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Update
from AIJAC
Were the
War Plans a Success?
April
7, 2003
Number 04/03 #05
Today's Update
focuses on recent attempts to claim that the war was poorly planned,
which emanated from a number of retired American generals and in leaks
from the Pentagon over the past week or so. The major complaint has been
that insufficient forces were used, allegedly to prove theories of technological
war put forward by US Secretary of Defence Rumsfield. However, Washington
Post columnist Charles Krauthammer argues that plan worked precisely
because of its flexibility, one of the major virtues of Rumsfield's new
strategy, HERE A good
New York Times piece by Bill Keller largely makes the same point,
that claims about the planning of the war appear both premature and based
on points far from self-evident.
Similarly,
New Republic foreign affairs expert Lawrence Kaplan argues that
the plan is admirably attuned to accomplishing the political tasks of
the war, rather than merely the military one. To read his view, CLICK
HERE
Finally,
on the grounds that you can never have too much expertise, here is yet
another contribution from the world's leading scholar of the Middle East,
Prof. Bernard Lewis. Lewis takes on the question of why there has been
less of a welcome for allied forces from Iraqis than many anticipated.
To read his exceptionally well-informed analysis, CLICK
HERE
Readers may
also be interested in:
Plan
B -- For Baghdad
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, Friday, April 4, 2003
The first
gulf war took six weeks. Afghanistan took nine. Kosovo, 11. We are now
just past two weeks in the second gulf war. It's time for a bit of perspective.
This campaign has already been honoured with a "quagmire" piece by the
New York Times' Johnny Apple, seer and author of a similar and justly
famous quagmire piece on Afghanistan published just days before the fall
of Mazar-e Sharif and the swift collapse of the Taliban.
The drumbeat
of complaint for the first two weeks from the media, retired generals
and anonymous administration malcontents has been twofold: the "flawed
plan" and the raised expectations.
With American
troops at the gates of Baghdad, the plan is looking pretty good now. But
even when things looked tough in Week Two, the frenzy of the critics was
a bit weird. It's a military cliche that all plans look great until the
shooting starts. Then the plan is thrown out. Nonetheless, Tommy Franks's
plan has fared better than most. It may not have anticipated the level
of initial resistance in the south. But this is a campaign of staggering
complexity. The fact that but a single element was miscalibrated (without
significant damage to the overall campaign) is, on the contrary, testimony
to a plan of remarkable prescience.
Even more
impressive was the speed of the military's adaptation to the new circumstances.
For a military establishment as large, mechanized, integrated and complex
as America's to be so nimble in adapting to the tactics of Saddam Hussein's
Baathist die-hard irregulars in southern Iraq is nothing short of astonishing.
Why deny it? Take credit for it. This flexibility will have a far more
decisive effect on the final outcome than the silly charge that the original
blueprint did not perfectly predict the future.
The other
major complaint has been raised expectations. It is true that before the
war there were expectations of a quick and bloodless victory. It is not
fair to say that the administration orchestrated the expectations. It
is fair to say that the administration allowed that impression to grow.
For example,
former president Bill Clinton predicted, "This war is going to be over
in a flash" and "You're looking at a couple weeks of bombing and then
I'd be astonished if this campaign took more than a week." President Bush
said nothing of the sort. But the administration did little to dispel
the conventional wisdom that Clinton was reflecting.
This passivity
is taken by administration critics to be a cynical attempt to manipulate
U.S. public opinion in support of a dubious war. Nonsense. The administration
already had remarkable across-the-board support for the war. Why raise
expectations at home? It is an axiom of political life that you never
raise expectations, whether in a political or military campaign, because
your defeats are then magnified and your victories discounted.
It is true
that the administration did not contradict the general view of an easy
war. But not for domestic political reasons. It did so for obvious and
very good military reasons. The target audience for these inflated expectations
was not the American people but Hussein's henchmen.
Plan A for
the war was a quick and devastating attack that would cause a collapse
of the regime and lead to the ultimate military outcome -- the Sun Tzu
ideal of victory with barely a shot fired.
