thedrifter
01-07-05, 06:46 AM
01-03-2005
We’re Still at War with Saddam
By Jim Simpson
The Christmas bombing in Mosul is yet another example of the fact that we still just don’t get it!
The increasingly audacious actions of Iraqi terrorists opposing the coalition presence have been mischaracterized from one end to the other as: “Saddam holdouts trying to disrupt January elections,” to “a growing insurgency of international dimensions stimulated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.” Both descriptions are clearly wrong, as is the assessment by Thomas Nichols, professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, who recently noted, “The situation in Iraq is so confusing that I have no idea what is going on there, and anyone that tells you that they do is not telling you the truth.”
Come on, get real!
The situation in Iraq was plain from the beginning and has never been more plain than at present. But it is a reality that both U.S. military planners and civilian leadership have willfully ignored, and the news media is either overlooking or deliberately avoiding. This flaw in our collective logic goes as far back as the Vietnam War and has never completely left us.
I am referring to our chronic, suicidal, infuriatingly stupid inability to fully understand, recognize, acknowledge and respond to the hideous, barbarous, but horribly effective methods of communist-trained governments and militaries. This unshakeable and deadly denial would make for a good study of mass psychology, but in the meantime, our soldiers are dying!
We are to some extent victims of our own successes. The United States since World War II has been very effective at what Vietnam expert Bernard Fall called “the set-piece battle.” Both in 1991 and 2003, we rolled across the desert in record time, dispatching Saddam’s forces in a massive meat grinder. Our superior weapons and tactics ruled the battlefield. These successes continue to engender an arrogance in our military and civilian leaders who continue to brush off Iraqi terrorists as “ragtag, rogue elements” and continue to seek out the perfect “set-piece battle” against them.
We confidently assure ourselves that we have “the strongest military in the world.” As our generals are fond of saying “We never lost a single battle in Vietnam.” But as North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap famously responded: “True, but irrelevant.”
Without for a second disparaging the integrity, bravery, abilities and effectiveness of our troops on the ground, which remain second to none, it must be said that, as with Vietnam, our leaders stubbornly refuse to recognize that we are dealing with standard communist tactics.
Those who fought in Vietnam will tell you they are painfully familiar: bombs in civilian marketplaces, killing children and babies, using civilians as human shields, using churches, schools and hospitals as fortresses, suicide bombers, beheadings, disembowelments, mass executions, kidnaping, daylight public assassinations, false surrenders, booby-trapped bodies, the list is endless.
These are standard communist tactics! When are we going to get it? Saddam’s Iraqi insurgents were trained by the acknowledged masters of this odious method, the Soviets.
There are two main purposes to these tactics: First, to terrorize the population. This intimidates them from helping us and encourages them to help the insurgents. Second, to create the impression that the insurgency is widespread and popular with the Iraqi citizenry. This engenders uncertainty among our leaders, soldiers and most importantly, the American public.
In this particular case the terrorists enjoy an added advantage: Saddam’s government was in power over thirty years. This means that Soviet population management methods are thoroughly entrenched. As I discussed in an earlier article (“Regime Change Means Eradicating the Ba’ath Party,” DefenseWatch, Feb. 19, 2003), the Ba’athists adopted the Soviet use of covert cells, which became part of the government’s organizational structure when they took power. This ever-widening circle of cells makes population oversight relatively easy right down to the neighborhood level. The Iraqi people know the Ba’athists are still around. They know who they are. They also know the Ba’athists know who they are.
What would you as an ordinary Iraqi civilian do in this situation? Countless analysts make the same mistake of seeing some noble defiance in the poker faces of Iraqi citizens. The Iraqis seemingly intransigent resistance to their coalition liberators – despite their being relieved of a mass murderer - is usually explained simplistically as “nationalism”, “patriotism” or even some nebulous “Islamic sentiment”. Most western journalists ignorantly accept the opinion of the Iraqi “Man on the Street” as gospel.
But there are very few Iraqis who will publicly state what they really feel. One would have to be insane to do so. Only those confident in their “message” feel safe to talk in public. Be sure: you are looking at the enemy. Most Iraqis are afraid to help us or associate with us in any way. We are treated daily to news stories about the violent treatment accorded those who do. We have come to understand their fear, but they have known what was in store all along.
