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Cost of the War in Iraq
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Friday, March 21, 2003
"Shock and Awe" Comes
if U.S. Fail to Separate the
People from the Regime
Calibrated War Makes Comeback
By Thomas E. Ricks
The war that the U.S. military has launched in Iraq isn't the kind it has been told by Colin Powell and his peers that it should be ready to fight.
Since the American policy of gradual "escalation" of military force ended in failure in Vietnam, a generation of officers has been shaped by the notion that when the nation goes to war, it must use its overwhelming power to decisively defeat enemies. But the opening phase of the latest Persian Gulf war has been marked instead by a few sharp, narrowly focused blows aimed at bringing down the government of Saddam Hussein without having to resort to a conventional, all-out attack.
Since yesterday, U.S. and British forces have launched about 60 cruise missiles at a few key "leadership" targets, dropped a handful of bombs, and sent Special Operations forces to reconnoiter key targets. Then they accelerated the timing of the ground war, sending several thousand troops across the border from Kuwait. Perhaps most importantly, the United States intensified a months-long psychological operations campaign aimed at turning the loyalties of the Iraqi army, or at least persuading it that resistance is futile. According to a senior Bush administration official, surrender negotiations were underway yesterday between U.S. officials and a number of Iraqi unit commanders.
"What they're trying to do right now is to punish the regime and give forces a chance to capitulate," this insider said. "It's a selective use of force to see if you can separate the people from the regime."
If this last chance to oust Hussein does not work, he added, "this is a force that has a plan to annihilate the Iraqi military, if it has to." He was referring to the relentless, "shock and awe" bombing campaign that some Pentagon officials had predicted might begin the war.
Another defense official agreed with that description of the war plan, saying that the first day of strikes -- which also have targeted some headquarters buildings of the Republican Guard, some of Hussein's most loyal troops -- have been intended "to see if we can try to tip things, first."
But this official warned that time is running out, and that the plan calls for escalating soon to extensive bombing raids.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld summarized this carrot-and-stick approach at a Pentagon briefing yesterday. "We continue to feel that there's no need for a broader conflict if the Iraqi leaders act to save themselves," he said. But, he continued, "what will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict. It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before."
more @ Washington Post.
post by vasco on 1:58 PM
The latest
and greatest
from Tacitus
It's difficult to know what to make of the war thus far. I'm probably a victim of my own heightened expectations, but I would rather have expected to control the entire Faw peninsula by this morning. We don't, and that strikes me as odd.
H2 and H3 have been seized. That's good, and grist for this story. Bad news, on the other hand, is the report that an Allied attack on a third location in western Iraq, ar Rutbah, has been repulsed.
Meanwhile, it appears that the 7th Cav is making an epic dash up the Euphrates-Tigris valley. Straight for Baghdad? Perhaps. But I don't think 7th Cav can take the city all on its lonesome.
My impression thus far is that of the calm before the storm. On both sides: we've not unleashed "shock and awe" (for reasons that I think will lead us to poor decisions in future wars), and they've not unleashed their full arsenal.
I'm not seeing the mass surrenders in the Shi'ite south, either. Yeah, a few hundred, but that ain't much. Speaking of the Shi'ites, anyone know our plans for being sensitive and multiculti when it comes to taking Karbala? Just asking.
I'm a pessimist in some ways, so keep that in mind when I say that this war is going to take a while. Something's going to happen that's going to make folks sorry they said "cakewalk."
more @ Tacitus.
post by vasco on 1:49 PM
What
Happened to
"Shock and Awe"?
After repeated boasts about "shock and awe" and MOABs and locus swarms and other horrific things soon the befall Iraq, the US has announced it is holding back that part of the campaign. This is kind of odd, since Bush promised that the armed forces would be allowed to prosecute their war unrestrained by political concerns.
Yeah, yeah, Bush was lying. But the fact of the matter is a major part of the invasion plan is now on hold. Why?
