Earth to Bush: They are Shooting Back

Tom Lowe

March 31, 2003
It's amazing how the perception of the war has changed in just a few days. Before it started, no one, including this writer, would have predicted that our troops would outrun their supply lines and become bogged down in front of Baghdad; or that the Shiites in the south would not welcome the American troops as liberators; or that the Iraqis would put up a fierce resistance in the face of our superior firepower, both in the air and on the ground.

As the truth begins to trickle out of Washington and the few non-embedded newspeople in the Middle East, the ineptitude and arrogance of the men and woman who planned this war and who are now charged with the task of carrying it out is becoming more and more apparent to the world, and, more importantly, to the American public.

It now appears that Secretary of Defense Rumsfield decided to fight this war on the cheap, with about half the ground forces recommended by the Pentagon. Rummy and the people around him, enamored with the lure of high-tech weapons, assumed--with little evidence to back up their assumptions--that a combination of high-tech weapons, superior firepower, and a population so fed up with Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime that they would abandon them at the very sight of American troops, would assure victory in a matter of weeks, if not days.

In military science, the study of logistics is probably the most stupefyingly boring subject of them all. Getting ammunition and supplies to the fighting troops requires meticulous planning by highly experienced personnel. It requires stockpiling and protecting the stockpiles. It requires a knowledge of how fast supplies and ammunition are consumed in battle and out of battle. It also involves the protection of supply lines, whether on land, air or sea. In an old Air Force Squadron Officers School textbook, I remember one of the principal generals of WWII stating that if there was a single aspect of the war in Europe that he wished he had attended to more, it would have been logistics.

Winston Churchill, Lord of the Admiralty, in WWI, accurately predicted the duration of the German drive into France by simply calculating when they would outrun their supply lines. That drive was stopped by the French army at the Battle of the Marne, but one of the main factors was the problems the German army had in getting supplies in a timely manner to continue their advance. Patton's army in WWII was forced to stop at least once because they ran out of gas. One of the most bizarre stories of WWII is the use of camels by the German army on the eastern front to carry fuel oil, since motor vehicles required more gas than they could carry just to get to the front lines.

Now U.S. troops are stalled fifty or sixty miles out of Baghdad and the Iraqi paramilitaries are attacking the supply lines, which are stretched out over a hundred miles and a perfect target for an enemy that can pick its time and place to attack and then vanish.

Was this Rummy's idea?

And then the Shiites in Basra and the south: Approximately 60% of Iraq's population belong to the Shiite sect of Islam. For many years, they have been subject to the brutal rule of a dictatorship which happens to be Sunni. In Desert Storm, we promised them autonomy, if not a separate state, and then sat back when Saddam Hussein ruthlessly crushed their revolt. In addition, we fired tons of depleted uranium shells into the area, and the result has been a proliferation of cancers, especially in children in the region. To believe that they had forgotten that they were betrayed only twelve years ago and would welcome us with open arms is one of the most harebrained ideas imaginable. They are smart enough to know that the U.S. will never give them autonomy, simply because their primary affinity is with Iran, which is also Shiite. The U.S. cannot afford to see a large part of Iraq's land and more than half of its population form an alliance with a nation hostile both to the Sunni part of Iraq and the U.S., which it calls the "Great Satan."

To complicate all this highly optimistic planning by Rumsfield & Co., the Iraqi army has not surrendered in masse. Instead, they are putting up intense resistance. They are prepared to contest Baghdad street by street, house by house. That leaves the U.S. forces with three choices, none of which is very attractive: 1. They can besiege the city and starve it out; 2. They can bomb it into rubble in the same manner as the allies bombed Caen, France or Köln, Germany during WWII; or, 3. They can take it street by street, house by house.

Alternatives 1 and 2 would involve horrendous carnage of innocent civilians, the majority of which are children, an outcome which the U.S. has been trying to avoid. With the world angrily looking on, such carnage wreaked upon the Iraqi people in the name of saving them would spark international outrage that would have horrendous long-range consequences for the U.S. On the other hand, alternative 3 would be slow, nasty, and result in very high U. S. casualties, which would result in horrendous political consequences for Bush and his clique. The administration will do all in its power to avoid U.S. casualties.

My guess is that Bush would easily sacrifice a million Iraqis to save his own political posterior and that carpet bombing of Baghdad will be his preferred mode of subjugation. A siege would take too long and opposition to the war in the U.S., higher than it was at the equivalent moment during the Vietnam War, would grow to threatening proportions if given that much time for the enormity of our actions to sink in.

It is difficult to predict just what will happen; the war has already soured. The "president" behaves on television as though he is being medicated with Thorazine. The blame game is already starting. The people are beginning to question the wisdom of the war and the rest of the people of the world are dead set against it. I predict carpet bombing. Stay tuned.