File spoon-archives/anarchy-list.archive/anarchy-list_2003/anarchy-list.0303, message 838


Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 15:03:37 -0500
From: Chuck0 <chuck-AT-mutualaid.org>
Subject: From "Plain Sailing" to "Where the Hell Are We?" to "Up the Creek"




-------- Original Message --------
Subject: From "Plain Sailing" to "Where the Hell Are We?" to "Up the Creek"
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 14:49:59 -0500
From: Dean Thomas <LETCAB-AT-comcast.net>
Reply-To: lbo-talk-AT-lists.panix.com
To: lbo-talk-AT-lists.panix.com



http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03272003.html
>From "Plain Sailing" to "Where the Hell Are We?" to "Up the Creek"
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Barely into its second week Operation Easy Sailing is in big trouble. One
simple way of measuring just how big is by adding up all the time you hear
the phrases "all according to Plan", and the "Our strategy is sound".

That's the captain of the Titanic speaking. At the military level the US/UK
force has been forced to suspend its advance on Baghdad. Every single dire
prediction of the critics is coming to pass. The stretched lines of
communication and supply running up west of the Euphrates past Nasiriya and
Najaf, or further east , west of the Tigris past Basra towards Amarah are
proving vulnerable to determined harassment by Iraqi forces. The Apache
helicopters have taken a fearful beating, as have the Abrams tanks. The
Shock and Awe overture saw around 400 cruise missiles, running at half a
million dollars a copy achieve less than significant damage.

Already there's fierce hand-to-hand infighting inside the Pentagon, as
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's numerous enemies in the military seek out
favored journalist to inflict punitive retaliation for what they describe as
his arrogance and folly. Those old lines from the Vietnam era, such as
"light at the end of the tunnel", "credibility gap" and the other scarred
veterans are back in active service.

Politically, the damage is equally, if not more serious. The entire strategy
of Bush and his counselors, the relatively small military force, the "roll
north" (or "roll south" until the Turkish people, bolstered by the world
peace movement decreed otherwise) scenario, were premised on disintegration
of the Saddam regime and amiable surrender of all enemy forces once the
first missiles fell on empty palaces in Baghdad and tanks rolled across the
Iraqi border towards Umm Qasr.

That political strategy lies in ruins as instructive as the gravestones of
the British force caught and wiped out at Kut by the Turks almost a century
ago. From Umm Qasr through to Najaf towards Baghdad Iraqis are resisting
fiercely. The credibility of the Iraqi exiles, on call as figleaf leaders
has dwindled to zero. Back in the homelands of the US/UK invaders the peace
movement proved its durability, with huge demonstrations. Much of the world
is revelling in Imperial Reverses, and that in itself is an event of vast
political significance. The supposed news monopoly of the American Empire
has similarly collapsed. The European audience of subscribers to Al Jazeera
surged by four million in the first week.

Anyone with a laptop can find their way to informed sources, such as the
daily bulletins of Russian military intelligence, or the knowledgeable
commentary of US veterans, that demolish the parrot babble of the Embedded
Ones.

Even the core Spokesfolk of Empire like the Washington Post are facing
reality. Here's how the Washington Post addresses the political elites
today, with a report by Thomas Ricks:

"March 27 - Despite the rapid advance of Army and Marine forces across Iraq
over the past week, some senior U.S. military officers are now convinced
that the war is likely to last months and will require considerably more
combat power than is now on hand there and in Kuwait, senior defense
officials said yesterday.

"The combination of wretched weather, long and insecure supply lines, and an
enemy that has refused to be supine in the face of American military might
has led to a broad reassessment by some top generals of U.S. military
expectations and timelines. Some of them see even the potential threat of a
drawn-out fight that sucks in more and more U.S. forces. Both on the
battlefield in Iraq and in Pentagon conference rooms, military commanders
were talking yesterday about a longer, harder war than had been expected
just a week ago, the officials said.

"Tell me how this ends," one senior officer said yesterday. While some top
planners favor continuing to press north, most Army commanders believe that
the pause in Army ground operations that began yesterday is critical. A
relatively small force is stretched thin over 300 miles, and much of the
Army's killing power, in more than 100 AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, has
been grounded by persistently foul weather or by battle damage from an
unsuccessful pre-dawn raid on Monday. To the east, the Marine Corps advance
on the city of Kut was also hampered by skirmishing along its supply line
and fuel shortages at the front."

And amid these reverses, the battle for hearts and minds inside Iraq is
taking familiar forms.

