Iraq Conflict At Stalemate After Nine Days
Differing Criteria For Victory Gives Edge To Iraq
3/28/03 9:41:56 PM
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Bill White
Commentary / Analysis -- The US-British attack on Iraq, what some might call the "Purim War", is at a stalemate tonight, and the longer it persists at that stalemate the greater the advantage will be for the Iraqi forces, and the greater the likelihood of the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in a negotiated ceasefire -- otherwise known as an Iraqi victory -- will be.
This is clearly a war that Iraq feels it is winning, and a war that has caused great concern for the planners at the Pentagon. In a fight where your opponent is expected to cream you, just being able to hang in there until the end is a victory, and given that there is no reason to believe that Saddam Hussein has ever had any goal except to weather out the US-UK attack and force them to expend their resources, ever day Saddam Hussein hangs in there is another day of victory for his forces.
The US and the UK have started to seriously expend both their supplies and their munitions, and must continue to do so in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the numerically superior Iraqi forces. The US and the UK have consumed more than 1/3rd of their cruise missiles, 1/4 of their precision munitions, and 3/5th of their repair parts. 1/5th of the armored vehicles in their advance units in the Third Infantry are disabled and awaiting repair; almost the entirety of the Apache helicopters that have been deployed to the region are disabled after another massive failed attack on the Medina division.
Plus, the Iraqis seem to be defeating the US air assault with the low-tech battle tactic of "hiding". Though US airpower has been touted, in Serbia and in Afghanistan, massive aerial bombardment of vehicles, artillery pieces, or men that were merely hidden or concealed with plain camoflauge, have allowed, generally, for a 98% survival rate among the targets. Osama bin Laden mentioned in one videotaped address that the allied bombardment of Tora Bora, which destroyed mountains (who were, unfortunately, too big to hide), killed about 2% of this force. Similarly, the Serbian army lost approximately 2% of its armed forces during the entire Kosovo campaign. There is no reason to believe that the allied aerial bombardment of Iraqi positions is causing much more than a 2% attrition of targeted Iraqi units; thus, it is clear that the air defenses the US faced on its first helicopter attack -- air defenses composed primarily of small arms -- were not significantly degraded when the United States counter attacked today.
Without its air power, the United States is helpless in desert terrain. It's heat sensors don't work. It's vehicles break down. It's troops get lost in sandstorms. And it is vulnerable to enemy attack.
Over the past 48 hours, battles have raged all along the Euphrates. The Iraqis ambushed the coalition forces near Karbela and Najaf, and the coalition forces were driven back. The Iraqis took 1300 casulaties in that attack -- 300 killed among them. The American took 160 casulaties and lost both ground and the initiative. Very few of the Iraqi casualties are members of the Iraqi army; very few of them had proper weapons or represented any investment of resources by the Iraqi government. Many of them launched primitive suicide attacks, ramming pickup trucks into tanks, ineffectively. Some of them, more effectively, destroyed about 30 US armored vehicles and captured a fully operational Abrams tanks. The Iraqis viewed the operation as a great success.
That perception is key. The Iraqis are waging jihad -- real jihad. They are fighting against foreign invaders on Muslim land. Plus, they have seen what Zionist occupation means (if only more American could see it!), and they know that if the Jewish-dominated United States is allowed to occupy Iraq, they will inflict on the Iraqis the same terror that Zionist occupiers inflict in Palestine. So when an Iraqi man picks up a gun and jumps in his pickup truck and launches a suicide attack on an American tank that he stands little chance of even damaging, he does so because he knows that he has to do so to protect his family and his children from the horrors of Jewish government.
There is no greater testimony to the absolute vaccum of immorality and total lack of ethical notions in the Jewish religion than that.
As to the practical military planners, they know almost all the US has fought so far has been militia and armed civilians of various sorts. They have 22 million of these people -- they have an essentially unlimited reserve. They could 1000 people a day in suicide attacks that took 100 US soldiers out of the battle, and they have enough men that they could do that and still have about the same population they started with.
There is a fundamental difference in the psychology of fighting in the US and in Iraq; each US life is precious -- it is perceived as precious to the US public, it represents a high investment in training, and it is part of a very small force -- and the US thus has to minimize casualties. The Iraqi military views their lives as cheap -- they have a lot of them, they are poorly trained, and they are poorly armed, and they are part of a religiong that views death in battle as an ideal to be celebrated, and not something to be avoided. Thus, the Iraqis could fight the US and take casulaties on a ten to one ratio and still win the war. That's what the Vietnamese did, though their ratio was more like 400 to 1 instead of 10 to 1.
