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Banned
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Some of You Voted Twice for Officials Who Don't "Support Our Troops"
...trying to reach you....trying to put my message in terms that you can relate to, because the candidates you voted to lead us use these meaningless (to me, anyway....) phrases, to "paint" those who challenge their statements and decisions.....
Some of us have told you the components of the following information, for several years. IMO, you cannot be exposed to it, enough, and for some of you, it has not begun to sink in, and it never will. For now.....you won't have much to say in response, but.....at some point, a "Reagan like" figure will come along, and declare that this was a "noble" war, and you'll embrace that message, because you knew it all the time, anyway......
Quote:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...icle387374.ece
May 01, 2005
The secret Downing Street memo
SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell
IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.
John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. <h3>Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.</h3>
<b>CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.</b>
The two broad US options were:
(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).
(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.
The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:
(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.
(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.
(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.
<b>The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.</b>
Quote:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0630/dailyUpdate.html
World>Terrorism & Security
posted June 30, 2005, updated 12:00 p.m.
Secret air campaign against Iraq?
Downing Street memo, other documents may show war really started earlier than March 2003.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
Most American media have focused on the allegations from the Downing Street memo that the Bush administration was going to "fix" the intelligence in order to justify the war against Iraq. Now the reporter who broke the original story says they have missed a more substantial allegation to arise from the same set of leaked documents.
Michael Smith, defense writer for the Sunday Times of London wrote this past Sunday that "The American general who commanded allied air forces during the Iraq war appears to have admitted in a briefing to American and British officers that coalition aircraft waged a secret air war against Iraq from the middle of 2002, nine months before the invasion began." (This bombing capaign is referred to in the Downing Street memo.)
Addressing a briefing on lessons learned from the Iraq war Lieutenant-General Michael Moseley said that in 2002 and early 2003 allied aircraft flew 21,736 sorties, dropping more than 600 bombs on 391 "carefully selected targets" before the war officially started. The nine months of allied raids "laid the foundations" for the allied victory, Moseley said. They ensured that allied forces did not have to start the war with a protracted bombardment of Iraqi positions.
If those raids exceeded the need to maintain security in the no-fly zones of southern and northern Iraq, they would leave President George W. Bush and Tony Blair vulnerable to allegations that they had acted illegally.....
........The Downing Street plan, according to the leaked briefing paper, was to use the United Nations to trap Saddam Hussein into giving them a reason to attack. The US and the British would do this by prodding "the UN Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors." It was hoped that Hussein would find this unacceptable, giving them a "legal justification for war."
But if that didn't work, the US was already working on "Plan B," and the information on that was in the Downing Street memo.
It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B [and apparently confirmed by Gen. Moseley's comments mentioned above]. Put simply, US aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.
The number of bombs dropped on Iraq in March and April of 2002 was almost zero. But from May to August, that increased to 10 tons a month.
But these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war. The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.
In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.
And in another story on June 19th for the Times, Smith reported that another of the leaked documents, a paper on British Foreign Office legal advice, showed that the increased bombing campaign was "illegal" under international law, despite US claims to the contrary.
" ... the leaked Foreign Office legal advice, which was also appended to the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July [2002] meeting [where the contents of the Downing Street memo wer recorded], made it clear allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam's forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations.
<b>The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.
Smith also writes that since Congress did not authorize military action against Iraq until Oct. 11, 2002, "the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally."......</b>
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The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. <h3>We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.</h3>
The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.
On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.....
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/wa...gewanted=print
February 15, 2007
A Prewar Slide Show Cast Iraq in Rosy Hues
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — When Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his top officers gathered in August 2002 to review an invasion plan for Iraq, it reflected a decidedly upbeat vision of what the country would look like four years after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power.
A broadly representative Iraqi government would be in place. The Iraqi Army would be working to keep the peace. And the United States would have as few as 5,000 troops in the country.
Military slides obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act outline the command’s PowerPoint projection of the stable, pro-American and democratic Iraq that was to be.
The general optimism and some details of General Franks’s planning session have been disclosed in the copious postwar literature. But the slides from the once classified briefing provide a firsthand look at how far the violent reality of Iraq today has deviated from assumptions that once laid the basis for an exercise in pre-emptive war.
