors.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA24APR04A
Pat Tillman, a soldier in the
75th Ranger Regiment, was
killed in action in Afghanistan. He gave up a lucrative NFL career in order to join
the Army after 9-11 inspired him.
This news has struck me very
hard.
But not
because he was wealthy and famous. It hurts deeply because of his motives. In an
age when those "on the other side" denigrate those who serve and die
as either the losers of society who had no choice but to enlist or mere
mercenaries in it for the money, Tillman's decision to defend us destroys those
arguments. He needed neither money nor opportunity that society supposedly had
denied him. He served—and died—for love of country. His service and death
highlight the truth about all the other men and women in the Armed Forces who
have served, died, or been injured at war these last 2-1/2 years.
It will really hit home when
I receive the Department of Defense email that notifies me of his death. It
will sound like all the others.
Because it
really is like all the others. A young soldier who died protecting me because he believed that it
was his duty.
God bless them all.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA23APR04A
Three thousand North Koreans may have died in a train
explosion that took place 9 hours after Kim Jong-il
passed through on his train.
The key is whether the Pillsbury Nuke Boy thinks we just
tried a decapitation strike on him. Never mind that we would not kill 3,000
just to get him. He could believe it.
More important is what conclusion he draws—surrender his nukes now before we succeed, or renew his
efforts to build nukes and prepare to use them against us?
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA22APR04B
We are now willing to hire
former Baathists.
I’m not sure what this means.
I’ve always felt that de-Baathification
of Iraq is
necessary to win. The senior Baath Party members and
those guilty of crimes regardless of rank should be forever barred from serving
the government. If we’re afraid they’ll fight us, well then arrest them! I mean
what the Hell. We are in charge there. The choice isn’t to just let them plot
against us or hire them.
I just don’t trust any general in the Iraqi military or any senior
civilian. They should be assumed guilty until proven innocent. After proper
sifting and making sure they turn in resisting Baathists
or hidden documents or arms or whatever just to make sure they now stay on our
side by visibly betraying their former lives, sure, I’d allow former Baathists a way to rehabilitate and re-enter society.
I don’t know the details, but I’m really worried we are just
letting the Trojan horse into the walls.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA22APR04A
My wild ass guess of 50% effectiveness for the Iraqi
security forces was right on the money according
to the US military:
About one in every 10 members of Iraq's
security forces "actually worked against" U.S. troops during the
recent militia violence in Iraq, and an additional 40 percent walked off the
job because of intimidation, the commander of the 1st Armored Division said
Wednesday.
Half fought.
Why didn’t the other half fight?
"It's very difficult at times to
convince them that Iraqis are killing fellow Iraqis and fellow Muslims, because
it's something they shouldn't have to accept," he said. "Over time I
think they will probably have to accept it."
Doesn’t this convince them that their enemies are willing
to kill “fellow” Iraqis?
Suicide attackers unleashed car bombings
against police buildings in Iraq's biggest Shiite
city Wednesday morning, striking rush-hour crowds and killing at least 68
people, including 16 children incinerated in their school buses.
Didn’t the mass graves of Saddam tell them something about
the willingness of the enemy to murder “fellow” Iraqis? Shouldn’t Iraqis
remember the price
of his rule? The trial
of Saddam can’t begin too quickly. People need reminding.
On the bright side, back to the first article, the US
military realizes that kill ratios are only relevant to showing our military
prowess—not as a metric of success:
Dempsey maintained in the interview that popular support
for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq is still
"very solid."
But he acknowledged "a form of descending
consent" for the U.S. military presence
occurring among Iraqis as time passes.
"There is a point where it doesn't matter how well
we're doing, it won't be accepted that we have a large military presence
here," he said. "We're all working very diligently trying to figure
out where that point is."
Exactly. This is why we must push
Iraqis to take over security functions instead of pumping more US
troops in. We may make “how well we’re doing” better with more US troops, but
we’ll reduce consent and lessen the pressure on the Iraqis to defend
themselves.
Questions were also raised about the wisdom of de-Baathification of the security forces. To me, taking the
recent fighting as proof of de-Baathification being a
mistake is ludicrous. Would a security force full of Baathist-led
and dominated units have fought for us 50% of the time? Shoot, the 10%
defection rate would have been a lot higher. De-Baathification
is not a mistake. The Baathists were and are our
enemy, remember? Will their past victims really appreciate the nuance of
bringing Baathist “skills” into the security forces?
No. The Shias and Kurds (and even many Sunnis) will
rightly see it as a betrayal and a danger to their future. Punish enemies and
reward friends—not the reverse.
To win, we do need to discuss problems (as this memo a bit
selectively quoted by the Village Voice (via
Instapundit) but which is still within the bounds of
constructive criticism, mostly). However, Max Boot notes the disconnect between reporting on the recent
counter-attack by our enemies and military reality:
I don't mean to underestimate the sheer physical challenge confronting
160,000 allied troops in controlling a country of more than 22 million people.
But from a purely military perspective, nothing that has happened in the last
two weeks poses an insurmountable obstacle. Rebel cleric Muqtada
Sadr seems to have ample money and firearms, probably
supplied by Iran, but he has no more than 6,000 ill-trained fighters in his Al Mahdi militia. Most Shiites scorn him as a parvenu. The
Sunni terrorists in Fallouja, many of them former
soldiers and members of the secret police, are a more formidable bunch, but
they too are nothing that a few thousand Marines can't handle.
Too often, criticism descends into madness and we end up
debating the accusation that the Jews/oil companies/Halliburton/insertyoursillyreason led to the war or engage in a debate
over an unseemly eagerness to insist that what we face is now Vietnam and we
should just surrender now and avoid the next 58,000 KIA. Oh, and imprison Bush
and his cabinet to boot for the crime of deposing Saddam. Krugman comes to mind easily for this line of insane
attacks.
I’ve raised issues I believe are wrong in our approach even
as I remain confident of winning and sure that we were right to overthrow
Saddam. Still, I’ve spent lots of time arguing against the ridiculous charges
and accusations. But let me say that ‘happy talk’ is not what I insist on. Real
discussions between Americans about how to win is the way to get Iraq
right rather than the gotcha politics we see to score political points. Happy
talk allows real problems to go uncorrected and leads to soldiers dying for
nothing, and to eventual defeat. Just as bad, insane charges
allow real problems to go undebated.
Get on with the June 30 turnover date. It is the start of a
path to a real government of Iraqis. Iraqis need to have ownership of their
country so they will fight their “fellow” Iraqis who blow up children on the
way to school and shell
their own people in prison.
Instapundit brings up the idea of partitioning Iraq
into Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish states (though he is
not decided on it). On the surface this seems appealing. Screw the Sunnis and
let them rot in their oil-less desert if they don’t want to contribute to the
new Iraq. But doesn’t the rat’s nest of Fallujah show us on a small scale what a rump Sunni state
will be like? And since I still wonder where Iraq’s WMD are and fear that at
least some are buried somewhere in Iraq’s Sunni heartland, I would not want to
leave the Baathists and Islamists in charge there,
eager for revenge against us, the Shias, and the
Kurds. Are we to then keep the Baathists “in their [smaller]
box” for another decade or so? Will we impose sanctions? Stoking resentment at
our continued presence? No, better to win this and keep Iraq
whole and friendly.
And try to debate in good faith how to win and bring Iraq
into the company of decent nations. I may not think that more US
or allied troops are a good idea, but at least debating troop strength is
constructive.
Even for those who still oppose the war and don’t think President
Bush deserves that outcome, don’t the Iraqis deserve a
chance at peace and freedom? I would have thought left and right could agree on
that.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA21APR04A
I have been very dismissive of the claims by some that we
should increase our troop strength in Iraq
to win. I think we have enough. And most of those who call for it are against
the war anyway, so they would be the first to panic when increased numbers
don’t do what they expect.
As I’ve noted, our kill ratios are irrelevant. Even a ten or
twenty to one kill ratio doesn’t win us the war. It is not a metric of success.
If we try to make it the metric of success, our people will only count our
casualties so even if we kill more of the enemy with more of our troops there,
more of ours will die too. As Sensing notes, if even 1% of Iraq’s
population is willing to fight or support the fighters, we’d face the need to
kill off perhaps 250,000 Iraqis:
If only one percent of the Iraqi population
is willing either to take up arms against us or actively support those who do,
then we are facing a force, however poorly organized and equipped, of just
under a quarter-million. As best as I can tell (figures are not exact), we are
killing between 6-8 Iraqis for every soldier or Marine
we lose. By the time we take out 240,000, we will lose between 30-40 thousand
dead.
Sensing guesses a 6 or 8 to 1 kill ratio in our favor. I
think 10:1 is more likely. But even at my ratio, we’d lose 25,000 dead to kill
all the Baathists and nutjobs.
This doesn’t even count dealing with foreign Islamists going to Jihadworld for the all-day ticket to paradise.
Sensing rightly notes that this is not the
way to win.
Not that we shouldn’t kill the enemy at 10:1 ratios or more
when they mass to fight, but our fighting prowess won’t win the war.
We have to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis. We have to
push the Iraqis to fight for their country against the Baathists,
Sadr nuts, and foreign Jihadis.
This is our metric of success. Some of our Iraqis broke and ran, it is true.
But others fought. We have to bolster the Iraqis who
fought with us, get rid of the ones who defected, and provide better leadership
to the ones who wouldn’t fight with us. If they continue to not fight, replace
them, too. It doesn’t matter that the Iraqis we arm won’t kill at anywhere near
our ratio. Don’t worry about that. Kill ratios aren’t the metric, remember?
Push the Iraqis to the front. It’s their country. They must fight. They can’t
be spectators to a war between America
and the Baathists and whoever they can trick into
fighting for them. The new Iraqi security forces must suffer 95% of the
casualties to kill off that 1% of actively resisting Sunnis and Jihadis. Because the security forces of the new Iraq
can’t afford to get tired. They have no place to go if they lose.
So hold onto 20,000 US troops through the June 30 transfer
of sovereignty to deal with the effects of the April Sunni/Sadr
surge (and I still bet we won’t need to send in 10,000 more as has been
discussed). But continue the glide path downward in our troop strength as soon
as possible. And turn over primary fighting duties to Iraqis as quickly as we
can in more secure areas—leaving US forces to ride to the rescue of our guys
who get in trouble.
Don’t Americanize this war. If we do, we’ll lose.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA20APR04C
I’ve worried about the hostility of the EU toward America
and why I think that it is in our interests to oppose this entity. We’ve spent
a century resisting efforts by a hostile power to control the continent (the
Kaiser, Hitler, and the Soviets) yet now we encourage officially the European
Union. In fifty years, we could fight a war with this increasingly
anti-democratic and anti-US body. The last sixty years of peace have been an
oddity for Europe after all. Why would we encourage them
to discover their roots?
Look at what
they do now:
European Commission president Romano Prodi Monday praised Spain's decision to pull its troops
from Iraq, saying the move could help mend the rift in Europe over the war as
well as increase pressure to resolve the Iraqi crisis.
If it was just the rift that was the issue, the Germans,
French, and Belgians could have supported the Iraq War. But no, slapping America
around is the only Euro-approved way of demonstrating unity.
But now Blair will put EU membership to the people for
a vote.
Thank goodness. Worse come to worst, I’d hate to lose Britain
as an ally.
But it would be better to end our obsolete support for
European unity. That is a Cold War relic. And it is decidedly not in our
interest any more.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA20APR04B
Al Qaeda people were probably the
ones who nailed the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad
last year so they clearly have motive. The Jordanians just nailed a few Islamists.
But was their earlier foiled plot really designed to kill
20,000 Jordanians?
The bomb plot was disclosed earlier this week and was said
to have been foiled following the arrests of several suspects in two raids in
late March and early April. Had the chemical bomb exploded, it could have
killed at least 20,000 people and wrecked buildings within a half-mile radius,
government officials say.