Here's Patrick Peterson of the Knight Ridder news chain, dateline Nasiriya,

"U.S. Marines, moving through this still-contested city, opened fire at
anything that moved Tuesday, leaving dozens of dead in their wake, at least
some of them civilians. Helicopter gunships circled overhead, unleashing
Hellfire missiles into the squat mud-brick homes and firing their machine
guns, raining spent cartridge cases into neighborhoods. Occasionally a tank
blasted a hole in a house. Several bodies fell in alleys. It was impossible
to know which casualties were civilians and which were members of the Iraqi
militias that have ambushed Marine convoys here for days as the Marines
tried to cross the Euphrates River on a rapid march north to Al Kut, where
they are expected to engage elements of Iraq's Republican Guard.."

We are, remember, just past the anniversary of the My Lai massacre, March
16, 1968, when American Gis, part of Operation Phoenix, machine-gunned
hundreds upon hundreds of women and babies and old men in a trench in
Vietnam, where US forces tried to suppression resistance in an area far
smaller than what they propose to control in the Fertile Crescent today. Now
roll fast forward to today's US excursion: "'I saw a lot of bloodshed,' said
Sgt. Ken Woechan, 23, a reservist and assistant Wal-Mart manager from Ocean
Springs. Miss. Woechan said at Nasiriya he saw what he believed were
militiamen hiding behind women and children. 'A family would run across and
there would be a guy behind them,' he said."

It doesn't take any imagination to see what's going to unroll in the next
days and weeks, as the US/UK forces try to consolidate their lines through
south and central Iraq.

The old Scorched Strategy is already beginning to unfurl, as the talk of
Precision Attacks fades, and the B-52s slowly widen their attack patterns,
and "softening up" the Republican guard means bombing neighborhoods in
Baghdad. Three hundred miles south, the British are already committing war
crimes by cutting off the water supplies of Basra, an attack on a civilian
population that has not gone unnoticed back in London, where Tam Dalyell,
Labor MP for Linlithgow and Father of the House of Commons writes today in
the Guardian of Blair as a war criminal who should be sent for trial in the
Hague.

"My constituency Labour party has just voted to recommend that Tony Blair
reconsider his position as party leader because he gave British backing to a
war against Iraq without clearly expressed support from the UN .I agree with
this motion. I also believe that since Mr Blair is going ahead with his
support for a US attack without unambiguous UN authorisation, he should be
branded as a war criminal and sent to The Hague. I have served in the House
of Commons as a Labour member for 41 years,and I would never have dreamed of
saying this about any one of my previous leaders. But Blair is a man who has
disdain for both the House of Commons and international law. This is a grave
thing to say about my leader. But it is far less serious than the results of
a war that could set western Christendom against Islam.The overwhelming
majority of international lawyers, including several who advise the
government (such as Rabinder Singh, a partner in Cherie Booth's Matrix
Chambers), have concluded that military action in Iraq without proper UN
security council authorisation is illegal under international law. The
Foreign Office's deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmhurst, resigned on
precisely this point after 30 years' service. This puts the prime minister
and those who will be fighting in his and President Bush's name in a
vulnerable legal position. Already lawyers are getting phone calls from
anxious members of the armed forces."

One final quote, from a Knight Ridder story describing the Pentagon
in-fighting, quoting an anonymous officer:" He added ruefully: 'As in
Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, we are using concepts and methods that
are entirely unproved. If your strategy and assumptions are flawed, there is
nothing in the well to draw from. If these guys fight and fight hard for
Baghdad, with embedded Baathists stiffening their resistance at the point of
a gun, then we are up the creek,' said one retired general. Dr. John
Collins, a retired Army colonel and
former chief researcher for the Library of Congress, said the worst scenario
would be sending American troops to fight for Baghdad. He said every
military commander since Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist, has hated
urban warfare. "Military casualties normally soar on both sides; innocent
civilians lose lives and suffer severe privation; reconstruction costs
skyrocket," Collins said, adding that fighting for the capital would cancel
out the allied advantages in air and armor and reduce it to an Infantry
battle house to house, street by street."

It all comes from political arrogance. Here's a story from The Guardian last
August, re-run gleefully by LSN. "The biggest war game in US military
history, staged this month at a cost of 165m with 13,000 troops, was rigged
to ensure that the Americans beat their 'Middle Eastern' adversaries,
according to one of the main participants. General Paul Van Riper, a retired
marine lieutenant-general, told the Army Times that the sprawling three-week
millennium challenge exercises, were "almost entirely scripted to ensure a
[US] win".








   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005