<If at first you don't succeed, lie and lie again" seems to be the watchword of the floundering Bush administration.>
Indeed, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That is the conclusion of the second team of weapons sleuths commanded by the US in Iraq, as reported last week in the Los Angeles Times. This expanded 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group found just what the first wave of US military experts and the UN inspectors before them found - NOTHING. Not a vial of the 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin or a drop of the 25,000 litres of anthrax or an ounce of the materials for the 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent - all claimed by George W Bush in his State of the Union speech as his justification for war. Nor has any sign of an advanced Iraqi nuclear weapons program been found.
Here the situation descends below moral rock bottom. Many Americans have already died in Iraq and they are still dying there almost daily. Between 30,000 and 40,000 ill trained Iraqi conscript troops have died and between 8,000 and 14,000 civilians. Nobody can find Saddam Hussein, everybody knows where George W Bush is.
On August 22, 2003, the top four-star general responsible for supplying US troops admitted that the Department of Defense planners blew it by not anticipating a long occupation and mounting casualties. As a result of their failures, some of the army's combat soldiers will be out of action, periodically, while their vehicles are broken down and/or being repaired. Militarily, this is dismal. The US has 16 of its total 33 brigades in Iraq. If this four-star general is correct (and there is no reason to doubt him), the US is now in the process of grinding half of its effective army into ruins in the sands of Iraq. This is not strategy, this is insanity.
General Paul Kern, who is the chief of the Army Materiel Command, cited as an example, the Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, which he said have now sustained so much wear and tear in Iraq that the army is many months short of replacements for the steel tracks on which they travel. General Kern said the army is also short of replacement tracks for Abrams tanks, Paladin howitzers, and other vehicles. The army has had trouble supplying enough tires for Humvee utility vehicles and generators for electrical power, General Kern said in an interview with a group of reporters at the Pentagon. This is public knowledge for anybody with internet access who knows how to search for information. But the US media has done very little or nothing to inform the American public about any of these military facts.
"We're going to be in trouble a year from now if we don't handle force strength", says General Barry McCaffrey, who led a US division in the earlier 1991 Gulf War. "We are in a global war on terror with inadequate forces", says General McCaffrey who is now a professor of national security studies at West Point. The US, which currently has some 368,000 army soldiers deployed in 120 nations, is at risk of overextending its troops. But let the historical facts be known before the real history is even written. The US army stood firmly against this Iraq enterprise right from the start. Officers and Generals without number have spoken out against it and are, as can be seen, still speaking out - at the risk of their commissions and careers. It is NOT and will NOT be possible for any politician to claim ignorance.
Currently, a massive air lift is taking place from the US mainland to Iraq in which supplies are carried to the US forces in Iraq. This airlift includes such heavyweight items as tanks, tracks, etc., etc.. Yes, the US has a huge global air lift capacity and supplying by air is fast. But it is no substitute for proper heavy duty logistics - and that means delivery by sea. This is where a small map exercise comes in handy. It takes no cartographic expertise to see that the only somewhat substantial port which the US has available to supply its Iraq force is Kuwait. There is just that one port. Find Kuwait on any map and look a little further around. Another grim bottleneck will quickly be discovered - the Straits of Hormuz.
In full neo-classical military terms, here we have a large forward deployed force now centred around Baghdad with a long land corridor behind it to its only supply port in Kuwait. Further behind we have the bottleneck of Hormuz. Hormuz is the real strategic danger point. If Iran were to decide to act, it could militarily close the Straits of Hormuz, likely for weeks. The US force around Baghdad would then die on the vine, unable to get anything but emergency airlift re-supply. If there is anybody in Iran now watching all this with care (and there is), they will see the US force in Iraq grinding itself into a state of ever greater immobility as its tires and tracks wear out. The strategic opportunity grows ever larger to the extent this happens. A sudden closure of the Straits of Hormuz would leave the US army as badly trapped as was the German Sixth Army around Stalingrad. This is NO idle conjecture. All across the West, there are military strategists and risk analysts who have already worked this one out. So have many responsible strategists and analysts INSIDE the US. Nobody listens to them.
It is to be hoped that the mad Mullahs in Iran do not give in to this huge and growing temptation.
Secretary of State Powell is now trying to do a full speed "handbrake turn" in the UN Security Council. It amounts to saying this: "You were right. We're stuck in Iraq. Now HELP - dam-mit." The US draft proposal now circulating calls for other nations to supply troops (as well as pay for their cost of deployment) to buttress the overextended US forces now in Iraq, while leaving an American General in overall command of this supposed "UN" occupation force.
Amongst the nations to which this request has been made are the "old Europeans" (Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld's slur on France and Germany), the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" (a favourite US media description of the French) and the "chocolate makers", a slur which was heard as recently as September 2, 2003 when the Bush Administration officially publicly sneered at the plans by four European countries to create an independent European military command headquarters near Brussels. These headquarters would be separate from NATO. When the plan was first discussed in Europe back in April, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher scoffed at Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg, describing their meeting as one between: "Four countries that got together and had a little bitty summit". He then referred to them all collectively as: "the chocolate makers".
This is the kind of "diplomacy" one sees in a sandbox when the kiddies are overdue for their naps. One could not blame the UN representatives of the four nations in question if they all got together to present Mr Powell with four boxes of their very best chocolates when they next see him at the UN.
Moving on from the frivolity, the very real problem with State Department spokesman Boucher's comments on September 2 is simply that France and Germany are two of the very few nations in the UN which stand with unused military forces on a scale that would help - a bit - to close the gap in Iraq. Making this harder is the fact that both France and Germany stand with budget deficits which are beyond the acceptable EU limit of 3% of GDP. To supply these additional forces to the US would require an even deeper dive into deficits. France has acted at its own presidential level by stepping right over all the Iraq and Middle East problems. They have proposed a genuine NEW trans-Atlantic alliance with the central premise of full equality between the US and Europe - at ALL levels. Nobody has paid any attention to this in Washington. For the Bush Administration, it is US supremacy or nothing.
To say that the talks in the UN Security Council will be tortuous would be to sadly underestimate the case. In public, American officials are pushing hard for the final adoption of a text by September 23, when President George Bush is due to address the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly. Washington will look for help from Britain, which this month holds the rotating Presidency of the Security Council.
By September 23, the US, for public consumption at least, fully expects to obtain a full UN Security Council Resolution authorizing elements of other nations' forces to be shipped to Iraq and commanded by a US General so President Bush can address the General Assembly and the world about "his" achievements in Iraq - with a full UN seal of approval. Somebody in the White House must be hallucinating.
By now, there is no desk officer in any nation who has not read the CBO report detailing the overextension of US forces. There is no Military Attache who has not read, verbatim, the Pentagon press conference by the US four-star General Paul Kern. All over the world, these officers have gone to their ministers and laid out the stark scenario: By March 2004 - without vast additional support from other nations - the US must act to diminish its forces in Iraq and likely lose military control on the ground. The "solution" is obvious. Stall long enough in the UN and the US will have to leave Iraq on its own. |