Was there a concerted effort to attack across Jordan
and Iraq at the
same time? With people and weapons flowing out of Syria
south and east, that is quite possible. Suspects claim they were under orders by
Zarqawi.
The 20,000 victims claim is
amazing. This would require a lot of nerve gas, expertly applied to succeed. But
even if they didn’t have that expertise, did they have the amount necessary and
think they could succeed? Was actual gas seized? I mean, the amount necessary
to kill that many isn’t something you can make in a basement lab. This is a
serious quantity.
And though the Syrians may not
have provided the chemical weapons from their own stocks (since intel could probably trace it to them), where did the gas
come from? Could we trace this back to Iraq?
Is this evidence that the Iraqis dumped WMD in Syria or elsewhere? And is there more still in Iraq or elsewhere available to the Islamists or Baathists? I’ve worried since the fall of Baghdad that our people in Iraq could get nailed by chemicals dug up and used by the Baathists. Now I worry more.
One would think this would get more coverage—either to
support or debunk it. I’d be dismissive if some of this information wasn’t
coming directly from Jordan’s
king.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA20APR04A
I look forward to the 60th
anniversary of the D-Day landings.
The French will have to thank
us in public ceremonies for all the little white grave markers that dot the
French countryside. Can you imagine the press following the 1944 campaign as
2004 unfolds? The summer and fall will be a travelogue of American-dominated
Western troops, with the British at our side, advancing across France and Belgium, liberating cities and small towns. With a contingent of Poles, too. And even a Canadian army. An army! Can you imagine? Even the
French, equipped with American weapons, took part.
The Germans will tug
uncomfortably on their collars as they are reminded that once they were the
fascist threat that killed our soldiers and now they refuse to help us fight
the modern successors of their fascist ideology.
And I really look forward to
seeing Saving Private Ryan hit the
small screens for the anniversary. Americans will be reminded again of the
meaning of sacrifice and how hard a tough enemy can make a war. We will all be
reminded that American soldiers fight for good causes and fight bravely.
Some might be reminded that
our soldiers and Marines still carry on that tradition as they fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA19APR04B
Iraqi experience has led to a
lessons-learned report that questions our plans to abandon heavy armor. From Strategypage:
U.S. Army
researchers, after scrutinizing operations in the 2003 Iraq campaign, have
concluded that those events contradicted the army’s plans for a new generation
of lighter armored vehicles, and dependence on improved communication and
reconnaissance to avoid or destroy enemy anti-vehicle weapons. The army
report, done at the Army War College, has not
been published. It’s said that only twenty copies were made and they are not
being widely distributed.
I'm on record as supporting
the retention of some type of armored behemoth in the future. Yes, a lighter
armored vehicle is nice to bridge the yawning gap between leg infantry and
Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but the envisioned 20-ton Future
Combat System (the reference to 39 tons below was from some talk of upping the
weight limit) cannot be both types of armored vehicle. Something has to give.
As I
wrote in 2002 in “Equipping the Objective Force” (I penned the first
version in summer 2001):
The collapse of the Soviet Union
transformed our strategic environment overnight. More than a decade later, the
Army still fields systems designed for that era. A new, lighter vehicle
suitable for a wide range of missions is necessary. The FCS may solve the
Army's strategic mobility problem, but it threatens to truncate the Army's
dominance of the conflict [spectrum] if it is
not as good as it needs to be. Even at 39 tons, the FCS may be too light if
evolved MBTs retain their place on the battlefield.
In addition, small numbers of FCS-mounted hyperinfantry
will not be able to exploit their killing power in peace operations.
A light, cannon-armed
FCS with an antitank guided missile attached and plugged into a tactical
network will handle many moderate conventional threats and will be useful in
stability operations. Experience with IBCTs may well
give the Army a better sense of what light armor can do and lead it to accept
that it cannot succeed in all threat environments. The IBCT has a limited role
as an early entry force and clearly recognizes that it is not the main fighting
force. It will eventually be supplanted by heavier divisions if the enemy is
heavy and will fight as a maneuver unit of a division.50 The
Objective Force is to blur that distinction so that the light forces are the
main fighting force. The FCS is critical to making this happen.
Building the FCS,
however, is a high-risk venture. The Army should not spend whatever it takes
attempting to meld multiple revolutionary technologies into one vehicle for all
missions. The FCS should be different from the Abrams and Bradley but must be
designed with near-term technology that incorporates modular improvements if
the Army is to turn "gee whiz" ideas into actual hardware. Separated
missiles and a sensor grid; active defenses; EGTs;
and exotic engines, fuels, and weapons can be retrofitted to defeat more
capable enemies. Barring successfully fielding exotic technologies to make the
FCS work, the Army must consider how it will defeat future heavy systems if
fighting actual enemies and not merely suppressing disorder becomes its mission
once again. The tentative assumptions of 2001 will change by 2025. When they
do, the Army will rue its failure today to accept that the wonder tank will not
be built.
Indeed, our assumptions did not
last even two more years. The value of our heavy armor in the race to Baghdad and in the post-war battles against well-armed Baathist and Islamist insurgents has been proven. We should
not discount that experience as we build our Future Force (the new name and
concept in place of the Objective Force).
With top-attack weapons
available to end-run the massive frontal armor of an Abrams, we cannot just
stick with our current design and expect our heavy armor to continue to survive
in battle. But I'm not ready to just abandon the monsters we've taken to war so
successfully. I’m old enough to remember that some have predicted the death of
main battle tanks since 1973. Forgive me if I don’t rush to declare the tank
extinct.
Evolved dinosaurs may still
crush those wily mammals nipping at their heels.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA19APR04A
Kagan and Kristol
want more
US troops in the war and want Rumsfeld’s scalp if
he won’t provide them:
On Thursday, the secretary
of defense announced a three-month extension in tours of duty for about 20,000
troops in Iraq. This did not increase the number of troops on the ground,
but it did undo a planned drawdown in military strength from 135,000 to
115,000, thereby maintaining current combat strength. But leaving 20,000 troops
in Iraq for an additional three months will almost certainly not be
enough. Close observers of the conflict in Iraq, civilian and military alike (military, of course, speaking
off the record), say that at least two additional divisions--at least 30,000
extra troops--are needed in Iraq just to deal with the current crisis. Even more troops may
well be needed to fully pacify the country. And it would be useful to have as
many of those troops as possible there sooner rather than later.
Let me first say that I was disturbed that Rumsfeld was planning to get rid of two Army divisions
before 9-11. He has never seemed to value what soldiers can do and what we need
soldiers (and Marines) to do. I strongly disagree with Rumsfeld
in the big picture. Nonetheless, I think Kagan and Kristol are off base on Iraq.
What crisis is so bad now? Sadr’s
threat is evaporating rapidly. His revolt was a joke as long as we don’t blow
it. And if we do, we’ll need a lot more troops than even Kagan
and Kristol anticipate, I imagine. Ramadi is tamped down. Fallujah
and the roads to Baghdad are hot
but this is not the Tet Offensive. This seems
contained and we’ll either negotiate or crush the enemy when the talks collapse
How many troops do we need in Iraq?
If you use the 2% of population as a base level to pacify a country, we’d need
500,000 troops to pacify 25,000,000 Iraqis. We have 135,000 US
troops; 25,000 allied troops (and I’m assuming the Korean and Japanese
contingents here); 20,000 contract security personnel; and 200,000+ Iraqis.
This totals 380,000. Even this is not enough for the 2% level. Plus, the
200,000 Iraqis are not as effective as they could be. If we assume half
effectiveness, they are equivalent to 100,000 for now, although in time they
can go up in effectiveness. The total is then 280,000 troop-equivalents.
But the entire country does not need pacifying to the same
degree. The 5 million Sunnis, 5 million Kurds, and 15 million Shias need differing levels of control. With 0.2%
representing a standard civilian peacetime police level and 2% representing the
minimum for a successful pacification campaign against opposition, we could
assume 2% in the hostile Sunni areas, 0.5% in the friendly Kurdish areas, and
1% in the restless and vulnerable but largely friendly Shia
areas.
In this approach, we need 25,000 security personnel for the
Kurds, 150,000 for the Shia areas, and 100,000 for
the Sunni areas. This totals 275,000 which is a bit
less than the 280,000 troop-equivalents we have. It is actually even a little
better than this since we have the use of our troops in Kuwait that provide
logistics and maintenance services without the same security needs as they
would impose if based inside Iraq. This is 40,000+ troops, I believe. So our
troops in Iraq
can devote more to offensive missions without the need to protect combat
service support troops inside Iraq.
Since I strongly believe that it is a mistake to Americanize
the war any more than it is, why would we lessen the pressure on the Iraqis to
perform? We cannot fight for years on end and expect the public to support the
war effort when we lose 30-40 soldiers a month on average and more in spikes.
If the Iraqis assume we will do the job, are we prepared to replace the 100,000
soldier-equivalents that the Iraqis provide right now just to fight the Baathists? And how long will the public support US
troop levels of a quarter million in Iraq?
No, we do not need more troops in Iraq.
Holding over 3 brigades in the short run is fine and preparing a couple more
brigades just in case is prudent, but I bet we won’t need to send them in. I don’t see the need for more numbers. Sure,
what soldiers wouldn’t want help? But this logic will lead to 500,000 troops in
a few years and the Iraqis will watch us fight the insurgents and just stay
angry at us for the damage of war as the memories of Saddam fade. No, we
must work hard to reduce our troops strength and our
role in the fight. Iraqis must step up and take over the fighting.
Do we need more troops generally in the Army? Yes. Ten more
separate brigades (40,000 troops) would be nice to help with the rotation of
forces and reduce the stress on the total Army and Marine Corps effort in Iraq
and elsewhere.
That said, I should post this article that
highlights the great risk we took in going to war with an Army smaller than the
planners thought sufficient to win. Instead of going ahead with what the
planners thought, we decided to take a risk and in the end fielded only 42% of
the divisions believed necessary to win. Indeed, on the very eve of invasion
our leadership ratified the assumption that we could go with far less than war
plans originally assumed.
And our leadership took this decision even though we needed
troops to fight in other unanticipated locations in the GWOT.* Indeed, an
unwillingness to disrupt our civilian workforce was a major part of the
decision to not fully mobilize for combat. In addition, we believed our air
power would reduce the need for ground troops and decided that plans for air
strength would remain as first anticipated. We also assumed that we could skimp
on troops overall by using troops from the main effort to bolster subsidiary
efforts after we won the main war. What is more, we reduced the number of heavy
units and emphasized lighter infantry units on the assumption that all the
armor we thought we’d need was too heavy to transport and ultimately unneeded
to win. Backing up our truncated combat force was a service
troop strength inadequate to wage war. The military even considered retraining
combat troops as support troops to meet the demands of war.
The military and civilian leadership knew we were taking a
risk yet we did it anyway. We ended up having virtually no strategic reserve.
When the enemy counter-attacked we found our assumptions faulty and we had only
two divisions out of our entire Army uncommitted to the war by the end. As the
author notes:
It will long be a question whether the photo-finish in World War II
reflected an uncommonly lucky gamble or a surprisingly accurate forecast. But
few would deny that, in their performance on the field of battle in the
critical campaigns of 1944-45, the hitherto still largely untested divisions of
the U.S. Army, so largely a product of General
Marshall's own faith and struggles, vindicated the bold calculation in Washington.
Of course, we won World War II so I shouldn’t be too harsh
on FDR and Marshall.
We’ll win in Iraq,
too, if we don’t panic and strain the home fronts in America
and Iraq by
flooding Iraq
with US troops.