The archive, an independent research institute at George Washington University, has posted the slides on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org.
August 2002 was an important time for developing the strategy. President Bush had yet to go to the United Nations to declare Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons programs a menace to international security, but the war planning was well under way. The tumultuous upheaval that would follow the toppling of the Hussein government was known antiseptically in planning sessions as “Phase IV.” As is clear from the slides, it was the least defined part of the strategy.
General Franks had told his officers that it was his supposition that the State Department would have the primary responsibility for rebuilding Iraq’s political institutions.
“D.O.S. will promote creation of a broad-based, credible provisional government — prior to D-Day,” noted a slide on “key planning assumptions.” That was military jargon for the notion that the Department of State would assemble a viable Iraqi governing coalition before the invasion even began.
“It was a way of forcing the discussion, to get clarity of how we and State were going to deal with the governance issue,” Col. John Agoglia, a Central Command planner at the time, said in an interview.
As it turned out, it was months before the command’s planners began to receive some of the clarification they were hoping for. The Bush administration put aside the idea of establishing a prewar provisional government for fear it would marginalize Iraqi leaders who had not gone into exile. Colonel Agoglia said he did not begin to get a sense of what the postwar arrangements would be until Jay Garner, a retired three-star general, was tapped by the Bush administration in January 2003 to serve as the first civilian administrator in postwar Iraq.
Another assumption spelled out in the PowerPoint presentation was that “co-opted” Iraqi Army units would heed the American appeals to stay in their garrisons and later help United States to secure the country.
Based on this and other hopeful suppositions, the command’s planners projected what the American occupation of Iraq might look like. After the main fighting was over, there was to be a two- to three-month “stabilization” phase, then an 18- to 24-month “recovery” phase.
That was to be followed by a 12- to 18-month “transition” phase. At the end of this stage — 32 to 45 months after the invasion began — it was projected that the United States would have only 5,000 troops in Iraq.
Now, those projections seem startlingly unrealistic given the current troop buildup, in which the United States currently has about 132,000 troops in Iraq and is adding about 20,000 more. But the projections, former military planners say, were intended to send the message to civilian policy makers that the invasion of Iraq would be a multiyear proposition, not an easy in-and-out war.
As it turned out, the assumptions on Iraqi and American forces were quickly overturned, partly as a result of new American policy decisions. Instead of staying in garrisons, many of the Iraqi soldiers fled after the war began. Senior American commanders hoped to quickly recall the Iraqi troops to duty anyway, but that option vanished in May 2003 when L. Paul Bremer III, Mr. Garner’s successor, issued an edict formally disbanding the Iraqi Army.
The message that the United States should gird itself for a substantial multiyear occupation seemed to be superseded when General Franks issued new guidance to his commanders a week after the fall of Baghdad on April 9 that they should be prepared to reduce the American troops in Iraq to a little more than a division by September 2003 — some 30,000 troops.
A series of ad hoc decisions and strategy changes followed as the insurgency grew and security deteriorated. A new military plan is now being put into effect, which the White House asserts may yet salvage a positive outcome. Almost four years after the invasion, however, the “stable democratic Iraqi government” the United States once hoped for seems to exist only in the command’s old planning slides.
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Quote:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/index.htm
<center><b>TOP SECRET POLO STEP</b></center>
<b>Iraq War Plan Assumed Only 5,000 U.S. Troops Still There by December 2006</b>
CentCom PowerPoint Slides Briefed to White House and Rumsfeld in 2002, Obtained by National Security Archive through Freedom of Information Act
PowerPoints Reflect Internal Debates Over Size and Timing of Invasion Force
.....Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich told Ricks (Fiasco, pp. 75-76) that PowerPoint war planning was the ultimate insult:
<i>"Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's [Office of Secretary of Defense] contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology -- above all information technology -- has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war. To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness."
</i>
National Security Archive senior analyst Joyce Battle asked the U.S. Army under the FOIA in 2004 for documents related to the 2001-2003 debates over troop levels for the Iraq war. In response, the Army referred the request to Central Command in 2005; and CentCom responded to the FOIA request in January 2007 with the declassified PowerPoint slides. The slides were compiled at CentCom with tabs labeled "A" through "L" (one slide is unlabeled). The Web posting today reproduces the documents as they were released by CentCom, together with additional items prepared by the National Security Archive: a brief chronology of Iraq war planning based on secondary sources, a glossary of military acronyms (essential for translating the otherwise cryptic references on the slides), and an introduction written by Ms. Battle.
