from: brian305
Drooling with greed over potential riches and tax cuts, they all
helped to allow a monster to steal the U.S. presidency and promote
an imperialist agenda. Now, trembling with fear, the Democrats and
Republicans alike find it impossible to reign in that monster as he
threatens to thrust the nation into the abyss. That monster's
predecesor, Adolph Hitler, couldn't be stopped either; and his
hegemonic war agenda ushered in utter catastrophe for Germany.
What will happen to a U.S. military that already is stretched thin
in Afghanistan and has its hands full with an insurgency in Iraq
when Iran is recklessly beckoned into the expanding war?
Will the global community, potential victims themselves, casually
just stand aside if the U.S., in an effort to bail itself out of a
tenuous situation in the Middle East, begins to use nuclear weapons?
Will the global community finally be forced to attempt to reign in
the world's true rogue nation?
And what fate will we face back here at home with our military lost,
the world seeking to reign in U.S. imperialism once and for all,
eager to collect war reparations and debt payments, our military-
industrial-economy collapsed and our dollars worthless? Will the
great U.S. empire collapse into a third-world, debt-ridden, banana
republic where the majority of its citizens live in abject poverty
and are ruled over by a foreign compardore leader whose main roll is
to sell off the nation's assets to foreign creditors? Will we begin
to see the so-called U.N. "peacekeepers" toting their military
hardware up and down our streets as they make sure that the
repressed U.S. public cannot revolt.
And finally, with the U.S. left broke and in shambles, will G.W.
Bush be left to live happily ever after, ill-gotten gains in tow and
collecting a nice large presidential pension at his new ranch in
Paraguay?
------------------------------------------------------------------
December 18, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative
How to Lose an Army
Plow deep into Iraq and dare Iran to strike.
by William S. Lind
Lose a war, lose an election. What else did the Republicans expect?
That is especially true for a "war of choice," which is to say a war
we should not have fought. It is difficult to imagine that, had
Spain defeated the U.S. in 1898, the Republicans would have won the
election in 1900.
What does the Democrats' victory mean for the war in Iraq?
Regrettably, not what it should, namely an immediate American
withdrawal from a hopelessly lost enterprise. Neither the Democrats
nor the Republicans, both of whom now want to get out, desire to go
into the 2008 election as the party that "lost Iraq," which is how
taking the lead for withdrawal could be painted. Instead, both
parties in Congress and the White House are likely to agree only on
a series of half-measures, none of which will work. We will stay
bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire for another two years, as the
troops caught in Operation Provide Targets continue to die.
A more critical if less obvious question is what do the results of
the election mean for a prospective attack on Iran? On the surface,
the Democrats' seizure of both houses of Congress would seem to be
good news. Having won their majorities because the American people
want out of a war, they ought to be reluctant to jump into a second
one.
Regrettably, that logic may be too simple. Because an attack on Iran
will be launched with no warning, the Bush administration will not
have to consult Congress beforehand. Congress could take the
initiative and forbid such an attack preemptively ("no funds may be
expended…"). But in an imperial capital where court politics count
far more than the nation's interests, Democrats may prefer to risk a
second war, and a second debacle, rather than open themselves up to
a charge of being weak on terrorism. The Democrats' approach to
national-security issues through the fall campaign was to hide under
the bed and ignore them as much as possible. That worked
politically, so they are likely to stick with it.
The Bush administration, for its part, will be tempted to do what
small men have done throughout history when in trouble: try to
escalate their way out of it. The White House has already half-
convinced itself that the majority of its troubles in Iraq stem from
Iran and Syria, a line the neocons push assiduously.
The departure of Donald Rumsfeld, which was greeted in the Pentagon
with joyful choruses of "Ding-dong, the witch is dead," may help to
avert an invasion. His successor, Robert Gates, has no background in
defense and is therefore likely to defer to the generals, for good
or for ill. In this case for good, as the generals emphatically do
not want a war with Iran. But for Gates to block White House demands
for an attack on Iran, he would have to threaten to resign. Is he
the sort of man to do that? That's not how bureaucrats build their
careers, an observation that holds for the generals as well.
The elephant in the parlor is, of course, the fact that Israel wants
an attack on Iran, and for Republicans and Democrats alike, Israel
is She Who Must Be Obeyed. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ran to
Washington as soon as the election was over, and the subject of his
discussions with President Bush is easy to imagine. Who will do the
dirty deed and when? Iran has already announced that it will
consider an attack by Israel an attack by the U.S. as well and
respond accordingly, so the difference may not much matter.
That response should concern us, to put it mildly, for that is where
a war with Iran and the war in Iraq intersect. The Iranians have
said that this time they have 140,000 American hostages, in the form
of U.S. troops in Iraq. If either Israel or the U.S. attacks Iran,
we could lose an army.