*Global War on Tyranny;
otherwise known as World War II.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA17APR04C
It took a Russian paper to note this in the media, but check this out
regarding our fighting in Fallujah (via Instapundit). First, he notes the strange eagerness to
compare the fighting to Vietnam:
The
administration of U.S. President George W. Bush has plenty of enemies both at
home and abroad. A lot of people would love to see Bush get a bloody nose in Iraq, or anywhere else. Last week the critics had a field day: With
heavy fighting in Fallujah and sporadic clashes
breaking out elsewhere, Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy said that Iraq had become "George Bush's Vietnam," and declared that the United States needs a new leader.
He rightly says that we are smashing our enemies in Fallujah without killing civilians on a mass scale:
Just like the Russians in Grozny, the Marines last week were supported
by tanks and attack helicopters, but the end result was entirely different. U.S. forces did
not bomb the city indiscriminately. The Iraqis fought well but were massacred.
According to the latest body count, some 600 Iraqis died and another 1,000 were
wounded. The Marines lost some 20 men.
Nice to see somebody in the press with
some clue, at least.
The writer, however, ascribes our success to technology:
The
Marines are far better trained, of course, but the Iraqis were fighting in
their hometown. The decisive difference between the two sides was the extensive
use of a computerized command, control and targeting system by the U.S. military. Satellites, manned and unmanned aircraft
collected precise information on enemy and friendly movements on the
battlefield night and day.
Modern U.S. field commanders have real-time access to this system, allowing
them to monitor the changing situation on the battlefield as no commander in
the history of war has been able to do. This technology has greatly enhanced
the effectiveness of aerial bombardments in the last decade. And now the nature
of house-to-house combat has changed as well.
It is a compliment to say we are better trained “of course,”
but our superior training is not a given. We work hard at it. Nor is it an
aside to state and then move on to the real reasons for our success.
Sure, technology helps, but the real advantage we have is
the training of our troops. While our enemies may be willing to die, they are
not part of—as we chanted in our running cadences in basic training—the US
military’s “killing machine.” The NYT article gets it (I’ll ignore the
stretch for a Vietnam
comparison by the author when he calls the mission a “search and destroy
mission.” I’m quite sure the Marines don’t refer to it that way. But hey, who
am I to insist on reporting rather than editorializing?):
American
forces killed more than 100 insurgents on Tuesday in close combat in a small
village in central Iraq, Marine commanders said Wednesday.
The
battle, classic urban combat that raged for 14 hours, was one of the heaviest
engagements since the invasion of Iraq last year. It showed not only the intensity
of the resistance but an acute willingness among insurgents to die.
"A
lot of these guys were souped up on jihad," said
Lt. Col. B. P. McCoy, commander of the Fourth Battalion, Third Marines.
"They might as well been suicide fighters."
Marines
fought house to house, roof to roof, doorway to doorway. They repelled attacks
of machine-gun fire, volleys of rockets and repeated charges by masked
fighters, Colonel McCoy said. Two marines were shot but their injuries were not
life-threatening.
The
fighting erupted in Karma, six miles northeast of Falluja,
during a search-and-destroy mission.
More than 100 insurgents killed and we suffered 2 wounded. And
how did we do it? With the high-tech gear that the Russian
writer clearly wants for his military? No:
One
of the most important tools for this battle comes from the garden shed:
sledgehammers. On Wednesday, marines punched "mouseholes,"
just big enough for gun barrels, in the brick walls of the homes they occupied.
They also smashed windows to scatter shards of glass across the front steps.
"It's
an early warning system," Capt. Shannon Johnson explained, as he crunched
noisily across the glass, "something the old guys taught us."
Nearby,
a squad of young men with crewcuts swung heavy
hammers under a punishing sun. They were knocking down the low walls along the
rooftops so they could move on catwalks from roof to roof.
"This
is classic urban warfare," said Maj. Gen. Jim Mattis,
commander of the First Marine Division. "It's all the stuff World War II
taught us, along with Korea, Vietnam and Somalia. People will be studying Falluja for years
to come."
The
weaponry — mostly low-tech, like machine guns and mortars — is also reminiscent
of earlier wars. There have been a few guided-missile attacks from the air. But
Falluja is so densely populated — 300,000 people in
only a few square miles — that commanders have been reluctant to call in airstrikes.
"And
we don't want to rubblize the city," said
Colonel McCoy, whose battalion of 800 clashes daily with insurgents. "That
will give the enemy more places to hide."
Hammers. Broken
glass. Personal and crew-served weapons like wars past. These are the
tools used to shred our enemy. It also confirms the care we are taking not to
destroy the city with its residents still present. It also shows our ability to
use our brains and avoid just leveling the city like the Russians did in Grozny. Rubble means lots of dead
civilians unless they are evacuated and just provides better cover and
concealment for the enemy.
We can be proud of how our soldiers and Marines have fought
this war. Proud that we have proven our enemies wrong who said if only they
could come to grips with us without all our high tech gear that they would beat
us. Our enemies may think the green banner is superior, but the Green Machine
is the real killing machine in battle. Willingness to die crumbles in the face
of ability to kill.
Now, I’m not really comfortable with counting enemy bodies.
It is not a measure of success or failure. And I don’t want it to become a
measure of success. But it is coming out more now because it seems like the
military wants to erase the impression that we are taking it on the chin. Our
public may think that reports of only US casualties means only we are taking
them. This is unfortunate. As much as I celebrate the skill of our Marines and
soldiers (and welcome whatever high tech gear they bring to the fight to
enhance our killing advantage over even souped-up
enemies), I hope the military high command is not putting pressure on lower
level officers to provide body counts. Just win.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA17APR04B
The new faux issue for the anti-war side to use in their
continued debate over whether to invade Iraq
has arrived!
As prologue, I’m continually amazed at their refusal to move
on and at least try debating the best course to win the post-war fight. I know
I ended any complaints about going into Somalia,
Haiti, Kosovo,
and Liberia
once we actually sent the troops in. My worry then was how to win. I certainly
never considered the interventions as immoral. And I cannot imagine wishing for
the enemy to kill our troops to prove I was right.
But I digress.
The current buring issue is … wait for it!
President Bush directed our military to plan
for an invasion of Iraq as early as November 2001!
President Bush secretly ordered a war plan
drawn up against Iraq less than two
months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan and was so
worried the decision would cause a furor he did not tell everyone on his
national security team, says a new book on his Iraq policy.
Horrors!
One must of course ignore a number of basic facts to be
outraged.
First, the military has an invasion plan for Iraq
already. I’m sure it was regularly updated. If not, that would outrage me.
Second, unless I’ve missed the dotmil
site that has the pdf files for all our invasion
plans, they kind of need to stay secret in case our enemies might find them of
use.
Third, I’m not aware that the President has to clear or even
inform all of his advisors on a given subject. I thought they,
you know, advised at the pleasure of the President.
Fourth, you must completely blank out the outrage that was
expressed for our supposed failure to plan enough for the war and aftermath.
Fifth, you have to really toss down the memory hole the fact
that any indications at all of planning prior to the war were seized on by
opponents of the war as evidence the administration had pre-judged the issue
and really wasn’t giving “peace” a chance. Shoot, it came out in one case I
recall that our work with a humanitarian group had to be kept secret lest the
group be ostracized for assuming war as it prepared to cope with any
humanitarian emergencies that might emerge.
Lastly, I know that I figured as early as December 2001 when
Kabul fell
that Iraq would
be next. My only question was spring or fall.
It is always so exciting to see the newest plastic turkey
issue arrive! Who will say the most idiotic thing about the non-issue? Which
news outlet will most embarrass themselves covering
it? How long will it last?
I’m giddy.
But mostly saddened, actually. Saddened that some will seize on anything to attack our war effort.
Saddened that the press either agrees with the attack or is
unable to see it as a faux issue.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA17APR04A
Troops of 1st AD
and 2 ACR (Light) who haven't already rotated back to their home base will be kept
in Iraq for another three months. This must be tremendously disappointing.
Still, like reservists getting called up in greater numbers now that we are at
war, I expect that soldiers will fight when necessary. It would certainly help
the soldiers' morale if criticism of the war effort didn't drift into defeatism
so much. In the end, the soldiers will step up. The critics will not.
While a short retention to
get past June 30 seems appropriate given the Fallujah
region and the lesser Sadr problem, the path to
reducing strength should get back on track as soon as possible. The Iraqis need
to take more of a burden, notwithstanding some well-publicized failures
(question: so how would recalling Saddam-era units intact after the war have
made them more loyal to the new Iraq?)
This does highlight our
numbers problem. We have over 150,000 mobilized for the Army. We are
reorganizing our divisions to provide 20% more line troops (armor, infantry,
recon) by reducing air defense and other support troops more suited to fighting
peer armies. We are also moving excess troops such as artillery units into new
military police units.
Yet this is not enough. We
should have had enough troops to reinforce Iraq in emergencies. I concede that even if we had those
troops we'd probably still want to keep the experienced troops longer to deal
with the surge of violence. Still, what if the uprisings had taken place in two
months when the two retained units were out of Iraq?
In addition to
reorganization, we need new Army units. I used to think that a couple motorized
infantry divisions with one organic battalion each of armor and mechanized
infantry for heavy forces was at the very least a good
start to handling the need for numbers. It might be better, however, to organize
separate brigades or even battalions to plug into existing divisions when they
rotate into Iraq or Afghanistan. We'd get more bang for the
buck and it would be much quicker to create new brigades and battalions than
the two years it takes to build a division from scratch. It seems like span of
control is greater now and in occupation duty, it would be rare anyway for
threats to emerge against all of a division's brigades. Some brigades could
operate independently, too.
We certainly need a larger
Army.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA15APR04B
We start out with the Palestinians:
Bush's concessions to Israel
on Wednesday enraged the Palestinians, who want an independent state in all of
the West Bank,
Gaza
and east Jerusalem
— land that Israel
captured in the 1967 Mideast
war.
Yet consider their recent
history regarding America alone:
- They cheer on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
- They cheer the September 11 attacks.
- They take Saddam's money to kill Israelis and lament his downfall in 2003.
- They kill Americans attempting to dispense scholarships to Palestinians.
And after all that, they
express some shock that we are backing Sharon's plan to get out of the occupied
territories with a wall to protect Israelis from Palestinian suicide bombers
while keeping some of the border-straddling settlements on the West Bank.
Never mind that this was
anticipated even in the last Clinton plan.
Never mind that the
Palestinians should be thanking God every day that our government has backed
Palestinian independence despite their deplorable conduct and support of
terror.
No, the Palestinians are
shocked that we support a border adjustment in Israel's favor.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give
you this week's prime example of the reality challenged: the Palestinians.
Actually, as long as some are
divorcing reality from arguments, why don't the Israelis vehemently insist that
the barrier wall is designed to protect Palestinians from Israeli suicide-bombers. That would be ok, wouldn't it?
Of course, it would be rude
to insist that only foreigners are capable of this.
The 9-11 hearings display
this characteristic as well.
How else can we explain the
heated accusations of the administration's most vocal opponents that Bush
should have done more prior to 9-11 to stop the attacks.
How can we take this line of argument seriously when they simultaneously insist
that the USA Patriot Act infringes on civil rights and that the administration
has suppressed dissent? How can they argue that we should have implemented
measures far more extreme than we've implemented after 9-11? And further, how can the critics insist with a straight
face that inquiry into mistakes must go back no farther than the inauguration
of Bush 43? How is reality even being recognized in this line of attack? Oh
yeah, the reality that if you looked before 2001 you might have to examine one
of the panel's
commissioners (thanks Instapundit) for her role
in the failure of intelligence. Yes, more tales of the reality challenged.
And let us not forget worldly
Hollywood types here who are unable to accept reality even if
we could pound it in with a two by four. Oliver Stone (via Instapundit),
when asked about Castro's prisons in
an interview, expresses surprise that anyone would think anything bad about
Castro's Cuba:
I must say, you're really picturing a
Stalinist state. It doesn't feel that way.
