The Long, Blinding Road to War (Gen. Petraeus)

[Barrett808]

THE MAKING OF A COMBAT GENERAL : 'Tell Me How This Ends'
The Long, Blinding Road to War
Unexpected Challenges Tested Petraeus in Iraq
By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page A01

First of three articles

At 7:30 a.m. on March 26, 2003, I slipped into the command post tent of the 101st Airborne Division to find the commander, Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, on the telephone. His face was drawn, as if he had slept poorly. Two days of appalling weather had virtually halted the U.S. Army's drive toward Baghdad, including the 101st, which was now trying to gather itself in a miserable swatch of Iraqi desert called Forward Operating Base Shell, 30 miles southwest of Najaf. Dust lay drifted in windrows inside every tent, and the division's 260 helicopters looked like they had been dipped in milk chocolate.

Worse yet, Iraqi Fedayeen irregulars continued to attack U.S. forces with fanatical and unexpected intensity. As Petraeus finished his call, an intelligence officer whispered to me that orders had come down overnight banning the term "Fedayeen," which means "men who sacrifice themselves for a cause," because it ostensibly invested them with too much dignity. They were to be referred to as "paramilitaries," an edict most soldiers duly ignored.

Petraeus hung up and ordered an aide to get his Humvee ready for a trip to the V Corps command post 20 miles to the north. He pushed back from the table, snapped the chin strap on his helmet, and shrugged on his flak vest. "Want to step outside and chat for a minute?" he asked.

We stood 15 feet beyond the tent flap. I blinked at the swirling dust, and felt grit between my molars. When Petraeus turned to face me, I was alarmed to see how troubled his blue eyes were. "This thing is turning ," he said. "The 3 ID" -- the 3rd Infantry Division, fighting just ahead of the 101st around Najaf -- "is in danger of running out of food and water. They lost two Abrams and a Bradley last night, although they got the crews out. The corps commander sounds tired."

(more)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36843-2004Mar6.html

[Malva Zebrina]

1. I am not registered there

it sounds like the beginning of the romanticizing of war and combat and the military and all the honor and glory of killing civilians by the thousands.

I should not make such a judgement without a good read of it, but I am weary of all the hype aout the military. None of them are heroes. I am sorry, I know that probably would offend those whose loved ones have died. But, under orders from their AWOL CIC, they invaded a country on a lie and that country was relatively defenseless--what little resistance it offered was soon shocked and awed out of existence. This was not a great military victory--it was a slaughter. It was not "defending our freedoms" as the millitary is brainwashed to believe their invasions are about.

Bush knew there were no weapons there to speak of. He knew it--the UN told him. INtelligence told him--he wanted to go there for other reasons, some of them ego based and others for the sake of monetary gain and for the sake of it's spoils. It had no air force, no army to speak of, and no navy. Certainly it had nothing that was threat to the US and it's "freedoms". Certainly it had nothing that justified bombing to bits the city of Bagdhad and ten thousand civilians--the 'collateral damage" to Bush's folly.

It was indeed a cake walk. No one can stand against the mighty American military and the time has come when that military is being used by evil men to conquor the world for their own purposes, not to defend the "freedoms" of the US.

The meager resistance of the Iraqis was soon stopped.

There are no military heroes, in my eyes. I feel sorry they were used as pawns by an evil CIC with a fascist bent--and that they had to die for such a cowardly leader's will, but I simply cannot say I regard our troops as heroes at all.

I am sorry--Ten thousand civilians murdered with Bush's shock and awe and massive bombings. It is a war crime. It is not something that heroes are made from.

[UpInArms]

2. very interesting -- this paragraph

After taking command of the 101st during the summer of 2002, Petraeus had been preoccupied with 1003 Victor, code name for the U.S. military's secret plan for conquering Iraq. But because of the political and diplomatic byplay in Washington over the winter, the 101st did not receive a formal deployment order until Feb. 6, 2003.

edited to add another paragraph of note:

Petraeus's first task was to build at least two forward refueling bases so that the division's 72 AH-64 Apache helicopters could attack Iraqi defenses on the southern and western approaches to Baghdad, helping clear a path for the 3rd ID and then the rest of the 101st. A pair of Apache battalions could drink more than 60,000 gallons of fuel in a single night's attack; the Army calculated that it would burn 40 million gallons in three weeks of combat, an amount equivalent to the gasoline consumed by all Allied armies combined during the four years of World War I.

[mistertrickster]

3. And helicopters proved to be just as low and slow in Iraq as they

were in Vietnam. Bad scene.