Plan A had
several parts: an intense initial "shock and awe" air attack, a bold rush
of armor to the gates of Baghdad and, fortuitously, a first-night decapitation
strike on Hussein's own bunker. But the key to Plan A was a further psychological-warfare
element: planting in the Iraqi leadership the idea that an American victory
was inevitable, that the war would be quick and that Hussein's collapse
would be immediate -- and therefore that Iraqi officials should be prepared
within hours to either flee or defect to the winning side.
The point
of allowing expectations to remain unrealistically high was to encourage
waverers in Hussein's entourage to turn against the regime very early
and end the war even before it began. It was a good idea. It did not pan
out. But given the possible benefits, it was certainly worth a try.
The regime
did not collapse overnight. Hence Plan B, an adapted version of the original
war plan. It involves real fighting and real losses. Plan A, in contrast,
while always plausible, was a hope for the miraculous. It was a kind of
anti-war plan, as it would not have required any real battles at all.
The miracle
having not happened, we are now fighting a conventional war. And winning
-- thanks to the Franks plan and its flexibility, and despite the carping
of those who, in conflict after conflict, see Vietnam in anything short
of immediate immaculate victory.
©
2003 The Washington Post Company
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUMSFELD'S
BAD OPTIONS
Strategic
Attack
by Lawrence
F. Kaplan
The New
Republic
Post date: 04.05.03
Issue date: 04.14.03
Last week,
Donald Rumsfeld's war plan hit two snags. The most serious was the unexpected
level of Iraqi resistance, which, when combined with the absence of a
popular uprising in the south, required diverting some American and British
forces from the road to Baghdad. This, in turn, created a problem for
the defense secretary closer to home, as a parade of U.S. Army officers
and their retired colleagues fanned out across the airwaves to criticize
the defense secretary's battle plan.
The gist
of their critique is fairly straightforward: Rumsfeld failed to approve
the number of troops that theater commander Army General Tommy Franks
requested for the war. It's not a new critique. The generals have been
complaining about paltry troop levels in the war plan for months. But
their complaints became more ferocious last week as casualty reports set
the top brass maneuvering inside the Beltway to ensure that political
leaders, not military commanders, took the blame. The issue was no longer
simply whether Rumsfeld had dispatched sufficient forces to the Persian
Gulf. It was his motives for doing so.
Retired Army
General Barry McCaffrey, who has become Rumsfeld's most outspoken critic,
asked, "Why would you do this operation with inadequate power?" To McCaffrey,
the answer is obvious: "Because you have such a strong ideological view,
and you're so confident in your views that you disregard the vehement
military advice from, particularly, Army generals who you don't think
are very bright." Elaborating on McCaffrey's point, retired Army Colonel
Ralph Peters wrote in The Washington Post that, for the defense secretary,
"[t]his war was supposed to prove the diminishing relevance of ground
forces." Or, as The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh summarized the objections
of one war planner, "Rumsfeld had two goals: to demonstrate the efficacy
of precision bombing and to 'do the war on the cheap.'"
There is
a kernel of truth here. But few of these critics bothered to entertain
a simpler and legitimate rationale for the war planónamely, that it was
drawn up with an eye toward political as well as military goals. Principal
among these goals was the need to fight the war as a "war of liberation,"
which meant placing an extreme emphasis on minimizing Iraqi civilian casualties.
Rumsfeld's plan also had to contend with the danger of large-scale American
casualties and thus precluded a months-long massing of American forces
in Kuwait, where they would have been vulnerable to Iraqi attack. Finally,
to limit Saddam Hussein's ability to launch missiles, torch oil wells,
and create mischief in southern Iraq, it called for a rapid advance to
Baghdad and, hence, a smaller force. The alternatives being proposed by
the generals today may arguably have enhanced the military effectiveness
of the campaign. But they also might have led to political catastrophe.
Pictures
do not lie, and the pictures coming from the battlefield in southern Iraq
suggest that elements of the U.S. war plan were based on erroneous assumptions.
Not least of these was that Iraqis would stream out onto the streets to
greet GIs with bread and salt. Instead, American and British forces have
been diverted to pacify cities the Pentagon had assumed would pacify themselves.