Stone doesn't think it feels like a Stalinist state. Ignore the
reality. Ignore the gulags and oppression. Ignore the patterns of aggression
around the world in support of thug-regimes and causes. Ignore it all. Castro
was nice to him and he didn't feel anything was wrong.
Yet another tale of the
reality challenged.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA15APR04A
Just a personal opinion on the WMD issue.
While I am satisfied that Saddam was pursuing nukes and
would have gotten them eventually if we hadn’t invaded, I am also convinced
that we will find some buried chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.
I still find it hard to believe that all his scientists were
scamming Saddam for money. And our long detour through the UN gave Saddam’s
people plenty of time to dig deep.
I just hope we find them before they are dug up and used on
our troops or the CPA.
I’ve said this before, but as long as the President
mentioned it last night, I figured I might as well toss in my two cents again.
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We’ve been told many times that if only we’d planned for the
post-war in Iraq as we spent planning the post-war in World War II (you know,
thousands of experts working for 3-1/2 years churning out tons of reports) we’d
have done better in Iraq.
Via Winds of Change, a little reminder (again) of
what post-WW II Germany
was like.
No, there wasn’t armed resistance like today, but the
economy and despair were rock bottom for four years before progress was
evident.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA14APR04C
For decades, dealing with a massed armored assault by North
Korea, supported by large numbers of
commandos infiltrating the South could only be met with massed troops absorbing
the body blow and hopefully holding Seoul
in the process. Only after stopping the North would the long slog back north
begin.
But the precision air power demonstrated in Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan
in 2001, and Iraq
in 2003 is now
coming to a DMZ near you:
Much of the new military equipment and weapons seen in Afghanistan and Iraq have reached South Korea. As a result, South Korean and American
commanders are changing their war plans. In the past, the basic idea was to
just survive the initial North Korean attack, which was seen as a massive one.
This was pretty obvious from the composition and deployment of the North Korean
forces. It was also known that North Korean officers were well drilled in Cold
War era Soviet tactics, which were built around a mighty initial attack. The
South Korean plan was to survive that attack, and then counterattack with the
help of American reinforcements.
But now, with smart bombs, improved helicopter gunships,
UAVs and better battlefield intelligence, plans are
moving towards more aggressively disrupting North Korean operations.
Even better, with 2nd ID moving off the DMZ and
pulling south, our lone division on the peninsula will be better poised to
direct all the lethal and precise weapons our ground forces now have.
Even better again, the North is so low on fuel and food that
even the Northern army is weaker and more poorly trained. So if the North
attacks, their armor will be slower, likely bunch up, and otherwise make
themselves easier targets for our weapons raining from the sky and sea. They’ll
probably be pretty brittle too.
So instead of just absorbing the first blow, we will reach
out to disrupt the first, less expertly landed blow. This means the North will
be stopped faster and farther north with more Northern losses and fewer
Southern/US losses. As this improvement in our firepower increases further, we
will eventually get to the point where our counter-attack will kick off rather
rapidly and we will welcome a Northern assault just to get the Northern units
out in the open and moving where we can easily detect and kill them.
And in time, should the political will be there, we’ll be
able to just strip the “counter” prefix off the war plans and just nail the
Pillsbury Nuke Boy for good.
And the best part? We could have
anti-missile ships off of Korea
and missile defense in Alaska to
shoot down whatever the North cobbles together.
That correlation of forces that Marxists love to prattle on
about is moving our way.
This means we have more freedom to squeeze the North since
their military option is getting weaker and weaker every day.
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I've said I'm most worried
about the Baathist resistance in Fallujah
and elsewhere and not worried about the Sadr affair. Strategypage says they are worried
about the Sadr affair and not the Baathists. They have a point but I think that who you
worry about more depends on what you are worrying about.
I worry about the Baathists because they have the means and motive to resist
hard in the short run and are the ones killing our troops. The Shias are friendly for the most part and although Sadr is defying us, he isn't terribly effective and the Shias consider him more of an idiot brother-in-law than a
legitimate voice of the Shia.
In the long run, Strategypage is correct. Since the Sunni Baathists are a minority in a geographically distinct
region, they can't on their own retake Iraq. The Shias, who represent
the majority, must be kept on our side to keep Iraq friendly—hence the worry about the Shias as the more important problem.
I guess I figure we can keep
the Shias content by transferring power to a Shia-dominated interim government on June 30 and
transitioning to a democracy where numbers will count (with minority rights and
rule of law established so losers don't reach for their AKs
and RPGs).
Given this distinction, I'm
actually glad that we have been softer on the Sadr
uprising. I'm still upset we are in a ceasefire with the Baathists
in Fallujah, mind you. But we can't storm Najaf the same way to get the idiot Sadr.
Najaf is a holy site and Sadr
would gain sympathy for being attacked in there. Indeed, were I the Iranians,
I'd have the Iranian contingent of the Mahdi Army in Najaf primed for a fight to the death to provoke the
destruction of holy sites and the death of Shia
civilians. Shoot, I'd blow up the holy sites myself since I'd be pretty sure
the Americans wouldn't do it even accidentally.
It would have been better for
our allied contingents to have held fast in the first attacks. Had they held,
the Sadr militia would have recoiled and gone home.
Even in Kut the Sadr people
showed little stomach for facing Americans and we swept the Sadr
thugs out quickly and with little resistance, and so had little need for
firepower (and no press coverage, too).
All in all, we'd be better
off arresting Sadr and his top lieutenants. Or better
yet, getting Sistani to bless the arrest and get local
cops backed by ICDC troops to do it. (And note that Sadr is backing off on his conditions to talk already—a
sign of his weakness) Then, as the price for letting the low level rabble go
home without their arms (the Sadr guys in Najaf are not locals as I understand it and 2,500 US troops
should be able to screen them leaving) and get Sadr's
people to turn over the Iranians in their midst to us (again, 2,500 US troops
will take custody). Summer in Gitmo should be lovely
for the Iranians. Trials and prisons for the top Sadr
Iraqis by other Iraqis would serve us well. Consequences must exist for
resisting us with arms.
Order needs to be maintained
at the lowest possible level of force. And the Sunni and Sadr
problems need to be addressed uniquely. We can afford to offend the Sunnis
since they hate us for removing them from power. We've been more than patient
giving them a chance to join the new Iraq. I thought the June 30 transfer would focus their
minds and lead to a dose of reality. Instead, their minds were focused to
resist. Smash them.
The Shias
we rely on as a base of support. The Kurds are an important addition to our
supporters but they can't be a base of support alone unless we abandon
democracy and just use the old tried and true colonial method of giving a
minority of friendlies formerly abused the guns (the
Kurds—not the Sunnis). I don't advocate that at all. So, since the Sadr uprising is more farcical than a real threat, don't
fight it like a real threat. Or it could
become one.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA14APR04A
The President ably defended
our Iraq policy:
American forces will "finish the work of
the fallen" and usher in a new era of freedom and democracy.
He needs to do this more. And often. Never let up. Make sure that the left has to wait
for yet another war to get their precious new Vietnam.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA13APR04D
US
forces are poised
to strike Sadr:
U.S. commanders vowed
to kill or capture al-Sadr, though officials
suggested they would give negotiations a chance.
"The target is not Najaf.
The target is Muqtada al-Sadr
and his militia," said Brig. Mark Kimmitt,
deputy head of U.S. military
operations in Iraq. "We will
hunt him down and destroy him. We would prefer it not in Najaf
or Karbala. We have very
great respect for the shrines, for the Shiites."
Sadr must be jailed or executed
for his crimes, his lieutenants must face trial, and his militia must be
disbanded with the Iranians turned over for a trip to Gitmo.
If negotiations can provide these things—fine. But all these things must
happen. Or Sadr’s people must be killed in battle if
they refuse to surrender and resist.
Our enemies must know there are consequences for opposing
us. We can’t just let them go home and try again when we may be more
vulnerable. We cannot let our friends see us flinch in the face of threats.
Neutrals must see that our friends are protected and that our enemies die or
languish in prison.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA13APR04C
The battle over accepting the call of the Venezuelan people
for a referendum on the thug Chavez continues. The AP report
has a gem:
Chavez opponents accuse the president of becoming
increasingly autocratic and pitting rich against poor with
"revolutionary" rhetoric. Supporters say he is the first president in
decades to show concern for Venezuela's impoverished
majority.
Concern
for the poor.
Yeah, Chavez loves the poor of Venezuala
so much that he wants more
of them.
As long as you say you love the poor, you can do anything
and lead your poor to support any crime, and some will still laud you for your
“concern.”
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA13APR04B
We’ve been hearing about new Vietnams
ever since 1975. Heck, the recent cries about a new Vietnam
in Iraq are the
second wave of cries. The first one was in the second week of the invasion when
a sandstorm stalled our hyperkrieg to Baghdad.
So what about the Vietnam
comparison? Even a US
Senator made the claim. He of course meant that we will be defeated inevitably.
But our defeat in Vietnam
isn’t inevitable. We had that war won, in fact, until Congress refused to honor
our pledge to supply South Vietnam
with weapons and our failure to honor our pledge to provide air and naval
support in the face of a North Vietnamese armored invasion. President Ford did
not step up to the plate, either.
M.T. Owens noted that the South Vietnamese showed they could
defend their country with our help:
The proof lay in the 1972 Easter Offensive. This was the biggest
offensive push of the war, greater in magnitude than either the 1968 Tet offensive or the final assault of 1975. The U.S. provided massive air and naval support and
there were inevitable failures on the part of some ARVN units, but all in all,
the South Vietnamese fought well. Then, having blunted the communist thrust,
they recaptured territory that had been lost to Hanoi. Finally, so effective was the eleven-day
"Christmas bombing" campaign (LINEBACKER II) later that year that the
British counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson exclaimed, "you
had won the war. It was over."
Three years later, despite the heroic performance of some ARVN units, South Vietnam collapsed against a much weaker,
cobbled-together PAVN offensive. What happened to cause this reversal?
First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the country
from Vietnam, forced South Vietnam to accept a cease fire that permitted PAVN
forces to remain in South Vietnam. Then in an act that still shames the United States to this day, Congress cut off military and
economic assistance to South Vietnam. Finally, President Nixon resigned over
Watergate and his successor, constrained by congressional action, defaulted on
promises to respond with force to North Vietnamese violations of the peace
terms. Sorley describes in detail the logistical and
operational consequences for the ARVN of our having starved them of promised
support for three years.
I thought I was right in the 1980s. I still do. Indeed, I have a bumper
sticker on my car that reads: "I don't know what happened. When I left, we
were winning!" There is growing evidence that this sentiment is not as
farfetched as some might think.
Yes. I too believed this in the 1980s. In 1982 (or ‘83 or
‘84, I forget), I had an undergraduate poli sci class and one class we were discussing Vietnam.
The teaching assistant (Bradley Martin, I think. The best TA I ever had. I
think he went on to become an officer in the Navy) asked the class what would
have happened if the US
had provided support to South Vietnam
in 1975. I said I believed that South Vietnam would have held off the
invasion—based on their earlier success with our help—and that today South
Vietnam would be an independent state more free than the North. I imagine that
Martin was surprised that a student in the 1980s University
of Michigan believed such a
violation of accepted wisdom that Vietnam
was unwinnable. To my surprise, he agreed with me. I
hope Martin is still in the Navy. We could use him.
So when some say that Iraq
is the new Vietnam,
I hope they are wrong. Because the only way it could become a new Vietnam
is if our elites convince the public that a winning effort is actually defeat.
In time, I think that Iraq
will be what Vietnam
could have been—a victory that leads to the freedom of tens of millions who
lived in fear and came to thank Americans for freeing them.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA13APR04A
We’re still in the process of ending the Sadr
and Fallujah uprisings. Our enemies have not stopped
us. We have stopped ourselves. We allow
our enemies a respite to talk in Fallujah and to
retreat in the areas held by Sadr’s thugs.
