Answering some questions I would like to thank everyone for visiting my site and commenting on my translations of the Russian military intelligence reports published by www.iraqwar.ru I am happy to say that during the past week or so I received close to 2,000 e-mails from people visiting my site who thank me for the translations. (I also got two e-mails with negative comments, but, I guess, one can't make everyone happy.)
I appreciate all feedback - positive and negative - and I am sorry for not being able to respond to most of the e-mails in a timely manner. To remedy the situation I will answer some of the most frequent questions I receive. Naturally, most people are wondering where these Russian military intelligence do reports come from and why does the GRU allow such materials to be published. My answer to both questions is: I don't know. The GRU is a huge and complex organization with tens of thousands people working there. This military intelligence agency does not report directly to the Russian government. The agency's activities are dictated by national security interests as perceived by the Russian Ministry of Defense and the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. The daily GRU reports you see on www.iraqwar.ru come from an anonymous source. At first I had my doubts as to the origin and accuracy of these reports. But I found them to be very detailed and technically accurate, especially against the background of near-complete information blackout in the mainstream media. Several days into the war these GRU reports proved to be extremely accurate in their analysis of the current situation in Iraq and predictions for the near future. In my mind this, at the very least, confirms that this information is based on actual intelligence data coming from the combat zone and analyzed by professional military experts. As to "who, where, why and how" - your guess is as good mine. Another question I frequently receive is why these GRU reports concentrate so much on the coalition side of the conflict, while providing only limited insight into the Iraqi tactics and situation. A possible war between Russia and Iraq is not very high on the Russian military's list of concerns. A war between Russia and the US, on the other hand, has been more than just a possibility for well over fifty years. Naturally, the Russian military intelligence is concentrating on its most powerful, even if not the most likely, potential enemy. Many people would like to know what the Iraqi Air Force is doing. And so do me. So far there hasn’t been a single word in the news about any actions by the Iraqi combat aviation. What I find even more surprising, however, is the absence of any coalition claims of destroyed Iraqi aircraft. During the first Gulf War and all the subsequent US and British attacks against Iraq Pentagon claimed destroyed Iraqi aircraft and damaged airfields. Previously we have seen many images of such attacks but now there is a near-complete silence in this regard. Based on Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence reports just prior to the war, Iraqi combat aircraft - namely the MiG-25 long-range supersonic interceptors - were frequently testing the coalition anti-aircraft defenses by probing the "no-fly zones". No Iraqi plane has been shot down in these incidents. Numerous attempts by the US Air Force to intercept the fast-flying Iraqi "Foxbats" have failed. Western military analysts believe that the Iraqi Air Force still has about 50-75 fully-operational fixed-wing aircraft, including MiG-25 and MiG-29 fighters as well as Su-25 and Mirage F1 attack planes. And in Iraq's case, as we've found out, Western analysts have a tendency to underestimate A similar interesting situation is observed with the Iraqi air defenses: while the skies over Baghdad light up every day with dense anti-aircraft artillery fire, SAM launches have been extremely rare. At the same time we know that during the past two years Iraq has been constantly launching SAMs at the US and British aircraft patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq. In 1999 Pentagon sources reported that Iraq had around 445 SAM missile launchers of all types a nd about 2,000 hand-held anti-aircraft missiles, plus some 6,000 anti-aircraft guns. Since then the US and British warplanes attacked a number of suspected Iraqi SAM sites. However, considering the unimpressive performance of the NATO air force against Yugoslav air defenses in the spring of 1999, one can conclude that Iraq's air defense potential in 2003 was close to the numbers cited by Pentagon in 1999. According to the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, just during the first quarter of 2002 Iraq fired more several hundred SAMs against the US and British aircraft. Westerner military analysts noted that these remarkably ineffective SAM launches might have been intended to mislead Pentagon as to the true potential of the Iraqi air defenses. It has been reported that most of the Iraqi launch sites terminated guidance signals well before their missiles could have struck their targets. As a point of reference one can take the loss of 63 US and 12 allied combat aircraft, as reported by Pentagon, during the first Gulf War. At the same time the analysts noted the equally unimpressive rate success of the anti-radiation missiles launched in response by the British and the US planes. Some analysts suggested that Iraq may be testing methods and equipment to counteract the anti-radiation missiles such as the US-made HARM and the British ALARM. Both types of missiles have been found intact in Yugoslavia and might have been studied by the Iraqis given the defense cooperation between the two countries during Milosevic's presidency. What we have seen in Iraq so far in term of air defense activity are the timely warnings of US air strikes provided by Iraq's grid of early-warning radars that operate in tight coordination with each other and with a large number of decoy radars; we have also seen considerable AAA activity over Baghdad but a relatively small number of reported SAM launches. These observations are difficult to explain, especially given the absence of any significant SAM-kill claims by the coalition. Some people writing me are wondering about the accuracy of the coalition claims of Iraqi military and political leaders supposedly being killed in coalition air strikes mainly against targets in Baghdad and Basra. Among these is the recent claim of up to 200 killed Iraqi special operations