Mark Phillips: The American Question
9/15/02: What the Next Iraq War Will Look Like.
"War is not conducted in order to punish an enemy for supposed or real sins,
but in order to break his resistance to the pursuit of one's own
interests. War is not a thing in itself, possessing its own goal: it is
an organic part of a policy to whose presuppositions it remains attached
and to whose needs it has to adapt its own successes."
Franz Mehring, quoted by Ernest Mandel in
The Meaning of the Second World War,
Verso 1986, p. 56.
The 1991 Iraqi war was fought with World War Two strategy on both sides. Masses of
allied mechanized forces enveloped the Iraqi flank, while
thousands of aircraft attacked anything that moved.
60,000 Iraqi dead paid for the incompetence of their commanders.
The coming rematch will be different.
This piece tries to read tea leaves to predict the future. Take it with as many grains
of salt as seem appropriate to you.
U.S. Strategy
Many press reports this year have emphasized basic disagreement over military
strategy within the U.S. government. There are two poles.
On the one hand, the military establishment favors a traditional approach based on
control of ground-based lines of supply. The generals would attack on two fronts:
from Kuwait north along the rivers toward Baghdad, and from Kurdish rebel territory
south toward Baghdad. The premise of this strategy is that Iraq will divide its
forces in the futile attempt to defend both fronts. The Iraqi units would be
destroyed in open terrain.
The fly in this ointment is Baghdad. If the Iraqi leadership positions its reliable
troops inside the city,
they could resist for some time. American military doctrine holds that
street-to-street fighting is the most difficult and costly of all potential missions.
Their fear is that Iraq can make the inevitable American victory slow and expensive.
On the other hand, civilian strategists close to Rumsfeld favor a hypermodern approach
relying on ability to airlift massive quantities of supplies. Their scenario would play
like the Marines' airmobile landing south of Kandahar last year. Airborne and airmobile
units would seize one or more forward positions near Baghdad, using them as bases for a
very rapid razzle-dazzle attack on the capital. The premise of this strategy is that
American units can move quickly and decisively enough to overwhelm Iraqi
resistance.
Once again the problem is Baghdad. If Iraqi elite units are dug-in there before
the attack begins, the razzle-dazzle is largely irrelevant. Moving too quickly through
the city could lead to the kind of defeat inflicted on
Russian armored columns inside Grozny in 1995: hundreds dead per day, whole units
destroyed.
Which approach will the President choose? My guess is both. Ground units will
attack from north and south to pin
and destroy Iraqi forces outside the capital, while
large-scale airmobile attacks capture forward bases in the vicinity of Baghdad.
Rapid movement will be crucial.
What happens then depends on
the Iraqi people.
Iraqi Strategy
Like the Americans, Iraqi generals have two basic strategies open to them.
On the one hand, they could try to defend the borders, slowing the American advance
and inflicting casualties as they retreat. The premise here is that the best way to
delay the inevitable is to try to keep the attackers away from Baghdad.
On the other hand, they could mass forces inside the city, fortifying it for the
longest siege possible. The premise here is that Americans will be reluctant to
accept the casualties implied by street-to-street fighting. If the defense can hold
out long enough, something good might happen. A revolt of the Arab masses might be the
most optimistic fantasy.
Which approach will Saddam choose? As with the American options, probably both.
Inferior conscript units will screen the borders in the weak hope of one or two lucky
shots. Elite units will take up siege positions inside the
capital. Whether a battle takes place there or not depends on what choices the people
make.
What Will the People Do?
All things depend on one question: how will the people respond to the invasion?
If the people rally to fight the invaders, the fight for
Baghdad can potentially be made bloody, and the occupation could be difficult. If not,
the defense will simply evaporate as soldiers and generals alike
try to hide themselves among civilians.
Which outcome is more likely? Hard to say. The Iraqi people have little reason to love
the Ba'ath party.
Yet it's not clear why they'd love the U.S. either, whose destruction of civilian
infrastructure followed by economic sanctions have combined to cost them a quarter million
children dead of dysentery over the last decade. Which choice would you make?
Probably to bow to the inevitable. Saddam has no possibility of victory.
Why die for a lost cause? Better to support
the Americans and pretend you like them. What then of the occupation which follows?
Results and Prospects
If this is right, the war will be swift. Three
or four weeks, and a few hundred casualties. The Iraqi people will suffer, and pretend to
love us as liberators. The balance of forces will tip farther toward imperialism.
The American ruling
class,
flushed with another success,
will become even more arrogantly certain that military force can act with
impunity anywhere in the world.
With Iraq secured, the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia
becomes strategically devalued. I'll bet it goes away, perhaps
via a C.I.A.-led coup which destroys the monarchy. The circumstances which
follow will pit a government of secular, pro-U.S. business types against a popular movement
under fundamentalist leadership.
Occupation of Iraq has immediate strategic consequences for the struggles in
Palestine. U.S. strategic planners will be tempted to exploit this position with an attack
on Hizballah, and with it, perhaps, Syria.
Iran is the inevitable goal. But Iran will fight. The Iranian people are
mobilized, and well-motivated by 25 years of misrule imposed on them by the C.I.A., the
Shah, and the oil corporations. Eventually, the popular movements in Afghanistan
will emerge from hiding to begin guerilla attacks on occupying troops, joined by a new
Iraqi resistance. The U.S.
will face something like people's war in these countries, to the extent that right-wing
leaderships can initiate such a thing.
Victory in Iraq will strengthen and accelerate American
imperialism's war euphoria. How long the euphoria lasts will depend on the peoples
under attack.
Back to 2002 menu
Back to Mark's Blogspace main page
More Information
- "All roads lead to Tehran", Phillips
- "Complexity", Phillips
- "weblogs: a history and perspective", blood
- "You've got blog", Mead
- EatonWeb Portal
- BlogHop
- Blogger
- Blogroots
- The Pepys Project
|