Now the Iraqis have lost some armored vehicles in addition to their personnel, but the armored vehicles they are losing are crap. They are losing old T-55 tanks and old 1970s era Russian APCs. The US is losing Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters. The Iraqis have thousands of them as well, and could burn through that stuff from now until forever. The US has only a small number of tanks and helicopters in the region. And think about what the Iraqis might win to compensate for these losses -- a permanent end to US trade sanctions, an end to UN sanctions and the ability to sell oil and purchase weapons on the open market. Given what their equipment is worth -- I could buy a (disarmed) tank like the ones the Iraqi use on the legal civilian market in the United States for less than a new car -- they could lose their entire low-end tank force and still turn a profit on the war. How could the US possibly profit as a nation (and not as a few individuals who capitalize on the losses of the whole) from this war?
And then there is the second thing here, which is the value of the US equipment the Iraqis are capturing. It's true that the Iraqis can't do much with it themselves; they don't have the in house capability and the research facilities and the production facilities to start churning out Abrams tanks (though give them a few years of study and that might change.) But the Russians do. And so do the Chinese. And now they have all this top secret US equipment in their hands, they have two nations which are pissed at the US, and they are in desperate need of weapons -- and that sounds like the basis for a trade. If the US captures a T-55 tank, that's worthless; if the Iraqis capture an Abrams, that's worth more than gold
So the war that is being fought here is being judged on the two sides by totally different criteria. In the West we're trained to believe that one human life is worth as much as another, so when we see the Iraqis have about 1200-ish KIA so far, and we have about 300ish (I need to count them up), we think "Ah-ha! We are winning!" But the truth is that the Iraqis we are killing, as soldiers and as economic units, are not worth a fraction what one of our soldiers, and thus we would have to do as we expected, and defeat the Iraqis on 2000 to 1 or more ratio, to achieve the "cakewalk" victory that had been talked about beforehand.
The US has barely engaged the Iraqi army, and it is clear, from the simple fact that the Iraqi government has been able to make very specific claims, and from the fact that the Iraqi government has been broadcasting on its television nothing but wrecked American and British vehicles and American and British war dead, that the ability of the Iraqi government to control its units in the field is solid even though the US and UK have destroyed those nodes that they thought were central to communications and command and control.
Then there is the greater issue, which is the very thin and vulnerable supply lines and choke points the US and UK are using. If Nasiriyah, for instance, were to fall tomorrow, 4000 US Marines would be isolate and surrounded, and the Third Infantry would be in real, real bad supply shape. All the US forward units have been ordered to cut their rations to one meal a day, and they have been ordered not to move, among other reasons, because the US does not have enough fuel in the region to be able to supply them to keep their vehicles moving. US tanks are being turned into armored pillboxes, and those pillboxes are being overwhelmed in Iraqi ambushes. Further, though US morale is still high, how long can you live on one meal a day, no sleep, no fuel and limited ammunition, before you start to degrade. The soldiers are grumbling after nine days in the field. Let them not eat for another weak and see where they are. And if water gets cut off and the desert temperatures start getting hot -- forget about it -- they will either be forced to surrender or recalled back home.
And that is the real danger. If a brigade of US forces gets surrounded and cut off, and, already low on supplies, runs out of supplies, and is compelled to surrender, the Bush Presidency, the Jewish presence in the White House, and this war is over. Finite. Done. The US public will not tolerate even 2,000 prisoners of war. There would be fighting in the streets and a permanent hatred of the military.
Hussein's best hope for victory -- and it may come -- would be to cut off a major unit of US forces and compel their surrender. If he achieves that, he will win -- and the current US situation means he may achieve that.
The trouble with the US leaders is two-fold: They walked in expecting a cakewalk, and now that they have made mistakes, they refuse to do the things they need to do to consolidate, because they are afraid those things would constitute an admission of mistake. Not only have they done something wrong, but they refuse to admit their errors. And while being tricked by the Jews -- particularly during a long streak of things that have gone mostly okay (9-11 being a big exception) is one thing. If they apologized, made things right, and stepped down, that would be okay -- they could be rehabilitated. But not being able to admit their mistake, and persisting in mistaken actions once they know they are wrong, is unforgivable -- and the families of the people they condemn to suffering should never forget it.
Eventually Hussein is going to win a significant victory. The rules of probability demand it. He has enough forces that he can launch hundreds of attacks if he desires. Each individual attack may have little chance of succeeding, but together the attack guarantee at least one major success. Hussein has had several minor successes, and the only variable preventing him from successfully achieving a major success is the amount of time he's had to achieve it. If he continues to survive -- and he must, since the US can't beat him strategically at this point -- then he will eventually achieve a major tactical victory, and at that point the US will withdraw in disgrace.
Since the US-UK attack force is doomed to fail, the US should take Hussein up on the backchannel peace overtures that have been made, or should make new overtures themselves, and they should conclude an agreement to withdraw, normalize relations with Iraq, and allow others to normalize relations with Iraq.
That conclusion is now the inevitable result of this conflict, at it is one the US and the UK should accept now and try to work for their advantage, instead of refusing and allowing it to be forced on them.
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