------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the April 10, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
THE DEATH OF A DELUSIONARY DOCTRINE: IRAQI RESISTANCE AND THE RUMSFELD STRATEGY By Fred Goldstein The heroic resistance by the people of Iraq to Washington's relentless high-tech military onslaught has inspired the world, shocked the Pentagon high command and dealt a severe blow to the Bush administration's ambitions to vastly expand U.S. capitalism's world empire. Millions of people have taken to the streets, from Indonesia to Bangladesh, from Seoul to San Francisco, from Syria and Morocco to the Philippines, marching on the U.S. and British embassies and their own governments, demanding an end to the criminal war of aggression, the bombing of cities and towns, and the massacre of civilians. The Pentagon has brought enough cruise missiles, bombs, rockets, aerial machine guns, tanks, and armored personnel carriers to launch a world war. The U.S. military has bombed Baghdad, including working class districts, markets, the telephone system, a maternity hospital, television stations and government buildings. It has launched attacks on major cities and towns such as Karbala, Najaf, An Nasiriyah and Samawa. The British have attacked Basra for two weeks running, bombing this city of 1.5 million and sending rockets and mortars into civilian areas. The Iraqi people have answered by defending the cities, digging in for the battle of Baghdad, and opening up a widespread, classical campaign of guerrilla warfare to impede the advance of the imperialist forces. RESISTANCE BRINGS SPLIT IN U.S. MILITARY The national resistance of the Iraqi people to colonial invasion and occupation has revealed the complete bankruptcy of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's war strategy and opened up a deep split in the U.S. military and a hail of criticism of the "war plan." The capitalist media suddenly became brave enough to criticize the Rumsfeld strategy--but only because they were speaking for a large section of the military brass who have been opposed to this strategy for over a year. The humiliation of the Pentagon war machine by the Iraqi masses determined to defend their country opened up a torrent of criticism and "I told you so" from the Army and the Marines over failure to provide sufficient troop strength and excessive reliance on air power. The split surfaced when Gen. William Wallace, the commander of the Army forces in the Persian Gulf, was quoted in numerous publications on March 27 as saying: "The enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against because of these paramilitary forces. ...We knew they were there but we did not know how they would fight." (New York Times, March 28) Gen. Wallace spoke while visiting For ward Operating Base Shell where the 101st Airborne was stationed. He was "stating aloud what many soldiers have been saying privately," continued the Times. "The general said that during this week's battle for the town of Najaf, south of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, Iraqi men in trucks took on American tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, with nothing more than light arms mounted in the beds of pickup trucks. "'Technical vehicles with .50 caliber weapons-any kind of weapon-leading the charge,' the general said, incredulous. 'They were charging tanks and Bradley's.' He termed the behavior 'bizarre.'" Then came the phrase that touched off a virtual civil war in the high command. Said Wallace, "I've got to give my best military judgment, given the weather, the long lines of communication, and given that we have to pull up our long line of logistics. We've got to take this pause. We're still fighting the enemy every night." This was echoed on the same day by the chief of staff of the First Marine Division, Col. Ben Saylor. "We've been contested every inch, every mile on the way up." It is no accident that the Army and Marines have led the criticism. The ground troops under those commanders have to face the masses of the Iraqi people, have to feel the fury of the national resistance. These troops on the ground have been utterly unprepared to fight against a popular war. Unlike that of the officer pilots who bomb with impunity, and of the naval forces that are far from the battlefield and well protected, the ground troops' morale is sinking, creating a dire situation for the brass. IGNORED THEIR OWN INTELLIGENCE WARNINGS Shortly after Wallace's public outburst, a spate of articles exposing the long and intense struggles in the Pentagon over the war plan began to appear in the capitalist press. A long and detailed inside account by Seymour Hersh appeared in the New Yorker magazine cover-dated April 7. Another extensive article in the London Guardian of March 29 revealed that Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the Central Command, had sent Rumsfeld a plan requesting 400,000 troops before the campaign began. "An angry Rumsfeld sent it back three times," wrote the Guardian, "on each occasion asking for a cut in the number of soldiers needed for the job, so that at the outset of the war, Franks had seen his forces reduced to 250,000." And of those 250,000, only 90,000 were in the theater when the war started. Most important, the Guardian revealed that, "Last month, the CIA issued a report saying that paramilitary units loyal to Saddam Hussein would threaten the rear of an advance on Baghdad. Similar warnings came from the Defense Intelligence Agency inside the Pentagon during the months leading up to the war." In fact, Orville Schell, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 31, quoted Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz: "People say to me, 'You are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps.' I reply, let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles." He had said this to a University of Warwick researcher six months ago. How can it be that the