Despite all the gee-whiz phone cams, and "fly away" satellite links, events
in the two weeks since the first bombs rained down on Iraq have been
anything but easy to follow. Exaltation at the initial surge gave way to
surprise that Saddam's loyalists were not merely fighting back but doing so
with spirit. Then came the stories of hungry GIs on the front lines,
followed by the rumble of recriminations in Washington.
It was all the fault of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a small army of
retired generals said on the record, while unnamed senior officers still in
uniform whispered contemptuously of civilian meddlers gumming up what would
otherwise have been a well-oiled military machine. Then, just as the press
was stretching to make comparisons with Vietnam, a sudden and unexpected
surge saw the Tigris crossed, the reported destruction of at least two
Republican Guard divisions and Baghdad encircled.
So what's a channel-surfing sofa spud to make of it all?
Well, here's a little intelligence to put things in perspective, a "back
story" as they say in Hollywood. While troops were getting all the air
time, a much dirtier but more subtle battle was raging in the Pentagon, on
Capitol Hill and in the White House.
Start with the purported two-day pause. If you believed CNN's resident
ex-general Wesley Clark, it was an omen of disaster. The troops furthest
into Iraq risked being cut off from supplies, fuel and ammunition, he said.
And Clark deserved to be taken seriously, his admirers added, since he was
a former NATO commander and the man who ran Bill Clinton's war in Kosovo.
Problem is, the pause wasn't anything of the kind. While Clark and his
allies were warning of operations being bogged down, the final push to
Baghdad was under way on multiple fronts.
A cynic might see a political motive in Clark's scepticism: he is prominent
among the handful of Democrats mulling bids for the White House in 2004. If
things go badly in Iraq, who better than a far-sighted general to lead the
nation through the troubled times to come?
Personal ambition may explain Clark's motives, but what of the unnamed
Pentagon sources who rushed to support his analysis? Since Clark was one of
the most reviled and disliked generals in recent US history, it couldn't
have been personal loyalty or respect.
Call it an alliance of convenience, the real targets being Rumsfeld and
Vice-President Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defence under Bush the
Elder in the first Gulf War. Cheney was an early enthusiast for a
revolutionary doctrine that says massive force and sweeping momentum win
battles - a theory that didn't sit well with the more traditional Norman
Schwarzkopf, who favoured treating the Iraqis much as he would have handled
the Soviets in Western Europe - direct and overwhelming force brought to
bear in a climactic battle.
Cheney objected strenuously. Under his plan - the one that eventually
carried the day - a seaborne assault swept the Iraqis out of Kuwait while
bombers pounded enemy entrenchments as an armoured column swept around in
an unexpected "left hook" to cut off their retreat.
It went according to plan - almost. Drilled in the traditional doctrine of
anti-Soviet warfare, the general throwing the vital hook, the one that was
supposed to block all avenues of escape, stopped cold and sat pat to
consolidate his position, just as he would have done if he had been facing
Moscow's finest. Enough Iraqis escaped with their tanks to put down the
subsequent rebellions by Shiites and Kurds.
And who was that general? None other than Barry McCaffrey, who received a
pro forma promotion before being squeezed out of the military. Today, after
a stint in the Clinton White House, he is NBC's in-house military guru and
one of the current campaign's biggest critics.
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld is playing the Cheney role, and his domineering
influence at the Pentagon is resented even more than that of his
predecessor. Cheney talked about scrapping big-ticket weapons programs, but
never actually managed to kill any of them. By contrast, the acerbic
Rumsfeld has been far more lethal.
Convinced that the generals were living in the past, he fought and won a
vicious bureaucratic battle to kill a lumbering behemoth of an artillery
system known as the Crusader, which critics said would be a cumbersome
liability against the sort of opposition being encountered in Iraq. In
times of peace, promotions come from managing procurement projects, and a
lot of careers hit a bitter dead end when the Crusader was spiked.
Same with the Osprey, another billion-dollar turkey that takes off like a
helicopter, rotates the huge propellers on the end of its stumpy wings
through 90 degrees, and flies like a plane. Rumsfeld harbours grave doubts
about the Osprey, which has so far killed more than 30 test pilots and
servicemen, but has begged off a fight with the congressmen in whose
districts it is built. This is despite what a disgusted Marine Corps
captain described in a letter to Aviation Week magazine as its habit of
"tumbling from the sky like a toy".
So what happened last week, just ever-so-coincidentally as Rumsfeld was
being pounded for mismanaging the war? The Pentagon and its congressional
allies seized the moment to announce that the Osprey had passed its latest
tests and was that much closer to going into full production.
Hammering your enemy when he is otherwise occupied is a military doctrine
as old as the Greeks. In Washington, however, that doesn't restrict the
list of targets to a dictator in a bunker deep beneath Baghdad.
http://theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/05/1049459857141.html
