Every battle is won before it is fought
— Sun Tzu
The battle for Baghdad appears to be lost even as it starts. From Damien Cave and Richard A. Oppel Jr. of the New York Times:
BAGHDAD, Feb. 5–A growing number of Iraqis are saying that the United States is to blame for creating conditions that led to the worst single suicide bombing in the war, which devastated a Shiite market in Baghdad on Saturday. They argued that the Americans had been slow in completing the vaunted new American security plan, making Shiite neighborhoods much more vulnerable to such horrific attacks.
They started the battle without the additional troops they said they needed to fight it. Hmm. Where have we seen that happen before?
And they took down significant portions of the Mahdi Army who were protecting the Shiite neighborhoods without enough regular forces to fill the security void. The U.S. “surge” is moving too slowly and, according to Naeem al-Kabbi, the deputy mayor of Baghdad, “the Iraqi Army is not ready.”
The Iraqi Army is not ready?
Is this Iraq fiasco starting to look like the movie Groundhog Day or what?
Patience, Camille
From the Times:
Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American military spokesman in Iraq, called for patience as the new security plan rolls out. “Give the government and coalition forces a chance to fully implement it,” he said in remarks carried by several news agencies.
There’s that word “patience” again. I’m out of patience with it.
The “enemy” has adopted new tactics, so we’re adopting new tactics. We’ve been hearing about our new tactics to counter their new tactics since 2003.
The “enemy” is complex: Shia militias, Sunni militias, al-Qaeda, death squads and crime gangs. You know: the same complex enemy it’s been all along.
The new U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is putting together a panel of experts to help reverse the situation. His predecessor, General George W. Casey, did that too. So did Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Peter Pace.
Pundits and politicians alike have been telling us for years that there is no military solution in Iraq, yet the administration and the Pentagon continue to seek a military solution. Nothing new there.
The method to the madness
Nor is there anything new about this warfare-centric administration kicking off a military operation by shooting itself in the foot, but good golly, will they ever learn?
It doesn’t take a Clausewitz to figure out that you don’t initiate actions with fewer troops than you know you need and is dependent on an ally–in this case the Iraqi government and its security forces–meeting benchmarks that it’s already failed to meet.
In Mark Helprin’s magnificent novel A Soldier of the Great War, someone asks why a madman is being allowed to run Italy’s World War I strategy. The answer: “Because we’re winning.”
The madmen behind the curtain in our present war–Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Fred Kagan and the rest of the neoconservative cabal–are losing. Losing large. And yet they’re still in charge.
My crystal ball is no clearer than anyone else’s, but here’s how I think is going on behind the scenes, and this scenario will play out.
The madmen have already said they’ll execute the escalation strategy regardless of what Congress tries to do stop them, and they’ve already started the escalation without the troops they supposedly need to pull it off. By turning the situation into a bigger quagmire than it already is, they’ll argue that the “Defeatocrats” need to go along with the troop increase to bail out the troops already in the soup or they won’t be supporting the troops.
In other words, this half-cocked, premature launch of the Battle of Baghdad is a stratagem to blackmail Congress into giving the administration what it wants.
Again, nothing new.
In all, the main differences between the Iraq War and Groundhog Day are 1) Groundhog Day was fiction, 2) Groundhog Day was funny, 3) the main protagonist of Groundhog Day learned from his past mistakes, 4) Groundhog Day made more money than it cost to make and 5) in Groundhog Day, nobody got permanently maimed or killed.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.
I had a conversation with one of my former Commanding Officers a few months before the invasion.
We agreed that that it was a forgone conclusion that the war was going to happen and felt that US forces would probably take Baghdad in a matter of a few weeks. Since the strategy looked to be built around utilization of light forces and rapid movement, with seemingly no significant numbers of forces coming behind to ensure that security and stability would be restored quickly in any meaningful way, we wondered if the US could keep a lid on things for very long. It didn’t take Nostradamus to know that the US was in deep kimchi the moment that Rumsfeld got in front of the American public and downplayed the looting going on in Baghdad following the fall of the government.
My last comment to him before we ended the call was that getting in and taking Iraq wasn’t a question militarily. That could be done. The question was once we’re there, how the hell do we ever get out?
I still reel at that thought that Rummy and his yes men didn’t consider that.
It was unbelievable, I actually sat with my mouth hanging open when I saw him say it. “Freedom’s messy” ranks alongside Bush’s “bring ’em on” as two of the prime examples of the arrogant stupidity of the architects of this debacle.
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“As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
— Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
“Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe — it’s a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment. I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they’re working at it at a good clip.”
February 2007 - The upgraded FV430 Mk3 Bulldogvehicles on patrol in Basra City, Iraq
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I’m certain that the Sgt that Rumsfeld gave this reply to felt much safer afterward, KNOWING that the armor issue was being worked on “at a good clip.”
There isn’t a level of hell low enough for these people.
A quote attributed to Einstein (but possibly apocryphal) is that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. One more reason to suspect the current administration is insane.
I feel for the guys stuck over there and the Iraqis caught in the middle of this civil war. At this point, a full-scale war between Sunni and Shiites seems inevitable.
…to have looked that quote up. It’s Benjamin Franklin’s.
But it’s true as true can get, regardless of who first said it.