Update: Tacitus points out that there could be legitimate military reasons for the postponment of "shock and awe". He's right.
more @ Dailykos.
post by vasco on 1:17 PM
Kurds Against
Turkish Intervention
of South Kurdistan
The Turkish Parliament is currently discussing whether to send Turkish troops into South Kurdistan. This time, to keep the Kurds quiet, the invasion will be under pretext of "humanitarian aid."
However, Kurds know very well that the only humanitarian aid Turkey can offer to Kurds is extermination of their language, identity, culture, habitat, etc.
Many believe that Turkish troops will move 25 miles into South Kurdistan. This will be sufficient enough to cut the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) forces from every international border, i.e. Iran and Syria, cutting escape and assistance routes. If it survives until then, the Iraqi regime would be supporting such a move as well. Turkey will then implement its "disarmament" massacre of Kurds and occupy oil rich Kurdish cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. Thus, the first steps will have been taken for the establishment of another "Cyprus".
It should also be noted that such a move would not be made without a green signal from the U.S. Such a conspiracy against the Kurdistan de facto state would not only reveal a repeated betrayal of the Kurds, but also be a lethal blow to Kurdish aspirations and struggle for independence with consequences remaining for decades.
However, there is a worse scenario. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), to say the least, has given conflicting and confusing signals on its position on the arrival of Turkish troops. Jalal Talabani, the PUK leader, has shown willingness to allow Turkish troops to enter south Kurdistan. The PUK must declare its position on Turkey. Sending confusing and conflicting signals does great damage to the Kurdish cause internationally.
The PUK and the KDP must stand together and issue a united statement in the strongest possible language against a Turkish invasion of South Kurdistan.
It will be a historical mistake if the Kurds do not all stand as one united nation against Turkish invasion of south Kurdistan.
more @ KurdishMedia News.
post by vasco on 3:58 AM
Turkish forces will
enter south Kurdistan,
says Turkish official
Ankara - Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin has confirmed that his country will dispatch troops to south Kurdistan, despite the objections of both the U.S. and Kurdish parties.
Speaking on the Turkish TV channel NTV today, Sahin said that the deployment was a humanitarian one, aimed at preventing the wave of refugees that occurred in the wake of the 1990-91 Gulf War.
"We can take this step once the parliament approves the motion," he said. The Turkish Parliament is today meeting to debate the sending of Turkish troops overseas and the granting of access to Turkish airspace to foreign forces.
"Our soldiers will cross the border only for humanitarian purposes," Sahin said. "If there is a refugee wave towards our border, we plan to stop the refugees on the other side of the border and accommodate them in humanitarian support centres there."
Sahin denied that Washington would object to the deploying of Turkish forces in south Kurdistan. "Undoubtedly, the Foreign Ministry was in contact with the United States while the motion was being prepared," he said. "Therefore, there will not be any problem."
more @ KurdishMedia News.
Founded @ Back to Iraq 2.0.
post by vasco on 3:48 AM
Why can this President
not seem to see that
America's true power lies
not in its will to intimidate,
but in its ability to inspire?
Senator Robert Byrd
The complete speech of Byrd was published at Reclaim Democracy site. What Byrd perhaps ignore is what was the view of the think thinker of Bush's gang, Samuel Huntington on this subject. We reproduce it bellow:
"the West won the world
not by the superiority of its
ideas or values or religion but
rather by its superiority in
applying organized violence.
Westerners often
forget this fact,
non-Westerners never do."
post by vasco on 3:39 AM
UK's Antivirus Sophos
Make the Profile of
a Virus Writer
According to the UK's Sophos, one of the world's largest antivirus companies, about 1,000 viruses are created every month, and in almost all cases the perpetrators are computer-obsessed males between the ages of 14 and 34. "They have a chronic lack of girlfriends, are usually socially inadequate and are drawn compulsively to write self-replicating codes. It's a form of original graffiti to them," says Sophos CEO Jan Hruska. Virus writers tend to explore known bugs in existing software or look for vulnerabilities in new versions in order to create and spread their infections, and Hruska notes that the next target for the virus writing community could be Microsoft's .Net platform for Web services. To boost the impact of their creations, virus writers also tend to share information to create variants of the
same infection, such as the infamous Klez worm, which has been among the world's most prolific viruses in the last year.
more @ CNet News.
