The Idiot Prince Will Have His War
by Stan Goff
© Copyright 2003, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be
reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
[FTW asked retired U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff to re-examine what we can
expect on the battlefield when the United States begins its invasion. The former instructor of military
science at West Point describes a scenario that is vastly different from what was expected last
September before the Bush administration encountered effective economic and political opposition.
Now denied the luxuries of a multi-front invasion from Turkey and Saudi Arabia the U.S. war
strategy has changed. The bottom line is that a great many more innocent civilians are going to be
killed. And the first and possibly crippling breakdown of U.S. plans will happen in Kurdestan. –
MCR]
March 17, 2003, 1500 hrs PST (FTW) -- The full-scale, unilateral US invasion of
Iraq appears – to many – to be imminent as this is written. In just hours President
Bush is expected to give Saddam Hussein a 72-hour ultimatum to leave the
country or else the bombs start falling. I have a reservation or two left about that,
based partly on hope, but partly on the even riskier assumption that this
administration realizes that it has miscalculated and that the consequences of
invasion may now outweigh the risks – from their standpoint – of no invasion.
The Bush regime seems to have a clear understanding of what desperate straits
they were in well before 9-11. The empire is in decline, and this means Americans
will have to reconcile themselves to a new world in which their profligate lifestyle
becomes a thing of the past. Americans do not understand that this is an
irremediable situation. That is why we are witnessing the beginning of what is
possibly the most dangerous period in human history.
If the administration decides miraculously in the next few days not to invade, the
most unthinkable risks will recede significantly. But this Junta has repeatedly
displayed a reckless adventurist streak that alarms even their own political allies,
and it appears that the hotter heads will prevail.
The actual tactical situation, never terribly auspicious because of the Kurdish wild
card that receives far too little attention (and which I will address later), has
deteriorated for the US. The denial of a ground front from both Saudi Arabia and
Turkey has completely reshuffled the tactical deck, and caused many a sleepless
night for harried commanders from Task Force Headquarters all the way down to
lonely infantry platoon leaders.
The ground attack will now go through Kuwait, a single front across which an
unbelievable series of heavy, expensive, high-maintenance convoys will pass, many
on long journeys to 18 provincial capitals, 19 military bases, 8 major oil fields, over
1,000 miles of pipeline, key terrain along minority Shia and Kurdish regions, as well
as Baghdad. But attacking forces are not the only mechanized ground forces.
The huge logistical trains that must consolidate objectives, set up long-term lines
of communication, and deliver daily support, will also be held up until airheads are
seized within Iraq to augment ground transportation with airlifts of people and
equipment. This shifts a higher emphasis onto airhead seizures (and therefore
Ranger units), and forces the security of the airheads themselves before they can
become fully functional.
Baghdad may require a siege, which has already been planned, but now that siege
doesn’t begin without a much lengthier invasion timeline that depends much more
heavily on airborne and airmobile forces that can be dropped onto key facilities to
hold them until mechanized reinforcement can arrive. At this writing, the 101st
Airborne (which is actually a helicopter division) has not even completed its
deployment into the region. Sections of the 82nd Airborne (a genuine paratroop
division) are still occupying Afghanistan.
The increased dependence on airlift is further complicated by weather. While
extreme summer heat doesn’t reach Iraq until May, the pre-summer sand storms
have already begun. US commanders have pooh-poohed the effect of these
storms, but they are simply putting on a brave face for the public. Sand can be a
terrible enemy. It clogs engine intakes, just as it clogs eyes and noses, gathers in
the folds of skin, falls in food, works its way into every conceivable piece of
equipment, and takes a miserable toll on materiel, machinery and troops. When air
operations become more critical to overall mission accomplishment, and when light
forces (like airmobile and airborne divisions) are operating independent of heavier
mechanized logistics, weather like sand storms matters...a lot.
The order of battle is widely available on the web, and there's no reason to recount
it here. The reason is, even with all these debilities and setbacks, the results of
the invasion are certain. Iraq will be militarily defeated and occupied. There will be
no sustained Iraqi guerrilla resistance. There will be no Stalingrad in Baghdad. We
should not buy into the US bluster about their invincibility, but neither should we
buy into Iraqi bluster.
Last September retired Marine General Paul Van Riper was selected to play the
Opposing Forces (OPFOR) Commander named Saddam Hussein for a 3-week-long,
computer simulated invasion of Iraq, called Operation Millennium Challenge.
He defeated the entire multi-billion-dollar US electronic warfare intelligence
apparatus by sending messages via motorcycle-mounted couriers to organize the
preemptive destruction of sixteen US ships, using pleasure vessels. At that point,
the exercise controllers repeatedly intervened and told him what to do; move these
defenders off the beach. Stop giving out commands from mosque loudspeakers.
Turn on your radar so our planes can see you. Because every time Van Riper was
left to his own devices, he was defeating the US.
While all this is surely amusing, does it really mean the Iraqis will defeat the US
during an invasion?
