DEFENCE: Saddam's cunning ruse
Where's the fight in Iraq?
Revolving military attitudes
Why has the war in Iraq been so easy? For contrary to the media hyper-ventilating of last week — and what an aeon of 24-hour news cycles ago that seems now! — that’s what the war thus far has been. The first Gulf War introduced to public and political notice the consequence of modern, asymmetrical wars: that, unlike Vietnam and Algeria, these could be easy, and for us, relatively bloodless. That one-sided Western wars had always been like this (cf. Malaya, for example), unless grossly mishandled, or politically undermined in the metropole, had been forgotten in favour of the fraudulent template that said: the white man won’t beat the brown or the yellow man, because no matter how much firepower the former has, he won’t use it. This, strictly speaking, wasn’t how new left protagonists of ‘liberation struggles’ quite parsed their ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric, but it’s what both sides understood to be the truth of the matter. Those being the two sides in the arena that mattered, to wit, the West. Is this then yet another one of those wars where ‘we have the maxim gun and they don’t’? Yes, up to a point, but in very large part we’re winning because the regime appears to be putting such an effort into losing.
For understandable reasons of patriotism perhaps, from those inclined towards it at any rate, that ‘one-sided’ nature of the war is seldom alluded to by those on the right. You will of course find plenty of boasting references to our superiority, but far less often will you encounter references to their sheer inferiority. Several factors account for this, including an admirable desire to avoid hubris, a basic sense of shame, and, slightly less pleasingly, an unwillingness to concede that this isn’t war as our (grand)fathers knew it. The reason it isn’t that latter thing (that there is a widespread, if unspoken, doubt to this being the ‘real’ warfare of legend, literature and Saturday afternoon black and white television) is due to something we’ll briefly return to: the simple fact that this is not great power war. When we get back into one of those, we’ll see enough people dying in traditional fashion to satisfy everyone, but for now we have the war we have. A war against a third world country, with a minuscule population compared to its invaders, bereft of modern military technology, and extraordinarily poorly led. Let us then consider the immediate consequences of such a thing.
What would you do?
Our first basic, text-book observation should be that the attacking force has complete air superiority. The advantages that this gives are self-evident. Indeed, so taken for granted is this state of affairs that it is hard for most watching this war to conceive of any other sort of conflict being engaged in by the West. In fact, it might almost be worth claiming that the West requires as a prerequisite complete air-superiority before it will go to war. That verges on being a political observation about when the West is liable to act, so we will move straight back to military matters.
What are the Iraqis up to — how is the regime reconciling the task of defending the state against invasion whilst lacking any air power? It’s easier at this stage of the war to note what they’re not doing: they’re not blowing bridges, nor are they laying mines, and astonishingly enough, they’re not using chemical weapons. They’ve made fitful efforts at destroying bridges as they’ve retreated, where anything like an organised retreat took place, but as yet have been frustrated each time. Possibly some lingering respect for Princess Diana deterred them from seeding landmines across Iraq during the year and more in which even the blindest despot could have seen that land war was coming, but who can say? It’s as sensible as any other theory so far advanced. And last of all, no WMD. Who’d have figured? Maybe they’re being saved up for something really important? They are bound to have a plan surely? Well there’s a question.
Overlooking the obvious
There is of course the possibility that Iraqi strategy is all a cunning ruse, which we’ve foolishly played along with. That Baghdad will soon be auto-immolated for Western military, inhabitant and regimist alike. It’s possible. Three things occur however in response to this (not least, why are the regime so seemingly calm? if this is the ace in their hole, you’d have thought they’d be sweating a bit more) and we should take them in turn:
(1.) There is no strategy. One overwhelming precedent exists for this thesis, and it happened a dozen years ago. Saddam had during the first Gulf War no strategy to speak of. He blundered into it, blundered his way through it, and then he blundered his way out of it. Not one single piece of evidence exists that suggests Saddam was working to a plan in 1990/91: so why think that he has one now? A convincing argument is there to be made that, an unchallenged autocrat has now needlessly led his country to war by a series of bizarre and unnecessary decisions; and, the ‘defence’ of Iraq reflects this underlying reality.
