By David
Hackworth
© 2003 David H. Hackworth
U.S. Army conventional brass, in their infinite wisdom, are about to
throw the book at a good soldier for doing what savvy combat leaders have
done since before the invention of gunpowder: deep-six the regs to protect
the troops and win fights.
According to a 4th Infantry Division staff weenie, battalion skipper
Lt. Col. Allen B. West violated the Rules of Interrogation – designed by a
platoon of legal beagles far removed from the Iraqi killing fields of the
Sunni Triangle, where West and his soldiers have been slugging it out
since Saddam Hussein disappeared.
West's sin was firing two pistol shots into the air and ground while
questioning an Iraqi police officer who was aiding local terrorists and
putting West's soldiers in their cross hairs on a regular basis.
In my outfit, West would have gotten a pat on the back and been told to
press on. But even though the double-crossing turncoat spilled his guts –
enabling West's unit to ambush the ambushers – West is looking at serious
slammer-time if found guilty by court-martial.
From what I've discovered, this street-smart leader used the right
tactics and techniques, while his commander, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno,
played Political Correctness – a popular sport with our star-wearers and a
major reason why the guerrillas are scoring so successfully in Iraq.
After six months of light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel propaganda from the
Bush administration reinforced by sycophants like Odierno, I'm convinced
few generals on the ground in Iraq understand either the nature of
insurgency warfare in general or their specific terrorist enemy.
Which isn't exactly breaking news. We've lost campaign after campaign
because most of our brass, from George Custer of Little Bighorn to Thomas
Montgomery of "Black Hawk Down" in Somalia, never bothered to understand
the nature of guerrilla warfare.
Sure, the U.S. military brilliantly won the tactical war in Iraq with
"shock and awe," but no amount of spin can shift the reality that it has
been losing the early innings of the occupation phase. The generals so
eager to court-martial colonels for doing their jobs should be
court-martialed themselves for not doing their duty and confronting SecDef
Donald Rumsfeld before we invaded Iraq. Had they, we wouldn't be dealing
with the aftermath of an inept war plan that provided neither enough
troops nor sufficient command guidance to prevent the looting and violence
that fueled the ever-expanding guerrilla conflict, a conflict that Col.
West and other heroes have been stuck in since Commander in Chief Bush
blithely declared the end of major combat in Iraq last May.
Last April, the only ministry that our forces protected was the Oil
Ministry. The rest of the ministries and infrastructure were sacked while
our troops looked the other way, and the Iraqi people watched the nuts and
bolts of their future Iraqi government being hauled away in hijacked
trucks.
Because there was no coherent strategy in the early weeks of the
occupation, our top brass responded to events rather than taking charge.
Reaction rather than action allowed the insurgents to gain the initiative
right from the get-go. And they're still at it, brazenly displaying the
same bold MO as they continue inflicting carefully planned pain on our
increasingly weary combat forces.
The generals should also be brought up for not fighting the dumb White
House decision to disband the Iraqi army. Instead of integrating that
450,000-man force into the stabilization process – and using it for
reconstruction and certain security ops, which would have helped our badly
stretched troops gain control over the looters and get the country up and
running – we made it our enemy. Thousands of trained and armed Iraqi
soldiers couldn't make tracks fast enough to join the insurgent movement.
The conventional generals like Odierno should be replaced by mainly
Special Forces leaders, both from the active and retired ranks, who
comprehend the war at hand. Leaders who'd drop the silly charges against
Col. West in a heartbeat so he could get on with winning his piece of this
ugly war.
As for the Perfumed Princes, send them home from both Iraq and
Afghanistan – another guerrilla war we're losing – and let them play
Political Correctness, or perhaps the emerging Blame Game, with the
chicken hawks who got us in this mess in the first place.
Col. David H. Hackworth,
author of his new best-selling "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts," "Price of
Honor" and "About Face," has seen duty or reported as a sailor, soldier
and military correspondent in nearly a dozen wars and conflicts – from the
end of World War II to the recent fights against international
terrorism.