Had Rumsfeld acceded to the original request by General Franks for 500,000
troops, a 14-day air campaign prior to the commencement of ground operations,
and almost two months to reach the outskirts of Baghdad, there surely
would have been sufficient forces to spare for this purpose. The defense
secretary, however, initially favored an invasion force of 150,000, a
simultaneous air and ground campaign, and a race to the Iraqi capital.
In the end, he split the difference with Franks. The result was a plan
that called for two heavy Army divisions, one light Army division, a Marine
division, and a British divisionónearly 300,000 troops in all. The time
that elapsed between the commencement of the air and ground campaigns
would now be measured in hours, not days. More important, the war would
begin with a "rolling start," launched even before the entire U.S. force
was in place.
Many of the
setbacks in Iraq have derived less from this plan than from its execution.
The fate of the missing 4th Infantry Division is by now well-known, its
equipment stranded off of the coast of Turkey for weeks awaiting a green
light that never came. Less well-known is that, were it not for Franks's
insistence that the ships carrying the equipment remain off the coast
of Turkeyóan insistence that continued even after the Turkish parliament
had voted against allowing American troops to transit through Turkey and
in the face of admonitions from the White House and even the State Department
to move their equipment to Kuwaitóhe might have another heavy division
at his disposal by now. As for the thousands of "additional" troops being
dispatched to the theater, their deployment was planned long before the
war began. True, in the run-up to the war, Rumsfeld did, as Hersh points
out, fiddle with their order of deploymentóspelled out in the Time Phased
Force Deployment Data, or "TipFid," a document that details which forces
should be sent where and when. But this is hardly without precedent. During
the run-up to the 1991 Gulf war, the Pentagon threw out the entire TipFid
and began from scratch.
All these
facts have been obscured by the chorus of Army officers that has emerged
to accuse Rumsfeld of harboring a reflexive opposition to the use of ground
forces. But, if true, the defense secretary isn't the only one wedded
to a particular orthodoxy. McCaffreyówho told The Washington Post three
days before the war that more than enough American troops were already
in the Persian Gulf and then told NBC on the eve of war that "in the south,
they're not going to put up much resistance"óhad taken the lead in lobbying
against Rumsfeld's attempt to kill the Army's cherished Crusader artillery
system and now rails against the "twits" who tout high-tech weapons and
air power in Iraq. Rumsfeld first earned the ire of McCaffrey and his
fellow Army generals when he directed a "top-to-bottom" review of the
armed forces in 2001, which, among other things, flirted with the idea
of cutting two Army divisions and culminated in his decision to kill the
Crusader. The two-time defense secretary has also prodded the Army to
embrace his goal of "transforming" it from a lumbering dinosaur into an
agile, light force that exploits the latest weapons and information technologies.
The result has been a widespread sense within the Army's ranks that Rumsfeld
considers the service an unwanted stepchildóa sentiment encapsulated by
a cover story in Armed Forces Journal International last year, which ran
a photograph of Rumsfeld along with the question, "Does he really hate
the Army?" Convinced that the answer is yes, Army officers have charged
that in Iraq Rumsfeld is, as Peters puts it, "out to prove a point. In
his vision of the futureóone shaped by technocrats and the defense industryóground
forces can be cut drastically in order to free funding for advanced technologies."
But was the
point of the war plan really to transform Iraq into a weapons-testing
range? "The notion that Rumsfeld designed Operation Iraqi Freedom with
the idea of scoring points in a procurement debate is absurd," says retired
Army Colonel and Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, himself
a Rumsfeld critic. If the defense secretary was "out to prove a point,"
it was the Bush administration's insistence that this would be a war of
liberation. That insistence obliged the Bush team to offer assurances
that, as Rumsfeld put it, "we do not need to kill thousands of innocent
civilians to remove Saddam Hussein from power." It also led them to implement
unusually strict rules of engagement, to rule out bombing targets with
a high probability of "collateral damage," and to overrule plans that
would have turned the lights or water off in Baghdad. The same sensitivities
played a role in the decision by Rumsfeld and his advisers to forgo a
massive preinvasion bombardment. "You see the dead civilians on Al Jazeera?"
asks a senior administration official. "Well, imagine the images you would
be seeing if we used air power and heavy armor the way we did in the Gulf
war."