Steyn thinks (and I agree) that we are too worried
about “rattling the teacups” of our enemies. Yes, counter-insurgency must be
waged at the lowest level of force possible, but where our enemies gather in
large numbers with military weapons, sending in the Bobbies should not be the
option. As Steyn notes:
Look at those pictures of the atrocity in Fallujah:
the remains of four corpses, and a bunch of savages dancing around them. In all
those photographs, can you add up more than a hundred men? And half of them are
punk kids under 11. There are 300,000 people in that city. A few score are
depraved enough to cheer on the killers of four brave men; 299,900 of the
town's population were either disapproving or indifferent.
And in the Arab world, the indifferent are the biggest demographic.
They sit things out, they see which strong horse has jostled his way to the
head of the pack, and they go along with him. The Turks.
The British. The British-installed
king. The thug who murders the king. The thug who murders the thug who murders the king.
The passivity of the Arabs, the sensitivity of the coalition and the
defeatism of the media is a potentially disastrous combination. Rattling
teacups gets you a bad press from CNN and the BBC. But they give you a bad
press anyway. And in Iraq, the non-rattling of the teacups is received by the locals not as
cultural respect from Bush and Blair but as weakness. In that cafe in Fallujah, as a parodic courtesy,
the patron switched the flickering black-and-white TV from an Arabic station to
the BBC, which as usual was full of doom and gloom.
The Iraqis will go with the winning side. And, though the Americans had
a bad week last week, the insurgents had a worse one, losing as many men in
seven days as U.S. forces did in the last year. The best way to make plain you're the
winning side is to crush the other guys -- and rattle their teacups so loudly
even CNN can't paint it as a setback.
Look what our sensitivity
and restraint has given us. Rumors of our violence outweigh our restraint.
It is simply not possible for us to be restrained enough since our enemies will
spread the vilest rumors about our bloodthirsty nature no matter how concerned
we are to not rattle teacups. No matter how hard we try to avoid harming
civilians. Better to fight hard (while taking care to
minimize civilian casualties because we are better than our enemies) and win
quickly since we will take the same amount of heat regardless of the actual
facts. The key is ending the fighting with a win as soon as possible.
Let the people of Iraq
know we are not afraid of winning. Let them know with certainty that we will
win at the end of the day—not the Baathists and not Sadr’s Iranian-supported fanatics. Via Sensing, Peters writes that we have to
crush the Baathists and Sadr’s forces. He
says:
Moqtada Sadr's organization must be destroyed. Sadr must be captured or killed. If he hides in a mosque,
go in after him. We're not impressing our enemies with
our restraint - they play the religion card as the ace that never fails.
And
the parallel operations in the Sunni Triangle must be pursued to the complete
subjugation of Fallujah and the defeat of any
terrorist who raises a gun.
Our
president must make no mistake: Any "settlement," any halt short of
the annihilation of the killers who want to destroy the future of Iraq, will be read throughout that troubled
country and the greater Islamic world as a resounding victory for the
terrorists. They'll be viewed as having defeated the U.S. military, stopping it in its tracks.
Reality
is immaterial. In the Middle
East, perception trumps
facts. Only uncompromising strength impresses our enemies. The president can't
afford to listen to the counsels of caution.
Oh, and Iran’s hand in supporting Sadr
that Peters notes will aid in justifying our spring 2005 campaign to end the
mullah’s regime in Tehran.
Crush our enemies. It’s bad enough we fought Vietnam
and gave our enemies sanctuaries in Cambodia,
Laos, and North
Vietnam. Don’t give our current enemies a
sanctuary in Fallujah to retreat to.
If we don’t destroy them now, they’ll retreat, lick their
wounds, and then they’ll be back for more. We are at war. Remember?
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA12APR04A
… then take Fallujah.
Fallujah
— 35 miles west of Baghdad
— saw occasional sniper fire Sunday, but was the quietest it has been all week.
Sunni insurgents and Marines agreed to a cease-fire that started early Sunday
and will last until the evening amid talks between Iraqi officials on how to
end the violence.
More than 600 Iraqis have
been killed in the fighting in Fallujah since
fighting began early Monday, the head of the city's hospital said Sunday. Rafie al-Issawi said actual
number may be higher because there were reports of people being buried at home.
At least five Marines have
died in the fighting.
Members of the Iraqi
Governing Council were holding a second day of negotiations with city
representatives Sunday in an attempt to win the handover of Iraqis who killed
and mutilated four American civilians on March 31 and of other militants.
Hundreds of U.S.
reinforcements moved in place on the city edge, joining 1,200 Marines and
nearly 900 Iraqi security forces already involved in the fighting.
So what are we doing with a ceasefire there? What is to talk
about other than their surrender and why would they do that now? Why on Earth
would we halt offensive operations to talk? If they want to talk, we can talk.
But our Marines should be driving them back and killing them as we talk. That’s
a negotiating position hard to beat. Surrender or die. Decide quickly while you
can.
So what have we done now? Talking saves them since we halt
offensive operations. What kind of incentive do they have to surrender? Just
talking keeps them alive!
Yes, the heavy combat is unsettling to some. But when
something is unsettling, you get it over with fast—not drag it out.
We’ve set a very bad precedent by treating the Baathist thugs as negotiating partners with stature. We’re
killing them and losing but a fraction of the troops in the process. We should
not let up until we win. Yes, when the ceasefire breaks down, we will use our
skilled Marines and kill at the same unbalanced ratio. Yet kill-ratios are
meaningless in isolation. Our national resolve depends on visibly winning, and
our dead are the only dead that count when our public opinion is polled. Win
quickly. Break the Baathists. Clamp down on the city
and sift it for any Baathists and any Islamists who
broke and melted into the population.
Take Fallujah. (Strategypage doesn’t seem to be as worried about the
negotiations in Fallujah, I should note. I disagree
but I note it. They are also heartened by the apparent increase in Iraqi
willingness to fight the thugs in response to this mini-crisis. As I’ll mention
in a bit, this is key)
Oh, and we need a lot more of the President
defending our cause in Iraq
and why we must win. Lots more. In
much more forceful and publicized forums.
But the call for more troops, as some in this article argue
for, is misguided. Sure, hold over some of the troops scheduled to depart until
we tamp this surge down. But I disagree strongly that we need more troops. We
have enough, and if we send more we do two things.
One, we reduce the pressure on the Iraqis to fight for
themselves. It would be a tremendous mistake to reverse the trend toward more
Iraqis under arms taking more responsibility for fighting the Baathists, Sadr’s goons, and
Islamists. We would be needlessly Americanizing the fight when we must put a
local face on it as much as possible, with our troops pulling back into the
background as soon as we can, where we can.
This relates to the second problem of increasing our troop
strength—we’d be escalating expectations of committing more US
troops. When we commit troops in large numbers, our public expects fast results.
And given the limited geographic scope of the insurgency, we would be adding
targets without adding useful capability. I think we have enough troops on
hand. And as we add troops, we’ll need more troops for support functions and
more troops to guard the support troops and more supply convoys to protect.
Pretty soon we’ll have the Samarra
Umpires Association as our troops need recreation and as the numbers of
baseball teams grow to require an actual association of military umpires to
referee the games! (This did happen in Vietnam,
by the way) And in a war that by its nature must drag on as insurgents are
tracked down in dribs and drabs, we would be reducing our time to win by making
it seem like we should be able to win fast with all those extra troops.
Reduce troop levels as soon as we can, relying on Iraqis to
endure most casualties, and our public will accept lengthy commitments. Like El
Salvador in the 1980s. Or Bosnia.
Or Kosovo. Or the Phillipines. Or Colombia. Or Afghanistan. Small numbers are easier to deploy for long durations.
Finally, when we do go after Sadr’s
forces, having waited for the Islamic holiday to end so civilians will clear the
area, do it as fast as possible (with our customary care for reducing civilian
damage, of course). We appear confident of rapid success when we do strike:
About 1,000 U.S.
troops backed by tanks swept into the southern city of Kut
on Wednesday to expell al-Sadr
militiamen. They met relatively little resistance.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (search), deputy chief of U.S.
military operations, appeared confident Saturday that
American troops can do the same when they move against al-Sadr elsewhere.
"It is our assessment
that the al-Sadr militia doesn't have the capability
to conduct prolonged offensive operations," he told reporters in Baghdad.
"Everytime his militia is faced with a determined
resolve of Iraqi security forces or the coalition military forces, they
typically will shoot a few rounds and run away."
Yes, we should easily crush his forces. But I would have one
caution: if Iranian Pasdaran goons have bolstered Sadr’s band of idiots, they could die hard. Perhaps not
skillfully, but they may not break and run when confronted. There could be
pockets of tough resistance. Prepare mentally for a hard fight. Be grateful if
it turns out easy. And for Pete’s sake, crush them—don’t halt the offensive to
negotiate once we start.
The same principle applies: when you begin to destroy Sadr, destroy Sadr.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA11APR04A
Amazingly, one degreed fellow
thinks our side needs to negotiate with Sadr!
America's wisest move would be to urge Ayatollah Sistani to begin talks with Mr. Sadr
at his home in Najaf. Such a meeting would signal Mr.
Sadr's recognition of the grand ayatollah as the
supreme Shiite leader. Any compromise would inevitably have to include a
statement by Mr. Sadr renouncing violence and
instructing his militiamen to return power in the cities under their control to
the Iraqi police. In return, the coalition authority would agree not to attempt
to arrest Mr. Sadr or to provoke him in the future.
It would also permit Mr. Sadr to re-open his
newspaper, Al Hawza, which was shut down last month,
provided it stops inciting violence.
Negotiate? With a man who couldn’t get as many votes as
Ralph Nader in a free election? A man who relies on
Iranian mullahs for money and advice? A man who uses murder and terror to build
a little fiefdom? A man who is in open—albeit militarily weak—revolt against
us? A man who is willing to ally with the Baathists?
Negotiate with that scum? At what point in a person’s long pursuit of a PhD
does all sense just leach out? And this is one of the people teaching about the
Middle East in our colleges.
Oh. And here’s the really good part:
Any
compromise will also require implicit recognition by all parties that Mr. Sadr's supporters will be allowed to participate in Iraqi
politics just as the Shiite organization Hezbollah does in Lebanon.
Creating an Iraqi Hezbollah may be in somebody’s interest
but it sure as Hell isn’t in our interest or in the interest of the Iraqi
people.
Sistani doesn’t need any
legitimacy and Sadr wouldn’t provide it if he did—God
forbid we should reach that point. Sadr does and
negotiating with him would give him the credibility he failed to build in the
last year. Negotiating with him would teach everybody that the rule of the gun
and the mob has not been replaced by rule of law.
My God, our problem is that our enemies don’t fear us enough
and our friends can’t count on us to destroy our enemies, and the neutrals are
getting the wrong ideas when they see how we treat our enemies too gently and
how our friends worry about our commitment.
Brooks is cooler and
feels we must get Sadr. Carefully to avoid offending Shia sensibilities, but get him. And Brooks is pleased that
the government is not panicking even as some see disaster looming and wish to
retreat as fast as possible:
This
week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert
Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam. Pundits and sages were spinning a whole series of mutually exclusive
disaster scenarios: Civil war! A nationwide rebellion!
Maybe
we should calm down a bit. I've spent the last few days talking with people
who've spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. We're
at a perilous moment in Iraqi history, but the situation is not collapsing.
We're in the middle of a battle. It's a battle against people who vehemently
oppose a democratic Iraq. The task is to crush those enemies without making life impossible for
those who fundamentally want what we want. …
Most
important, leadership in the U.S. is for once cool and resolved. This week I
spoke with leading Democrats and Republicans and found a virtual consensus.
We're going to keep the June 30 handover deadline. We're going to raise troop
levels if necessary. We're going to wait for the holy period to end and crush Sadr. As Joe Lieberman put it, a military offensive will
alienate Iraqis, but "the greater risk is [Sadr]
will grow into something malevolent." As Charles Hill, the legendary foreign service officer who now teaches at Yale, observed,
"I've been pleasantly surprised by the boldness and resolve."
