The death of a delusionary doctrine
Iraqi resistance and the Rumsfeld strategy
By Fred Goldstein
The heroic resistance by the people of Iraq to Washington's
relentless high-tech military onslaught has inspired the world,
shocked the Pentagon high command and dealt a severe blow to
the Bush administration's ambitions to vastly expand U.S.
capitalism's world empire.
Millions of people have taken to the streets, from Indonesia
to Bangladesh, from Seoul to San Francisco, from Syria and
Morocco to the Philippines, marching on the U.S. and British
embassies and their own governments, demanding an end to the
criminal war of aggression, the bombing of cities and towns,
and the massacre of civilians.
The Pentagon has brought enough cruise missiles, bombs,
rockets, aerial machine guns, tanks, and armored personnel
carriers to launch a world war. The U.S. military has bombed
Baghdad, including working class districts, markets, the
telephone system, a maternity hospital, television stations and
government buildings. It has launched attacks on major cities
and towns such as Karbala, Najaf, An Nasiriyah and Samawa. The
British have attacked Basra for two weeks running, bombing this
city of 1.5 million and sending rockets and mortars into
civilian areas.
The Iraqi people have answered by defending the cities,
digging in for the battle of Baghdad, and opening up a
widespread, classical campaign of guerrilla warfare to impede
the advance of the imperialist forces.
Resistance brings split in U.S. military
The national resistance of the Iraqi people to colonial
invasion and occupation has revealed the complete bankruptcy of
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's war strategy and opened
up a deep split in the U.S. military and a hail of criticism of
the "war plan."
The capitalist media suddenly became brave enough to
criticize the Rumsfeld strategy--but only because they were
speaking for a large section of the military brass who have
been opposed to this strategy for over a year. The humiliation
of the Pentagon war machine by the Iraqi masses determined to
defend their country opened up a torrent of criticism and "I
told you so" from the Army and the Marines over failure to
provide sufficient troop strength and excessive reliance on air
power.
The split surfaced when Gen. William Wallace, the commander
of the Army forces in the Persian Gulf, was quoted in numerous
publications on March 27 as saying: "The enemy we're fighting
is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against because of
these paramilitary forces. ...We knew they were there but we
did not know how they would fight." (New York Times, March
28)
Gen. Wallace spoke while visiting For ward Operating Base
Shell where the 101st Airborne was stationed. He was "stating
aloud what many soldiers have been saying privately," continued
the Times. "The general said that during this week's battle for
the town of Najaf, south of Baghdad on the Euphrates River,
Iraqi men in trucks took on American tanks and Bradley fighting
vehicles, with nothing more than light arms mounted in the beds
of pickup trucks.
"'Technical vehicles with .50 caliber weapons-any kind of
weapon-leading the charge,' the general said, incredulous.
'They were charging tanks and Bradley's.' He termed the
behavior 'bizarre.'"
Then came the phrase that touched off a virtual civil war in
the high command. Said Wallace, "I've got to give my best
military judgment, given the weather, the long lines of
communication, and given that we have to pull up our long line
of logistics. We've got to take this pause. We're still
fighting the enemy every night."
This was echoed on the same day by the chief of staff of the
First Marine Division, Col. Ben Saylor. "We've been contested
every inch, every mile on the way up."
It is no accident that the Army and Marines have led the
criticism. The ground troops under those commanders have to
face the masses of the Iraqi people, have to feel the fury of
the national resistance. These troops on the ground have been
utterly unprepared to fight against a popular war. Unlike that
of the officer pilots who bomb with impunity, and of the naval
forces that are far from the battlefield and well protected,
the ground troops' morale is sinking, creating a dire situation
for the brass.
Ignored their own intelligence warnings
Shortly after Wallace's public outburst, a spate of articles
exposing the long and intense struggles in the Pentagon over
the war plan began to appear in the capitalist press. A long
and detailed inside account by Seymour Hersh appeared in the
New Yorker magazine cover-dated April 7.
Another extensive article in the London Guardian of March 29
revealed that Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the Central Com mand,
had sent Rumsfeld a plan requesting 400,000 troops before the
campaign began. "An angry Rumsfeld sent it back three times,"
wrote the Guardian, "on each occasion asking for a cut in the
number of soldiers needed for the job, so that at the outset of
the war, Franks had seen his forces reduced to 250,000." And of
those 250,000, only 90,000 were in the theater when the war
started.
Most important, the Guardian revealed that, "Last month, the
CIA issued a report saying that paramilitary units loyal to
Saddam Hussein would threaten the rear of an advance on
Baghdad. Similar warnings came from the Defense Intelligence
Agency inside the Pentagon during the months leading up to the
war."