Indeed, consider
what might have transpired had the Army leadership gotten its way: numerous
heavy divisions, a heavy bombing campaign prior to the commencement of
ground operations, and a months-long buildup in Kuwait. "If the goal is
to prevent the destruction of infrastructure and the destruction of Iraqi
civilians," says Michael Vickers, an ex-Special Forces officer and military
analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, "then the
original CENTCOM plan would have been way too slow and methodical for
that purpose." Why? To begin with, as Vickers explains, "The more bombing
there is, the more civilian casualties there are, and a Gulf war-type
air campaign on a cluttered battlefield doesn't make sense if the point
is not to be at war with the Iraqi population but with the regime that
oppresses them." The logic extends to the ground campaign as well, which,
if it took two months to reach Baghdad, and did so with twice as much
firepower, would have obvious implications for Iraq's civilian populationóparticularly
if a slower advance were preceded by artillery barrages and air strikes.
Those implications,
moreover, would resonate far beyond Iraq, for even in conflicts viewed
as broadly legitimateówhich this one, unlike, say, Kosovo, is notóquestions
of who may be killed and how many may be killed in the pursuit of a particular
aim have become increasingly controversial. This is doubly true in this
case, where killing civilians contradicts the avowed purpose of the war
and would have an immediate effect throughout the region. Indeed, even
the relatively low level of civilian casualties the U.S. campaign has
inflicted thus far has elicited an outcry across the Arab worldóan outcry
that would be louder still if the numbers approached the thousands of
civilians killed in the first Gulf war.
Another motive
guiding the Rumsfeld war plan was force protection. This is particularly
true of the rolling start, the central purpose of which was to avert a
bottleneck of American troops in Kuwait and, hence, to deny Saddam a tempting
target. "Sequencing all these forces through a tiny country like Kuwait
would have been a logistical nightmare," says Thomas Keaney, a retired
Air Force colonel and executive director of the Johns Hopkins University
Foreign Policy Institute. "Piling up such a small force in such a small
area would have also invited retaliation from the other side." The point
of funneling forces through Kuwait, rather than stacking them up there,
was simply this: to deny Iraqi forces the opportunity to employ chemical
or other weapons against a stationary targetónamely, hundreds of thousands
of American troops concentrated in a relatively small area. "From the
beginning, we understood that leaving [American forces] in the desert
for six months was not an option," says a senior defense official. "It
would have been tantamount to painting a bull's-eye on their backs."
In addition
to keeping American and Iraqi casualties to a minimum, the Rumsfeld planóand
particularly its call for a small forceóreflected the desire for a rapid
advance through southern Iraq. This, in turn, reflected concerns that
Saddam would torch now-secure oil fields, destroy dams and dikes, and
launch missile attacks from the area. "Speed equals a small force," says
Tom Donnelly, a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute, "and,
because we used a small force, the nightmare scenarios in the south have
now been taken off the table." But the swiftness of the advance left behind
another nightmareóthe rear-area mayhem that has exacted a steep toll on
American and British forces. Anticipated or not, Rumsfeld's advisers claim
the price was one worth paying. "You have to consider the alternative
scenarios," says one. "We did, and whatever you see now doesn't even come
close to them."
The primacy
that the Rumsfeld war plan attaches to political considerations has inevitably
left the defense secretary open to accusations of "micromanaging the war's
operational details," as Hersh describes the military's complaint. It
is true that, in the debate over force structure in Iraq, Rumsfeld and
his advisers unquestionably reached deeper into the realm of military
expertise than any of their recent predecessors. But the political ends
of this war are more complex than simple battlefield victory and arguably
too important to be left to the generals. Their plan for a lengthy air
assault followed by a grinding armor advance would almost certainly have
resulted in far more Iraqi casualtiesóand possibly more American ones
as well. True, success on the battlefield would have been assured. But
does anyone today really believe it is not?
At its core,
then, the debate between Rumsfeld and the Army generals isn't about how
much is enough. Nor is it even about the merits of limited war versus
the use of overwhelming force. It is about the role of politics in wartime.
The first Bush administration prided itself on leaving strategic questions
to the generals, even allowing them to set the terms of the Gulf war's
conclusion, the consequences of which we are still living with today.
And, whether it was Bosnia, the military budget, or homosexuals serving
in the armed services, the Clinton administration allowed themselves to
be overruled by the generals on a regular basis. It was during the tenure
of then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, notes former
chief Air Force historian and University of North Carolina Professor Richard
Kohn, "that civilian control eroded most since the rise of the military
establishment in the 1940s and 1950s." Under Rumsfeld, the pendulum has
clearly swung back in the other direction.
The defense
secretary's uniformed critics, echoing Powell's boast that, during his
tenure at the Pentagon, "we were able to constantly bring the political
decisions back to what we could do militarily," insist the pendulum swing
back their way once more. But Powell had things backward, and so do his
heirs. It is political ends that dictate military means. Were the reverse
to be true and were this war to be handed over to the generals, the result
would likely be an impressive military victory and a political disaster.
And that wouldn't be much of a victory at all.
†
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at TNR.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Question, and Answers
Why Iraqis
were slow to embrace their liberators.
BY
BERNARD LEWIS
Wall Street
Journal, Sunday, April 6, 2003 12:01 a.m.
"Where
are those cheering crowds we were told would come out to greet us?"
This question
was asked with increasing urgency--by most with puzzlement, by some with
anguish, by others with derision, according to temperament and allegiance.
It is a fair question, and it deserves an answer. Different answers have
been offered to this question, varying again according to temperament,
allegiance, and other factors. But in any answer, three points are of
central importance.
The first
of these is the Iraqi rising and repression of 1991.
At the beginning
of the Gulf War in that year, the U.S. government called on the people
of Iraq to rise in rebellion and overthrow the tyrant who had oppressed
them for so long. They responded readily, and rebellions broke out in
many parts of the country. But in the meantime, the victorious U.S. had
accorded a cease-fire to the defeated Iraqi dictator. In the days that
followed, Saddam Hussein, using the helicopters that the cease-fire agreement
had allowed him to retain, ostensibly for transport purposes, crushed
the rebellion, region by region and group by group, Shiites in the south
and Kurds in the north, killing tens of thousands in the most brutal way,
including with chemical weapons.
Various explanations
have been offered as to why the United States government granted a cease-fire
in the moment of victory, and there are even some who still defend it.
There is no defense--though some have offered explanations--of the abandonment
of those whom we had incited to rebel. Our Iraqi friends--and I mean friends--saw
this as a betrayal; and this left, at the very least, a legacy of caution
and suspicion.
This caution
and suspicion were revived and reinforced by two new concerns, one deriving
from the conduct of the war, the other from the debate about the war.
In purely
military terms, the decision to go straight for Baghdad, bypassing the
cities of the south, was no doubt a wise tactical choice. It did however
leave the largely Shiite south under Saddam Hussein's control. He probably
had insufficient regular forces there to cope with a major military assault,
but the whole monstrous apparatus of surveillance and repression remained
in place, and the people in the south knew very well what would happen
to them if they revealed their real sympathies prematurely.
Their understandable
caution was further reinforced by the strong and vocal opposition to the
war around the world and more especially in the United States. This manifested
itself in many ways and, under their very eyes, in the mostly critical
questioning of the military by the media in the press briefings taking
place on their doorstep.
For us in
the West, this is the normal free debate of an open society. But Iraqis,
both rulers and ruled, have had no experience of any such thing since
the overthrow of the parliamentary regime and the establishment of the
dictatorship almost 50 years ago. What they believe they see is indecision,
hesitation, even weakness and fear.
This could
only intensify their worry that once again the United States may flinch
from finishing the job, and reach some kind of accommodation, if not with
Saddam Hussein himself, then with some like-minded but more amenable successor,
found among his entourage. There are indeed audible voices advocating
just such a resolution of the conflict.
The public
debate against the war will be similarly understood--or rather misunderstood--both
by Saddam Hussein and by his subjects, and will have the unintended effect
of encouraging him and discouraging them. The antiwar campaign will not
end the war, but it may turn out to have made it longer and harder.
Mr. Lewis,
professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, is the author,
most recently, of "What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern
Response" (Oxford, 2002).
Copyright
© 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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