Even the mainstream media is finally coming to realize that today’s events in Iraq are the real war and we are still fighting Saddam’s army (see “The Enemy In Plain View,” Wall Street Journal Online, Dec. 21, 2004), which stated in part:
“These events [the public execution of election workers in Baghdad on Dec. 20) ought to put to rest the canard that what we are facing in Iraq is some kind of ‘nationalist’ uprising opposed to U.S. occupation. The genuine Iraqi patriots are those risking their lives to rebuild their country and prepare for elections. They are being threatened, and murdered, by members and allies of the old regime who want to restore Sunni Ba’athist political domination. Or to put it more bluntly, we haven’t yet defeated Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
The Journal article saluted retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson for first warning of the Ba’athist underground in The Washington Post in an op-ed article on Apr. 2, 2003, a week before the statute of Saddam in Baghdad was pulled down. Anderson’s warnings were dismissed at the time, especially by the CIA, which still believed that Iraq could be pacified with a “decapitation” strategy eliminating Saddam and his top aides.
The Journal concluded:
“But the more we learn about the insurgency, the more Mr. Anderson’s analysis has proven true. The latest evidence comes from a batch of intelligence documents reported in last week’s U.S. News & World Report. Reporter Edward Pound cites U.S. documents saying ‘former regime elements’ are behind most of today’s terror attacks in Iraq. He quotes one document as noting that Saddam and his allies ‘appear to have planned for an insurgency before the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.’ Months before the Coalition invasion, members of Saddam’s intelligence service and Fedayeen were planning how to build roadside bombs and to target convoys and such soft targets as water plants and oil pipelines.”
Our military and political leaders seem to be the only ones who still don’t get it! Who in their right mind would allow troops to mass as they did for dinner in Mosul that fateful day? Frequent mortar attacks alone make such gatherings foolish in the extreme. But we also know there are many enemies among the Iraqis that wander before our eyes every day. Who in their right mind would allow improperly vetted Iraqis into secure base areas?
And it is not as if there are not ready answers to these dilemmas. Anytime soldiers gather for any reason, they should be in small, dispersed groups. All Iraqi workers should face regular and repeated polygraph tests conducted by skilled Americans. Are there even any such instruments in-theater? I bet not! If allowed onto American bases, all Iraqi workers should be searched from top to bottom, coming and going. Loitering crowds and large outdoor gatherings of Iraqis should be prohibited. This reduces the risk of casualties from bomb/mortar attacks and makes it difficult for terrorists to hide in crowds. These are but a few simple solutions. There are many more.
Our war strategy seems to be based more on anticipated headlines than anticipated results. The insurgents know this and work to make those headlines as ugly as possible. There is nothing new about this. It is the exact strategy followed by the PAVN under Giap. They used our media and our political institutions against us. We were our own worst enemy.
We react defensively, trying not to offend anyone - God forbid we should do that! If the Iraqis are starting to hate us, it is because we persist in following an inane policy of political correctness. Our refusal to adopt essential restrictions on everyday conduct for the Iraqi people and tough methods for gaining intelligence on the enemy, is getting a lot of Iraqis – those who actually support us – killed.
No wonder they are angry. At home, they are threatened daily with torture and death if they don’t “support the cause” of the Iraqi Ba’athist insurgents, while in the street they get blown to bits due to our grossly inadequate security measures. They are starting to ask themselves: why bother helping a liberator who’s too stupid to impose even a modicum of discipline?
This is also why – whether they realize it or not, whether they want to or not – our own news media must choose a side in this conflict: our side!
The national news media, by its relentless depiction of an Iraq out of control, is serving the goals of the enemy in making the insurgency look more intractable, more overwhelming, more unbeatable than it will or could ever be without their help. The national news media blithely abdicated their responsibility to impartial journalism in the Vietnam War. The misperceptions of that war created by the Western press were responsible, more than any other single factor, for our defeat. They cannot be given a free hand to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory once again.
Does this mean they passively accept DoD’s press releases as gospel? Of course not. What it does mean is that the media needs to stop giving the terrorists a platform. The media needs to quit trumpeting terrorist successes with a triumphant cinematic blow-by blow account of the action; they need to quit reporting terrorist murders of civilians as a coalition failure rather than as the gross violation of human rights it is.
Instead of airing the highly suspect complaints of a wealthy Sunni shop owner (most certainly a beneficiary of Saddam’s regime), the media should honestly report the many thousand gestures of gratitude shown by the Iraqi people to our troops. Instead of relentlessly airing the Abu Ghraib abuses by a few misguided guards, why not honestly report the bravery, dedication and moral superiority of the American fighting man?
The news media wonders why it has reached new lows in public trust. The news media must demonstrate by its actions a willingness to tell the truth, which means giving credit where credit is due and avoiding being used by a malevolent enemy for purposes inimical to our interest.
A good place to begin would be to inform the American people in depth that we are still at war with Saddam’s Soviet-trained murderers and call them exactly what they are.
Jim Simpson is a Contributing Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at
one.wonders@verizon.net. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.
