By Gary Brecher ( war_nerd@exile.ru )
A hundred years from now, people will be scratching their heads at the
way American voters dealt with war. It's a tale of two Bushes: Bush
the Father was forced into the first Gulf War when Saddam invaded
Kuwait. He handled it just about perfectly. First he organized the
only Middle East coalition in history that actually worked, then
fought and won the war with hardly any American losses. He handed us
our only strategic victory since 1945.
And we voted him out.
Ten years later, his kid becomes president, pisses off all our allies,
invades Iraq for no reason, screws up the war so we've got 1100 dead
GIs by election time...and wins reelection.
I guess the lesson is, if you want to get reelected, make war as badly
as an Argentine. We'll love you for it. Just whatever you do, don't
win. That's the one thing we won't forgive.
It just proves what I always thought: people are stupid. What drives
me crazy is the way everybody falls for the same stories over and
over. Like Fallujah. Anybody getting that "here we go again" feeling,
watching the invasion of Fallujah? It's like Take 2 of a real bad war
movie. In the first place, we're supposed to own Fallujah. We've been
conducting air strikes on a city we supposedly took years ago.
Rumsfeld's cronies screwed up the occupation so totally that by April
2004 the insurgents had taken over the city, and we had the Marines,
the same Marines who are hitting Fallujah right now, lined up on the
outskirts ready to go in. And then, like I wrote in my column, Bush's
PR people called it off -- wimped out, because they knew there'd be
lots of gore, which would be bad for the boss's reelection campaign.
So we've handed the insurgents six months warning that after the
election when PR doesn't matter so much, we're going into Fallujah.
I've had landlords who didn't give me that much notice.
That's not how you attack. You don't give the enemy six months to get
ready for you. That's six months of preparing defenses -- those air
strikes on Fallujah targeted "enemy fortifications," which means the
insurgents have been digging in, organizing local militias, weeding
out informers, plotting mortar zones...while our troops waited at the
city limits waiting for Nov. 2.
Then we go through the whole farce of getting Allawi's government to
"order" us to retake the city. Here again, it's politics over tactics.
Politically it's important to make it look like the Iraqi government's
in charge. But tactically, it just gives the dug-in rebels in Fallujah
a 72-hour warning that we're about to attack. So much for tactical
surprise.
No surprises: Marines retake Fallujah, insurgency leaders escape, disperse
No surprises: Marines retake Fallujah, insurgency leaders escape, disperse.
Conventional guerrilla-warfare strategy says that if your enemy is
massing a huge conventional force to attack you, you disperse -- just
vanish. Mao said, "Lose land and save people, land can be retaken.
Lose people to save land, people and land both lost." In other words,
don't risk your guerrilla force defending static positions.
The real pros, the brains of the insurgency, slipped out of Fallujah
weeks ago. They're already attacking us from the rear, just like Mao
suggested, going after the soft targets, like the Iraqi cops. They
grabbed a police station way up North and killed 21 poor suckers in
uniform the other day.
Meanwhile, we're running into "fierce resistance" in Fallujah. So
who's still in town, shooting back at us? Well, guerrilla armies are
like any other armies; they've got their elite, and then they've got a
lot of cannon fodder. We're attacking the cannon fodder while the
elite watches from a distance.
By cannon fodder I mean kids, local kids who can't wait to get their
64 concubines in Paradise by dying for the 'hood. On any other
battlefield, they'd be pushovers. But here they're fighting in their
own alleys and back streets. And they've had all those months of
training, plotting out the best ambush sites, ranging their mortars,
burying IEDs under every intersection. Amateur troops with good morale
can be very effective defending their home ground. And it's urban
warfare, where armor isn't all that effective.
So we're fighting in the worst possible situation: the people we're
really looking for have already left town, but there are still enough
wannabe-martyrs in town to kill a lot of our guys.
And the only way to get rid of the bastards is to hose down every
shack in Fallujah with chain-cannon or tank rounds. Which means that
along with the RPG-toting teenagers, we're going to end up killing a
lot of toddlers and their mothers. Which does not look good on the
Al-Jazeera Evening News.
We'll take the town, sure. But we'll lose men, piss off every Muslim
from Frankfurt to Jakarta, and we won't find anybody worth capturing.
The serious fighters of Fallujah are in safe houses around the Sunni
Triangle, munching pistachios with their big hairy feet up, watching
the battle and laughing.
In short, we're screwed. I can hear you asking, "Gary, how can we get
out of this mess?"