Certainly not. It will, however, make it far more expensive, slow, difficult, and
deadly for Iraqis.
The Iraqi military won't prevail because they can't. They are weak,
under-resourced, poorly led, and demoralized. What the delays mean is that the
US will depend on sustaining the initiative and momentum through brutal,
incessant bombing designed to destroy every soldier, every installation, every
vehicle, every field kitchen in the Iraqi military.
War will inflict terrifying casualties on the Iraqi military. There will be collateral
damage to civilians, even with attempts to attenuate that damage, and in case we
fail to remember, soldiers are like everyone else. They have families and loved ones.
What is uncertain is the aftermath.
This is the variable that is never factored into the thinking of our native political
lumpen-bourgeoisie; their deeds plant the seeds of future and furious resistance.
If half million Iraqi soldiers die, and 100,000 civilians are killed in collateral damage,
we have to remember that there are at least (for the sake of argument) five people
who intensely love each of the dead. And if we think of the grief of millions after
this slaughter, and of the conversion of that grief into rage, and combine that with
the organization of the internecine struggles based on historical ethnic fault lines
(that the Ba'ath Party has repressed), we begin to appreciate the explosive
complexity of post-invasion Iraq.
This invasion will also ignite the fires of Arab and Muslim humiliation and anger
throughout the region.
Most importantly, in my view, there are the Kurds.
Anyone who has followed the news has heard about "Saddam's" gassing of the
Kurds. That's how it is portrayed. Nonetheless, few people have bothered to find
out what the truth is, or even to investigate this claim.
Stephen Pelletiere was the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on
Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. He was also a professor at the Army War College
from 1988 to 2000. In both roles, he had access to classified material from
Washington related to the Persian Gulf. In 1991, he headed an Army investigation
into Iraqi military capability. That classified report went into great detail on Halabja.
Halabja is the Kurdish town where hundreds of people were apparently poisoned in
a chemical weapons attack in March 1988. Few Americans even knew that much.
They only have the article of religious faith, "Saddam gassed his own people."
In fact, according to Pelletiere – an ex-CIA analyst, and hardly a raging leftist like
yours truly – the gassing occurred in the midst of a battle between Iraqi and
Iranian armed forces.
Pelletiere further notes that a "need to know" document that circulated around the
US Defense Intelligence Agency indicated that US intelligence doesn't believe it was
Iraqi chemical munitions that killed and aimed the Kurdish residents of Halabja. It
was Iranian. The condition of the bodies indicated cyanide-based poisoning. The
Iraqis were using mustard gas in that battle. The Iranians used cyanide.
The lack of public critical scrutiny of this and virtually all current events is also
evident on the issue of the Kurds themselves.
That issue will come out into the open, with the vast area that is Kurdistan, with
its insurgent armed bodies, overlaying Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and even parts of Syria,
which will realign the politics and military of the entire region in yet unpredictable
ways.
As part of the effort to generate an Iraqi opposition, the US has permitted
Northern Iraqi Kurdistan to exercise a strong element of national political
autonomy since the 1991 war. This is a double-edged sword for the US in its
current war preparations, particularly given this administration’s predisposition for
pissing all over its closest allies. Iraq's Northern border is with Turkey, who has for
years favored the interests of its own Turkmens in Southern Turkish Kurdistan at
the expense of the Kurds, who have waged a guerrilla war for self-determination
against the Turks since the 1970s.
The Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan or PKK) (Kurdish Worker's Party), Turkish Kurds
fighting for an independent Kurdish state in southeast Turkey, was singled out on
the US international terrorist organization list several years ago, in deference to
fellow NATO member, Turkey. PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan is so popular with the
Kurds that Turkey was forced to commute his death sentence, subsequent to his
capture, to life imprisonment, for fear that his execution would spark an uprising.
Other non-leftist Kurdish independence organizations developed and alternatively
allied with and split with the PKK and each other. Turkey now claims that PKK
bases are being constructed in Iran, with Iranian complicity, from which to launch
strikes against Southern Turkey. Groups other than the PKK, more acceptable to
the US, predominantly the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Kurdistan
Patriotic Union (PUK) have been administering Northern Iraqi Kurdistan as an
autonomous zone under the protective umbrella of the US no-fly zone. The
Turkish government fears the influence of this section of Kurdistan in the wake of a
US military action that topples Saddam Hussein’s Ba'ath government, because
Kurds have declared their intention of declaring an independent Kurdish state
there. The Turks find this absolutely unacceptable, and have declared forthrightly
they will invade to prevent this happening. They have also threatened to attack
Kurds in Iran, but this is a far less credible threat.
Kurdish nationalists have long experience with betrayals and alliances of
convenience, and know American perfidy very well. They have declared at the
outset that in the event of an invasion, they will defend themselves from Turkish
incursions. They are not willing to lose the autonomy they have gained over the
last eleven years in Northern Iraq. This not only puts them at odds with US ally
Turkey, it potentially puts them at odds with the US itself, even with US wishes
that they participate in indigenous actions against Iraqi forces. The US does not
want that region destabilized in the post-invasion period, because Kirkuk in the
East of Iraqi Kurdistan is a huge oil producing zone.