Ellie
We’re Still at War with Saddam
By Jim Simpson
The Christmas bombing in Mosul is yet another example of the fact that we still just don’t get it!
The increasingly audacious actions of Iraqi terrorists opposing the coalition presence have been mischaracterized from one end to the other as: “Saddam holdouts trying to disrupt January elections,” to “a growing insurgency of international dimensions stimulated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.” Both descriptions are clearly wrong, as is the assessment by Thomas Nichols, professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, who recently noted, “The situation in Iraq is so confusing that I have no idea what is going on there, and anyone that tells you that they do is not telling you the truth.”
Come on, get real!
The situation in Iraq was plain from the beginning and has never been more plain than at present. But it is a reality that both U.S. military planners and civilian leadership have willfully ignored, and the news media is either overlooking or deliberately avoiding. This flaw in our collective logic goes as far back as the Vietnam War and has never completely left us.
I am referring to our chronic, suicidal, infuriatingly stupid inability to fully understand, recognize, acknowledge and respond to the hideous, barbarous, but horribly effective methods of communist-trained governments and militaries. This unshakeable and deadly denial would make for a good study of mass psychology, but in the meantime, our soldiers are dying!
We are to some extent victims of our own successes. The United States since World War II has been very effective at what Vietnam expert Bernard Fall called “the set-piece battle.” Both in 1991 and 2003, we rolled across the desert in record time, dispatching Saddam’s forces in a massive meat grinder. Our superior weapons and tactics ruled the battlefield. These successes continue to engender an arrogance in our military and civilian leaders who continue to brush off Iraqi terrorists as “ragtag, rogue elements” and continue to seek out the perfect “set-piece battle” against them.
We confidently assure ourselves that we have “the strongest military in the world.” As our generals are fond of saying “We never lost a single battle in Vietnam.” But as North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap famously responded: “True, but irrelevant.”
Without for a second disparaging the integrity, bravery, abilities and effectiveness of our troops on the ground, which remain second to none, it must be said that, as with Vietnam, our leaders stubbornly refuse to recognize that we are dealing with standard communist tactics.
Those who fought in Vietnam will tell you they are painfully familiar: bombs in civilian marketplaces, killing children and babies, using civilians as human shields, using churches, schools and hospitals as fortresses, suicide bombers, beheadings, disembowelments, mass executions, kidnaping, daylight public assassinations, false surrenders, booby-trapped bodies, the list is endless.
These are standard communist tactics! When are we going to get it? Saddam’s Iraqi insurgents were trained by the acknowledged masters of this odious method, the Soviets.
There are two main purposes to these tactics: First, to terrorize the population. This intimidates them from helping us and encourages them to help the insurgents. Second, to create the impression that the insurgency is widespread and popular with the Iraqi citizenry. This engenders uncertainty among our leaders, soldiers and most importantly, the American public.
In this particular case the terrorists enjoy an added advantage: Saddam’s government was in power over thirty years. This means that Soviet population management methods are thoroughly entrenched. As I discussed in an earlier article (“Regime Change Means Eradicating the Ba’ath Party,” DefenseWatch, Feb. 19, 2003), the Ba’athists adopted the Soviet use of covert cells, which became part of the government’s organizational structure when they took power. This ever-widening circle of cells makes population oversight relatively easy right down to the neighborhood level. The Iraqi people know the Ba’athists are still around. They know who they are. They also know the Ba’athists know who they are.
What would you as an ordinary Iraqi civilian do in this situation? Countless analysts make the same mistake of seeing some noble defiance in the poker faces of Iraqi citizens. The Iraqis seemingly intransigent resistance to their coalition liberators – despite their being relieved of a mass murderer - is usually explained simplistically as “nationalism”, “patriotism” or even some nebulous “Islamic sentiment”. Most western journalists ignorantly accept the opinion of the Iraqi “Man on the Street” as gospel.
But there are very few Iraqis who will publicly state what they really feel. One would have to be insane to do so. Only those confident in their “message” feel safe to talk in public. Be sure: you are looking at the enemy. Most Iraqis are afraid to help us or associate with us in any way. We are treated daily to news stories about the violent treatment accorded those who do. We have come to understand their fear, but they have known what was in store all along.
