Published in Maclean's Magazine, March 31, 2003 (edition date: April 7) London Was it just another random collage of video streams, or did the juxtaposition of live TV feeds, on Britain's Sky News this past Wednesday, reveal much more than the sum of its parts ? On frame left of the split screen, above the title "War on Iraq", Tony Blair was facing Prime Minister's Questions at Westminster. A strapline across the bottom of the screen quoted him as saying: "enormous progress has been made." Simultaneously, at frame right, a dead body was being pulled from the wreckage of a Baghdad bazaar, allegedly hit by misguided U.S. or British missiles. So is it progress or predicament in the war on Iraq ? The former, insist officials at the Pentagon (who after waffling for a time finally declined to accept responsibility for the bazaar bombing). But with mounting civilian casualties, and often equally grim evidence from the battlefield, an unsettling pattern is developing in this second week of the U.S.-led campaign: a good number of physical objectives are being achieved, but almost invariably without gaining the desired results. Armoured infantry columns ate up 200 miles of desert on the way to Baghdad, only to be stalled by overstretched supply lines that are regularly ambushed by Iraqi troops and militia. And while American and British firepower is brought to bear on strategic cities such as Basra and Nasiriya, it's not grateful civilians providing the welcome, but fanatically determined militiamen willing to fight and die for Saddam Hussein. "You could have expected that the Fedayeen would be fanatical," says Daniel Neep, Middle East specialist for Britain's Royal United Services Institute, referring to the young irregulars who have emerged from obscurity to make their mark on the front lines. "But the fact that they've actually translated their fanaticism into organized resistance is quite surprising. What we knew about them was that they were not a particularly well trained army -- basically they were thugs. So obviously this has been a problem of intelligence of not knowing just how much of a problem the Fedayeen could present. Overall I would say there was an underestimation of how much resistance would be met in the first place." The consequences of this and other shortcomings of the Rumsfeld doctrine are many and varied, but most boil down to the U.S. Defense Secretary simply getting the math wrong: General Tommy Franks hasn't been provided with enough troops to do the grunt work. And the grunt work is turning out to be much more demanding than expected, with U.S. and British soldiers having to win over a skeptical -- and sometimes hostile -- civilian population, even while they grapple with the dual threats of guerrilla-style attacks and sudden tank battles. Add to that Rumsfeld's pointed warnings to Syria and Iran not to meddle in Iraq, and U.S. field commanders suddenly face potential adversaries at two more points of the compass. The absence from the northern front of the 4th Infantry Division, denied transit by the Turkish government, weakens Gen. Franks' forces both by strength and position, because Saddam Hussein's generals have been able to deploy more of their forces in the south. Iraqi units have exploited this to marked effect, creating a greater than expected number of points of resistance across a broader front, and -- crucially -- maintaining communications and support lines in the northeast between Baghdad and Basra. Of the failure to field an additional division in the north, retired Maj Gen Julian Thompson, who commanded Britain's 3 Commando Brigade in the Falklands war, told Maclean's: "It would have been a good idea to have had a fail-safe force or plan in place for that eventuality. In other words you have to bank on the basis of pessimism and prepare for a worst case decision from the Turks. Because when an army advances this quickly, you're constantly having to dispatch units along the way to deal with the enemy's attacks on your lines of supplies. If you're not careful and go too swiftly, you end up with three men and a dog at the front end." But Thompson agrees with other veteran commanders that all's not lost -- provided the Americans get a lot more muscle into action as soon as possible. "I'm sure the U.S. high command is sufficiently mentally agile to cope with these challenges," he says. But will mental agility be blocked by doctrinal rigidity ? That question shook the Pentagon like the blast wave of a rogue missile, this past week, when confirmation came of persistent rumours that Secretary Rumsfeld has been stubbornly refusing the demands of his top Army brass for a larger invasion force. It was left to a retired general, Barry McCaffrey, to give voice to the frustrations of serving officers like army chief General Eric Shinseki and Marine commandant James Jones. A gruff, aggressive soldier (two days after the cease-fire that brought the 1991 Gulf War to an end, McCaffrey's 24th Infantry Division crushed a column of Iraq's Hammurabi Republican Guard, destroying hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles) the former general has gone public with charges that Rumsfeld has critically undermanned the campaign. By week's end, everyone up to the commander-in-chief acknowledged, however tacitly, that this was true, and President Bush ordered another 120,000 