<b>Chronology:</b>
[Based on accounts in Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: Regan Books, 2004); Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006); Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).]
November 21, 2001 - President Bush asks Defense Secretary Rumsfeld about contingencies for war with Iraq, and directs him to initiate planning.
November 26, 2001 - Rumsfeld meets with Gen. Franks at CentCom headquarters in Tampa and they review the existing operating plan, OPLAN 1003.
December 1, 2001 - Rumsfeld asks Franks to develop a commander's estimate as the basis for a new war plan.
December 4, 2001 - Franks presents a video conference for Rumsfeld on his commander's estimate, outlining robust, reduced, and unilateral plans based on levels of regional support <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/Tab%20A.pdf">(see Tab A)</a>.
December 28, 2001 - Gen. Franks briefs President Bush at Crawford on the commander's estimate calling for an invasion force of 275,000 troops.
January 29, 2002 - President Bush targets Iraq in his "axis of evil" State of the Union speech.
February 1, 2002 - Gen. Franks presents Generated Start, a plan building to 275,000 troops, to Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.
March 3, 2002 - Gen. Franks briefs President Bush again on Generated Start, but there is pressure from Rumsfeld to reduce troop levels.
March 10, 2002 - Vice President Cheney begins a Middle East tour seeking support from friendly governments for the invasion of Iraq.
March 21, 2002 - Gen. Franks meets with commanders at Ramstein, Germany on planning that still calls for 5 and 2/3rds divisions but emphasizes a faster march to Baghdad.
March 29, 2002 - Gen. Franks briefs the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
April 20, 2002 - Gen. Franks briefs President Bush at Camp David on planning, calling for war to begin with 180,000 troops, ramping up to 250,000.
April 20, 2002 - A PowerPoint slide on "Phase I Operations" lists the following, among other steps: 1) Secure international/regional support; 2) Posture forces for offensive operations; 3) Enhance intelligence and targeting; 4) Degrade and deceive Iraqi regime; 5) Deter Iraqi internal and external operations; 6) Prepare Iraqi opposition groups for action <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/Tab%20D.pdf">(see Tab D)</a>.
May 10, 2002 - PowerPoint slides on a "Compartmented Plan Update" summarize several matters: timing; "enabling actions" for war, including continuing "OGA [CIA] covert action" in U.S.-controlled northern Iraq "which started 4-5 months earlier," "post-regime government strategy," and "strategic information operations;" force deployment; and Phase IV (post-conflict) actions, including "ensure the territorial integrity of Iraq," The expected duration of Phase IV: months <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/Tab%20C.pdf">>(see Tab C)</a>.
May 11, 2002 - Gen. Franks presents the "Running Start" plan to Bush at Camp David, speeding up the invasion, using "Red, White, and Blue air strike plans" as a bridge to war, launching with only one Marine Expeditionary Unit and 2 Army brigades or, maximum version, two divisions.
May 21, 2002 - When asked by the press "how many troops," Gen. Franks says, "That's a great question and one for which I don't have an answer because my boss has not yet asked me to put together a plan to do that. They have not asked me for those kinds of numbers. And I guess I would tell you, if there comes a time when my boss asks me that, then I'd rather provide those sorts of assessments to him. But thanks for the question." (Gordon/Trainor p. 52, Ricks p. 38)
June 19, 2002 - Gen. Franks briefs President Bush again on Generated Start and discusses ongoing work on Running Start.
June 27-28, 2002 - Gen. Franks tells his commanders at Ramstein to focus on Running Start because of the administration's impatience.
August 1-2, 2002 - Gen. Franks meets his commanders at Tampa and tells them they need to be prepared to attack Iraq immediately if so ordered. But there are concerns that Running Start will result in a larger number of U.S. casualties.