Received from NewScan Daily newslist. NewsScan Daily (FREE), a lively summary of information technology news writed by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas. To subscribe, send email to Newscan. Copyright 2003. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
post by vasco on 2:50 AM
Silver Lining:
Tough Travel Is Good
for Virtual Conferencing
Partly as a consequence of war buildup and terror alerts, virtual conferencing businesses have been thriving. InterCall's voice-communications volume is up 60% from this time a year ago, and Talkway Communications says its video e-mail service is up more than 50% from last December. Other companies, such as PlaceWare and WebEx, are reporting similar increases, and many companies have in-house video services. American Standard, a manufacturer, has more than 100 videoconferencing units worldwide, and an executive of that company says: "It's improved our productivity and, of course, that's always a savings to us. And it keeps us in front of our customers all the time." He says the company's travel policy stipulates that "travel is the mode of last resort."
more @ USA Today.
Received from NewScan Daily newslist. NewsScan Daily (FREE), a lively summary of information technology news writed by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas. To subscribe, send email to Newscan. Copyright 2003. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
post by vasco on 2:42 AM
Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles not Just
for Reconnaisance
A new Pentagon report says the Department of Defense is planning the rapid development of sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for a variety purposes beyond simple reconnaissance: "The Department is committed to transform our military into a more agile, lethal and efficient force, capable of meeting the diverse security needs of our nations and partners. UAVs have a central role in this transformation... Today's UAVs are more sophisticated and capable than ever. As the military's operational tempo has increased, so too has the employment of UAVs to include performing a wider variety of missions than just reconnaissance."
more @ USA Today.
Received from NewScan Daily newslist. NewsScan Daily (FREE), a lively summary of information technology news writed by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas. To subscribe, send email to Newscan. Copyright 2003. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
post by vasco on 2:12 AM
Pentagon Eagerly
Buying Commercial
Satellite Access
To make sure it has enough communications bandwidth to meet the voracious information needs of the high-tech invasion force surrounding Iraq, the Pentagon has assembled ten times the satellite capacity that was used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Much of that capacity is from civilian sources, and the president of the Satellite Industry Association says that the Defense Department "is hovering up all the available capacity." A Fox News executive explains that the Pentagon's extensive bandwidth needs will have an impact on the media's ability to cover the war: "There are 600 members of the media embedded there, all using the same satellite phones."
more @ Washington Post.
Received from NewScan Daily newslist. NewsScan Daily (FREE), a lively summary of information technology news writed by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas. To subscribe, send email to Newscan. Copyright 2003. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
post by vasco on 2:06 AM
U.S. Customers Service
Has Changed its
Name and Customs
The Bureau of Customs and Border protection (formerly the U.S. Customers Service) has changed not only its name but also it highest-priority mission. Whereas it used to regard the war on drugs as its main purpose, it now has a new top mission: stopping potential terrorist weapons. The Bureau tries to inspect 7.2 million shipping containers a year, in addition to 11.1 million trucks, 2.4 railroad cars, 768,000 commercial airline flights, and 128,000 private flights. One Customs official explains the challenge by noting the problem confronting an inspector examining a cargo container filled with scrap metal or spare parts: "Think about what that would look like in an image. In that case, a canine could help us." He added: "Besides, they're cheap."
more @ New York Times.
Received from NewScan Daily newslist. NewsScan Daily (FREE), a lively summary of information technology news writed by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas. To subscribe, send email to Newscan. Copyright 2003. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
post by vasco on 2:02 AM
The Arrogant Empire:
Why America Power
Scares the World
America’s unprecedented power scares the world, and the Bush administration has only made it worse. How we got here—and what we can do about it now
by Fareed Zakaria
Part I: The United States will soon be at war with Iraq. It would seem, on the face of it, a justifiable use of military force. Saddam Hussein runs one of the most tyrannical regimes in modern history.
