-Caveat Lector- http://www.motherjones.com/news/warwatch/2003/14/we_345_02.html
Finding Fault For nearly a week, ever since the war in Iraq turned out to be something more difficult than a military "cakewalk," officials at the White House and the Pentagon have been on the defensive. Faced by reports that US and British forces are getting "bogged down" in southern Iraq, they have announced that the allies are making good progress. Confronted by suggestions that the war is a US affair, they have declared that an impressive coalition supports the administration's policies. And, plagued by rumors of a rift between the Pentagon's civilian and military leadership, they have insisted that the war plan was developed -- and is backed -- by administration officials and career officers alike. That argument has appeared strained, however, as a growing cadre of retired military leaders have criticized the military plan, suggesting that civilian officials at the Pentagon overruled or ignored recommendations from commanders in the field. And, as Bryan Bender of The Boston Globe reports, the criticism is being aimed at a single target: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In particular, Bender writes, Rumsfeld is being derided for "micromanaging" war planning, opting for a 'rolling start' strategy, and a minimal ground force. The angry denials have come from Rumsfeld ("if you ask anyone who has been involved in the process from the Central Command ... every single thing they've requested has in fact happened") and Joint Chiefs boss General Richard B. Myers ("If there's more force flowing, it had always been planned to flow"). But are the denials denting the perception that something has gone terribly wrong in the Pentagon's planning? Perhaps the most telling -- and damning -- account of the schism within the Pentagon has come from Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. Hersh is rapidly emerging as one of the most insightful -- and, in the eyes of the Bush administration, troublesome -- journalists covering Washington today. In his latest report, he writes that "Rumsfeld's team took over crucial aspects of the day-to-day logistical planning -- traditionally, an area in which the uniformed military excels -- and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the senior Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff." Notably, Hersh cites "senior war planners" as sources for his report. "On at least six occasions, the planner told me, when Rumsfeld and his deputies were presented with operational plans -- the Iraqi assault was designated Plan 1003 -- he insisted that the number of ground troops be sharply reduced. Rumsfeld's faith in precision bombing and his insistence on streamlined military operations has had profound consequences for the ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas. 'They've got no resources,' a former high-level intelligence official said. 'He was so focussed on proving his point -- that the Iraqis were going to fall apart.'" Importantly, Hersh also describes the sort of Pentagon that Rumsfeld has built. It is an institution shaped by the secretary's early show of "personal contempt" for many of the commanders in place when he arrived, and his love for "off-the-cuff memoranda" chastising military commanders. "'In those conditions -- an atmosphere of derision and challenge -- the senior officers do not offer their best advice,' a high-ranking general who served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said. One witness to a meeting recalled Rumsfeld confronting General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, in front of many junior officers. 'He was looking at the Chief and waving his hand,' the witness said, 'saying, 'Are you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?' In early February, according to a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld appeared at the Army Commanders' Conference, a biannual business and social gathering of all the four-star generals. Rumsfeld was invited to join the generals for dinner and make a speech. All went well, the official told me, until Rumsfeld, during a question-and-answer session, was asked about his personal involvement in the deployment of combat units, in some cases with only five or six days' notice. To the astonishment and anger of the generals, Rumsfeld denied responsibility. 'He said, 'I wasn't involved,'' the official said. ''It was the Joint Staff.'' 'We thought it would be fence-mending, but it was a disaster,' the official said of the dinner. 'Everybody knew he was looking at these deployment orders. And for him to blame it on the Joint Staff -- ' The official hesitated a moment, and then said, 'It's all about Rummy and the truth.'" Among the influential former military commanders launching precision strikes against Rumsfeld is retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the onetime advisor to then-Joint Chiefs boss Colin Powell. Writing in US News, McCaffrey echoes other military planners in deriding Rumsfeld's early determination that a war in Iraq could be won through air power and "special operations forces" supported by as few as 10,000 troops. And, while military commanders successfully lobbied for a larger force, McCaffrey argues that Rumsfeld's confidence in his own theories still haunts the war plan. "We are now in an ugly situation. But we can, and will, recover. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has dismissed these problems as pinprick attacks by 'ones and twos.' Tell that to the marines still battling to hold open the critical bridges at An Nasiriyah. Tell it to the 3rd Infantry Division troops who now must destroy five Iraqi Republican Guard heavy divisions, supported by only two Marine tank battalions and the tank-killing Apaches of the 101st Airborne. Tell it to the composite British division troops who are trying to work 'smash and grab' operations with a handful of infantry battalions in Basra. So Rumsfeld has emerged as the primary target for criticism about the war plan. But the secretary was hardly the only Washington power-broker to sell the war as a short and happy mission of liberation followed by a flowering of democracy throughout the region. As Harold Meyerson asserts in LA Weekly, at some point, a cadre of neoconservatives including Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney "sold the Brooklyn Bridge to our president." "It was a lovely scenario, but to believe it, the neos had to willfully forget countless lessons of history, and at least one law of thermodynamics: That for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. In the world according to the neos, world-shaking changes in U.S. policy -- arrogating to itself the right to wage preventive war, and plunging Iraq into that war -- might encounter some resistance along the way, but in the end lead to an outpouring of support. To the administration's nationalist tough guys -- Cheney and Rumsfeld in particular -- this is a matter of some, but not overwhelming, concern. American