sent to me by a friend in Portland, OR thought it worthy to share
Out of My Mind: Common Wisdom & Other Oxymorons
©2003 Jonathan Dobrer
The common wisdom on the War, Invasion, Liberation,
Democratization,
Decapitation of Iraq was that the first part would be
easy—a cakewalk.
The problem with common wisdom is that it is an oxymoron.
Wisdom is
not a commonly found commodity.
The talking heads all assured us that we would sweep away
the nasty
regime of Saddam and the “real battle” would be the
rebuilding of the
nation and the imposition of democracy. Imposed democracy
is of
course, another oxymoron.
We were thinking so far ahead and counting so much on an
easy and
pre-ordained victory, that the government has already let
some no-bid
contracts for the rebuilding of what we are currently
destroying. To
the surprise of few, the contract goes to Halliburton.
Yes, the very
same Halliburton that paid our vice president Dick Cheney
$30 million
for services to be rendered.
We were sure we would win quickly and cleanly because we
had better
technology, smarter bombs, more guided missiles than ever
before. They
had few planes, bad and misguided missiles and old
technology. We had
the real secret weapon, the American soldier. The best
trained,
smartest, best equipped warriors of all time. We were
motivated. We
were ready. They, on the other hand, had a rag-tag bunch
of soldiers
who really didn’t want to fight, couldn’t wait to surrender
and hated
their leader. Oh yes, the Republican Guard might put up a
fight, but
they would be quickly overwhelmed by our technical and
moral
superiority.
Well, as Clauswitz observed, the first casualty of battle
is the plan.
It seldom survives the first engagement.
We began earlier than planned by bombing leadership targets
and trying
to kill Saddam. Then we came in with our troops also a
couple of days
earlier than planned because we didn’t want them to
re-establish the
command infrastructure that we might have damaged on the
first strike.
Then we didn’t have a northern front because Turkey did not
only NOT
let us base there, they threatened to create a second
opposition front
by going in themselves and turning the Kurds from being our
active
allies to opposing our nominally allies, the Turk. This
was, not to
put too fine a point on it, a mess.
So with our northern front on boats going through Suez and
the military
police, who are used to maintain the lines of communication
and
supplies, still on boats, we raced across the desert. Um
Qsr didn’t
fall as fast and quietly as planned. Basra got surrounded
but neither
taken nor controlled and we bypassed them on our way to
Baghdad. Not
forgetting the prime objective is often a good thing. But
so is
covering your rear. We did only one of these.
So we advance on Baghdad, having left irregulars, guerillas
and
possibly even some Republican Guard troops to harass our
supply lines.
This is how a convoy of 6 trucks got shot to hell and POWs
taken.
All of this indicates that when we choose to begin this
war, WE were
not ready. Maybe diplomacy was dead. Maybe the UN was a
dead end.
Maybe Saddam has to go. But we picked the day and time and
we were not
ready. We were not ready either militarily or politically.
Not
knowing what Turkey would do, was a very large hole in our
strategic
planning.
We created expectations with our advertising of Shock and
Awe that had
to disappoint. We failed to deliver. We did not stun our
adversaries
into numb paralysis. We did not create a sense of the
inevitability of
their defeat. We over-sold our “effects based strategy.”
This “effects based strategy” and superior technology was
supposed to
replace the old Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force.
Colin Powell
vowed after Vietnam that we would never again trickle and
escalate. We
would have everything we needed and sweep the opposition
away.
But people who never served in the military, like
Rumsfield, thought
that “boots on the ground,” were unnecessary. Technology
and speed
would win the day and night vision goggles would own the
night. It is
hard to imagine how the Powell Doctrine could be considered
old and
outdated since it hadn’t really been tried. In Desert
Storm, the Iraqi
troops endured 100 days of being pounded by missiles and
B-52s before
being chased by our troops and planes back to Iraq.
This time they are on their own land, fighting a foreign
foe who may be
as frightening to them, as an unknown, as the all too
well-known
Saddam. They are also not fighting fair. They are
pretending to
surrender and then shooting. They are hiding and not
standing up and
fighting like men. Well, they are not fighting like stupid
suicidal
men. We do have bigger guns and better technology. We
have Stealth
fighters and they have stealth and guile.
Even if we learned little from Vietnam, where we had the
big guns and
they had the jungle, the rest of the world did learn.
Guerilla war and
what we call terror, technically “asymmetrical warfare” is
what small
poor groups use against big rich countries. Nothing new in
this.
David did not arm-wrestle with Goliath. American
Revolutionaries did
not fight “cricket.” And no, I’m not making a moral
equivalency, only
a tactical comparison.
So it begins. We have over-sold our expectations and
under-sold the
costs and sacrifices of war. We are unprepared to suffer
dead
Americans, captured women soldiers or even a large number
of Iraqi
civilian casualties. We expect clean and painless war.
Another
oxymoron.
By the time this goes to print on Sunday, we may be in
Baghdad. It may
be over. Or Baghdad might be the summer equivalent of
Stalingrad in
winter. Hell comes in both hot and cold. And war is
always Hell.
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