The Siege of Baghdad
Glenn David Cox | 13.06.2007 22:40 | Anti-militarism | Iraq | Terror War | World
It’s funny, in a sad sick almost perverse sort of way, but it seems the only people who listen to George Bush and take him seriously anymore is the insurgency. Several months after his royal hind ass made his now famous “bring em on” statement the insurgency issued their own proclamation saying in affect, we have brought it on do you have anything else you wish to say to us?
The on going political battle over Bushes insane surge, like Custer wishing for ten more men or Westmoreland’s asking for 500,000 more. It belies someone’s ignorance and inability to understand tactic’s and by thinking that what is needed is just more warm bodies to storm the enemy trenches they create a recipe for a blood bath and the certainty of defeat in Iraq.
The siege strategy was used during the crusades against the middle-aged castles of Acre the ultimate irony is the insurgencies battle plan was once used by Saladin the great, it was used by the Russians at Stalingrad and by McArthur in the South Pacific and by the Afghans against the Russians etc. You isolate your enemy and cut him off from resupply or make resupply so difficult that he has to use a disproportionate amount of troops to guaranty his supply lines.
The American forces in Baghdad’s Green zone have no airstrip and are fourteen miles from the airport through Baghdad’s winding ancient narrow roads. General Von Paulus in Stalingrad was promised the Lufftewaffe would keep him supplied but it was an idle boast. The Americans have a more powerful air force to be sure but also a greater dependence on fuel and commodities. The high tech war machine like all war machines is only as good as it’s supply and there is another possibility to consider.
Suspected Sunni insurgents bombed and badly damaged a span over the main north-south highway leading from Baghdad on Tuesday - the third bridge attack in as many days. The attack occurred 35 miles south of Baghdad and just six miles south of a bridge brought down on Sunday by what was believed to be a suicide truck bomber.
On Monday, a parked truck bomb destroyed a bridge carrying traffic over the Diyala River in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. There were no casualties, but vehicles were being forced to detour to a road running through insurgent controlled territory to reach important nearby cities.
Earlier in the month a bomb attack heavily damaged the Sarhart Bridge, a key crossing 90 miles north of the Capital
In March and April, three of Baghdad's 13 bridges over the Tigris River were bombed. The attacks were blamed on Sunni insurgent or attempts to divide the city's predominantly Shiite east bank from the mostly Sunni western side of the river but far more likely it was an attempt to negate the American strength in armored vehicles
Is the campaign against the bridges an attempt to lay siege to Baghdad? Or like Khe San a generation before an elaborate ruse to draw attention away prior to a larger coming Tet style offensive. In either case the surge has begun but it has been the insurgents who have surged rather than the US.
At Stalingrad the German panzers became almost useless in the narrow streets, this army like the Americans had been designed for lighting war not for urban street fighting. A thousand eyes kept the Russian army aware of every German move and allowed Russian snipers the choicest targets.
As the occupying power in Iraq the US is responsible for keeping the residents of Baghdad fed and watered. The millions of Baghdad will create just one more burden on US forces already overburdened. Thus the American surge is already defeated without the ability to move freely the already over stretched forces will become unable to support it’s outposts. They will fall one by one just like the firebases around Khe San and the crusaders castles in Lebanon.
At Khe San the US decided to use the massive force of B52 attacks but the focus had already shifted away from victory to self-defense. The enemy had captured something far more precious than a firebase they had taken away from the Americans the certainty of victory. As the North Vietnamese army slipped away and the US forces emerged from their bunkers to claim a hollow victory, a sucker holding the bag on a snipe hunt slowly realizing he has been had. To spend huge amounts of blood and treasure to defend a muddy hill top not for a victory but only to stave off defeat.
The American surge is the latest in an attempt to stave off defeat; the moral battle was lost long ago. The political battle a stalemate, between the forces of timid stupidity verses the forces of entrenched insanity. The greatest megalomaniac’s of the 20th century had drawn up battle plans for the conquest of England and one of the cornerstones of operation sea lion was in avoiding London. Even a madman knew a large metropolis would swallow an army, and as the tide turned at Stalingrad the mad man began to cashier his own generals.
For in his madness it could only be the generals who were not following his orders not the fatal flaw in his own tactics. The mad man brooded over his scale model of the new Berlin much like the current mad man broods over his scale model of what the Iraqi’s call Bush’s palace, the Vatican city sized embassy in Baghdad which will probably never be occupied or at best be used a last redoubt.
