Tuesday Morning Quarterback on War

THE BEST LAID PLANS
Great Expectations
by Gregg Easterbrook


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Only at TNR Online | Post date 03.25.03 E-mail this article

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Last week everyone thought the war would be over fast, and so the stock market soared--one of its best weeks in decades. Yesterday, everyone thought the war might become a quagmire and the market plummeted. If nothing else, this ought to lay to rest the perennial sophism that business loves war. Historically, stock markets have done poorly in time of conflict and boomed in time of peace--the 1990s Long Boom happened when the Western nations were engaged in no major wars and global tensions were declining across the board. Individual firms may profit from conflict, but business generally hates fighting. Assets get destroyed. Uncertainty prevails. Trade is disrupted. People don't buy, except for essentials. Yesterday, capital markets sent a strong signal about their dislike of war.

That aside, why is there a sudden perception of quagmire? Partly because Iraqis are not folding rapidly enough for the instant media cycle. (On Saturday, following the third day of hostilities, The New York Times editorialized that the war was going too slowly.) Partly because the objectives of this campaign are much more complex than the objectives of the Gulf war, a point that zillions of words of commentary have largely missed, and that the administration failed to prepare the public for. (Talk of "shock and awe" by U.S. military leaders in the days before the war was counterproductive, leading Americans to anticipate the fight would end very fast and, by giving Iraq warning, preventing the "shock" from coming as a shock--that is, being unexpected.) Partly because Iraqi military behavior, so far, evinces a certain logic.

First, the logic of Iraqi action. Commentators are fretting that allowing the United States to cross the Kuwait-Iraq border almost unopposed, and to race with little resistance toward major cities, represents some kind of sinister rope-a-dope tactic. Iraq is simply avoiding the part of the fight it is certain to lose. During the Gulf war, Iraqi commanders learned that in the desert or other open spaces, American armored firepower and air power are overwhelming. Records from 1991 show that before that conflict some Iraqi commanders actually thought they'd be able to prevail against the United States in desert fighting, owing to their greater experience. They learned otherwise.

Since Wednesday, Iraqi commanders have simply conceded all open space to the coalition attack. Iraq does not want to let us in but knows it cannot stop the initial thrust. Commanders are waiting for our forces to try to enter cities, where the open-space advantage will be lost. We can frustrate this strategy by bypassing Basra--using the MacArthur dictum, "hit 'em where they ain't"--but we cannot bypass Baghdad. There, the Iraqis know, our advantage will erode; plus the chance that we will kill civilians increases, and there is nothing the Baghdad regime wants more than for the United States to kill civilians. Sadly, Iraqi tactics so far make considerable sense.

If Iraqi tactics make sense, does this mean that Saddam is alive and calling the tune? Sadly again, it's starting to appear that in a cruel twist on history (and on the people of Iraq), we did hit the place where he was, but that he survived anyway. But Saddam doesn't dictate specific battlefield tactics; his professional army is thought to do most of that.

Saddam's professional army is now fighting like it doesn't plan to give up--exactly as the French fought in the early days of the Nazi attack in 1940. And that makes perfect sense: Saddam's professional army doesn't yet have to give up because it still has men and materiel. But every day it will have less of both, while every day the United States has more, as more forces enter the region. France in 1940 went from determined resistance to collapse almost without warning. This may still happen to Iraq, just not the in 48 or 72 hours that commentators foolishly predicted.

Iraq cut and ran in 1991 in less than 100 hours because the fight then was to expel Saddam's legion from a neighbor; pretty much the moment Iraqi commanders realized they were being pounded, they turned and sprinted back to the safe turf of their home country, where the coalition left them alone. Now Saddam's legions, and his Baath Party, have no safe turf to which to retreat. So they're not yielding, at least not yet, just as the French, with nowhere to retreat, initially resisted the odds. Few invaded nations have ever yielded without any fight at all.

And why haven't the Shias of Basra revolted against Saddam? They may yet. But under Baath Party rule, Iraq has never been invaded by others; it has done the invading. Even people who hate a dictatorial regime may not necessarily like the sight of tanks of other nations wheeling across their homeland. Convincing the Iraqi "street" that we really mean it well may take some time. In 1942, had American forces crossed the Rhine, typical Germans might have furiously resisted. When American forces did cross the Rhine in 1945, typical Germans cheered and threw flowers.

The dark calculus of the moment is the likelihood that Iraqi commanders still hope they can actually win--becoming the first Arab force to defeat a Western force in centuries--if they can just inflict enough causalities. In 1991, Saddam thought the coalition would fold and go home if it lost even a few hundred soldiers; he may think the same thing now, and he knows his best edge is that we care about our soldiers while he cares about neither his soldiers nor his civilian population. Also part of the dark calculus, Saddam is rooting for every report of Iraqi noncombatants killed. He knows world opinion and even American public opinion can't stand that.

Does this mean American commentators must take a hard view of American losses? Within reason, yes. Does this mean American commentators must take a hard view of Iraqi civilian losses? No. Morals are morals; we must not kill civilians. We would surely aid our cause by bombing the Al Rasheed Hotel, where Iraqi communications gear is hidden, but it can't be done without killing civilians. We must accept the added burden that morality imposes.

