Cakewalk: Getting It Wrong: U.S. Military Might and Myths
Smoler, Fred
0N FEBRUARY 13, 2002, Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman wrote in the Washington Post that "demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Not...
...They will probably wait until the authority of the regime is very visibly disintegrating...
...hecatombs of civilians were not slaughtered by promiscuous air attacks or Iraqi chemical weapons...
...Not all potential antagonists will be so vulnerable...
...American air-launched munitions now generally land within at least a few meters of their targets, and in many cases a single bomb will destroy a target with a warhead small enough to minimize the collateral damage it will inflict if it misses...
...The Wehrmacht crushed Poland in a thousand hours, and that first blitzkrieg remains a byword for an appalling mismatch...
...Why were civilian casualties so low...
...But 'this was an illusion...
...his rhetorical blunder was to deploy a metaphor connoting a jauntiness that seems tasteless in describing any war...
...This, too, is an old story: Croatian conscripts deserted the multinational Yugoslav monarchy in 1941, and minority nationalities at times fought indifferently for the Hapsburg and Czarist Empires in the First World War...
...The tipping point came late, when American armor raided downtown Baghdad, but it came...
...Journalism may not be a progressive science...
...The Baath regime could neither induce Iraqis to die for it in any significant numbers nor compel the Coalition to kill large numbers of Iraqi civilians...
...We know that special forces coordinated tactical air power and the Kurdish Peshmerga, so that after Turkey refused to allow the deployment of the Fourth Infantry Division on her soil, a northern front was nonetheless developed...
...A few days before the war began, published predictions by the more respected nongovernmental organizations ranged up to fifty thousand civilian deaths, five hundred thousand civilian injuries, and two million refugees and displaced people...
...the Turks did not invade northern Iraq...
...They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Americans in Mogadishu and the Russians at Grozny...
...And the refusal was in some part the result of the intrinsic fragility of a multinational empire of dubious perceived legitimacy...
...No one who paid attention to the Gulf War should have been surprised by the abilities of Coalition troops...
...The Baathists did not possess effective weapons of mass destruction or chose not to use them...
...So the Iraq War is more or 40 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 less sui generis: an unprecedented feat of arms that many observers refused to recognize while it was occurring, and which some could not bring themselves to acknowledge even after it had transpired...
...a representative analysis, by James K. Galbraith, appeared in the American Prospect on April 1: The dilemma is now acute...
...the Abrams's main gun significantly outranges enemy tank guns...
...know that they seized key airfields in Western Iraq and engaged in Scud hunts in areas from which missiles might have reached Israeli cities...
...The analogy hounds had the wrong scent: there may have been a disastrously Stalinoid command structure, but there was no Stalingrad in the making...
...THE REFUSAL Of most Iraqi troops to fight to anything like the bitter end remains the crucial element in explaining the dimensions of the victory...
...Another technological advance involves real-time targeting—it is reported that in at least one case during this war, fourteen minutes elapsed between the acquisition of intelligence on a target and the delivery of the munitions...
...It had wagered, and it had won on an astonishing scale...
...But in minimizing the likely cost to the Coalition, Adelman was clearly on to something...
...and all the ghastly lot of it, have presumably made some of this clear...
...Vietnam...
...But those early pseudo-successes in the south misled some observers, especially those desperate for signs of Coalition failures...
...It is likely that the attacks on Iraqi command and control, both those executed by special forces and by Coalition aircraft, aggravated certain noteworthy tendencies of totalitarian regimes at war: the inability to secure good information from a terrorized and politicized officer corps, the party's mistrust of the armed forces, the difficulty of delegating authority to lower level commanders who can seize evanescent opportunities...
...the evidence suggests that in terms of potential military energy, Iraq was in 2003 not a nation, but lines on a map...
...the reports of the rape couches with restraints and convenient video cameras—so that the rapes could be demonstrated to relatives living abroad...
...It has now indisputably arrived: 10 percent of munitions dropped in the Gulf War were precision guided missiles, whereas perhaps 90 percent of the munitions used in Afghanistan were PGMs...
...In retrospect, Vietnam and the October War of 1973 were the high-water mark of third world military relative effectiveness in conventional contests with modern Western states...
...Things would get "difficult" only if Saddam played the cad and drew the Americans into Baghdad...
...In the desert, armies fight armies...
...We do not know how many Iraqi troops were killed as opposed to how many simply deserted, and we do not know how many were suborned...
