-Caveat Lector-
http://www.motherjones.com/news/warwatch/2003/14/we_345_02.html
Finding Fault
For nearly a week, ever since the war in Iraq turned out to be something
more difficult than a military "cakewalk," officials at the White House and
the Pentagon have been on the defensive. Faced by reports that US and
British forces are getting "bogged down" in southern Iraq, they have
announced that the allies are making good progress. Confronted by
suggestions that the war is a US affair, they have declared that an
impressive coalition supports the administration's policies. And, plagued by
rumors of a rift between the Pentagon's civilian and military leadership,
they have insisted that the war plan was developed -- and is backed -- by
administration officials and career officers alike.
That argument has appeared strained, however, as a growing cadre of retired
military leaders have criticized the military plan, suggesting that civilian
officials at the Pentagon overruled or ignored recommendations from
commanders in the field. And, as Bryan Bender of The Boston Globe reports,
the criticism is being aimed at a single target: Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. In particular, Bender writes, Rumsfeld is being derided for
"micromanaging" war planning, opting for a 'rolling start' strategy, and a
minimal ground force.
The angry denials have come from Rumsfeld ("if you ask anyone who has been
involved in the process from the Central Command ... every single thing
they've requested has in fact happened") and Joint Chiefs boss General
Richard B. Myers ("If there's more force flowing, it had always been planned
to flow"). But are the denials denting the perception that something has
gone terribly wrong in the Pentagon's planning?
Perhaps the most telling -- and damning -- account of the schism within the
Pentagon has come from Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. Hersh is rapidly
emerging as one of the most insightful -- and, in the eyes of the Bush
administration, troublesome -- journalists covering Washington today. In his
latest report, he writes that "Rumsfeld's team took over crucial aspects of
the day-to-day logistical planning -- traditionally, an area in which the
uniformed military excels -- and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the senior
Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff." Notably, Hersh cites "senior war
planners" as sources for his report.
"On at least six occasions, the planner told me, when Rumsfeld and his
deputies were presented with operational plans -- the Iraqi assault was
designated Plan 1003 -- he insisted that the number of ground troops be
sharply reduced. Rumsfeld's faith in precision bombing and his insistence on
streamlined military operations has had profound consequences for the
ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas. 'They've got no
resources,' a former high-level intelligence official said. 'He was so
focussed on proving his point -- that the Iraqis were going to fall apart.'"
Importantly, Hersh also describes the sort of Pentagon that Rumsfeld has
built. It is an institution shaped by the secretary's early show of
"personal contempt" for many of the commanders in place when he arrived, and
his love for "off-the-cuff memoranda" chastising military commanders.
"'In those conditions -- an atmosphere of derision and challenge -- the
senior officers do not offer their best advice,' a high-ranking general who
served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said. One witness to a meeting
recalled Rumsfeld confronting General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of
Staff, in front of many junior officers. 'He was looking at the Chief and
waving his hand,' the witness said, 'saying, 'Are you getting this yet? Are
you getting this yet?'
In early February, according to a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld
appeared at the Army Commanders' Conference, a biannual business and social
gathering of all the four-star generals. Rumsfeld was invited to join the
generals for dinner and make a speech. All went well, the official told me,
until Rumsfeld, during a question-and-answer session, was asked about his
personal involvement in the deployment of combat units, in some cases with
only five or six days' notice. To the astonishment and anger of the
generals, Rumsfeld denied responsibility. 'He said, 'I wasn't involved,''
the official said. ''It was the Joint Staff.''
'We thought it would be fence-mending, but it was a disaster,' the official
said of the dinner. 'Everybody knew he was looking at these deployment
orders. And for him to blame it on the Joint Staff -- ' The official
hesitated a moment, and then said, 'It's all about Rummy and the truth.'"