August 4, 2002 - PowerPoint slides on "Compartmented Concept Update 4 Aug 2002" summarize the Generated Start plan, the Running Start plan, a Modified plan, and Phase IV actions, including "Establish a secure environment and assist in recovery and reconstruction" and "free individuals unjustly detained" <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/Tab%20L.pdf">(see Tab L)</a>.
August 5, 2002 - Gen. Franks briefs the president and the NSC on "1003V" (<a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/Tab%20K.pdf">see Tab K</a> and <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/Tab%20L.pdf">Tab L</a>), and discusses the Hybrid concept. According to Gordon/Trainor, "it was a hit at the White House," though Franks saw that Secretary of State Colin Powell had doubts. Powell later called Franks to express his concern about force levels.
August 5, 2002 - Colin Powell tells President Bush after dinner, "You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people . . . . You'll own it all." (Woodward, p. 150) (This the supposed "Pottery Barn rule": you break it, you own it.)
August 14, 2002 - Gen. Franks and Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart meet with Rumsfeld and update him on the Hybrid option.
August 15, 2002 - PowerPoint slides on "Compartmented Planning Effort 15 August 2002" <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/Tab%20I.pdf">(Tab I)</a> provide background on planning, <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/Tab%20I%20-%20page%202.pdf">noting</a> "POTUS/SECDEF directed effort; limited to a very small group . . . Integrate / consider all elements of national power . . . Thinking 'outside the box', but 'inside a compartment'." <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/Tab%20I%20-%20page%204.pdf">"Key Planning Assumptions"</a> for Generated Start included "DoS will promote creation of a broad-based, credible provisional government - prior to D-day" [invasion], and "Iraqi regime has WMD capability."
August 26, 2002 - Vice President Cheney speaks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars targeting Iraq.
<b>["host" inserts:]</b>
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresid...p20010916.html
Camp David, Maryland
<b>September 16, 2001</b>
The Vice President appears on Meet the Press with Tim Russert
....MR. RUSSERT: Do we have evidence that he's harboring terrorists?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: There is--in the past, there have been some activities related to terrorism by Saddam Hussein. But at this stage, you know, the focus is over here on al-Qaida and the most recent events in New York. <b>Saddam Hussein's bottled up, at this point, but clearly, we continue to have a fairly tough policy where the Iraqis are concerned.</b>
MR. RUSSERT: Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No.......
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20020826.html
<b>August 26, 2002
Vice President Speaks at VFW 103rd National Convention </b>
....... On the nuclear question, many of you will recall that Saddam's nuclear ambitions suffered a severe setback in 1981 when the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor. They suffered another major blow in Desert Storm and its aftermath.
But we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors -- including Saddam's own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam's direction. <b>Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.</b>
Just how soon, we cannot really gauge. Intelligence is an uncertain business, even in the best of circumstances. This is especially the case when you are dealing with a totalitarian regime that has made a science out of deceiving the international community. Let me give you just one example of what I mean. <b>Prior to the Gulf War, America's top intelligence analysts would come to my office in the Defense Department and tell me that Saddam Hussein was at least five or perhaps even 10 years away from having a nuclear weapon. After the war we learned that he had been much closer than that, perhaps within a year of acquiring such a weapon. ..........</b>
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September 6, 2002 - Gen. Franks meets with President Bush and the NSC to review war planning. "Can we win this thing?" asks Bush. "Absolutely," says Franks. (Gordon/Trainor 74)
December 12, 2002 - Rumsfeld meets with Gen. Franks and with Lt. Gen. McKiernan, who argues that the Hybrid plan should be replaced with the Cobra II alternative that he has developed calling for a larger invading force. By the end of the month it is understood that Rumsfeld has essentially endorsed Cobra II. (Gordon/Trainor 93)
March 20, 2003 - The U.S. invades Iraq.
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Quote:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/index.htm
......In mid-2002, military analyst William Arkin obtained a leaked copy of a briefing on the Iraq plans and revealed the existence of POLO STEP in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times (June 23, 2002, p. M1). According to Arkin, the revelation unleashed the fury of Gen. Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld who immediately ordered a probe of the leak that lasted until the end of 2003 and subjected more than 1,000 military and contractor personnel to sometimes repeated questioning..........