Pentagon and the White House ignored not only the Iraqis, but the CIA and the DIA, both of whom have huge budgets just for the purpose of finding out such information? How could Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Under secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, all of whom planned this war, put the U.S. military effort at such a risk in the face of blunt warnings by their own spy agencies? The most important thing to note about the controversy over the war plan is that it is entirely superficial. The dispute has been reduced to a question of judgment. In fact, it is not merely a question of poor judgment on Rumsfeld's part. It is a question of ideology and world outlook that underlies the disastrous miscalculation. DOCTRINE OF WORLD DOMINATION The Bush administration developed its doctrine of world domination in a National Security Strategy document of September 2002. This is an evolution of the Defense Planning Guidance first promulgated in March 1992, authored by Wolfowitz and approved and later modified by Cheney. It has been brought up to date and couched in language about countering terrorism. But it basically asserts the right of U.S. imperialism to intervene and remove any government that Washington deems a threat. The document further flatly states that no power or combination of powers shall be allowed to challenge the world supremacy of the Pentagon. Such an outrageously aggressive and delusionary political doctrine, which proclaims the intention of U.S. imperialism to dominate the globe and its population of 6 billion people, must of necessity have an enabling military doctrine that can envision such a world conquest within the means available to U.S. capitalism. Richard Perle, recently deposed as chair of the Defense Policy Board, who had been a Rumsfeld appointee and an architect of this war, told PBS last July 11 that the Iraqi government was "a house of cards ... Support for Saddam, including within his military, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder." And Paul Wolfowitz, speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on March 11, said his Iraqi contacts in the United States tell him that "their friends and relatives want to know what is taking the Americans so long. When are you coming?" These are the ideological and doctrinal collaborators of Rumsfeld. Their miscalculation stems from the absolute need for this strategy to work. It must work, or their doctrine of world domination falls to earth. The Rumsfeld military doctrine--the supremacy of air power, high technology and threats of "shock and awe"--is a 21st-century version of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy. It harkens back to an era when the masses of the world were as yet isolated from one another, cut off from modern technology, military means, means of communication, and historical experience of struggle and organization. It recalls the era when British gunboats could sail to the coast of China or Africa and fire their cannons--a vastly superior military technology at the time-- and devastate a coastal area in order to bring the local rulers into submission. Or when Commodore Matthew C. Perry "opened up" Japan in the 1860s by sailing his fleet into the harbor, firing menacing cannon rounds, and demanding trading rights and other concessions. This was the "shock and awe" of the 19th century, which is being resurrected for the 21st century with computer-guided bombs instead of cannon balls. THE FATAL FLAW IN THEIR DOCTRINE Its two principal and interconnected assumptions are that Washington can get its way by threatening governments into submission or changing "regimes" around the globe so as to establish absolute sovereignty and domination. And that the people of the world are an inert mass--they are mere objects sufficiently disorganized and non-threatening that they do not have to be taken into account as the fundamental factor in world history. All that is needed is to send some smart bombs, cruise missiles, killer helicopters and computerized tanks, and U.S. domination is assured. This, of course, is a necessary military doctrine for any faction of the ruling class that dreams of establishing a world empire. It means that you don't have to use millions of soldiers to go kill and be killed in massive combat. It means that the role of the infantry and the marines is to go in and "mop up" after murderous bombardments and then be transitional occupation forces helping to usher in new puppet governments that will do the beck and call of Washington. It means that the working class here being sent to the wars of conquest will not have to undergo hardships; will not rebel against being used as shock troops for the transnational corporations and the oil companies. It means the ruling class can have "endless war " abroad and social stability at home. But the Iraqi government, which has become a government of national resistance, and the Iraqi people in every city, town and village, have already proven decisively on the ground that the Rumsfeld strategy, and the Bush doctrine of empire that it is calculated to uphold, are false to the core. The forces of this mighty imperialist power have had to fight every inch of the way against a small, impoverished country, weakened by 12 years of sanctions and bombing. The immediate danger is that these war criminals, in order to vindicate their bankrupt strategy, shall try to produce a victory by intensifying their already unspeakable crimes against the Iraqi people. They feel that they have enough military power to compensate for their staggering miscalculations of the resistance, and will wade through rivers of blood to avoid the ultimate humiliation of defeat. The worldwide anti-war movement must do all possible to show total solidarity with the Iraqi people and whatever is necessary to stop this criminal war. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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