Among the influential former military commanders launching precision strikes
against Rumsfeld is retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the onetime advisor to
then-Joint Chiefs boss Colin Powell. Writing in US News, McCaffrey echoes
other military planners in deriding Rumsfeld's early determination that a
war in Iraq could be won through air power and "special operations forces"
supported by as few as 10,000 troops. And, while military commanders
successfully lobbied for a larger force, McCaffrey argues that Rumsfeld's
confidence in his own theories still haunts the war plan.
"We are now in an ugly situation. But we can, and will, recover. Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has dismissed these problems as pinprick attacks
by 'ones and twos.' Tell that to the marines still battling to hold open the
critical bridges at An Nasiriyah. Tell it to the 3rd Infantry Division
troops who now must destroy five Iraqi Republican Guard heavy divisions,
supported by only two Marine tank battalions and the tank-killing Apaches of
the 101st Airborne. Tell it to the composite British division troops who are
trying to work 'smash and grab' operations with a handful of infantry
battalions in Basra.
So Rumsfeld has emerged as the primary target for criticism about the war
plan. But the secretary was hardly the only Washington power-broker to sell
the war as a short and happy mission of liberation followed by a flowering
of democracy throughout the region. As Harold Meyerson asserts in LA Weekly,
at some point, a cadre of neoconservatives including Rumsfeld and Vice
President Dick Cheney "sold the Brooklyn Bridge to our president."
"It was a lovely scenario, but to believe it, the neos had to willfully
forget countless lessons of history, and at least one law of thermodynamics:
That for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. In the world
according to the neos, world-shaking changes in U.S. policy -- arrogating to
itself the right to wage preventive war, and plunging Iraq into that war --
might encounter some resistance along the way, but in the end lead to an
outpouring of support.
To the administration's nationalist tough guys -- Cheney and Rumsfeld in
particular -- this is a matter of some, but not overwhelming, concern.
American power, as they see it, grows out of the barrel of a gun. In their
interactions with such longtime allies as France and Germany, and such
fledgling democracies as Turkey, they've made it clear that they'd rather
have nations fear us than like or admire us."
Echoes of Indochina
Among the retired military officers to find fault with the Pentagon's
planning is James Webb. Writing in The New York Times's Week in Review
section, Webb notes that a majority of US casualties to date have been the
result of "guerrilla actions against Marine and Army forces in and around
Nasiriya." In that fighting, Webb sees troubling echoes of the war he saw
first-hand. And, like others, he worries those echoes will only grow louder.
"In fact, what will be called an occupation may well end up looking like the
images we have seen in places like Nasiriya. Do Iraqis hate Saddam Hussein's
regime more deeply than they dislike the Americans who are invading their
country? That question will still be with this administration, and the
military forces inside Iraq, when the occupation begins, whether the war
lasts a few more days or several more months.
Or worse, the early stages of an occupation could see acts of retribution
against members of Saddam Hussein's regime, then quickly turn into yet
another round of guerrilla warfare against American forces. This point was
made chillingly clear a few days ago by the leader of Iraq's major Shiite
opposition group, who, according to Reuters, promised armed resistance if
the United States remains in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is overthrown.
Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don't expect it to
get any better for a while. "
Webb is hardly alone in seeing grim reminders of Vietnam in the sandy
battlefields of Iraq. Orville Schell, writing in the San Francisco
Chronicle, argues that the Baghdad regime clearly intends to fight a
"people's war" in the same way the North Vietnamese did. But what might
prove even more difficult for US and British forces, Schell points out, is
the Iraqi intention to take its guerrilla war into the cities.
"An indiscriminate urban counterinsurgency effort could prove as
compromising to America's image as the campaigns to 'win the hearts and
minds of the people' in rural Vietnam did decades ago. As Sun Zi warned:
'The worst policy is to besiege cities.'
Body counts, B-52 strikes, wounded GIs in medi-vac choppers, downed
helicopter gunships surrounded by AK-47 toting peasants, 'Five O'clock
Follies- like' Centcom briefings, anti-war demonstrations, troop
escalations, and a repetition of official expressions that the war is still
'on track,' all have a haunting ring.