How could such a thing happen? The danger springs from the fact that
almost all the supplies our forces in Iraq use, including vital fuel
for their vehicles, comes over one supply line, which runs toward
the south and the port in Kuwait. If that line were cut, our forces
might not have enough fuel to get out of Iraq. American armies are
enormously fuel-thirsty.
One might think that fuel would be abundant in Iraq, which is (or
was) a major oil exporter. In fact, because of the ongoing chaos,
Iraq is short of refined oil products. Our forces, if cut off from
their own logistics, could not simply fuel up at local gas stations
as German Gen. Heinz Guderian's Panzer Corps did on its way to the
English Channel in the 1940 campaign against France.
There are two ways, not mutually exclusive, that Iran could attempt
to cut our supply line in Iraq in response to an attack on Iranian
nuclear facilities. The first would be by encouraging Shi'ite
militias to which it is allied, including the Mahdi Army and the
Badr Brigades, to rise up against us throughout southern Iraq, which
is Shi'ite country. The militias would be supported by widespread
infiltration of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who have shown
themselves to be good at this kind of thing. They are the people who
trained and equipped Hezbollah for its successful defense of
southern Lebanon against the vaunted Israeli army this past summer.
The Shi'ite militias already lie across our single supply line, and
we should expect them to cut it in response to Iranian requests. We
are already at war with the Mahdi Army, against which our forces in
Iraq have been launching a series of recent raids and air strikes. A
British journalist I know, one with long experience in Iraq, told me
he asked the head of SCIRI, which controls the Badr Brigades, how he
would respond if the U.S. attacked Iran. "Then," he replied, "we
would do our duty."
Iran has a second, bolder option it could combine with a Shi'ite
insurrection at our rear. It could cross the Iran-Iraq border with
several armored and mechanized divisions of the regular Iranian
Army, sever our supply lines, then move to roll us up from the south
with the aim of encircling us, perhaps in and around Baghdad. This
would be a classic operational maneuver, the sort of thing for which
armored forces are designed.
At present, U.S. forces in Iraq could be vulnerable to such an
action by the Iranian army. We have no field army in Iraq;
necessarily, our forces are penny-packeted all over the place,
dealing with insurgents. They would be hard-pressed to assemble
quickly to meet a regular force, especially if fuel was running
short.
The U.S. military's answer, as is too often the case, will be air
power. It is true that American air power could destroy any Iranian
armored formations it caught in the open. But there is a tried-and-
true defense against air power, one the Iranians could employ: bad
weather. Like the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, they could
wait to launch their offensive until the weather promised a few days
of protection. After that, they would be so close to our own forces
that air power could not attack them without danger of hitting
friendlies. (This is sometimes know as "hugging tactics.")
Reportedly, the Turkish General Staff thinks the Iranians can and
will employ this second option, no doubt in combination with the
first.
Perhaps the greatest danger lies in the fact that, just as the
French high command refused to consider the possibility of a German
attack through the Ardennes in 1940, Washington will not consider
the possibility that an attack on Iran could cost us our army in
Iraq. We have made one of the most common military mistakes—
believing our own propaganda. Over and over, the U.S. military tells
the world and itself, "No one can defeat us. No one can even fight
us. We are the greatest military the world has ever seen!"
Unfortunately, like most propaganda, it's bunk. The U.S. Armed
Forces are technically well-trained, lavishly resourced Second-
Generation militaries. They are today being fought and beaten by
Fourth-Generation opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan. They can also
be defeated by Third-Generation opponents who can react faster than
America's process-ridden, PowerPoint-enslaved military headquarters.
They can be defeated by superior strategy, by trick, by surprise,
and by preemption. Unbeatable militaries are like unsinkable ships:
they are unsinkable until something sinks them.
If the U.S. were to lose the army it has in Iraq to Iraqi militias,
Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both, cutting our one
line of supply and then encircling us, the world would change. It
would be our Adrianople, our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power
and prestige would never recover. Nothing, not even Israel's
demands, should lead us to run this risk, which is inherent in any
attack on Iran.
There is one action, a possibility opened by the Democrats'
electoral victory, that would stop the Bush administration from
launching such an attack or allowing Israel to do so. If our senior
military leaders, especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would go
public with their opposition to such an adventure, the new
Democratic majority in Congress would have to react. The public that
put it in office on an antiwar platform would compel it to answer or
lose all credibility. While the Joint Chiefs would infuriate the
White House, they would receive the necessary political cover from
the new Democratic Congress. The potential is there, for the
generals and the Democrats alike.
For it to be realized, and the disaster of war with Iran to be
averted, all the generals must do is show some courage. If the Joint
Chiefs keep silent now and allow the folly of an attack on Iran to
go forward, they will share in full the moral responsibility for the
results, which may include the loss of an army. Perhaps we should
call it "Operation Cornwallis."
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_12_18/article.html
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