Support our Iraqi friends so they will arrest Sadr, try him, and let him rot in an Iraqi prison.
And aim for the June 30 transition without flinching.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA10APR04B
The Chinese are improving their ability to control the skies
over the Taiwan Strait. Chinese ability to invade is
improving even as Taiwanese basic training is being eased. From Strategypage:
April 6, 2004: Taiwanese politicians are beginning to
complain about the declining state of military training. Young men are now more
prone to complain of the rigors of military training,
and parents have more frequently complained to politicians. As a result, basic
training has been made "more bearable" and readiness in many combat
units has declined. American military observers have been complaining to senior
Taiwanese commanders, and now it's become a political issue. One thing spurring
this debate is the growing military power of China. By the end of this year, China is expected to have over 200 Russian Su-27
class warplanes in service. The various versions of the Su-27 (like the Su-30)
are roughly equivalent to the American F-15. China is allowing its pilots to fly more hours a
month and is training more air force maintenance personnel (so that the Su-27s
can be used more intensively.) Taiwan military planners see China having sufficient military power to have a
chance at successfully conquering Taiwan as early as 2006. In response, Taiwan is buying new early warning radars and
anti-aircraft weapons. Taiwan has only some 330 modern fighters and is planning to upgrade them
soon.
So, as early as 2006 the Chinese will have better air power.
Intensive training of pilots and ground personnel looks like gearing up for
action. Coupled with rapid Chinese improvements in amphibious capabilities (described
as a “crash” building program), the possibility that China’s first aircraft
carrier will be ready by 2006—with two more to follow quickly, and the fact
that at best Taiwan’s defenses will only start to improve by the end of the
decade, and we have a serious window of opportunity for the Chinese to take
Taiwan in the latter half of this decade. The Peking Olympics are scheduled to
be held in 2008.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat myself here, but 2008
right before the Olympics would be a great time for the Chinese to launch a
surprise offensive to capture Taiwan.
The Chinese say they want Taiwan
back more than anything else and they are building military capability to
achieve that goal. We need to believe the Chinese when they say they want Taiwan
and we need to notice their military preparations to carry out that objective.
And by all means, move more forces to the Pacific and
instill a sense of urgency in the Taiwanese who seem oblivious to the threat
even as they hint at independence which are fighting words to Peking.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA10APR04A
Sometimes I am frustrated the Europeans don’t seem to feel
the urgency of the war on terror. Sure, they help us in the quiet war on cells
and funding, but when it comes to operations designed to break the Islamists and
keep them from getting weapons that can be provided by hostile states (like
Iraq or North Korea or Iran), or even just publicly expressing support, they
are lagging in their efforts.
Yet their holding back is not protecting them. The war on
terror may be focused on
Europe as the terrorists look to attack targets there (via Donald Sensing):
MADRID Suspicions
hardened Monday that Europe has become the main target of Islamist
terrorists in the Western world as a letter signed by Al Qaeda's
European branch promised to turn Spain into "an
inferno" and French special forces rounded up
more than a dozen suspected members of a group with ties to the network.
"Europe is
now clearly in the spotlight of terrorism," said Daniel Keohane, a security and defense expert at the Center for
European Reform in London who says it is highly probable that Al Qaeda was behind the Madrid bombing. "It is the
greatest terrorist threat the Continent has ever faced."
I thought that refusing to get involved in Iraq
was supposed to shield Europeans from the wrath of the Islamists. Apparently not.
In a related calculation, the Turks refused to participate
in the Iraq War or even to let us attack Iraq
from Turkish territory, in order to get into the EU. The French had reportedly
threatened that Turkey
would not be admitted to the EU for a generation if the Turks cooperated with
us. So, the Turks forfeited an overly generous aid package that we offered and
threw in their lot with the Euros. And Turkey’s
reward is now apparent:
Foreign Minister Michel Barnier
told parliament Wednesday that France would oppose Turkey's entry into the
European Union "under current circumstances."
“Current circumstances” of course meaning
“Turkey is filled with Moslems.”
Hey, it happens. The Turks trusted the French. They F’d up. Join the club. Or not, actually.
But back to the original point. The
Europeans are not joining up like I’d expect allies to do. Spain’s
recent apparent defection over Iraq
especially hurts. And it isn’t like their leaving Iraq
will protect them.
Yet it is hard for me to maintain anger. They are sovereign.
And they help us when they can and when they think they share the danger. Is
this maddening? Yes. But I imagine the French and British would have liked our
help from 1914 to 1917 and from 1939 to 1941. In each war, domestic considerations
of what was in our interest and what we could contribute kept us from opposing
what the Europeans felt was an obvious danger. We came around in time. I trust
that in time our allies will come around, too.
Heck, I’d be happy if more of my fellow citizens felt we are
at war.
And until our friends and allies do come around, I will not
gloat when they suffer losses to the new Islamist focus on Europe.
I sent my condolences to the Spanish embassy after 11 M. Today, I received the
short form letter the embassy wrote back:
Thank you very much for your kind message and support during this
difficult time.
The American People have shown their compassion and feelings of
solidarity toward those who have suffered he horror of
the March 11 terrorist attacks. The citizens of Spain and this Embassy thank you for your
generosity.
Even when we think the Europeans are idiots for refusing to fight as
hard as we’d like them too, their suffering should not ever be a reason to
gloat. Our compassion and solidarity will be more effective than our scorn.
This will be a long war, remember. The Coalition of the Willing will change over time as nations enter and leave
based on their needs. In the end, we will win. Of that I am certain.
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NPR today seemed to be in a tizzy of describing a widening
Sunni-Shia uprising. I actually had to switch it off
this morning driving to work.
A Sunni-Shia alliance idea is
far-fetched. Sadr and the Baathists
are allying for their own purposes and not for a grand resistance between the
branches of Islam. The Sunnis know they need the Shias
to revolt if the Sunnis are to have a chance at getting the US
out and regaining control of Iraq.
The Sunnis would turn on the Shias in a New York
minute, as the saying goes, if they did drive us out.
Sadr is allying with Sunnis
because Shias won’t help him in sufficient numbers.
If Shias would help him, he’d rely on Shia help.
And I sincerely doubt that Shias
generally would risk an alliance with the Sunnis even if they wanted us out.
The Shias have lost out to the Sunnis for four
centuries despite outnumbering the Sunnis by a good margin. Why ally with them
to fight us when all they have to do is wait until June 30 and they’ll begin to
get power through the ballot box?
But more important for our purposes, we should advertise the
Sunni-Sadr link! Sunnis killed the elder Sadr and now the good-for-nothing thug son would ally with
them. The nutjob son would betray the memory of his
father and his own Shia people and risk Sunni
domination for another four centuries.
Yeah, that’s what I’d be spreading were I god of the CPA.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA07APR04A
Another gem from Strategypage:
The CJTF-HOA musters between 1,300 and 1,600 task force personnel based
at the 88-acre Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti. The 2nd Marine Regiment's K Company, 3rd
Battalion and the Army's 'Old Guard' 3rd Infantry Regiment's B Company (usually
performing ceremonial duties in Washington DC) are currently providing force
protection at Lemonier.
B Company was recently trained by the Marines in Tactical Recovery of
Aircraft and Personnel (TRAP) tactics, which prepares the unit's three platoons for fast-paced insertion and exertion of
troops to retrieve assets in hostile situations.
Although the article describes the Horn mission as a “hearts
and minds” oriented mission, training B company in
TRAP seems significant to me. Are we expecting lots of helicopters and aircraft
to be criss-crossing the region soon? In hostile situations?
I still expect some offensive action in the Horn region
before summer begins.
Otherwise, why train a unit in TRAP when it is mainly there
to protect the base?
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA06APR04B
First of all, relax, this isn’t the Sepoy
Mutiny. I hate to see our troops taking casualties like this but our
enemies have simply counter-attacked. They do that. I wish the Marines the best
in this battle. They are getting it rough right out of the gates in their return
to Iraq. I wish
they had Bradleys to carry their riflemen instead of
their flimsy and huge AAVs that I see in photographs.
Second, it is important to see the Sadr
revolt as a separate event from the Sunni counter-attack in Fallujah
and Ramadi.
Sadr’s revolt is a desperate
attempt to change the rules of a game he was losing. He wasn’t getting anywhere
with threats and the Shias weren’t listening to him.
He took money from foreigners and tried to lead the poor in revolt. Oh, and
although I thought he was probably not a terrorist yet, I am wrong
on that count:
Sadr was long suspected of using violence, and murder, against opponents. A
months long investigation last year, using Iraqi
police and detective, uncovered the details of Sadrs
use of death squads and terrorism against civilians, clerics and government
officials who opposed him. In the last week, members of these death squads were
arrested, and this apparently pushed Sadr to open
rebellion.
So I expect Sadr will lose big
despite all the attention he is getting in the press. I am troubled we didn’t
nail him earlier, but as long as he is painting a target on his chest now, we
better not miss this chance to get him off the streets for good. And follow up
in the areas we put down the Sadr revolt with civil
affairs guys. Spread money around. Nobody likes having
their neighborhoods torn up. Otherwise, resentment will build up.
Unfortunately, Sadr’s gamble
coincides with a far
more serious event: the crackdown on the Baathists
in Fallujah and the attacks by Baathists
against our forces in Ramadi, probably in support of
the Fallujah fight:
Reports from Ramadi, near Fallujah, said dozens of Iraqis attacked a Marine position
near the governor's palace, a senior defense official said from Washington. "A
significant number" of Marines were killed, and initial reports indicate
it may be up to a dozen, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Heavy casualties were inflicted on the insurgents as well,
officials said. It was not immediately known who the attackers were, nor whether the attack was related to fighting under way in
nearby Fallujah.
Depending on the number of Ramadi
deaths, Tuesday's casualties could have brought the the
three-day total as high as about 30 Americans and more than 130 Iraqis killed
in the fighting.
On the Fallujah front, Marines
drove into the center of the Sunni city in heavy fighting before pulling back
before nightfall. The assault had been promised after the brutal killings and
mutilations of four American civilians there last week. Hospital officials said
eight Iraqis died Tuesday and 20 were wounded, including women and children.
Marines waged a fierce battle for hours Tuesday with gunmen
holed up in a residential neighborhood of Fallujah.
The military used a deadly AC-130 gunship to lay down a barrage of fire against
guerrillas, and commanders said Marines were holding an area several blocks
deep inside the city. At least two Marines were wounded.
I’ve always worried most about the former regime elements.
The foreign Islamists are easier to spot and can unite Iraqis against a foreign
threat to their future. The Baathist guys have
nowhere to go, however, so I always believed they were the center of gravity
for our pacification campaign. During the big unit drive on Baghdad,
I kept expecting a large heavy armor force to head through the Ramadi Gap to hit Baghdad
from the west and roll through Saddamite strongholds
there. Sadly, the area remained untouched and now the Baathist
holdouts are striking back from these areas. The population in the Sunni
triangle is either sympathetic to the Baathists or
too scared to help us enough to run them down fast enough.
Though we are winning the post-war fight overall, enemies do
refuse to go along with the other side’s timetables for victory. I’ll not try
to gloss this over since I am disappointed that we failed to lock down these
two towns enough to prevent Baathists from massing
enough to do the damage they are doing. It hurts to see our people dying like
this now. Nonetheless, it is also true that the Baathists
will be more vulnerable as they decide to fight. Perhaps they were fooled into
thinking Sadr’s revolt represents a Shia uprising that the Sunnis must now join. In any case,
despite the casualties, we can’t shrink from piling on them and killing as many
as we can while they stand up and fight. Doing that will
result in lower casualties in the long run.
Wars ebb and flow before the final victory is achieved.