For more than 25 years he has sought to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and has, in several documented cases, succeeded. He gassed 60,000 of his own people in 1986 in Halabja. He has launched two catastrophic wars, sacrificing nearly a million Iraqis and killing or wounding more than a million Iranians. He has flouted 16 United Nations resolutions over 12 years that have warned him to disarm or else, including one, four months ago, giving him a “final opportunity” to do so “fully and immediately” or face “serious consequences.” But in its campaign against Iraq, America is virtually alone. Never will it have waged a war in such isolation. Never have so many of its allies been so firmly opposed to its policies. Never has it provoked so much public opposition, resentment and mistrust. And all this before the first shot has been fired.
Watching the tumult around the world, it’s evident that what is happening goes well beyond this particular crisis. Many people, both abroad and in America, fear that we are at some kind of turning point, where well-established mainstays of the global order—the Western Alliance, European unity, the United Nations—seem to be cracking under stress. These strains go well beyond the matter of Iraq, which is not vital enough to wreak such damage. In fact, the debate is not about Saddam anymore. It is about America and its role in the new world. To understand the present crisis, we must first grasp how the rest of the world now perceives American power.
It is true that the United States has some allies in its efforts to topple Saddam. It is also true that some of the governments opposing action in Iraq do so not for love of peace and international harmony but for more cynical reasons. France and Russia have a long history of trying to weaken the containment of Iraq to ensure that they can have good trading relations with it. France, after all, helped Saddam Hussein build a nuclear reactor that was obviously a launching pad for a weapons program. (Why would the world’s second largest oil producer need a nuclear power plant?) And France’s Gaullist tendencies are, of course, simply its own version of unilateralism.
But how to explain that the vast majority of the world, with little to gain from it, is in the Franco-Russian camp? The administration claims that many countries support the United States but do so quietly. That signals an even deeper problem. Countries are furtive in their support for the administration not because they fear Saddam Hussein but because they fear their own people. To support America today in much of the world is politically dangerous. Over the past year the United States became a campaign issue in elections in Germany, South Korea and Pakistan. Being anti-American was a vote-getter in all three places.
Look at the few countries that do publicly support us. Tony Blair bravely has forged ahead even though the vast majority of the British people disagree with him and deride him as “America’s poodle.” The leaders of Spain and Italy face equally strong public opposition to their stands. Donald Rumsfeld has proclaimed, with his characteristic tactlessness, that while “old Europe”—France and Germany—might oppose U.S. policy, “new Europe” embraces them. This is not exactly right. The governments of Central Europe support Washington, but the people oppose it in almost the same numbers as in old Europe. Between 70 and 80 percent of Hungarians, Czechs and Poles are against an American war in Iraq, with or without U.N. sanction. (The Poles are more supportive in some surveys.) The administration has made much of the support of Vaclav Havel, the departing Czech president. But the incoming president, Vaclav Klaus—a pro-American, Thatcherite free-marketer—said last week that on Iraq his position is aligned with that of his people.
Some make the argument that Europeans are now pacifists, living in a “postmodern paradise,” shielded from threats and unable to imagine the need for military action. But then how to explain the sentiment in Turkey, a country that sits on the Iraqi border? A longtime ally, Turkey has fought with America in conflicts as distant as the Korean War, and supported every American military action since then. But opposition to the war now runs more than 90 percent there. Despite Washington’s offers of billions of dollars in new assistance, the government cannot get parliamentary support to allow American troops to move into Iraq from Turkish bases. Or consider Australia, another crucial ally, and another country where a majority now opposes American policy. Or Ireland. Or India. In fact, while the United States has the backing of a dozen or so governments, it has the support of a majority of the people in only one country in the world, Israel. If that is not isolation, then the word has no meaning.
more @ Newsweek.
post by vasco on 1:39 AM
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Turning the
American Republic into
an Imperial Power
The Short-Lived American Empire
by Gwynne Dyer
Just over two thousand years ago, when the Roman republic turned itself into an empire and extended the 'pax romana' over most of the known world -- western Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, plus the great reservoir of barbarian tribes in eastern Europe and central Asia -- Rome exercised direct control over about half the total population, and was able to tax them and raise troops from them. So the Roman empire lasted over four hundred years.