Also, commentators must accept that U.S. helicopters are going to get shot down. Helicopters fell in Vietnam whenever within range of small-arms fire. Our technological mastery has not altered the fact that helicopters remain fragile. Look at the photo of the Apache in the Iraqi farmer's field. It's our most advanced mode, the "longbow" version. And it went down without even having time to fire back. The right weapons sponson, visible in the photos, is still fully racked with missiles and rockets.

 

Times Online

Will America crumple at the sight of its own blood?
Peggy Noonan
The question on everyone's mind that nobody in the US can bear to discuss



It is a great unanswered question of the war and one we Americans don¡¯t want answered. How much will America be willing to suffer? What kind of losses will America accept and absorb, if it comes to that?

It is on our minds, more so since the war has turned hard, but it¡¯s not what Americans are discussing. The war has just begun; you don¡¯t go on to the field at Gettysburg chattering about likely losses and the impact back home. You go in committed to the fight and confident of victory. To speak of possible high losses seems fear-mongering, alarmist, lacking in faith. No one in the United States has said the word bodybags since before the fighting began.

The world has for some time assumed that America cannot, or will not, accept widespread casualties if the fight proves brutal and bloody. President Saddam Hussein obviously thinks that with enough difficulties and enough deaths America will fold, as it did in Somalia and Lebanon, and retreat. And of course there was Vietnam.

The international assumption is that Vietnam showed that modern America is incapable of accepting heavy battlefield losses, no matter how just or legitimate the conflict. But this clich¨¦ demands examination. For ten years of the Vietnam War, from 1964 to 1974, America showed it could take bodybags ¡ª every day. Fifty thousand of them in all. I remember each Friday night on local TV they would show the high school photos of the New York area boys who died that week. They all had short hair, high cheekbones and big smiles, and it gave you a feeling of emptiness and disorder to see their pictures roll across the screen.

America did turn against the war and its ravages, but the reason was not only those pictures. America¡¯s political leadership was badly split, and even those who championed the war¡¯s prosecution spent its last years in desperate pursuit of a negotiated way out. One by one America¡¯s parents decided that they weren¡¯t going to let their son become the last American to die for an inadequate political settlement.

Bodybags were only part of the story. A lack of confidence in our leaders and growing ambivalence about the justice of our position were the other parts.

After Vietnam the American military establishment began to press for new preconditions of war. They would insist that political backing for any military action be real, clear and sustainable; that military planning include exit strategies in case of insupportable disaster; and that America go into any conflict with full and ferocious force. Thus the heavy bombing, the highly technologised fighting force, the highly trained specialists that we see on the news every night. (There is some debate about whether the initial US onslaught was full and ferocious enough. But after six days our troops are closing on Baghdad, which suggests the first moves were neither weak nor wet.)

The idea was that if you go in with overwhelming force, victory will beat the bodybags home. All of which is understandable as strategy; but it has also tended to support the assumption that Americans can¡¯t take battlefield losses; that they¡¯ve grown soft and unused to suffering; that ultimately they don¡¯t want to pay a price.

What is the truth? The truth is no one knows. Those in the US Administration do not know. They can¡¯t go to a mall and ask: ¡°By the way, would a thousand deaths be all right with you? Would five thousand?¡± When Paul Wolfowitz was pushed by The New York Times, the Deputy Defence Secretary, a prime and early supporter of an invasion, said: ¡°In the end, it has to come down to a careful weighing of things we can¡¯t know with precision, the costs of action versus the costs of inaction, the costs of inaction now versus the costs of inaction later.¡±

The American people themselves are not sure exactly what as a nation they would be willing to sustain and accept. How could they be? It will be a day-by-day decision. And different parts of the country will likely offer different answers on different timetables. If you asked the question, ¡°What kind of losses can America accept?¡± down South, where Americans are both sweeter and tougher, the answer might likely be, ¡°Well it¡¯s a war, and war is hell, and in war you gotta do what¡¯s needed to be done.¡± That would probably be the consistent response from George Bush¡¯s Republican base: we can take a lot to do what¡¯s right. And those last four words ¡ª ¡°to do what¡¯s right¡± ¡ª are the key to the answer.

The novelist Tom Clancy, a great respecter of the military and appreciator of Americans, told me: ¡°The American people are the same people they were in 1942.¡± We can take losses, he said, we are just as tough as ever. But ¡°there has to be a good reason. The people will accept what¡¯s necessary but not what isn¡¯t.¡± Meaning the American people will suffer through and accept if they believe the war is needed and America¡¯s position is right.

It may be that America will find out how high a price it is willing to pay to oust Saddam and pacify Iraq. Hopes for an end to war that comes sooner rather than later ¡ª and with minimal loss rather than maximum ¡ª continue, and with good reason. But it may be turning tough indeed, and the words Bloody Baghdad may be about to become famous.

My own hunch is that Americans are more patient, persevering and accepting of pain than we know. We found that out on 9/11, and we may be about to find it out again. But Americans are practical. They all know how to do a cost-benefit analysis. They will be patient, persevering and willing to absorb pain as long as they feel they can win and are winning. They will accept bodybags as part of the price of victory, but not for a second will they accept them if they start to see evidence of defeat.




The author is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal