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ROLLING START

The Idiot Prince Will Have His War

by Stan Goff

© Copyright 2003, From The Wilderness Publications,
www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted,
distributed or posted on an Internet web site for
non-profit purposes only.

[FTW asked retired U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant
Stan Goff to re-examine what we can expect on the
battlefield when the United States begins its invasion. The
former instructor of military science at West Point
describes a scenario that is vastly different from what was
expected last September before the Bush administration
encountered effective economic and political opposition.
Now denied the luxuries of a multi-front invasion from
Turkey and Saudi Arabia the U.S. war strategy has changed.
The bottom line is that a great many more innocent
civilians are going to be killed. And the first and
possibly crippling breakdown of U.S. plans will happen in
Kurdestan. – MCR]

March 17, 2003, 1500 hrs PST (FTW) -- The full-scale,
unilateral US invasion of Iraq appears – to many – to be
imminent as this is written. In just hours President Bush
is expected to give Saddam Hussein a 72-hour ultimatum to
leave the country or else the bombs start falling. I have a
reservation or two left about that, based partly on hope,
but partly on the even riskier assumption that this
administration realizes that it has miscalculated and that
the consequences of invasion may now outweigh the risks –
from their standpoint – of no invasion.

The Bush regime seems to have a clear understanding of what
desperate straits they were in well before 9-11. The empire
is in decline, and this means Americans will have to
reconcile themselves to a new world in which their
profligate lifestyle becomes a thing of the past. 
Americans do not understand that this is an irremediable
situation.  That is why we are witnessing the beginning of
what is possibly the most dangerous period in human history.

If the administration decides miraculously in the next few
days not to invade, the most unthinkable risks will recede
significantly.  But this Junta has repeatedly displayed a
reckless adventurist streak that alarms even their own
political allies, and it appears that the hotter heads will
prevail.

The actual tactical situation, never terribly auspicious
because of the Kurdish wild card that receives far too
little attention (and which I will address later), has
deteriorated for the US.  The denial of a ground front from
both Saudi Arabia and Turkey has completely reshuffled the
tactical deck, and caused many a sleepless night for
harried commanders from Task Force Headquarters all the way
down to lonely infantry platoon leaders.

The ground attack will now go through Kuwait, a single
front across which an unbelievable series of heavy,
expensive, high-maintenance convoys will pass, many on long
journeys to 18 provincial capitals, 19 military bases, 8
major oil fields, over 1,000 miles of pipeline, key terrain
along minority Shia and Kurdish regions, as well as
Baghdad.  But attacking forces are not the only mechanized
ground forces.

The huge logistical trains that must consolidate
objectives, set up long-term lines of communication, and
deliver daily support, will also be held up until airheads
are seized within Iraq to augment ground transportation
with airlifts of people and equipment.  This shifts a
higher emphasis onto airhead seizures (and therefore Ranger
units), and forces the security of the airheads themselves
before they can become fully functional. 

Baghdad may require a siege, which has already been
planned, but now that siege doesn’t begin without a much
lengthier invasion timeline that depends much more heavily
on airborne and airmobile forces that can be dropped onto
key facilities to hold them until mechanized reinforcement
can arrive.  At this writing, the 101st Airborne (which is
actually a helicopter division) has not even completed its
deployment into the region.  Sections of the 82nd Airborne
(a genuine paratroop division) are still occupying
Afghanistan.

The increased dependence on airlift is further complicated
by weather.  While extreme summer heat doesn’t reach Iraq
until May, the pre-summer sand storms have already begun. 
US commanders have pooh-poohed the effect of these storms,
but they are simply putting on a brave face for the
public.  Sand can be a terrible enemy.  It clogs engine
intakes, just as it clogs eyes and noses, gathers in the
folds of skin, falls in food, works its way into every
conceivable piece of equipment, and takes a miserable toll
on materiel, machinery and troops.  When air operations
become more critical to overall mission accomplishment, and
when light forces (like airmobile and airborne divisions)
are operating independent of heavier mechanized logistics,
weather like sand storms matters...a lot.

The order of battle is widely available on the web, and
there's no reason to recount it here.  The reason is, even
with all these debilities and setbacks, the results of the
invasion are certain.  Iraq will be militarily defeated and
occupied.  There will be no sustained Iraqi guerrilla
resistance.  There will be no Stalingrad in Baghdad.  We
should not buy into the US bluster about their
invincibility, but neither should we buy into Iraqi bluster.

Last September retired Marine General Paul Van Riper was
selected to play the Opposing Forces (OPFOR) Commander
named Saddam Hussein for a 3-week-long, computer simulated
invasion of Iraq, called Operation Millennium Challenge.

He defeated the entire multi-billion-dollar US electronic
warfare intelligence apparatus by sending messages via
motorcycle-mounted couriers to organize the preemptive
destruction of sixteen US ships, using pleasure vessels. 
At that point, the exercise controllers repeatedly
intervened and told him what to do; move these defenders
off the beach.  Stop giving out commands from mosque
loudspeakers.  Turn on your radar so our planes can see
you.  Because every time Van Riper was left to his own
devices, he was defeating the US.

While all this is surely amusing, does it really mean the
Iraqis will defeat the US during an invasion?

Certainly not.  It will, however, make it far more
expensive, slow, difficult, and deadly for Iraqis.

The Iraqi military won't prevail because they can't. They
are weak, under-resourced, poorly led, and demoralized.
 What the delays mean is that the US will depend on
sustaining the initiative and momentum through brutal,
incessant bombing designed to destroy every soldier, every
installation, every vehicle, every field kitchen in the
Iraqi military.

War will inflict terrifying casualties on the Iraqi
military.  There will be collateral damage to civilians,
even with attempts to attenuate that damage, and in case we
fail to remember, soldiers are like everyone else. They
have families and loved ones.

What is uncertain is the aftermath.

This is the variable that is never factored into the
thinking of our native political lumpen-bourgeoisie; their
deeds plant the seeds of future and furious resistance.

If half million Iraqi soldiers die, and 100,000 civilians
are killed in collateral damage, we have to remember that
there are at least (for the sake of argument) five people
who intensely love each of the dead.  And if we think of
the grief of millions after this slaughter, and of the
conversion of that grief into rage, and combine that with
the organization of the internecine struggles based on
historical ethnic fault lines (that the Ba'ath Party has
repressed), we begin to appreciate the explosive complexity
of post-invasion Iraq.

This invasion will also ignite the fires of Arab and Muslim
humiliation and anger throughout the region.

Most importantly, in my view, there are the Kurds.

Anyone who has followed the news has heard about "Saddam's"
gassing of the Kurds.  That's how it is portrayed. 
Nonetheless, few people have bothered to find out what the
truth is, or even to investigate this claim.

Stephen Pelletiere was the Central Intelligence Agency's
senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. 
He was also a professor at the Army War College from 1988
to 2000.  In both roles, he had access to classified
material from Washington related to the Persian Gulf.  In
1991, he headed an Army investigation into Iraqi military
capability. That classified report went into great detail
on Halabja.

Halabja is the Kurdish town where hundreds of people were
apparently poisoned in a chemical weapons attack in March
1988.  Few Americans even knew that much.  They only have
the article of religious faith, "Saddam gassed his own
people."

In fact, according to Pelletiere – an ex-CIA analyst, and
hardly a raging leftist like yours truly – the gassing
occurred in the midst of a battle between Iraqi and Iranian
armed forces.

Pelletiere further notes that a "need to know" document
that circulated around the US Defense Intelligence Agency
indicated that US intelligence doesn't believe it was Iraqi
chemical munitions that killed and aimed the Kurdish
residents of Halabja.  It was Iranian. The condition of the
bodies indicated cyanide-based poisoning. The Iraqis were
using mustard gas in that battle. The Iranians used cyanide.

The lack of public critical scrutiny of this and virtually
all current events is also evident on the issue of the
Kurds themselves.

That issue will come out into the open, with the vast area
that is Kurdistan, with its insurgent armed bodies,
overlaying Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and even parts of Syria,
which will realign the politics and military of the entire
region in yet unpredictable ways.

As part of the effort to generate an Iraqi opposition, the
US has permitted Northern Iraqi Kurdistan to exercise a
strong element of national political autonomy since the
1991 war. This is a double-edged sword for the US in its
current war preparations, particularly given this
administration’s predisposition for pissing all over its
closest allies. Iraq's Northern border is with Turkey, who
has for years favored the interests of its own Turkmens in
Southern Turkish Kurdistan at the expense of the Kurds, who
have waged a guerrilla war for self-determination against
the Turks since the 1970s.

The Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan or PKK) (Kurdish Worker's
Party), Turkish Kurds fighting for an independent Kurdish
state in southeast Turkey, was singled out on the US
international terrorist organization list several years
ago, in deference to fellow NATO member, Turkey.  PKK
leader Abdullah Ocalan is so popular with the Kurds that
Turkey was forced to commute his death sentence, subsequent
to his capture, to life imprisonment, for fear that his
execution would spark an uprising.

Other non-leftist Kurdish independence organizations
developed and alternatively allied with and split with the
PKK and each other. Turkey now claims that PKK bases are
being constructed in Iran, with Iranian complicity, from
which to launch strikes against Southern Turkey. Groups
other than the PKK, more acceptable to the US,
predominantly the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the
Kurdistan Patriotic Union (PUK) have been administering
Northern Iraqi Kurdistan as an autonomous zone under the
protective umbrella of the US no-fly zone. The Turkish
government fears the influence of this section of Kurdistan
in the wake of a US military action that topples Saddam
Hussein’s Ba'ath government, because Kurds have declared
their intention of declaring an independent Kurdish state
there. The Turks find this absolutely unacceptable, and
have declared forthrightly they will invade to prevent this
happening. They have also threatened to attack Kurds in
Iran, but this is a far less credible threat.

Kurdish nationalists have long experience with betrayals
and alliances of convenience, and know American perfidy
very well. They have declared at the outset that in the
event of an invasion, they will defend themselves from
Turkish incursions. They are not willing to lose the
autonomy they have gained over the last eleven years in
Northern Iraq. This not only puts them at odds with US ally
Turkey, it potentially puts them at odds with the US
itself, even with US wishes that they participate in
indigenous actions against Iraqi forces. The US does not
want that region destabilized in the post-invasion period,
because Kirkuk in the East of Iraqi Kurdistan is a huge oil
producing zone.

The very first complication of post-invasion Iraq will
likely be the demand that US commanders disarm the Kurds.

Northern Iraq could easily become contested terrain
involving partisan warfare between Turks, Kurds of three
factions, the Iranians, and the US, with the Syrians in a
position to play the silent interloper. This would amount
to the devolution of Northern Iraq, a key strategic region,
into another Afghanistan or Somalia. It is already
straining relationships between Turkey and the United
States, NATO allies, even as the NATO alliance itself comes
under severe strain, with a Euro-American trade war as a
backdrop.

And the Kurds have the motivation, tenacity, and fighting
spirit to do those kinds of things that General Van Riper
did to defeat the Rumsfeld "Robo-Military" in Operation
Millennium Challenge.

We begin to see how the Bush Junta is the equivalent of a
mad bee keeper, that no longer leaves the hive stable and
merely smokes it into a stupor to harvest the honey. It now
proposes to simply start swatting all the bees and taking
the honey by brute force.

We cannot see the war as an extricable, external
phenomenon. We have to see it as it is embedded in the
larger complexities of the whole period. When the cruise
missiles fly at 400 per day, that is 400 times $1.3 million
in self-destructing technology. 30 days of this is $15.6
billion in Cruise missiles alone. This is great news for
Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin, but it is bad news for public
schools.  At the antiwar demonstration in Washington DC,
March 15th, I met many more teachers, now wearing buttons
that said "money for education not war." This is a
reflection of the deepening consciousness of the American
people, but one that has not yet grasped the depth of the
crisis that drives the war. Nor does it measure how every
missile’s impact increases the rage of the Southwestern
Asian masses and the justifiable anxieties of Africa and
East Asia.

The real bet that Bush & Co. make on this war is that it
can secure oil at $15 a barrel, rescue dollar hegemony,
gain the ability to wage its economic war on China and
Europe, and inaugurate a fresh upwave of real profit. That
will not happen.

When the invasion goes, we will certainly see plenty of
images of cheering "liberated" Iraqis. This is common after
any successful military incursion, a combination of real
relief in some cases, as we saw in the first stage of the
1994 Haiti invasion, but also of self-defense and
opportunism.

The costs incurred by the war, combined with the insane
Bush tax cuts for the rich, will deepen the Bush regime’s
economic conundrums. The coming social crisis in the US
will emerge against a backdrop of elevated public
expectations.  The hyperbole employed by this
administration to justify this war, against rapidly
strengthening resistance and a corresponding loss of
credibility outside the indoctrinated and gullible United
States, led them to warn the public about perpetual "war on
terror," but with the sugar coating that there would be no
domestic economic sacrifice. The mountain of personal and
institutional debt in the US, the threat of deflation, the
trade deficit, the overcapacity, the rising unemployment
and insecurity, all these factors will be worsened by the
Bush doctrines. And Bush, like his father before him, will
go down. Along with him, Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar
will go down in political flames, and it will be a long
time indeed before anyone can align themselves with the US
as an ally. As in the last elections for the Republic of
Korea, candidates will find that election victory depends
on now independent one can prove oneself of the United
States.

We have had our course charted now, and the military option
is all the US ruling class really has to maintain its
dominance. After Iraq, there will certainly be increased
asymmetric warfare, "terrorism," if you will, directed at
Americans, American institutions, American targets. And
when the rest of the world recognizes how thinly spread the
US military is, thinly spread physically, but also
economically because it is not a sustainable institution in
its current incarnation, rebellions will occur. They have
already started. Then the response of the weakening US will
be to lash out, often with totally unforeseeable
consequences, just as the consequences of this impending
invasion are unforeseeable.

Our military might is no longer a sign of strength, and the
US military is not invincible. Its use as both first and
last resort is a sign of profound systemic weakness. That
its employment could destabilize the world, and cause us to
stumble into a Third World War is a real possibility.

We in the antiwar movement have struggled to protect the
Iraqi people. We may fail in that. But as resistance
fighters in WWII or national liberation fighters in the
post-colonial era, we must differentiate setbacks from
defeat, when we suffer those setbacks we can not be
demoralized and demobilized. We will keep our eyes on the
fact that the system itself is failing and this adventure
is a symptom of that failure, and continue to work for the
political destruction of our current regime as a tactical
necessity. The perfect storm is coming. It's in the genetic
code of the system right now and inevitable. And while we
don't know how it will look, we have to keep our eyes on
the prize - emancipation from the whole system, and let
that be our lodestar.  Never quit. Never. We are in the
stream of history, and we have been given a grave and
momentous responsibility. Every day we delayed them was a
victory.

There is a long struggle ahead, and it will become more
terrible. But just as those before us fought slavery,
apartheid, fascism, and colonialism, we will take up our
historical task with confidence and determination, and
assert our humanity against these gangsters.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity.


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