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Quote:
STRATEGY; Gulf War Redux; The president seems determined to attack Iraq again. But have we fully grasped the lessons of the last time around?;
<h3>WILLIAM M. ARKIN. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Jun 23, 2002.</h3> pg. M.1
<b> It is now crystal clear that the Bush administration intends to go to war with Iraq. The armed forces have gone so far as to create a top-secret code name for the planning. They call it "Polo Step," and access is highly restricted and compartmentalized.</b>
Unfortunately, the determination to fight has not been matched by a clear, creative, carefully thought-out approach to developing strategy and tactics--an approach that would take into account the full capabilities of the armed forces today and the real lessons of Operation Desert Storm.
Many members of the Bush national security team are veterans of the first war with Iraq, among them Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Yet Pentagon planners have received little guidance beyond hazy injunctions to bring about "regime change" and eliminate Saddam Hussein's capacity to build weapons of mass destruction.
The result is a planning vacuum, filled by a cacophony of competing proposals and "concepts" that reflect the biases of individual services or the pipedreams of political factions: Launch 250,000 U.S. ground troops from Kuwait, some suggest; pound hundreds of Iraqi targets with unrestricted air power, others urge; send in the Special Forces to work their Afghanistan-style magic among the Kurds; or, the favorite of right-wing hawks, unleash that phantom resistance force known as the Iraqi National Congress.
The compartmentalized secrecy classification only makes it harder to get the planning process back onto solid ground. Wars cannot be planned on the floors of Congress, or in other public places. But locking out most of the Defense Department's own professionals doesn't work well either. American military power is in the midst of such a radical transition, and the challenge posed by Hussein is so difficult, that President Bush needs the best minds available--all of them--thinking as boldly as possible.
A good place to start would be with "Engagement Area Thomas." Probably no one in the Bush White House would recognize the name, and few if any among the Defense Department's current civilian leadership would either. But "EA Thomas," as the Army called it back in 1991, offers today's war planners a lesson they sorely need right now.
Every armchair general knows about the famous ''left hook'' of Desert Storm, the nighttime sweep across the desert to the west of Kuwait that carried U.S. tanks and other armored forces around the unguarded left flank of Hussein's vaunted defensive line and routed his legions.
Less well known is the role of the 101st Airborne Division. The Screaming Eagles were on the leading edge of the left hook with a specialized assault force of more than 200 Apache and Cobra attack helicopters. The then-new Apaches, in particular, carried the Hellfire antitank missile, which would become famous in Afghanistan a decade later when CIA drones launched them against elusive Al Qaeda targets.
The 101st was to use the firepower and mobility of its attack helicopters and light infantry to slow any Iraqi onslaught until the heavy armor of other divisions could reach the scene. As it happened, after 39 days of bombing by U.S. and allied warplanes, Hussein's forces were no longer in the onslaught business. Instead of fighting a delaying action, the 101st leapfrogged 155 miles farther into southern Iraq. There, it established massive refueling and rearming points in the desert; they were supposed to support further attacks into the ancient heart of Iraq--the Euphrates River valley, which lay at the far northwestern edge of the American battlefield.
By the end of the first day of the ground war, Feb. 24, 1991, the 101st had flown more than 1,000 helicopter sorties. Before U.S. tanks were anywhere near catching up to them, Screaming Eagle helicopters were hovering over Iraq's Highway 8, the strategic southern route between the Kuwaiti theater and Baghdad.
Late in the evening of day two, a desert shamal came howling through the region, a blinding, choking dust storm that shut down almost every element in the American advance. It didn't matter. Iraqi forces in the Kuwait theater were beaten. Their only remaining option was retreat.
The only other possible routes to Baghdad were Highway 6 from Basra far to the east along the Iranian border, or smaller roads along a series of causeways and embankments through the vast marshlands where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet. Lt. Gen. Gary Luck, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, dispatched an additional aviation brigade to the 101st Division force to close off that option.
Enter EA Thomas.
Apache helicopters from the 101st launched attacks into the marshes. And commanders had decided to set up a "kill box" 120 miles farther to the east on a stretch of Highway 6 they designated "Engagement Area Thomas." Thomas was just 10 kilometers north of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. The division's plan was to airlift its 1st Brigade of light infantry into Thomas, in a move its official history says "would have firmly closed the door on the escaping Iraqi army by blocking the north-south Basra road."