(2.) There is a strategy, it’s just totally useless. This is essentially a development of point one, and what it reflects as to the way Iraq is run. Even were there a strategy of whatever dubious worth, it must by now be comprehensively degraded by the fact that the Iraqi command and control structure is presumably in ruins? Again, that’s all plausible enough, but it’s still missing the real non-howling dog.
(3.) Iraq doesn’t have battle-ready WMD. Few subjects cause more rubbish to be written than ‘WMD’. Even the gibberish letters are misleading: most chemical and gas-based weapons have such poor dispersal rates, that other than in a concentrated battlefield environment, they have little killing power compared to conventional explosive weaponry. And even when eventually used during contemporary war, it will most likely be the side-effects for combat-readiness of suiting-up that will cost most of the causalities i.e. kills be still be scored by conventional weapons, merely assisted by the retarded fighting capability of the afflicted ground forces. But did, does Iraq have them? If she does/did, why doesn’t she use them?
In the event of the regime having a meaningful amount of chemical or other unconventional weaponry, the only plausible grounds, other than staggering incompetence, for not using them is because either, urban deployment is felt to be the most effective wartime use, or, it’s being held in reserve as a final insurance against regime change. The thinking being, if we threaten to use it, they’ll at least let us, what, escape? Again, we’re back in the realm of incomprehensible Iraqi behaviour, so there’s little utility in trying to account for it. What, though, the most nonsensical reaction provoked by WMD is so consistently, is the ‘dire response’ so frequently vouchsafed by the press on behalf of Washington (or sometimes London). This is the silliness that says, directly or otherwise, ‘if the bad guys go nuclear/chemical/biological, we’ll do the same. But. Worse’.
Try that schema out on the practical test of Iraq: if, say, chemical weapons are used on coalition forces, in, for example, Baghdad, what exactly are the Anglo-Americans going to do? Gas, if they have enough gas, some blameless Western town, Hiroshima-style, to show that they’re taking the whole business very seriously? This is unlikely, it is in addition, improbable. It won’t, to save time, happen. Who knows whether the Iraqis know this? But I repeat, we are such good guys that even if they managed to kill a competent number of our soldiers it is incredible to suggest that our governments will then proceed to kill, in retaliation, a severe quantity of Iraqi civilians (them being the only kind of Iraqi to hand in conveniently bunched quantities).
Unhappy to think on
One other possibility exists for the weirdly lacklustre quality of Iraqi defence, despite all the time they’ve had to prepare, and all the preparations we’ve been assured they’ve been making, albeit M. Blix hasn’t been finding. The possibility is that Iraq will not be defended in Iraq, but that it will be defended abroad. This modern doctrine of ransom obviously entails a credible threat existing against something our governments would rather not have credibly threatened. Who knows whether this is in fact the case, and in an act of much appreciated (by me anyway) kindness, our governments aren’t letting on until the whole thing is over in order not to alarm us?
Here’s one reason why London and New York and Washington and LA are probably not secretly being held hostage by Spectre-style nukes (the only pertinent WMD in this game): if they were, we would never have gone to war in the first place. The risk, as our consistent behaviour towards every nuclear armed state demonstrates, would have been judged too great, and we would have taken our chances and just waited to see what would happen. The near-certain guarantee that Iraq doesn’t, inside or outside the country, have functioning WMD is exactly that we invaded her.
In the end some claim to justify pre-emption will have to be established once we’ve won, for no other reason for intervention has yet been demonstrated by the course of this war. All it has shown, and in the most testing arena possible, is the lack of capacity Iraq has had to threaten the West. This isn’t over yet, and the war could turn out to have been justified, but you’d have to hope it doesn’t. Only after the Nazis had been stupid enough to discount cheering Ukrainian peasants garlanding the Wermacht whilst their priests celebrated masses for them, did the citizens of the USSR realise that the invaders were as bad as Stalin, but worse still, foreign. We’re not going to make this mistake. Morale is still the first theatre of war, and Iraqi military morale cannot possibly be high. Victory is assured, but Saddam has, thus far, made it easy for us.
[A note on great power war: next week ERO will be running an article on the likelihood of the United States taking on anyone her own size.]
John Rugby, April 3, 2003 10:59 PM