Even the mainstream media is finally coming to realize that today’s events in Iraq are the real war and we are still fighting Saddam’s army (see “The Enemy In Plain View,” Wall Street Journal Online, Dec. 21, 2004), which stated in part:
“These events [the public execution of election workers in Baghdad on Dec. 20) ought to put to rest the canard that what we are facing in Iraq is some kind of ‘nationalist’ uprising opposed to U.S. occupation. The genuine Iraqi patriots are those risking their lives to rebuild their country and prepare for elections. They are being threatened, and murdered, by members and allies of the old regime who want to restore Sunni Ba’athist political domination. Or to put it more bluntly, we haven’t yet defeated Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
The Journal article saluted retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson for first warning of the Ba’athist underground in The Washington Post in an op-ed article on Apr. 2, 2003, a week before the statute of Saddam in Baghdad was pulled down. Anderson’s warnings were dismissed at the time, especially by the CIA, which still believed that Iraq could be pacified with a “decapitation” strategy eliminating Saddam and his top aides.
The Journal concluded:
“But the more we learn about the insurgency, the more Mr. Anderson’s analysis has proven true. The latest evidence comes from a batch of intelligence documents reported in last week’s U.S. News & World Report. Reporter Edward Pound cites U.S. documents saying ‘former regime elements’ are behind most of today’s terror attacks in Iraq. He quotes one document as noting that Saddam and his allies ‘appear to have planned for an insurgency before the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.’ Months before the Coalition invasion, members of Saddam’s intelligence service and Fedayeen were planning how to build roadside bombs and to target convoys and such soft targets as water plants and oil pipelines.”
Our military and political leaders seem to be the only ones who still don’t get it! Who in their right mind would allow troops to mass as they did for dinner in Mosul that fateful day? Frequent mortar attacks alone make such gatherings foolish in the extreme. But we also know there are many enemies among the Iraqis that wander before our eyes every day. Who in their right mind would allow improperly vetted Iraqis into secure base areas?
And it is not as if there are not ready answers to these dilemmas. Anytime soldiers gather for any reason, they should be in small, dispersed groups. All Iraqi workers should face regular and repeated polygraph tests conducted by skilled Americans. Are there even any such instruments in-theater? I bet not! If allowed onto American bases, all Iraqi workers should be searched from top to bottom, coming and going. Loitering crowds and large outdoor gatherings of Iraqis should be prohibited. This reduces the risk of casualties from bomb/mortar attacks and makes it difficult for terrorists to hide in crowds. These are but a few simple solutions. There are many more.
Our war strategy seems to be based more on anticipated headlines than anticipated results. The insurgents know this and work to make those headlines as ugly as possible. There is nothing new about this. It is the exact strategy followed by the PAVN under Giap. They used our media and our political institutions against us. We were our own worst enemy.
We react defensively, trying not to offend anyone - God forbid we should do that! If the Iraqis are starting to hate us, it is because we persist in following an inane policy of political correctness. Our refusal to adopt essential restrictions on everyday conduct for the Iraqi people and tough methods for gaining intelligence on the enemy, is getting a lot of Iraqis – those who actually support us – killed.
No wonder they are angry. At home, they are threatened daily with torture and death if they don’t “support the cause” of the Iraqi Ba’athist insurgents, while in the street they get blown to bits due to our grossly inadequate security measures. They are starting to ask themselves: why bother helping a liberator who’s too stupid to impose even a modicum of discipline?
This is also why – whether they realize it or not, whether they want to or not – our own news media must choose a side in this conflict: our side!
The national news media, by its relentless depiction of an Iraq out of control, is serving the goals of the enemy in making the insurgency look more intractable, more overwhelming, more unbeatable than it will or could ever be without their help. The national news media blithely abdicated their responsibility to impartial journalism in the Vietnam War. The misperceptions of that war created by the Western press were responsible, more than any other single factor, for our defeat. They cannot be given a free hand to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory once again.
Does this mean they passively accept DoD’s press releases as gospel? Of course not. What it does mean is that the media needs to stop giving the terrorists a platform. The media needs to quit trumpeting terrorist successes with a triumphant cinematic blow-by blow account of the action; they need to quit reporting terrorist murders of civilians as a coalition failure rather than as the gross violation of human rights it is.
Instead of airing the highly suspect complaints of a wealthy Sunni shop owner (most certainly a beneficiary of Saddam’s regime), the media should honestly report the many thousand gestures of gratitude shown by the Iraqi people to our troops. Instead of relentlessly airing the Abu Ghraib abuses by a few misguided guards, why not honestly report the bravery, dedication and moral superiority of the American fighting man?
The news media wonders why it has reached new lows in public trust. The news media must demonstrate by its actions a willingness to tell the truth, which means giving credit where credit is due and avoiding being used by a malevolent enemy for purposes inimical to our interest.
A good place to begin would be to inform the American people in depth that we are still at war with Saddam’s Soviet-trained murderers and call them exactly what they are.
Jim Simpson is a Contributing Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at
one.wonders@verizon.net. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.
Ellie