Enemies adapt or counter-attack. And forget about Sadr’s
ploy. It will fail. The Sunni gambit is the one to watch. It will be awhile
before we know whether this is a desperate attempt to drive us out before June
30 (or prevent us from turning over power to the Shias
and Kurds on that date) or a real counter-attack that represents hidden
strength.
I’m hoping for the former. I think we have the edge in this
war by a long shot. But a dedicated, well-armed and financed insurgency—even in
relatively small numbers—could go on for longer than I expected them to last
after Baghdad fell so easily. All the more reason to get the Iraqi security forces up and running
so they can carry the burden. They won’t be ready June 30, but that date
must stand. Our enemies fear it for a reason and that is why they fight so hard
now.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA06APR04A
We have not been so distracted by crushing Saddam and his
nuclear ambitions that we couldn’t decimate
al Qaeda, according to our State Department:
A
new cadre of untested Islamic militants is emerging to take the place of
leaders in Osama bin Laden's
al Qaeda network, which is now under
"catastrophic stress" as a result of international operations over
the past 30 months, the senior State Department counterterrorism official told
a House International Relations subcommittee yesterday.
At least 70 percent of al Qaeda's senior
leadership has been detained or killed since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks triggered a worldwide offensive
against the network, and the remaining 30 percent is largely on the run, State
Department counterterrorism coordinator J. Cofer
Black testified. The movement has been "deeply wounded" by the
elimination or arrest of more than 3,400 lower-level members and allies,
forcing it "to evolve in ways not entirely by its own choosing," he
said.
Fancy that, our allies have not been too offended by our
actions in Iraq
to protect ourselves! They even cooperate with us in “international operations”
waging a “worldwide offensive.” Who’d have thought this would happen?
And in other news, the Spanish now find that the Islamists
are also mad about Spain
helping us in Afghanistan.
The Islamists fail to understand the nuance of understanding that the Afghan
campaign is now considered appropriate (but not in 2001, recall) while Iraq
is inappropriate. Spain’s
offer to double their small Afghan contingent as they pull out of Iraq
has just annoyed the Islamists more and they demand
a withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan:
"If these demands are not met, we will declare war on
you and ... convert your country into an inferno and your blood will flow like
rivers," the letter said.
Having run once, the Islamists have amazingly come to the
conclusion that the Spanish will run again. Having compelled one retreat, they
want another. Who’d have imagined that?
It all comes down to the rivers of our blood. That’s really
all they want.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA05APR04B
It really comes down to this in Iraq and although I’ve
thought many of the anti-war side’s complaints about the war and occupation
have been off the mark, one thing that I have been frustrated with is our refusal
to support our friends and marginalize or defeat our enemies:
We should not be more willing to help our adversaries than our friends.
Democracy is about not only elections, but also about tolerance, compromise and
liberty. Twenty-five years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, declared "the first day of God's
government." In a rushed referendum supervised by armed vigilantes,
Iranians voted for theocracy. For a quarter century, they have struggled to
undo their mistake. It would be a betrayal of Bush's vision as well as 24
million Iraqis if we replicate it in Iraq.
We treat every group like peaceful rival factions of the
League of Women Voters instead of recognizing that we’ve got some criminal
gangs mixed in too. We fail to recognize that some factions want rule of law
and some want mob rule. We bone headedly fail to support our friends.
Finally, at least, we are going
after Sadr and his militia:
U.S. administrators in
Iraq declared a
radical Shiite cleric an "outlaw" Monday and announced a warrant for
his arrest, heightening a confrontation after battles between his supporters
and coalition troops killed at least 52 Iraqis and nine coalition troops,
including eight Americans.
About bloody time. The arrest
warrant was issued months ago by an Iraqi judge. Why we’ve waited this long
I don’t know. It does help that he is wanted for murdering a Shia cleric in April 2003. That’s got to undermine is Shia solidarity schtick.
His militia of course blame us for
the fighting
on Sunday. We started it, they say, when they were just protesting
peacefully:
A coordinated Shiite militia uprising against the American-led
occupation rippled across Iraq on Sunday, reaching into Baghdad and the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City on the capital's outskirts and roiling the holy city of Najaf and at least two other cities in southern Iraq.
Darned lucky for them they remembered to pack their RPGs and AKs along with the
slogan banners, eh? Otherwise they’d have been defenseless. I don’t think Sadr can win this battle—too many Shias
don’t like him—but we let him get strong enough to challenge us. I’m mad that
we treated him with kid gloves since Baghdad
fell. We didn’t gain his good will with that policy. We just allowed him to
build a militia that has battled us and led to dead soldiers. And that is
something to remember. Our occupation didn’t drive Shias
to revolt. This group has been hostile since day one. They may not have wanted
Saddam’s boot on their neck, but only because they wanted to wear the boots and
do the stomping.
Support our friends—with money, access to the government,
and seats at the table. Defeat our enemies—by marginalizing them politically
and if they fight us, ruthlessly crush them.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA05APR04A
Sadr may not be a
terrorist—yet—but he is not the right type to wield power in Iraq.
His supporters
are rioting, causing deaths. We can’t let his thuggish tactics scare us
from swatting him down:
"For the past 11 months, Iraq has been on the path to democracy and
freedom -- freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the
press," Bremer said. "Those freedoms must be exercised peacefully.
This morning, a group of people in Najaf have crossed
the line and moved to violence. . . . This will not be tolerated by the
coalition, this will not be tolerated by the Iraqi people, and this will not be
tolerated by the Iraqi security forces."
I’m not talking about a massacre here, just contain his
supporters and if they initiate violence, target those with guns or those doing
the attacking. The protesters should be contained at the lowest level of
violence possible. Defend with lethal violence only targets worthy of
defending. That is, if they want to torch a 7-11, it isn’t worth killing one of
them. If they try to torch a police station, then defend it. That’s how the
National Guard taught me crowd control. Let them blow off steam—it should be
legal to protest. Just arrest those who are violent and if they make a street
battle of it over a worthwhile target, hit the gun wielders with focused lethal
violence.
Violence should not lead to victories in a new Iraq.
Rule of law—not rule of the mob.
And since I wrote the above, we lost 7 dead fighting
Sadr’s people who used military weapons to attack
Iraqi police stations. Sadr is not just an opposition
leader—he’s a combatant with his own militia and must be defeated. We’ve
treated him with kid gloves for too long.
Incidents like this are tough. Seven of
our soldiers dead all at once. And the urge to strike back is high. But
we have to fight smart. Don’t drive friendly people neutral and neutral people
hostile by flailing about and killing innocents. Yet doing nothing only
emboldens Sadr. And its effects can go wider, too.
Neutral people can go hostile by seeing our weakness. And the friendly can go
neutral if they see us unwilling to confront our enemies. We have to go after Sadr and his organization. Quietly.
But hard. A summer in Gitmo might be just what Sadr
needs. And some jail time for his underlings. And US snipers
for his arms-toting militiamen.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA04APR04C
The Spanish have not been able to
surrender fast enough as the terrorists up their goals in the face of a
retreating Madrid government.
(Tim Blair via Instapundit)
The terrorists seem to know something that I’ve harped
on—when you have an enemy beaten, pursue them until they are utterly destroyed
and defeated. Never ever let them up off the mat once they are down.
Let’s see, the Islamists have a choice between hitting America—which
will reach around the globe to destroy them in whatever remote mountain they
choose to hide on; or, they can hit a country like Spain
that will quickly offer terms if you’ll just please stop.
The Spanish are in for a hard summer if it’s a race between
their appeasing and their enemies’ murderous anger.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA04APR04B
The amazing debate that will not die continues. I’m not
talking about any particular article or anything, just the mind boggling debate
that I see in many places and contexts over whether to invade Iraq
that those opposed to the war continue to wage with nearly unabated zeal. One
would think that capturing Baghdad
would kind of end that but it has not.
What gets me is the periodic, “by invading Iraq
we are distracted from the real threats of Iran
and North Korea;”
followed by the “we could have deterred a nuclear attack on us instead of
invading.”
First of all, what do those who say we should have dealt
with Iran or North
Korea before Iraq
actually mean considering they are also the ones who say deterrence should work
just fine? That’s what always really got me. I knew darned well that if our
government had said fine, let’s invade North
Korea or Iran
quickly while Iraq
is still in its far-from-imminent-threat stage, that as
sure as I know anything, the NK- or Iran-firsters
would have balked and said we should not invade.
So what could “dealing with” these
greater threats meant? I know, in an ideal world of the hard left that would
mean showering these states with money, apologies, and “peaceful” nuclear
technology (we are the only nation not to be trusted with nuclear power or
weapons, apparently), but let’s assume that this surrender policy is off the
table for now.
Inevitably, dealing with North
Korea or Iran
first in the left’s minds would mean that we simply deter them. Ignoring that
dealing with Iraq
second after any other first target was really just arguing for not doing
anything about Iraq, let’s look at the logic of deterrence as the left
advocates.
The anti-war left has said that they are in favor of it (now
that the Cold War is over, of course) rather than using our military to prevent
nuclear strikes on our homeland. Groups like the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace have argued we could deter and
that if deterrence failed, we would have retaliation to ball back on. My God,
the very idea of missile defense is horrifying to the neo deterrence crowd. But
that’s another rant.
First of all, as people who hated deterrence during the Cold
War, preferring to—in its extreme variations—totally disarm unilaterally to
show a good example (or just partially disarm for the mainstream left), their
conversion to the value of deterrence is not comforting. I’m a little
suspicious you might say.
Second, assuming that their conversion is real, their
position accepts that we should allow our looniest enemies to gain the means to
strike us with nuclear weapons. Our strategy of going after known enemies to
prevent them from getting nukes is to be tossed out in favor of a strategy that
assumes they love life as much as we do, and that they
are in fact deterrable. We must assume that nuclear-armed Islamist enemies
don’t believe that we are too weak to respond in kind and don’t believe we
would collapse if struck with a nuclear weapon. This deterrence strategy
assumes that Islamists don’t believe that losing 10% or even 90% of the Moslem
community (which is so filled with the unpure anyway
that maybe they think Islam can use a good “cleansing”) is a good price to pay
for destroying the power of the infidels. Sadly, by counting on deterrence
rather than prevention, we increase the odds that we will face a nuclear attack
by an enemy that is not deterred by our nuclear arsenal because they think us
weak, or think Allah will bless them with our destruction, or whatever. A bunch
of mad people without nukes are obviously less likely to nuke us than a less-mad
crowd with nukes.
But let’s go on with the logic of enforcing deterrence. If
we are struck with a nuclear weapon, the left’s love of deterrence has led many
of them to say we would retaliate in kind if deterrence failed. That has always
kind of floored me. I mean, they think it is morally superior to destroy an
enemy with a nuclear device after we’ve been hit with one rather than wage
non-nuclear war to stop a nut case from getting that bomb? But aside from that,
would the neo deterrence left really advocate using a nuclear weapon in
response to a nuclear attack on us?
The general “retaliate” mantra isn’t enough. Against whom
would they retaliate? Let’s assume we know who did it—or who supplied the nuke.
Would we reply by destroying a city in the enemy state? Would we destroy a
major military unit or base of the offending state? I have to say that even I
would shudder at the idea of slaughtering a hundred thousand or a million
civilians in an enemy state to reply to the loss of tens of thousands of our
people. Many of those people would be enemies of that state anyway and so we’d
be killing opponents of the regime. I would not want to just slaughter
civilians even to maintain deterrence.
But we would have to reply. And with
nukes. A robust conventional JDAM campaign would not be enough. Even overthrowing
the guilty regime after we were nuked would not maintain deterrence. We’d have
to use nukes and kill tens of thousands, too. A symbolic detonation in a remote
area would just symbolize our weakness. So we’d need to target the capital
palace with very small penetrating nukes to destroy the seat of government and
those directly responsible without killing too many civilians and then send several
nukes against major pillars of the regime’s loyal military. This to kill
numbers and to make sure the deaths accomplished something like weakening the
regime and not just retaliation.