Von Paulus pleaded for permission to withdraw and was advised that where a German foot stood a German foot stayed. The politics of cut and run verses the personal pride of the leader, the madness of leadership who view military tactic’s as personal affronts. As Nathan Bedford Forrest succinctly observed "getting there firstest with the mostest." In regards to our own current surge without the firstest the mostest becomes a mute point the mostest with the latest is a pointless exercise.
As the siege continues the US forces will become more dependant on helicopters for re-supply and will begin to lose them in greater numbers like Von Paulus they will assume a defensive position more interested in holding positions rather than taking. Will the US then call in B52 strikes on Baghdad to try and break the siege? Or will it try sending a reinforcing column to break the siege or will they finally admit the inevitable and withdraw?
A new and perhaps last chapter has begun, new in the names and places but as old as war itself. The military is well aware of the coming checkmate and are fired for their candor in saying so only the media and the madman soldier on. Fighting on not to achieve victory or even to forestall defeat but to sacrifice the blood of innocents on all sides but to preserve protect and defend the fragile ego of the leader.
The siege strategy was used during the crusades against the middle-aged castles of Acre the ultimate irony is the insurgencies battle plan was once used by Saladin the great, it was used by the Russians at Stalingrad and by McArthur in the South Pacific and by the Afghans against the Russians etc. You isolate your enemy and cut him off from resupply or make resupply so difficult that he has to use a disproportionate amount of troops to guaranty his supply lines.
The American forces in Baghdad’s Green zone have no airstrip and are fourteen miles from the airport through Baghdad’s winding ancient narrow roads. General Von Paulus in Stalingrad was promised the Lufftewaffe would keep him supplied but it was an idle boast. The Americans have a more powerful air force to be sure but also a greater dependence on fuel and commodities. The high tech war machine like all war machines is only as good as it’s supply and there is another possibility to consider.
Suspected Sunni insurgents bombed and badly damaged a span over the main north-south highway leading from Baghdad on Tuesday - the third bridge attack in as many days. The attack occurred 35 miles south of Baghdad and just six miles south of a bridge brought down on Sunday by what was believed to be a suicide truck bomber.
On Monday, a parked truck bomb destroyed a bridge carrying traffic over the Diyala River in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. There were no casualties, but vehicles were being forced to detour to a road running through insurgent controlled territory to reach important nearby cities.
Earlier in the month a bomb attack heavily damaged the Sarhart Bridge, a key crossing 90 miles north of the Capital
In March and April, three of Baghdad's 13 bridges over the Tigris River were bombed. The attacks were blamed on Sunni insurgent or attempts to divide the city's predominantly Shiite east bank from the mostly Sunni western side of the river but far more likely it was an attempt to negate the American strength in armored vehicles
Is the campaign against the bridges an attempt to lay siege to Baghdad? Or like Khe San a generation before an elaborate ruse to draw attention away prior to a larger coming Tet style offensive. In either case the surge has begun but it has been the insurgents who have surged rather than the US.
At Stalingrad the German panzers became almost useless in the narrow streets, this army like the Americans had been designed for lighting war not for urban street fighting. A thousand eyes kept the Russian army aware of every German move and allowed Russian snipers the choicest targets.
As the occupying power in Iraq the US is responsible for keeping the residents of Baghdad fed and watered. The millions of Baghdad will create just one more burden on US forces already overburdened. Thus the American surge is already defeated without the ability to move freely the already over stretched forces will become unable to support it’s outposts. They will fall one by one just like the firebases around Khe San and the crusaders castles in Lebanon.
At Khe San the US decided to use the massive force of B52 attacks but the focus had already shifted away from victory to self-defense. The enemy had captured something far more precious than a firebase they had taken away from the Americans the certainty of victory. As the North Vietnamese army slipped away and the US forces emerged from their bunkers to claim a hollow victory, a sucker holding the bag on a snipe hunt slowly realizing he has been had. To spend huge amounts of blood and treasure to defend a muddy hill top not for a victory but only to stave off defeat.
The American surge is the latest in an attempt to stave off defeat; the moral battle was lost long ago. The political battle a stalemate, between the forces of timid stupidity verses the forces of entrenched insanity. The greatest megalomaniac’s of the 20th century had drawn up battle plans for the conquest of England and one of the cornerstones of operation sea lion was in avoiding London. Even a madman knew a large metropolis would swallow an army, and as the tide turned at Stalingrad the mad man began to cashier his own generals.
For in his madness it could only be the generals who were not following his orders not the fatal flaw in his own tactics. The mad man brooded over his scale model of the new Berlin much like the current mad man broods over his scale model of what the Iraqi’s call Bush’s palace, the Vatican city sized embassy in Baghdad which will probably never be occupied or at best be used a last redoubt.