If over the last few days, U.S. military planners have come to view
'irregular forces' like the Fedayeen Saddam and the Special Republican Guard
commandos as 'a major annoyance' -- the 'equivalent of the black pajama Viet
Cong,' as one senior U.S. intelligence official put it -- we can only wonder
what kind of an annoyance such insurgents will be to the process of 'nation
building.'"
As Robert Timberg and Tom Bowman of The Baltimore Sun report, echoes of
Vietnam "are invariably detected whenever the United States embarks on a
course that involves the use of military force." Those looking to compare
the war in Iraq, less than two weeks old, with the war in Vietnam may be
rushing ("For one thing -- and it's a big thing -- Vietnam claimed upward of
58,000 American lives"). Still, despite such knee-jerk tendencies, the two
write, "a few similarities seem worth noting."
"The fedayeen, for example, are displaying the same passion and brutality as
the Viet Cong did some three decades ago, although clearly not in the same
numbers. Call them terrorists or death squads or irregulars. Whatever their
crimes, they are also engaging in combat activities that fall under the
rubric of guerrilla tactics."
It may, as Rumsfeld recently insisted, be "a bit early for history to be
written," Rupert Conrwell concedes in The Independent. But he asserts that
history won't be denied, and that a single question is quietly gnawing at
the American psyche: "Could this be -- will this be -- another Vietnam?"
"The answer, in some respects, is simple: of course not. The Vietnam war,
from an American point of view, lasted nine or 10 years. The campaign to
remove Saddam Hussein has barely been in progress nine or 10 days. Whether
it lasts nine or 10 weeks (perfectly possible), or nine or 10 months (rather
unlikely), it surely will not last nine or 10 years.
Unlike Vietnam, and for all today's second-guessing, the purely military
outcome is certain. Saddam Hussein will be driven from power. But the fond
belief in Washington -- and the one on which this war was largely sold --
that the advancing GIs would be welcomed as liberators, as they were in
occupied France in 1944, has already been shown to be an illusion.
And if the resistance continues, President Bush, Mr Rumsfeld and the rest
will have to decide whether to cast aside all efforts to pursue their
'gentleman's war', a war of aiming only at regime targets, and attack vital
civilian infrastructure to hasten victory. America has never been a patient
country. Already calls can be heard to 'stop messing about' and to flatten
the regime by flattening Baghdad, Basra, Nasiriyah and anywhere else where
the Americans are getting bogged down. But that would be to exhume the
dreadful mantra that sums up American good intentions gone wrong in Vietnam,
that 'to save this village, it must be destroyed'."
The war is less than two weeks old. Does that mean that it is too early to
note apparent similarities to the war which has come to focus US
expectations and fears about military adventurism? Tom Engelhardt doesn't
think so. Writing on TomDispatch.com, the web-logger and MotherJones.com
contributor argues that the war in Iraq might be best understood as the war
in Vietnam "on fast forward."
"In fact, it's taken less than a week for American reporters to begin to
doubt Pentagon briefers (foreign reporters began in that mode) -- a passage
that took years in Vietnam -- and for the briefers to begin to look like
participants in the long ago Saigon press briefings that included the
infamous 'body counts,' mockingly nicknamed by reporters 'the Five O'clock
Follies.' In other words, a week into the war the first cracks in what may
become a media 'credibility gap' are already showing. As it turns out,
Pentagon policies for controlling the media were quite brilliant, but also
dependent on the delivery of the promised war -- a brief 'cakewalk' of
liberation.
We've leapt years in a week. Who knows, if things don't break just right for
this administration, where we'll be a week from now? When you think about
it, it's taken a lot of ridiculous dreaming and planning by men inside not
just the Beltway, but the Bubbleway, over many years, to turn Sadaam Hussein
into Ho Chi Minh for even a few weeks or months."
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