The very first complication of post-invasion Iraq will likely be the demand that US
commanders disarm the Kurds.
Northern Iraq could easily become contested terrain involving partisan warfare
between Turks, Kurds of three factions, the Iranians, and the US, with the Syrians
in a position to play the silent interloper. This would amount to the devolution of
Northern Iraq, a key strategic region, into another Afghanistan or Somalia. It is
already straining relationships between Turkey and the United States, NATO allies,
even as the NATO alliance itself comes under severe strain, with a Euro-American
trade war as a backdrop.
And the Kurds have the motivation, tenacity, and fighting spirit to do those kinds
of things that General Van Riper did to defeat the Rumsfeld "Robo-Military" in
Operation Millennium Challenge.
We begin to see how the Bush Junta is the equivalent of a mad bee keeper, that
no longer leaves the hive stable and merely smokes it into a stupor to harvest the
honey. It now proposes to simply start swatting all the bees and taking the honey
by brute force.
We cannot see the war as an extricable, external phenomenon. We have to see it
as it is embedded in the larger complexities of the whole period. When the cruise
missiles fly at 400 per day, that is 400 times $1.3 million in self-destructing
technology. 30 days of this is $15.6 billion in Cruise missiles alone. This is great
news for Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin, but it is bad news for public schools. At
the antiwar demonstration in Washington DC, March 15th, I met many more
teachers, now wearing buttons that said "money for education not war." This is a
reflection of the deepening consciousness of the American people, but one that
has not yet grasped the depth of the crisis that drives the war. Nor does it
measure how every missile’s impact increases the rage of the Southwestern Asian
masses and the justifiable anxieties of Africa and East Asia.
The real bet that Bush & Co. make on this war is that it can secure oil at $15 a
barrel, rescue dollar hegemony, gain the ability to wage its economic war on China
and Europe, and inaugurate a fresh upwave of real profit. That will not happen.
When the invasion goes, we will certainly see plenty of images of cheering
"liberated" Iraqis. This is common after any successful military incursion, a
combination of real relief in some cases, as we saw in the first stage of the 1994
Haiti invasion, but also of self-defense and opportunism.
The costs incurred by the war, combined with the insane Bush tax cuts for the
rich, will deepen the Bush regime’s economic conundrums. The coming social crisis
in the US will emerge against a backdrop of elevated public expectations. The
hyperbole employed by this administration to justify this war, against rapidly
strengthening resistance and a corresponding loss of credibility outside the
indoctrinated and gullible United States, led them to warn the public about
perpetual "war on terror," but with the sugar coating that there would be no
domestic economic sacrifice. The mountain of personal and institutional debt in the
US, the threat of deflation, the trade deficit, the overcapacity, the rising
unemployment and insecurity, all these factors will be worsened by the Bush
doctrines. And Bush, like his father before him, will go down. Along with him, Tony
Blair and Jose Maria Aznar will go down in political flames, and it will be a long time
indeed before anyone can align themselves with the US as an ally. As in the last
elections for the Republic of Korea, candidates will find that election victory depends
on now independent one can prove oneself of the United States.
We have had our course charted now, and the military option is all the US ruling
class really has to maintain its dominance. After Iraq, there will certainly be
increased asymmetric warfare, "terrorism," if you will, directed at Americans,
American institutions, American targets. And when the rest of the world recognizes
how thinly spread the US military is, thinly spread physically, but also economically
because it is not a sustainable institution in its current incarnation, rebellions will
occur. They have already started. Then the response of the weakening US will be
to lash out, often with totally unforeseeable consequences, just as the
consequences of this impending invasion are unforeseeable.
Our military might is no longer a sign of strength, and the US military is not
invincible. Its use as both first and last resort is a sign of profound systemic
weakness. That its employment could destabilize the world, and cause us to
stumble into a Third World War is a real possibility.
We in the antiwar movement have struggled to protect the Iraqi people. We may
fail in that. But as resistance fighters in WWII or national liberation fighters in the
post-colonial era, we must differentiate setbacks from defeat, when we suffer
those setbacks we can not be demoralized and demobilized. We will keep our eyes
on the fact that the system itself is failing and this adventure is a symptom of that
failure, and continue to work for the political destruction of our current regime as a
tactical necessity. The perfect storm is coming. It's in the genetic code of the
system right now and inevitable. And while we don't know how it will look, we have
to keep our eyes on the prize - emancipation from the whole system, and let that
be our lodestar. Never quit. Never. We are in the stream of history, and we have
been given a grave and momentous responsibility. Every day we delayed them was
a victory.
There is a long struggle ahead, and it will become more terrible. But just as those
before us fought slavery, apartheid, fascism, and colonialism, we will take up our
historical task with confidence and determination, and assert our humanity against
these gangsters.
Freedom is the recognition of necessity. |