Von Paulus pleaded for permission to withdraw and was advised that where a German foot stood a German foot stayed. The politics of cut and run verses the personal pride of the leader, the madness of leadership who view military tactic’s as personal affronts. As Nathan Bedford Forrest succinctly observed "getting there firstest with the mostest." In regards to our own current surge without the firstest the mostest becomes a mute point the mostest with the latest is a pointless exercise.
As the siege continues the US forces will become more dependant on helicopters for re-supply and will begin to lose them in greater numbers like Von Paulus they will assume a defensive position more interested in holding positions rather than taking. Will the US then call in B52 strikes on Baghdad to try and break the siege? Or will it try sending a reinforcing column to break the siege or will they finally admit the inevitable and withdraw?
A new and perhaps last chapter has begun, new in the names and places but as old as war itself. The military is well aware of the coming checkmate and are fired for their candor in saying so only the media and the madman soldier on. Fighting on not to achieve victory or even to forestall defeat but to sacrifice the blood of innocents on all sides but to preserve protect and defend the fragile ego of the leader.
Glenn David Cox
Homepage:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17871.htm
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Defeat in Iraq: An excuse to Nuke Iran?
13.06.2007 23:11
Webster Tarpley
The flawed assessment offered by the Baker-Hamilton report neglects a crucial aspect of the political-military situation of the US and other foreign armed forces in Iraq: the danger that the US army of occupation might be cut off, encircled, and annihilated as a fighting force over the next few months. This flaw in turn makes it easier for Baker-Hamilton to reject a priori the one rational response to the current reality, which is the extrication of US forces before it is too late. We do not need a new way forward in Iraq; we require a speedy way out of Iraq.
The real argument concerning Iraq has nothing to do with victory; the issue is now avoiding catastrophic military defeat for the US, in a form far worse than the Baker-Hamilton group has chosen to imagine. The looming specter is the worst of military cataclysms a battle of annihilation on the model of the Romans at Cannae, L. Crassus at Carrhae, or of von Paulus at Stalingrad.
US forces attempting to defend a zone of occupation deep within landlocked Iraq now face an extraordinarily critical situation. These forces are wholly dependent on a supply line based on two roads on either side of the Euphrates which stretch some 400 miles (about 650 km) from Kuwait north towards Baghdad. It is along these roads that gasoline, food, ammunition, and all other sinews of war must be transported by truck convoy. Two roads of 400 miles each add up to 800 miles of highway to defend an impossible proposition in the face of a sustained peoples war by the Shiites of the lower Euphrates. The Iraqi resistance understood early on that these truck convoys represented a grave vulnerability for the occupation forces, and this has been the key to their most effective weapon so far, the improvised roadside bomb or IED. This vital aorta of supplies could now be cut in several places at once by the Shiite guerrillas of the Mahdi army or related groups.
If You Think Bush Is Evil Now, Wait Until He Nukes Iran
Paul Craig Roberts
Even the neoconservative warmongers, who deceived Americans with the promise of a “cakewalk war” that would be over in six weeks, believe that the war is lost. But they have not given up. They have a last desperate plan: Bomb Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney is spear- heading the neocon plan, and Norman Podhoretz is the plan’s leading propagandist with his numerous pleas published in the Wall Street Journal and Commentary to bomb Iran. Podhoretz, like every neoconservative, is a total Islamophobe. Podhoretz has written that Islam must be deracinated and the religion destroyed, a genocide for the Muslim people.
The neocons think that by bombing Iran the US will provoke Iran to arm the Shiite militias in Iraq with armor-piercing rocket propelled grenades and with surface to air missiles and unleash the militias against US troops. These weapons would neutralize US tanks and helicopter gunships and destroy the US military edge, leaving divided and isolated US forces subject to being cut off from supplies and retreat routes. With America on the verge of losing most of its troops in Iraq, the cry would go up to “save the troops” by nuking Iran.
Five years of unsuccessful war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel’s recent military defeat in Lebanon have convinced the neocons that America and Israel cannot establish hegemony over the Middle East with conventional forces alone. The neocons have changed US war doctrine, which now permits the US to preemptively strike with nuclear weapons a non-nuclear power. Neocons are forever heard saying, “what’s the use of having nuclear weapons if you can’t use them.”
Neocons have convinced themselves that nuking Iran will show the Muslim world that Muslims have no alternative to submitting to the will of the US government. Insurgency and terrorism cannot prevail against nuclear weapons.
Hard Rain
The radio-active fallout
14.06.2007 12:01
Zeb
Has Baghdad Captured Petraeus?