Many people in Washington now talk openly of turning the American republic into an imperial power that enforces a 'pax americana' around the planet, but the United States has only 4 percent of the planet's population, and its people are equally averse to high taxes and US casualties. The demand for US troops and money will rapidly outrun the supply, so the American empire will last about twenty minutes -- but it may be a hectic and painful twenty minutes.
The dream of American empire has attracted American neo-conservatives for decades, but it gained a much broader following after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The only apparent constraint on US power had been removed, and the idea that the world will be a safer place if it is governed by multilateral organisations under the rule of law began to give way to the fantasy that the United States can and should make the world a safer place
(particularly for American interests) by the unilateral exercise of its own immense power.
Official Washington was starting to oppose any new international rules that might act as a brake on the free exercise of US power even in Bill Clinton's administration. It was Clinton, not George W. Bush, who fought an international ban on land mines and tried to sabotage the new International Criminal Court. President Bush's cancellation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the US veto on new provisions for intrusive inspections under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and Washington's more recent rejection of similar attempts to write some provisions for enforcement into the Biological Weapons Treaty simply follow in the same path.
As Boston University professor and retired US army officer Andrew Bacevich wrote in a recent edition of 'The National Interest', "In all of American public life, there is hardly a single prominent figure who finds fault with the notion of the United States remaining the world's sole military superpower until the end of time." This is called hubris, and it is generally followed by nemesis. That will probably arrive during the next phase of the fantasy: the wildly ambitious project to make the conquest of Iraq the cornerstone for a wholesale restructuring of the Arab world along American lines.
"America has made and kept this kind of commitment before, in the peace that followed a world war," said Mr. Bush late last month, comparing the project with the rebuilding of German and Japan after 1945. "We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary." You don't know whether to laugh or cry, but tears are probably more appropriate, for that is where this is all going to end.
Iraq is no more like Germany than Saddam Hussein is like Adolf Hitler. Germany and Japan in 1945 were industrial states with strong national identities, several generations' experience of democracy, homogeneous populations, and fully professional bureaucracies. Iraq is an artificial state of competing ethnic identities with no democratic tradition and a deeply politicised, totally corrupt state apparatus dominated by a single ethno-religious minority.
Never mind running the world or spreading democracy throughout the Middle East; merely occupying Iraq is likely to prove too heavy a burden for the US public to tolerate for very long. The Kurds in the north will try to keep the de facto independence they have enjoyed for the past ten years, and the Turkish army will move in to ensure that they don't set up an independent Kurdistan that would act as a beacon for Turkey's own huge Kurdish minority. The Iraqi Kurds will fight if the Turks invade, and America can either intervene in this no-win situation or leave the north of Iraq to another round of bloody fighting.
The Shia Arab majority of Iraq's population, long excluded from power by the Sunni Arab minority, will also try to leave Iraq unless it gets the lion's share of power in Baghdad. That won't happen because the loyalties of Iraqi Shias lie with their co-religionists in Iran, and Washington will not allow a pro-Iranian government to emerge in Baghdad that would control Iraq's oil and menace Saudi Arabia's. So the US will end up running Iraq through the same Sunni Arab elite that Saddam Hussein's Baath party draws most of its members from, and as a result Shia militants will soon be attacking American occupation forces in southern Iraq.
The Romans dealt with this sort of stuff all the time. In fact, they often had four or five situations like this going on in various parts of their empire at the same time. They just spent the money, put in the troops, took their casualties, and killed enough of the locals to make the rest keep quiet. But does anybody seriously think that the current generation of Americans is going to pay that sort of price for a world empire that nobody except a narrow Washington-based elite really wants? We are probably no more than two years away from a Somalia-style US withdrawal from Iraq.
Gwynne Dyer, Ph.D., is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.For more on Gwynne Dyer, please read GBN.
sended by Bruce Sterling to Nettime.
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post by vasco on 4:04 AM