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 how
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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