14.06.2007 23:09
At least Howe and King George III were convinced the American revolutionaries were defeated, their Congress forced to flee the city and General George Washington’s army apparently shocked and awed from the battlefield. The king’s troops entered Philadelphia in triumph and settled down for a comfortable winter in this, the British Empire’s second largest city, with its many Loyalists and their pretty ladies. To Parliament back in London, Howe’s capture of Philadelphia seemed a brilliant move - politically, at least: Howe had shown the hitherto unconvinced British population that a military solution to the American colonial uprising might be possible.
American revolutionary leaders were not, however, about to give up the fight. And as for Howe’s occupation of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin described it another way:
“Howe has not captured Philadelphia. Philadelphia has captured Howe.”
The most powerful military force in North America - one of Britain’s best field armies - was actually bottled up far from its main supply base at New York. Howe was in Philadelphia, but what was he to do next if the revolutionaries continued to fight? And fighting was precisely Washington’s intention. He stepped up training at Valley Forge, and his army’s morale rose. Further, France, with its powerful navy, entered the war on the side of the revolutionaries. It became apparent that the revolution was not defeated, and the British army in Philadelphia could be cut off by land and sea.
Howe, a brilliant general, became the scapegoat for misguided British colonial policies and was compelled to resign his command - all this for taking Philadelphia! By springtime, Howe’s replacement, General Henry Clinton, had to abandon the city. Clinton began a fighting withdrawal, marching his troops back to New York.
On a hot and steamy June day at Monmouth, New Jersey, the Americans fought Howe’s best troops to a standstill, inflicting heavy losses. A formerly ragtag revolutionary force was now a formidable and confident field army. Now, the American Revolution could not be defeated.
The revolutionaries might not win by pitched battle, but time was on their side. They were fighting for their own homeland, on their own soil. It was a classic insurgent scenario, to be replayed many times in the following centuries, from Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia to Hitler’s failed occupation of Europe and America’s failed campaigns in Indochina. The Revolutionary War dragged on another five years, but the result was total victory for the uprising. In the future, many of the best British regiments would mention little about the “American War” in their otherwise glorified regimental histories.
Is there a comparison to be made between Howe’s proud army and the tens of thousands of American troops now “occupying” Baghdad under the command of the much-admired General David Petraeus? Well, there is always a comparison in cases of military folly.
With Petraeus’s troops scattered in company-sized units planted in vulnerable outposts throughout the city’s ever-dangerous neighborhoods, the American army is being made captive. Captive to the teeming, violent city of Baghdad. Captive to the anti-occupation insurgents, who now have the initiative to strike when and where they choose. Captive, also, to the whims of American domestic politics, wherever they might lead. Captive to the arrogance of political and military leaders who said the seizure of Iraq would be a “cakewalk” and are now desperate for any victory, anything that might be described as victory, at whatever cost, in the coming few months.
Have President George Bush and the “Neoconservatives” and our leading military commanders walked into a trap of their own making in Baghdad? Just like Sir Billy Howe in Philadelphia?
More important, more crucial: What if the Iraqi puppet government collapses, and with it go the army and police - essential allies in any block-by-block contest? And if the Iraqi insurgents make it too costly in terms of truck drivers’ lives and helicopters to supply those thousands of duty-bound soldiers in their scattered outposts, how do we extricate them? As with Howe in 1777, the main American supply bases are far away - mostly to the south, in Kuwait and other client states. Vital American supply lines are vulnerable to being cut by roadside bombs and calculated, determined insurgent attacks.
An “exit strategy” from Iraq that depends on fighting rather than political agreements will wash Baghdad’s streets in blood this summer. Much of it American blood.
What then, as the question goes, are we fighting for?
To avoid a humiliating and bloody retreat from Baghdad? Is this what our soldiers are killing and dying for? Or to prevent a defeat that has been brought on by corrupt leadership at the highest level of our government? Or to prop up an incompetent administration in Washington until the next election?
Historically, the result of such misguided policies is always the same: Dead fighters on both sides. Many more dead civilians. And humiliation for the invaders, no matter how brave or patriotic they might be.
Now is the time, before it is too late, to lay the groundwork for all parties concerned with the destiny of Iraq to forge a truce that will permit General Petraeus and his army to leave Baghdad with some semblance of military honor. Otherwise, so many American soldiers will be stationed in vulnerable posts throughout the city that it could be said Baghdad has captured General Petraeus.
Just as Philadelphia once captured General Howe.
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Stuart A.P. Murray, author of thirty five books, specializes in American history.
Stuart A.P. Murray
Homepage:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17882.htm