Well, you're in luck because the War Nerd has been on the job,
brooding about Iraq full-time. I've been able to go full-time because
my damn medical problems flared up this past month and kept me at
home, channel-surfing. Embarrassing kidney stuff -- if you ever want
revenge on somebody you really hate, just give them kidney problems.
What with the pain and the time off work, I've had a stroke of genius.
My solution may shock you at first, but you just ride out that first
shockwave and you'll see it's golden.
We're losing this war, folks. We've got to do something radical. Right
now, Iraq is ungovernable. We've installed one Iraqi puppet after
another, and they've all failed. Some just didn't have the balls, some
were blown up in their cars. And those were the lucky ones; some of
the others, like the commander of the "Fallujah Brigade," were
snatched out of their cars and taken to soundproofed basements where
nobody could hear them scream, while Islamic torturers went to work on
their fingernails and testicles.
Now we've appointed Allawi. It's a step in the right direction,
because he is one mean son of a bitch. An interesting guy; he started
out as a hit man for Saddam's Ba'ath Party, quashing dissent by
blowing the dissenters' heads off. Then he decided he wanted to be a
doctor -- maybe he got interested in medicine by seeing what people's
brains looked like splattered all over the sidewalk, I don't know.
Anyway, he went up to the head of an Iraqi medical school,
Godfather-style, and said "I want an MD degree." They agreed with
hardly any delay. It was the fastest qualification in history. None of
those 50-hour shifts as an intern for Allawi; he graduated with honors
in the time it took the Dean of Med School to sign the paper, trying
not to let his hand shake too much.
Then Allawi had a fight with Saddam. Luckily, he was in London at the
time. If you had a fight with Saddam in Iraq, you ended up in the
dungeons getting cigarettes put out on your eyeballs. But London
allowed Allawi a little more scope. So instead of hitting Saddam's
enemies, he became a CIA asset and started putting .22 rounds in the
back of Iraqi officials' heads. You know, putting his talents to the
service of freedom.
By all accounts, Allawi is a talented killer. In his first week in
office, he personally took out six suspected insurgents -- just
lined'em up and gave each one a bullet in the brainstem. Him being an
MD, he also performed the autopsies which revealed that the deceased
died of heart failure, which was technically true -- your heart does
tend to stop when your head's blown open.
This is the kind of guy we need to run Iraq. If Allawi had had a
better start, he'd be fine. Unfortunately, he's way, way too closely
identified with the Occupation. No Iraqi will ever trust him again.
Right now he controls about ten square yards of Iraq -- the space
covered by his special Delta-Force bodyguards. That's it. If he ever
walks out alone, even in the middle of that downtown mortar range
known as the Green Zone, he's toast.
What we need is somebody like Allawi, but not identified with the
American occupation. Somebody double-tough, with plenty of experience
in running Iraq.
That narrows it down to a pool of applicants consisting of exactly one guy.
I think you can see where I'm going here, folks. That's right: Bring
back Saddam!
Look at the man's record! He came up from nowhere, a peasant boy from
the boondocks (Tikrit) and took control of the craziest country on the
planet. Better still, he kept control for decades. He survived every
crisis a ruler could have: rebellions in Kurdistan and the Shiite
zone, all-out war against Iran, American bombing and invasion, CIA
assassination plots, blockade. None of it even fazed him. There were
literally hundreds of attempted coups against him -- and the guys who
planned them are fertilizing the desert now -- some of them taken out
by our own guy, Doctor Allawi.
But Allawi was never more than hired muscle. Saddam was the brains of
the outfit all along. We ought to realize that by now, after trying to
run Iraq on our own. Saddam must be sitting in his cell mumbling to
himself, "So, Yankees -- now you see what I had to deal with! Now you
see it's not so easy, huh? Now you see you can't run Iraq on hymns and
happy thoughts, eh, you sons-of-jackals amateurs!"
By hiring Allawi we've already pretty much admitted that Saddam was
the right man for the job, because Allawi is just a midget version of
Saddam with the beard shaved and the American flag stamped on his
forehead. Which is why he'll never get the respect he needs to run the
place -- the Iraqis see him as our puppet. Old ladies would tear him
limb from limb if they caught him in the street without his Delta
operators.
Nope, there's only one man for this job: ol' Soddom himself. Sure,
there might be a problem explaining to the American voters why we blew
a trillion dollars and a thousand GIs' lives putting the guy we ousted
back in power. But hey, just wrap the flag around Saddam. He won't
mind, he's a flexible guy. And we'll fall for it. We'll fall for
anything.
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