...Still, the Gulf War was not necessarily a perfect predictor of the outcome of the Iraq War...
...As in 1991, it was essentially defenseless against aerial attack and incapable of maneuver...
...Although three of those divisions seem to have done almost all of the fighting, one can not argue that a minimal commitment of manpower sufficed to shatter Saddam's regime: in addition to the hundred thousand Coalition troops in Iraq when the Pentagon declared victory, there were at least as many more in theater...
...Iraq was in range of both land- and carrierbased air power, and its armed forces could neither contest American air supremacy nor challenge our control of the seas...
...The most vivid future remembered (that is, projected) by many of the pessimists was Vietnam, where the vast material superiority of the United States had arguably been squandered by strategic vacuity...
...This was an old, old dream: first, air power's prophets, then, its lobbyists had repeatedly predicted that air power would make possible cheap imperial policing operations, or would allow capital-rich states to make inexpensive and ever victorious war upon their less sophisticated enemies, or would prove so frightful that the next war would be the last, or would make manpowerintensive traditional militaries obsolete...
...urban warfare did not gut the American army...
...For the Baathists, other imagined pasts would then come into play: the antiwar movement, 42 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 or the United Nations, or the Russians and French would force a ceasefire and save the regime...
...On the regime's own count, Coalition attacks killed on the order of two thousand civilians...
...T T HIS DID NOT happen...
...When the militias seemed to be holding Basra and counterattacking (however sporadically and ineffectively) the Coalition's lines of communications, the regime apparently attempted to reinforce what it mistook for success by sending detachments of its most reliable troops south, to stiffen resistance by threatening hideous reprisals against people who shirked sui 44 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 CAKEWALK cidal attacks...
...They listened to Western strategists musing about how a desert battle would be a pushover...
...In this war, Coalition aircraft flew 15,825 sorties and delivered 27,250 weapons in 21 days (fewer than one-third of the strikes and a tenth the number of weapons employed in the Gulf War...
...Simultaneously, pundits thought that revolutionary nationalism had opened up inexhaustible reservoirs of potential military energy, energy that would increasingly be exploited by third world states and insurgencies...
...The revolution has been much announced and (somewhat unfairly) dismissed several times...
...A number of observers also mistook the attacks by the Saddam Fedayeen for signs of popular resistance...
...At the risk of mistaking current shibboleths and pseudo-explanations for more than the clichés of the moment, one can say that the Coalition's staggering victory was the result of the proficiency of its combined arms and operations— the brilliant integration of its mechanized forces with its tactical air power—that shattered an Iraqi army peculiarly ill-suited to and ill-equipped for the war it had to fight...
...But that was not the past the pessimists imagined...
...In 1991, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops began to desert after forty-two days of air attacks...
...and generally bad at maneuver...
...At close quarters, and above all inside cities, some (although by no means all) of the Coalition advantages might have been minimized: for example, in urban combat, enemies can fire at the thinner armor on the sides and rear of an Abrams...
...The Iraqi state, perhaps 60 percent to 65 per cent Shia Arab and 20-some percent Kurd, has been a notoriously cruel tyranny misruled by a minority of a minority: Saddam's loyalists among a Sunni Arab minority that may make up 17 percent of its population...
...On April 20, Edward Said wrote, in the Observer, Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons not found, the Stalingrads that didn't occur, the artillery defenses that never happened, I wouldn't be surprised if Saddam disappeared suddenly because a deal was made in Moscow to let him, his family, and his money leave in return for the country...
...I I T Is TEMPTING to pronounce the pessimist case bankrupt...
...The Wehrmacht, of course, had significantly outnumbered the Poles, while the hundred thousand Coalition troops had routed three hundred thousand Iraqi troops, and perhaps another hundred thousand militia...
...It would be difficult to produce an Iraqi regime as ghastly as the one we have destroyed...
...Stable democratic societies are not spontaneously generated by bayonets, either...
...the regime was not fighting for its survival, nor the troops for their national soil...
...In the remembered future, this past would repeat itself...
...peoples will on some occasions fight armies, but this was very far from such an occasion...
...the revolution they represent is now more than a quarter of a century old...
...Sometimes—although oddly rarely— the crowds do escape, and armies disintegrate...
...When Saddam attacked Shia Iran, his own Shia conscripts were generally reliable (and his Republican Guards were eventually formidable...
...What does the victory presage for the future military balance...
...For comparative perspective, during the Second World War, indeed during the Vietnam War, hundreds and sometimes thousands of bombs were necessary to destroy specific targets...