troops to join the 125,000 U.S. and British combat troops already in Iraq. As changes were being made to the military plan, Britain's Tony Blair was seeking equally dramatic adjustments from the Bush administration on the political front. Blair urgently needs the Iraq issue to be brought back under the United Nations umbrella, not just to speed humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people and to lend legitimacy to a post-war administration of the country, but for his own survival. For although the first days of the war saw British public opinion swinging behind their squaddies in the field, MPs from all parties are warning that a prolonged, bloody conflict will place the Prime Minister back in the crosshairs of his Labour backbenchers' sights. Having endured two record-breaking revolts in his parliamentary party, Blair and his aides don't want to face a third vote, which will almost certainly arise in some form at war's end. Sadly for Blair, President Bush and his team have thrown him only the thinnest of lifelines, so furious are they still with France, Russia and the entire U.N. process. At their joint press conference this past week, Bush mumbled a few phrases about welcoming United Nations help on the humanitarian front, but even the administration's sole mulitlateralist, Colin Powell, is holding firm that the U.S., not the U.N., will control Iraq for a considerable time to come. Here again, the doctrinal extremism of the administration's hawks is holding the President to his rigid, unilateralist course. Prior to resigning last week from the defence policy board (amid charges of conflict of interest) neo-conservative guru Richard Perle savaged the U.N. in an article in Britain's Spectator. In turns of phrase that even Saddam Hussein's speechwriters might well admire, Perle wrote: "The "good works" part (of the U.N.) will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the looming chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order." One senior member of Secretary General Kofi Annan's staff shakes his head in disbelief. "I don't think there's any way to change the minds of people like this," he tells Maclean's. "They're die-hard rejectionists and there's probably no-way of turning them around. But I believe there are many more people who understand the great potential benefits to America of the United Nations, and its these people who will help us get around the Richard Perles. We'll find ways to connect with people who understand the virtues of multilateralism. We'll show that the United Nations can do what needs to be done. As was the case in Kosovo, you'll find the Americans will come back to the U.N. for assistance in the ensuing peace. The U.S. needs the United Nations as much as the United Nations needs the U.S." Not least to help quell the rising tides of anti-Americanism: the more destructive and drawn out the road to peace, the less viable will be a purely U.S.-administered interim government. Middle East specialist Daniel Neep points to the growing number of young Iraqis, many of whom fled Saddam's regime, who have been returning from Jordan and Syria to resist the invasion force. "I think it's indicative of the way the US has mishandled its image in the Middle East -- this just shows you the extent of genuine anger against the U.S. in the Arab world. It raises huge questions about examining the policies that brought this on." Re-examining policy, however, is not a big priority on the U.S. domestic scene, due in part to the supportive coverage of the war thus far by the American public's chief source of news, the networks. A senior Canadian diplomat in the United States told Macleans: "I think the difficulties with the war are beginning to sink in in other countries, but not here. The comments of the President, the Defense Secretary and Tommy Franks -- they're all taken on board. The person who is quoted here the most from other countries, in fact the only one who's quoted and shown on TV, is Tony Blair." He says there are signs, however, that the U.S. administration wants to reconnect with traditional allies. "Fence mending has to be a dual exercise. So you'll see some of the countries that have taken opposing views looking for ways and means that they can help in a humanitarian effort. At least on reconstruction, I think the Bush administration is not necessarily as hawkish as some people think. But where it becomes complicated is if something has to go through the Security Council. Then there's the danger again of permanent-five politics coming into play." Try explaining all of this to the inhabitants of the war zone. The broken mechanisms of the old geopolitical order have thrown more than a few bits of heavy metal in their direction; it's cold steel that surrounds Iraqi families in communities like Basra. They're in the jaws of the same cruel trap that's held them since the end of the 1991 Gulf War: terrorized in town by Saddam's gunmen, and threatened by foreign armies who lurk nearby, proclaiming good intentions, but producing, up to now, only a new variation on the terrible theme of siege. To ordinary Iraqis, the great men and women of the western democracies aren't tyrants like Saddam Hussein, but they are, in their own way, very dangerous -- as the Bush administration's "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is proving every day. |