The plan was extraordinarily bold. It meant airlifting hundreds of American troops far beyond the existing battlefront and landing them behind a retreating but still heavily armored enemy. But out of the blue--or so it seemed to the Screaming Eagles--an overall cease- fire was declared and the war ended.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf famously declared the gate closed on escaping Iraqi military units. In fact, the gate was not closed, and much of the Republican Guards, Hussein's best-trained and best- equipped units, escaped into the megalopolis of Basra as the war ended.
Yet the mistake that was made in leaving Hussein an escape route then pales in comparison with the mistakes that have since been made in interpreting what happened in the Gulf War, especially the little corner of it named Engagement Area Thomas.
No U.S. troops landed there, but Apache helicopters flew daylight missions into the area, along the critical escape route, for four hours before the war ended, and they never encountered a single Iraqi tank.
Hussein's was a slow moving and truly defeated army, and the United States had the mobility and the audacity to perform complete surprises, if creative thinkers who actually understood the geography and the battle conditions had been allowed to use their creativity. But Schwarzkopf, and by extension, Washington, did not see what air power had already achieved in defeating Hussein's army.
They were myopically wed to the doctrine that the only effective way to wage a war is to overwhelm a theater of operations with ground troops, effectively matching Iraqi tanks one for one. American military leaders and their civilian superiors could not conceive that southern Iraq could be split off from Baghdad through Army air power--or that an audacious move by airborne troops could isolate an entire Iraqi army, with all the negotiating leverage that would have given the United States against Hussein.
That is precisely the lesson of EA Thomas, however. New weapons and equipment are opening the way to new strategies and new tactics, but the technology is changing faster than the understanding and vision of those who command it.
If the Bush administration is to fight a second war with Hussein, what it needs to do above all else is to break free of its obsession with secrecy and bring its best military minds to bear on the problem of devising strategies and tactics that take full advantage of the revolutionary capabilities our armed forces now possess.
The current Central Command proposal to launch 250,000 troops from Kuwait in a Normandy-style invasion does not represent the kind of audacious thinking the problem requires and our present capabilities will support. Neither does the notion of pounding hundreds of targets in an all-out air war. And the right-wing love affair with the CIA-created Iraqi National Congress or with Kurdish fighters in the north is foolishness.
But a combination of all those approaches, coupling air-mobile Army assault forces with strategic air power and covert operators linked to proxy forces like those in Afghanistan, offers the best hope of a positive outcome--not just on the battlefield but in whatever comes afterward.
So far, that is not happening. Polo Step briefings are filled with arrows and symbols for bridges and other targets, with no sense of taking real advantage of Iraqi geography, the ability to isolate Basra or the fact that the Kurds already control a huge portion of the north--including usable airfields (remember what airfields in Pakistan and Uzbekistan meant for Afghanistan?).
Whatever the Bush administration decides to do militarily, Americans need to approach from three fronts--north, south and west. That means Special Forces and helicopters. It means desert boots and aircraft on Iraqi territory.
Putting U.S. forces inside Iraq will convey the deadly serious message that the United States is not going to walk away this time. It will say the United States is not hoping to match Hussein tank for tank. And it is not going to keep on trying to hit Hussein through the Iraqi civilian population--the one form of warfare he can probably survive indefinitely.
Most important, the best plan for the United States is to say exactly what it is going to do right up to the end, so that the Iraqi people and the rest of the world understand.
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As many of you know, my wife's son is in the US military....deployed by these war criminal "leaders"....he is devoted to them and to their "vision".
If you voted for Bush/Cheney in 2004, and for a republican majority in congress, last november, is it unreasonable to consider that your vote may have resulted in the opposite of "supporting our troops"?
<b>I post this thread for your consideration, and if you support or condemn our leaders, can you explain to me how they are supporting, or not supporting "our troops", by their actions. If you agree with me that the evidence "is there" to indict Bush and Blair for the crime of "aggressive war", do you think it is possible for a CIC who it is reasonable to believe has committed the most serious crime "against humanity", to effectively command or "support our troops", or ever be trusted to do so, "in good faith"?</b>
Last edited by host; 02-15-2007 at 09:47 AM..
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02-15-2007, 09:37 AM