troops during an air strike against a Ba'ath party's building in Basra. I do not wish to pretend to understand the logic of the Iraqi troops. Speaking for myself, however, I will have to say that the Ba'ath party headquarters in Basra would not be my first choice as a hiding place. I think this should be obvious to anyone familiar with the concept of an aviation bomb. Therefore, when the official statements by the coalition command talk about Iraqi military or political leaders being killed in strikes against various Iraqi government and military buildings in Basra, Baghdad and elsewhere - large, unprotected, stationary targets with known coordinates that already have been attacked more than once - I choose to treat such claims with skepticism. Thinking that the enemy is that much dumber than you cannot possibly be the recommended approach to winning wars. I seriously doubt that Saddam Hussein spends his afternoons drinking tea with his military's high command in the garden of his Baghdad residence. The progress of the war, if you can call it that, is also being misrepresented, to put it mildly. The mainstream media in the West seems to be entirely content with swallowing whatever information it’s given by the US and British officials, even when this information makes no sense whatsoever. I was just reading an AP report on Yahoo news from March 31 entitled “U.S. Moves to Within 50 Miles of Baghdad” and I had this strange feeling of deja-vue. Sure enough, after entering the title of this story into the Yahoo search engine I got the following title: “Troops March Within 50 Miles of Baghdad” also from AP dated March 26. Perhaps they were marching in different directions: the first time toward Baghdad and the week later – away from Baghdad? I don’t know and I don’t think the AP knows either. The situation in the media coverage of the war is unlikely to improve. Pentagon is adding further restrictions on the flow of information from Iraq that is already a trickle and the US mainstream media seems to be engaged in a very bizarre show of self-censorship. Most of you already know about the decision by NBC and by the National Geographic to fire Peter Arnett - a Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam War reporter and one of a handful of Western journalists still remaining in Baghdad. The reason for this drastic measure by the NBC and the National Geographic was Arnett's interview to the Iraqi television in which he said that the coalition's original war plans have failed and now they are searching for alternatives. By giving this interview Arnett did not brake any laws and he told the truth - exactly what a journalist should do. However, it seemed that the NBC and the National Geographic expected Arnett to push Pentagon's propaganda instead as NBC is doing here in the States. And there is no explanation and no excuse for the National Geographic getting in the middle of this - I always thought this magazine was about geography, not about the Department of Defense information war efforts. Today I called to cancel my National Geographic subscription: I like the photos but I don't like corporate politics. The US Army Central Command came down like a ton of bricks on... Heraldo, of all people. Apparently Heraldo had the misfortune of someone watching his news broadcast where he drew lines in the sand of the Iraqi desert illustrating the outlines of the Arabian Peninsula and some countries located there. Pentagon accused Heraldo of revealing secret military plans. I understand that Pentagon is fighting an information war (mainly against its own people), but this is just ridiculous. My personal view of the war is simple: I believe it should end as quickly as possible. The US and the UK should bite their pride and to withdraw as many of its troops from Iraq as they have left as soon as possible. This will save lives on all sides and this will save everybody a great deal of money and aggravation. Of course none of this will happen for no government is in business of saving lives or money. Finally I would like to address al the questions regarding reproducing translations of my articles from www.iraqwar.ru and requests for interviews: you can freely use my translations for non-profit educational use without my expressed consent as outlined in the copyright section of this page. I don not hold any rights to the original reports by "Ramzaj" appearing on www.iraqwar.ru. I do not give any interviews. If you have any questions you can e-mail me, however, due to the large number of e-mails I receive, it may be some time before you get a response. Some people have offered to mirror my Web site: this is not a good idea. My site is close to 100Gb and if you configure your Web mirroring application to follow all links, you will definitely overload the server. Also, there is an automatic process on the server adding unnecessarily active IPs to the "access denied" list. You wouldn't want to get on that list. If you need to mirror the reports about the war in Iraq, do so from the main page of my site and limit your mirror to one level below the index page. I cannot and will not accept any money from anyone. I appreciate your desire to help, but I only invest my free time into the projects like aeronautics.ru and iraqwar.ru. If you are feeling charitable, you may want to contact JERA Systems firm in Moscow - it's a small private IT company that provides my site, the Iraqwar.ru, the VIF2.ru military history portal and numerous other projects with free hosting and free technical support. They can probably use your help as the unexpected sharp increase in Web traffic put a real strain on their servers and network, slowing down their commercial projects. You can e-mail them at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Also, the Iraqwar.ru project needs volunteers who can submit interesting news reports. The site publishes samples of news reporting from a variety of sources, but we would like to widen the scope by including materials written by private citizens and news published by local media around the world. If you are willing to help, then go to www.iraqwar.ru, register and submit your materials. The site can also use English- and Russian-language editors (not necessarily professionals - simply people with good language skills) to review submitted information and approve it for publication on a volunteer basis. The project is a non-profit educational resource. Venik March 30, 2003 ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