Then, we’d also have to make sure the government was
overthrown so it wouldn’t try to come back at us again when it gets more nukes.
But the basic point is that to defend the idea that we can
deter future nuclear strikes on us, we’d have to use nukes if we faced an enemy
that was not deterred the first time. And that is the problem with the anti-war
side’s professed love of deterrence. I just don’t believe them.
I don’t think the neo deterrence left would accept that we
must retaliate with nuclear weapons under
any circumstances up to and including the loss of multiple American cities
to nuclear attack. In the end, they think we face mirror images of ourselves
who will of course never use nuclear weapons. They don’t really believe they’d ever have to support retaliation.
Never mind that some mullahs in Iran
have said they’d gladly accept millions of dead Moslems to destroy Israel.
Never mind that our conventional military power did not deter
bin Laden from 9-11. Nor did it deter Saddam in 1990. Nor did Israel’s
nukes deter Saddam from launching missiles against Israel
in 1991. Fear of our power did not deter Saddam from trying to kill Bush 41 in
1993. And fear of our power did not deter Saddam from preparing to invade
Kuwait again in 1996 only to back off when we deployed our troops to Kuwait in
response (ah, you say, isn’t that proof of deterrence? No. Brandishing our
troops should not have been necessary to deter. Our power existed whether in Fort
Hood or on the Kuwait
border. All we did is prove to Saddam that we would only reply ineffectively to
his threats and not take the excuse to invade and finish him off. Conventional
deterrence was probably weakened that year).
No, the neo deterrence left would argue that enough had died
already. Why lower ourselves to revenge? Why kill innocents separate from the
regime. Won’t the dreaded cycle of violence continue? What did we do to provoke
this anyway? Shouldn’t we give even larger tribute to the enemy as sincere
shows of our sorrow? And how sure are we really that we know for sure who did
it? Would we kill thousands because we think we know who did it? Let’s
investigate for a few years…
Really, the left’s advocacy of deterrence is just a
defensible alternative to preemption for the left as long as the left never has
to contemplate defending deterrence. Once we fall back to deterrence, the left
would again retreat to doing nothing. The only objective is to prevent a more
forceful alternative. They just want to deter the US.
Ok, I think I started rambling about four paragraphs ago.
You get my drift. Time to just stop.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA04APR04A
Via Andrew Sullivan,
this lovely piece
of work about Islamists ranting about their grievances and their
determination to kill us. One lovely “spiritual leader” in Britain
said:
"They warned them in New York - stop the
terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. They did not
listen. They gave them bloodshed in New York. Now Tony Blair has been warned."
To all those who say our invasion of Afghanistan
or Iraq caused
Islamists to hate us, I offer the above statement. Reminder: The bloodshed in New
York took place in September 2001. The Taliban fell
in December 2001. Baghdad fell in
April 2003.
Yet the historically challenged nutball
thinks the latter two caused the former.
So what do we do to appease them? Remind me again, please.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA03APR04C
“I’m
Sure This Isn’t a Cover Up” (Posted April 3,
2004)
Now that some are questioning the UN’s responsibility for standing
by during the 1994 Rwanda
genocide:
A fire swept through an evidence room at the
U.N. tribunal for Rwanda on Friday,
destroying computers and folders but no key documents, a tribunal spokesman
said.
Tragic accident, I’m sure. And good luck
that the fire didn’t touch any key documents—just the worthless ones.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA03APR04B
So by invading Iraq
we’ve created Islamists? That’s a common charge anyway.
Here’s a good
article refuting that:
The afterword
of Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The
Age of Sacred Terror, which is easily the best book about the rise of
bin Ladenism and the Clinton administration's
response to it, tells us the following: "U.S. officials have spoken of
'tens of thousands' of individuals who were trained in the camps of
Afghanistan, and Germany's intelligence chief put the number at seventy thousand,
though many were trained as soldiers to fight alongside the Taliban, not as
terrorists. Still the number of operatives at large is probably multiples
greater than that on any other terrorist group in memory."
Benjamin and Simon were
once the director and senior director for counterterrorism in the Clinton
administration's National Security Council, and they, too, are
highly critical of the Bush administration. I strongly suspect the numbers
above are grossly exaggerated. When I visited Ahmed Shah Massoud,
the legendary Tajik leader of the Northern
Alliance, in the fall of 1999,
he told me that he was then facing around 700 Arab Afghans. This figure
fluctuated a bit, perhaps, but the Taliban never deployed more than 1,000 Arab
Afghans against him.
But, for the sake of
argument, let's accept the numbers suggested by Benjamin and Simon. In other
words, during the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency, when the United States studiously avoided invading Iraq, the number of Islamic holy warriors fully formed in the
Afghan training camps skyrocketed. Let us recall these were the glory years of
the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, when the president often worked night
and day to bring conciliation and settlement to the two sides. These were the
years, too, when the Americans went to the rescue of the Bosnian Muslims. And
these were the times when President Clinton tried to make nice-nice with
President Mohammad Khatami of Iran (of course, Sunni
Muslim holy warriors might not care for this too much; but since bin Laden knew
he hadn't blown up the American
barracks at Khobar Towers in 1996, and since his
contacts inside the Saudi royal family were pretty good, he might have drawn
the right conclusion when the Clinton administration didn't retaliate against
the real perpetrator of the Khobar bombing, the
regime in Tehran--to wit, Clinton wasn't tough).
So, during the best of
years--or at least, according to Clarke and Kerry, vastly better years than
what followed--al Qaeda grew from scratch to an
umbrella organization, drawing into its apocalyptic designs holy warriors from
the Middle East, America, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Orient. These
were the years when bin Laden promised the faithful that they, not the
Americans, were the "stronger horse."
And now, according to
the "realists" and antiwar Democrats, the Bush administration has
made things worse. It's theoretically possible, of course. It's possible the Clinton years were less energizing to the enemy than the Bush
years, when the Taliban were destroyed, bin Laden was put to chase, and al Qaeda as an organization was badly battered. It is possible
that America's invasion and (temporary) occupation of Iraq will galvanize holy warriors as did the first Gulf War for
an earlier generation. Professor Bernard Lewis's textual analysis showing that
bin Laden used the first Gulf War as a clarion call for holy war is undeniable.
(And was not the first Gulf War worth angering Islamic militants?)
I quote at length because I really do get tired of the
repeated claim that by fighting against Islamists and destroying those who the
Islamists hold out as heroes defying America,
that we create terrorists. It truly is a philosophy of surrender. If we don’t
fight, they kill us. If we fight, they kill us. No matter what we do, whether
rescuing Kuwait
or Iraq, or
Bosnian, Somali, or Kosovo Moslems, the Islamists want to kill us. It should be
abundantly clear that even surrendering and converting en-masse to Islam would
not be enough to placate our enemies since the Islamists have made it clear
that not even many Moslems are pure enough for their taste.
Also note that the Persian Gulf War pissed them off. This 1991 war of the exemplary coalition and UN approval. The war with French participation (on our side). The war that
liberated conquered Moslems from an invader that stripped the country of
valuables like bank robbers on a heist. Even this war made the Islamists mad.
One has to ask, what doesn’t make the Islamists mad at us?
And another question must be asked, why should we care?
Kill them. Arrest them. Doesn’t much
matter to me. Just take the fight to them. And don’t let up.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA03APR04A
So, if you have a UN-sanctioned
coalition to defeat a ruthless dictator all will be well. Legitimacy will be
assured. That’s what we are told these days.
Consider this woman
in South Korea who recently passed away:
The couple were among thousands of leftist farmers who
believed in North Korea's promised "liberation" from landlords and
took up arms in Chiri's thick forests and jagged
ravines. They kept fighting, long after North Korean troops retreated and even
after the Korean War ended in 1953 with an uneasy truce.
Her husband died in battle in 1952. By 1955, most of the Chiri Mountain guerrillas had
been killed or surrendered, but Chung and others continued raiding police
stations and villages, even though they had no communication with North Korea.
Chung's life on the run ended in a shootout with police on
Nov. 12, 1963. "Disoriented communist bandit caught!" read headlines
at the time. Chung was wounded in the gunbattle and
lost her right leg.
With her arrest, South Korea finally declared
an end to drawn-out operations against peasant "partisans" who fought
the pro-U.S. government in the South.
Imagine that, the war ended in 1953 but it wasn’t until two
years later that most of the insurgents had been killed or captured. And it
took ten years before the government could finally say the insurgents were
gone. And this in a country that was saved by a
UN-authorized coalition and that had UN troops in the country all that time.
Sure, they were US troops after the war, but they had the authority of the UN.
And a point to remember is that the South Koreans did the fighting. While US
forces sat in their bases. I guess the insurgents weren’t too impressed with
the legitimacy provided by the UN.
The passage of time makes all our past accomplishments seem
easy and preordained—in contrast to the present messy uncertainty. Post-World
War II Europe and Japan
were easy from our vantage point. We forget about the chaos in Germany
and the Ukrainian insurgents who fought into the 1950s against the Soviets. Heck,
the Spanish-American War was a “splendid little war” as long as you forget the
years we fought Filipino insurgents after the war. Lots of history looks
written in concrete until you remember the details and uncertainties of the
day. Even the Korean War seems easy and straightforward from today.
I did not know this detail.
Sometimes I think that the post-war in Iraq
looks so bad to some is only by comparing it to the ease of conquering Iraq
in the large-scale combat portion of the fighting. Normally, several hundred
dead in policing after the war to run down diehards would be insignificant
compared to the losses in the war itself. Only the fact that the 3-week
conquest was a cake walk leads us to moan over the post-war.
One day Iraq
will look easy. Or it will, if we don’t lose our nerve.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA02APR04A
Peters is
good. I may disagree with his continued emphasis on complaining about our
troops levels. While true in the short run after the fall of Baghdad,
it was true only because we expected defecting Iraqis to make up the numbers by
staying at their posts. When that didn’t happen, it was really too late to rush
troops in. Had we done so, where would the troops for the troop rotation have
come from? We’d be talking a much larger National Guard rotation.
In time, we rebuilt Iraqi security forces and the numbers
looked just fine to me according to my back
of the envelope calculations.
But Peters emphasizes what I noted about our failure to
crack down on Fallujah:
Fifth
(and related), when the cities of the Sunni Triangle, such as Fallujah, Ramadi or Tikrit, engaged in acts of terror, we needed to make an
example of one of them to demonstrate our power and resolve to the others.
He also notes that the men and boys who committed atrocities
against our dead had finally found American targets they could take on with
some confidence of victory:
Confident
enemies do not drag bodies through the streets and mutilate corpses. The grim
display in Fallujah was a symbol of weakness, not a
sign of strength.
Kid gloves where we can. Most
Iraqis deserve our help, despite the widely televised images of localized rage.
Iron fist where we must. Delenda est Fallujah.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA01APR04C
Bravo. I stand in awe.
Just go read Lileks. The latter part.
Amazing what does and does not anger the world, eh?
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAPR2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA01APR04B
A good Strategypage description of
the Cuban-Venezuelan
alliance:
Three years ago, Chavez made a deal with Cuba to supply cut rate oil (worth half a
billion dollars a year at market rates.) Cuba paid for little of the oil, now owes nearly $800 million and is not expected to
ever pay the debt (mainly because Cuba simply hasn't got the cash.) In addition to
the medical brigade, Cuba has sent military, police, political and media advisors to help Chavez
out. Who says dictators (even elected ones) don't have friends?
Oh, we know that dictators have friends. Just look to
Hollywood or college faculty rooms. You just have to be the right kind of
dictator.
Of special note is the description of the so-called medical
brigades. Yes, they do provide medicine, but with political minders well
represented in the brigades, the purpose is to promote revolutionary communist
zeal in the host country.
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