power, as they see it, grows out of the barrel of a gun. In their interactions with such longtime allies as France and Germany, and such fledgling democracies as Turkey, they've made it clear that they'd rather have nations fear us than like or admire us." Echoes of Indochina Among the retired military officers to find fault with the Pentagon's planning is James Webb. Writing in The New York Times's Week in Review section, Webb notes that a majority of US casualties to date have been the result of "guerrilla actions against Marine and Army forces in and around Nasiriya." In that fighting, Webb sees troubling echoes of the war he saw first-hand. And, like others, he worries those echoes will only grow louder. "In fact, what will be called an occupation may well end up looking like the images we have seen in places like Nasiriya. Do Iraqis hate Saddam Hussein's regime more deeply than they dislike the Americans who are invading their country? That question will still be with this administration, and the military forces inside Iraq, when the occupation begins, whether the war lasts a few more days or several more months. Or worse, the early stages of an occupation could see acts of retribution against members of Saddam Hussein's regime, then quickly turn into yet another round of guerrilla warfare against American forces. This point was made chillingly clear a few days ago by the leader of Iraq's major Shiite opposition group, who, according to Reuters, promised armed resistance if the United States remains in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is overthrown. Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don't expect it to get any better for a while. " Webb is hardly alone in seeing grim reminders of Vietnam in the sandy battlefields of Iraq. Orville Schell, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, argues that the Baghdad regime clearly intends to fight a "people's war" in the same way the North Vietnamese did. But what might prove even more difficult for US and British forces, Schell points out, is the Iraqi intention to take its guerrilla war into the cities. "An indiscriminate urban counterinsurgency effort could prove as compromising to America's image as the campaigns to 'win the hearts and minds of the people' in rural Vietnam did decades ago. As Sun Zi warned: 'The worst policy is to besiege cities.' Body counts, B-52 strikes, wounded GIs in medi-vac choppers, downed helicopter gunships surrounded by AK-47 toting peasants, 'Five O'clock Follies- like' Centcom briefings, anti-war demonstrations, troop escalations, and a repetition of official expressions that the war is still 'on track,' all have a haunting ring. If over the last few days, U.S. military planners have come to view 'irregular forces' like the Fedayeen Saddam and the Special Republican Guard commandos as 'a major annoyance' -- the 'equivalent of the black pajama Viet Cong,' as one senior U.S. intelligence official put it -- we can only wonder what kind of an annoyance such insurgents will be to the process of 'nation building.'" As Robert Timberg and Tom Bowman of The Baltimore Sun report, echoes of Vietnam "are invariably detected whenever the United States embarks on a course that involves the use of military force." Those looking to compare the war in Iraq, less than two weeks old, with the war in Vietnam may be rushing ("For one thing -- and it's a big thing -- Vietnam claimed upward of 58,000 American lives"). Still, despite such knee-jerk tendencies, the two write, "a few similarities seem worth noting." "The fedayeen, for example, are displaying the same passion and brutality as the Viet Cong did some three decades ago, although clearly not in the same numbers. Call them terrorists or death squads or irregulars. Whatever their crimes, they are also engaging in combat activities that fall under the rubric of guerrilla tactics." It may, as Rumsfeld recently insisted, be "a bit early for history to be written," Rupert Conrwell concedes in The Independent. But he asserts that history won't be denied, and that a single question is quietly gnawing at the American psyche: "Could this be -- will this be -- another Vietnam?" "The answer, in some respects, is simple: of course not. The Vietnam war, from an American point of view, lasted nine or 10 years. The campaign to remove Saddam Hussein has barely been in progress nine or 10 days. Whether it lasts nine or 10 weeks (perfectly possible), or nine or 10 months (rather unlikely), it surely will not last nine or 10 years. Unlike Vietnam, and for all today's second-guessing, the purely military outcome is certain. Saddam Hussein will be driven from power. But the fond belief in Washington -- and the one on which this war was largely sold -- that the advancing GIs would be welcomed as liberators, as they were in occupied France in 1944, has already been shown to be an illusion. And if the resistance continues, President Bush, Mr Rumsfeld and the rest will have to decide whether to cast aside all efforts to pursue their 'gentleman's war', a war of aiming only at regime targets, and attack vital civilian infrastructure to hasten victory. America has never been a patient country. Already calls can be heard to 'stop messing about' and to flatten the regime by flattening Baghdad, Basra, Nasiriyah and anywhere else where the Americans are getting bogged down. But that would be to exhume the dreadful mantra that sums up American good intentions gone wrong in Vietnam, that 'to save this village, it must be destroyed'." The war is less than two weeks old. Does that mean that it is too early to note apparent similarities to the war which has come to focus US expectations and fears about military adventurism? Tom Engelhardt doesn't think so. Writing on TomDispatch.com, the web-logger and MotherJones.com contributor argues that the war in Iraq might be best understood as the war in Vietnam "on fast forward." "In fact, it's taken less than a week for American reporters to begin to doubt Pentagon briefers (foreign reporters began in that mode) -- a passage that took years in Vietnam -- and for the briefers to begin to look like participants in the long ago Saigon press briefings that included the infamous 'body counts,' mockingly nicknamed by reporters 'the Five O'clock Follies.' In other words, a week into the war the first cracks in what may become a media 'credibility gap' are already showing. As it turns out, Pentagon policies for controlling the media were quite brilliant, but also dependent on the delivery of the promised war -- a brief 'cakewalk' of liberation. We've leapt years in a week. Who knows, if things don't break just right for this administration, where we'll be a week from now? When you think about it, it's taken a lot of ridiculous dreaming and planning by men inside not just the Beltway, but the Bubbleway, over many years, to turn Sadaam Hussein into Ho Chi Minh for even a few weeks or months." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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