> Behalf Of Doug Pensinger
>
> More than 50,000 casualties in less than 100 hours, 500/hr,
> zoiks. And what,
> less than 1-200 of our own? Some significant percentage of which
> were killed
> or wounded by friendly fire? Sounds more like the Ravens vs the
> Pop Warner*
> rejects. This was an Iraqi army of what - 1/2 million under arms, many of
> which were battle tested vets? Amazing.
>
Many of the frontline Iraqi troops were conscripted militia rather than the
elite Republican Guards etc. It's rarely ever a good military strategy to
have your best troops in the very front line when facing a massive attack.
You keep your best to plug any gaps that occur, or to counterattack.
As for allied casualties, in total I think they were less than 100. The
Brits lost about 12, almost all through (US) friendly fire. Recognition
procedures never have seemed to be a US strongpoint (let me tell you one day
about why Australian aircraft had to delete all red paint during 1942).
One thing to note, however, is that the Kuwaiti/Iraqi desert is absolutely
the sort of environment you'd want to fight an integrated air/armoured war
in. There or Egypt/Libya or the Polish/Russian steppe. Ideal for fast
travelling large armoured formations. Especially when the Abrams and
Challenger tanks had such a qualitative advantage over the Iraqi T72/T82.
Also, there was no pulling of punches by the allied forces at all, as
evidenced by the absolute carnage along the road from Kuwait City back to
Iraq. Virtually a repeat of the Falaise Gap slaughter during the breakout
from Normandy in 1944, or Stalingrad if you prefer. Continuous annihilating
air attack on an enemy trapped with nowhere else to go and virtually no way
of hitting back. But then again, the allied forces probably weren't geared
up to deal with hundreds of thousands of prisoners. And noone could have
assumed that the ground war would be over in just 100 hours.
As for the Landmine treaty, I know the Australian government was pretty well
pissed off that the US scuttled it. Along with the biological weapons treaty
(similarly scuttled) it had been a major initiative of successive Australian
governments for well over the last decade, and one that we thought met US
requirements fairly well. It's not as if we are traditionally anti-US. In
fact, we've probably paid our dues more than any other of the US allies.
Brett