...As far as is now known, only four or five of these weapons indisputably missed their targets and killed Iraqi civilians...
...Urban warfare can be hideously expensive for the attacker: within two weeks, the Germans controlled half of Stalingrad, but at a cost of 7,700 dead and 31,000 wounded...
...DISSENT / S ummer 2003 n 45 CAKEWALK What does the war indicate about the future balance of power...
...Pick a proverbial military triumph of the Second World War, in fact, pick the first: the Polish campaign...
...The imagined past was one where the Vietnamese willingness to die exceeded our willingness to kill them, and where the civilian deaths seemed to negate any plausible moral calculus...
...In cities, armies fight cities...
...We doves correctly foresaw that the war would not be a cakewalk . . ." In fact, by the time American troops entered Tikrit, the metaphor had become almost wholly unmoored from any analytic specificity, and the tenacity with which the disputants clung to the word was baffling...
...The Iraqis were not stupid...
...0N FEBRUARY 13, 2002, Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman wrote in the Washington Post that "demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk...
...We still know very little, and other significant factors may emerge...
...But the precedents were misleading: the result was swift and absolute defeat...
...W W HY WERE the pessimists so wrong...
...Americans are much better at war than is generally understood, but that is no reason to think that we will show any genius at liberal imperialism...
...After successive defeats, it melted away...
...We wire...
...One can overrate this effect, and it is a mistake to assume that rulers receive no more than they deserve in time of war: they often receive far more than they deserve...
...These air strikes could be launched without the greater risk of "collateral damage" we'd have run had we been hitting units concealed in the midst of a civilian population of four and a half million...
...they had a good sense of Grozny, and a vivid if misleading one of Mogadishu (where the Americans admitted to killing a thousand of their enemies, and may have killed as many as thirty-five hundred of them, after a loss of eighteen dead...
...r r EW OF THE pessimists imagined the Re publican Guard divisions staging an up set in the desert...
...FRED SMOLER teaches literature and history at Sarah Lawrence College and is a contributing editor at American Heritage Magazine...
...If you were looking to pillory Adelman, you could land on the fact that he'd asserted that tactical air power, special forces, and Kurdish irregulars would suffice to topple Saddam's regime: our Afghan War, redux...
...In the Iraq War, both were presumably more highly motivated...
...Dropped from a sufficient height, concrete bombs can destroy tanks...
...With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made two gross misjudgments in concluding that coalition forces could safely bypass Basra and Nasiriya and that Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq would rise up against Saddam Hussein...
...People who have been repeatedly and effectively terrorized—and within recent memory betrayed and abandoned by the outside world—are arguably unlikely to risk everything on the off chance that the Americans will arrive before the Mukhabarat does...
...The pessimists and the Baathists anticipated a war of protracted urban combat, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism, where Coalition casualties would mount inexorably and Iraqi civilian casualties swiftly reach appalling levels...
...In an alleged irony that the critics never tired of asserting, Afghanistan and Iraq were two of the first places imperial air war was tried (in the 1920s...
...Saddam's regime may have thought—possibly correctly—that it needed to appear invincible to sustain the terror that secured obedience...
...its hydraulically stabilized turret, targeting technologies, and the skill of its crews mean that it can fire on the move, and at night, with remarkable accuracy...
...But how do we assess the interpenetration of these causes...
...And on that front, forces coordinated by Coalition special forces did take Kirkuk and Mosul and annihilated or forced into Iran units associated with al-Qaeda...
...General Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a press conference in December 2002, "I would just say there's nobody involved in the military planning . . . that would say that this sort of endeavor—if we are asked to do it—would be a cakewalk .....But the image had legs, so to speak, and on April 22 Nicholas Kristof could write in the New York Times, "No one got the level of resistance quite right...
...Adelman's phrase might have suggested that the war would be no more than an exuberant parade...
...We do not know why this was so, but the likely explanations are the unattractiveness of the Iranian theocracy and effective Baath terror...
...They seldom capitulate, least of all when their backs are to the wall...
...T T HE MISPERCEPTION and misinterpretation of the "failure" of Shiites to rise in the south—or in Baghdad—suggests that observers both in the region and in the world press have a shaky grasp of the probable behavior of people incarcerated in totalitarian regimes...
...But secret policemen and party thugs do not seem to make the best light infantry...
...Some of the critics knew the story of the Stalingrad grain elevator— where forty or fifty Russians held off ten times their number for days...
...Lighter American armor—Bradleys and even the marines' wheeled and thin-skinned LAVs (Light Armored Vehicles)—are also remarkably caDISSENT / Summer 2003 n 41 CAKEWALK pable against heavier armor...
...And so the political battle—the battle for hearts and minds—will be lost...
...No plausible challengers are visible anywhere else...
...American units within sight of the city might well have triggered the Shiite revolt the regime so feared (more than half the capital's population is Shiite...
...Kabul was ceded to the warlords only when the Taliban drove out of town...
...As a military analogy, the critics were thinking of a certain narrative of Jenin (or of Hue), and also recalled Stalingrad, Berlin, and Warsaw...
...Coalition troops in Iraq had routed perhaps four times their number in three weeks—but the critics clearly felt they had gained some moral advantage when Kenneth Adelman used the word, and thought that they might still win the argument...
...Why should he do otherwise...
...In the long run, China and India may (or may not) be rising military powers...
...The Coalition had run risks it might not have run in the face of a more skillful or enterprising enemy...
...R. W. Apple was typical...
...Precisionguided munitions arrived late in the Vietnam War...
...Allied deaths in the Gulf and Iraq Wars totaled less than the United States incurred in an average week at the height of the Vietnam War...
...Terrorist discipline can maintain cohesion, generally (although not always) at a significant cost: the German army executed at least fifteen thousand soldiers for cowardice and desertion over the course of the Second World War, during which time the American army executed one man, but the relative effectiveness of the two armies does not seem to demonstrate that terrorist discipline inevitably exacts a stiff price in military capacity...
...An uninterrupted series of defeats—a sense of hopelessness— can dissolve armies...
...The war had gone badly for the US in the south, and Bush couldn't risk the same in Baghdad...
...Already, the commander of American ground forces in the war zone has conceded that the war that they are fighting is not the one they and their officers had foreseen...
...Another possibility is that it was ordered to keep the Coalition forces out of eyeshot of Baghdad...
...This was like someone mistaking the escalating 1944 savageries of the desperate and despairing Milice for a sign of the broad popularity of its creator, Pierre Laval, and the Vichy regime—but oddly enough, no one at the time seems to have made that mistake...
...Was it worth two million...
...The two phenomena were interrelated: had the United States killed large numbers of civilians, it is CAKEWALK possible that Iraqi willingness to die for the regime would have increased, and had large numbers of relatively skilled Iraqis been available to fight in built-up areas, it is likely that the United States would have been compelled to inflict significant collateral damage...
...In 1991, the Iraqis were outnumbered, and after one hundred hours of ground combat were allowed to retreat unmolested...
...The novelist Alan Furst once wrote that "Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, but Russia fought back," and this is an old story...
...Regime terrorism did not provoke systematic and savage Coalition responses...
...But the pessimists retain a powerful argument: proverbially, one can neither mine coal with bayonets nor sit on them...
...The conflict in Iraq took place under optimal conditions...
...46 n DISSENT / Summer 2003...
...The Second World War...
...the prison of children liberated on the road to Baghdad...
...People who assumed that the absence of an immediate revolt meant that the people of Iraq were loyal to the regime were very foolish, or peculiarly inattentive to the decades of reports from human rights organizations...
...When the Coalition attacked Saddam Hussein, most of Iraq did not fight back...
...This is an astonishing figure, particularly when one considers that the regime's forces systematically broke the laws of war with the likely result (and probably the intent) of provoking civilian casualties: by feigning surrenders, threatening and on occasion carrying out terrorist attacks, and locating munitions and combatants in civilian neighborhoods, most especially in those structures most likely to evoke rage if attacked, in schools, hospitals, mosques, and Shiite slums...
...But some of them are, and seem to know it...
...American bombs are now so accurate that they are in some cases inert, filled with concrete...
...The Iraqi army, like other modern Arab armies, is traditionally bad at tactical leadership, improvisation, information management, weapons handling, and maintenance...
...But the failure to fight in cities meant that Iraqi armor faced American forces under the worst possible conditions: relentlessly attacked from the air, then engaged by vastly superior Abrams tanks...
...In retrospect, these troops might have been better employed in Baghdad...
...perhaps a third of the Baghdadis are Sunni...
...But Adelman also wrote that expelling Saddam from Kuwait in 1991 had been a cakewalk, which meant that an Adelmanian cakewalk could require up to half a million troops, an air campaign lasting many weeks, and a few hundred Allied dead...
...What is a suitable perspective...
...In the Iraq War, though, it seems very likely that although terrorist discipline kept some part of the Iraqi army and militia together for a couple of weeks, the cohesion so achieved was pretty minimal, and the price paid for this modest achievement may have been steep...
...the Republican Guard had fought courageously (and in the case of the Tawakalnah division, not wholly unskillfully) when covering the withdrawal from Kuwait...
...There were some disturbing precedents: formations that had fought wretchedly when invading Iran had proved tenacious and finally effective when defending Iraq...
...Combine the disparity of losses and the relative size of the forces committed, and you probably have to go back to Agincourt to find so great a victory—but the lethality of weapons has increased notoriously since Agincourt, which makes the minute Coalition losses even more astonishing...
...This was probably a misreading: the first definition is simply "something easily accomplished," and as early as 1916 the word was used to denote a comparatively effortless military endeavor...
...Since the fall of Baghdad, the photographs of, and interviews with, men with amputated tongues, cropped ears, gouged eyes, and hideous scars...
...they were not thinking about the Gulf War at all...
...the war did not involve Israel...
...What, precisely, had Adelman meant...
...In part because of the self-restraint—with a few exceptions— shown by Coalition troops and in part due to a technological revolution, the use of precision-guided munitions, particularly GPS (Global Positioning System)-guided munitions, in unprecedented quantities...
...Whether we can produce a vastly superior one is an open question...
...this time, fewer air attacks over a shorter period seem to have produced a similar effect: many of the Iraqis were indeed shocked and awed...
...After all, the Arab street did not rise...
...Special forces may also have assisted in the decapitation of the Baath regime and the Iraqi armed forces by attacking command and control facilities, or by assassinations, or by subversion, or by assisting in the acquisition of targets for Coalition bombardment—all with asyet incalculable effect...
...Writing in the New York Times on March 29, he could claim, With every passing day, it is more evident that the failure to obtain permission from Turkey for American troops to cross its territory and open a northern front constituted a diplomatic debacle...
...Nonetheless, a vicious circle was foreseen by critics of the war, and imagined to be most acute in the "inevitable" urban combat...
...Helicopter gunships were on one occasion driven off by anti-aircraft fire...
...Although it is possible that the estimate is low—the result of an inability to gather complete information— it seems more likely that it is high, given the regime's notorious mendacity...
...But perhaps not...
...Let one of the more distinguished journalistcritics stand for the rest: on March 28, Simon Jenkins wrote in the London Times, In Baghdad the coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance...
...Elias Canetti memorably wrote that "inside every army there is a crowd, struggling to escape...
...Meanwhile, the prime stocks of precision munitions have been drawn down, and speculation about the future use of cluster bombs and napalm and other vile weapons is being heard...
...If history is a guide, you cannot subdue a large and hostile city except by destroying it completely...
...the Americans would and could learn nothing from it...
...The level of violence will therefore be raised...
...It took two years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall to the Vietcong...
...The smallest error in this series is off by more than an order of magnitude...
...The diplomatic debacle with Turkey is unlikely to have delayed the victory by as much as a week...
...But to anyone with a sense of military history, the war had not gone badly for the United States in the south...
...if they miss their targets, they are unlikely to kill civilians...
...It had not gone badly anywhere...
...The Battle of Baghdad was to be Stalingrad on the Tigris, or the fantasy Jenin (the Jenin of the genocidal massacre) multiplied a thousand-fold...
...The old saying holds that we remember the future and imagine the past...
...Memories of the crushing defeats of the Gulf War, and the swift destruction of any force that contended with the Americans over the course of the Iraq War, presumably had a cumulative effect on morale...
...Anecdotal evidence suggests that many deserted: there were reports of whole battalions of boots neatly lined up by the roadside, with small arms stacked next to them (boots give deserters away to both miliW W HAT DO WE KNOW...
...But the much-predicted future of cheap, independent, and ever successful air operations has yet to arrive, and in the event, Coalition combat units in Iraq included five divisions...
...This sounds plausible...
...this may have been the sum of the things that went badly...
...Was rescuing a country from a revolutionary nationalism captured by Stalinists worth a million Vietnamese deaths...
...Not everyone in the defense establishment agreed...
...A generation ago, it was fashionable to suggest that the conventional military balance was tipping away from the United States and its allies...
...It was widely assumed that the Americans (and their allies) could do nothing about these alleged trends...
...Cities do not fight armies...
...Its increasingly expensive weapons systems— the descendents of the armor and tactical aircraft that had dominated the Second World War—were allegedly no longer cost-effective at the margins, for they were now too easily countered by relatively cheap anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons...
...If the political cohesion of the Iraqi army disintegrated under the shock of war, this may in retrospect seem to have been inevitable, but it wasn't...
...By any comparative standard, Coalition losses were negligible: there were sixty-eight American deaths attributed to enemy action, and adding in British deaths, the Coalition fatalities were around a hundred—losses terrible for those who bore them, and for those who mourn them, but fantastically small in any historical perspective...
...Even after the war, the failed attacks and a misinterpretation of the strategy of bypassing some cities gave rise to something of a stab-in-theback myth...
...We know that the Republican Guard divisions were deployed outside Baghdad rather than within it, and had been devastated by repeated Coalition air strikes, attacks to which they could make almost no effective reply...
...The United States was able to build up massive forces in a bordering state (Kuwait) and attack at leisure...
...Short of massacre, we will not inherit a pacified Iraq...
...Hostile cities have ways of making life ghastly for aggressors...
...This unprecedented accuracy vastly multiplies both the military and the political effectiveness of DISSENT / S um mer 2003 • 4 3 CAKEWALK tactical air power...
...There are as yet no estimates for Iraqi combat casualties, but there is one interesting estimate for civilian deaths: the one offered by the regime itself, before it was destroyed...
...By failing to deploy and fight inside the city, the Republican Guard forfeited significant advantages: cities are de facto fortresses, they blunt some of the technological and tactical advantages of the Coalition forces, and the pessimists knew this...
...The Coalition's ability to avoid inflicting vast numbers of civilian casualties minimized the initial political costs of the war and may have denied the regime an effective rallying cry...
...The Gulf War was an astonishingly one-sided victory, and Allied losses in Iraq DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 39 CAKEWALK War were around a third of our losses in the 1991 conflict...
...We may surmise that Iraqi morale had previously been eroded by the quarter-century of needless sacrifice and privation, most recently by the miseries wrought by the sanctions, and greatly exacerbated by Saddam's kleptocracy...
...So Adelman almost certainly understood a cakewalk as encompassing a significant effort and some human cost...
...In the course of that mismatch, the Poles inflicted fifty thousand casualties on the Wehrmacht...
...For further comparison, in the first years of the Second World War, the British Royal Air Force managed to drop fewer than half its bombs within five miles of their aim points...
...If and when tanks meet headon in open country, few anti-tank weapons can penetrate the glacis plate of an Abrams...
...Why did the Republican Guard deploy as it did...
...They are not like countryside...
...But in Iraq, where after a while it was impossible to see al-Jazeera or the British Broadcasting Corporation, the casualties were misrepresented by less plausible sources—and opinion does not seem to have been enraged to the point of producing significant support for the embattled regime...
...This refusal was presumably in significant part the result of Coalition military action: the cumulative effect of bitter experience, of repeated hopeless engagements...
...Thoughtful observers are now more struck by the weakness and fragility of many hostile regimes than by any premonition of their increasing military strength...
...The resulting civilian casualties were shown again and again on the twenty-four hour Arab television network al-Jazeera and enraged opinion in the Arab world...
...For example, by some accounts the Coali CAKEWALK tion had ten thousand special forces operating tary and secret police, and also to the enemy, behind Iraqi lines, and we do not yet know who may put even deserting troops behind much about what those forces were doing...
...peculiarly ill-trained to cope with high-tempo operations...
...Shock and awe" neither shocked nor awed...
...One report asserted that the Guard had been forbidden to deploy within Baghdad for fear that it would attempt a coup (as had happened in the wake of the Gulf War...
...The cakewalk, popular on American plantations in the 1850s, and the first dance to cross over from black to white society, had couples promenading, high stepping, and kicking...
...Strategic bombing was so inaccurate that the Germans were often unable to determine what the RAF was trying to hit...
...The work of securing a decent Iraq necessarily began with war, but that goal has many enemies and amazingly few friends...
...The superior proficiency of American troops greatly exacerbated the difficulties posed by their superior materiel: while the best Iraqi troops have historically shown admirable qualities—unit cohesion, courage and tenacity, an ability to fight setpiece defensive battles—American tactical skills vastly overshadow those of Iraqi troops...
...Leaving aside his own Russian catastrophe, Napoleon invaded a decaying monarchy in 1808, but Spain fought back, to devastating effect...
Vol. 50 • July 2003 • No. 3