In fact, Orville Schell, writing in the San Francisco
Chronicle on March 31, quoted Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq
Aziz: "People say to me, 'You are not the Vietnamese. You have
no jungles and swamps.' I reply, let our cities be our swamps
and our buildings our jungles." He had said this to a
University of Warwick researcher six months ago.
How can it be that the Pentagon and the White House ignored
not only the Iraqis, but the CIA and the DIA, both of whom have
huge budgets just for the purpose of finding out such
information? How could Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz,
Vice President Dick Cheney, and Under secretary of Defense
Douglas Feith, all of whom planned this war, put the U.S.
military effort at such a risk in the face of blunt warnings by
their own spy agencies?
The most important thing to note about the controversy over
the war plan is that it is entirely superficial. The dispute
has been reduced to a question of judgment. In fact, it is not
merely a question of poor judgment on Rumsfeld's part. It is a
question of ideology and world outlook that underlies the
disastrous miscalculation.
Doctrine of world domination
The Bush administration developed its doctrine of world
domination in a National Security Strategy document of
September 2002. This is an evolution of the Defense Planning
Guidance first promulgated in March 1992, authored by Wolfowitz
and approved and later modified by Cheney. It has been brought
up to date and couched in language about countering terrorism.
But it basically asserts the right of U.S. imperialism to
intervene and remove any government that Washington deems a
threat. The document further flatly states that no power or
combination of powers shall be allowed to challenge the world
supremacy of the Pentagon.
Such an outrageously aggressive and delusionary political
doctrine, which proclaims the intention of U.S. imperialism to
dominate the globe and its population of 6 billion people, must
of necessity have an enabling military doctrine that can
envision such a world conquest within the means available to
U.S. capitalism.
Richard Perle, recently deposed as chair of the Defense
Policy Board, who had been a Rumsfeld appointee and an
architect of this war, told PBS last July 11 that the Iraqi
government was "a house of cards ... Support for Saddam,
including within his military, will collapse at the first whiff
of gunpowder."
And Paul Wolfowitz, speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars
on March 11, said his Iraqi contacts in the United States tell
him that "their friends and relatives want to know what is
taking the Amer icans so long. When are you coming?"
These are the ideological and doctrinal collaborators of
Rumsfeld. Their miscalculation stems from the absolute need for
this strategy to work. It must work, or their doctrine of world
domination falls to earth.
The Rumsfeld military doctrine--the supremacy of air power,
high technology and threats of "shock and awe"--is a
21st-century version of 19th-century gunboat
diplomacy. It harkens back to an era when the masses of the
world were as yet isolated from one another, cut off from
modern technology, military means, means of communication, and
historical experience of struggle and organization. It recalls
the era when British gunboats could sail to the coast of China
or Africa and fire their cannons--a vastly superior military
technology at the time--and devastate a coastal area in order
to bring the local rulers into submission. Or when Commodore
Mat thew C. Perry "opened up" Japan in the 1860s by sailing his
fleet into the harbor, firing menacing cannon rounds, and
demanding trading rights and other concessions.
This was the "shock and awe" of the 19th century, which is
being resurrected for the 21st century with computer-guided
bombs instead of cannon balls.
The fatal flaw in their doctrine
Its two principal and interconnected assumptions are that
Washington can get its way by threatening governments into
submission or changing "regimes" around the globe so as to
establish absolute sovereignty and domination. And that the
people of the world are an inert mass--they are mere objects
sufficiently disorganized and non-threatening that they do not
have to be taken into account as the fundamental factor in
world history. All that is needed is to send some smart bombs,
cruise missiles, killer helicopters and computerized tanks, and
U.S. domination is assured.
This, of course, is a necessary military doctrine for any
faction of the ruling class that dreams of establishing a world
empire. It means that you don't have to use millions of
soldiers to go kill and be killed in massive combat. It means
that the role of the infantry and the marines is to go in and
"mop up" after murderous bombardments and then be transitional
occupation forces helping to usher in new puppet governments
that will do the beck and call of Washington.
It means that the working class here being sent to the wars
of conquest will not have to undergo hardships; will not rebel
against being used as shock troops for the transnational
corporations and the oil companies. It means the ruling class
can have "endless war " abroad and social stability at
home.
But the Iraqi government, which has become a government of
national resistance, and the Iraqi people in every city, town
and village, have already proven decisively on the ground that
the Rums feld strategy, and the Bush doctrine of empire that it
is calculated to uphold, are false to the core. The forces of
this mighty imperialist power have had to fight every inch of
the way against a small, impoverished country, weakened by 12
years of sanctions and bombing.
The immediate danger is that these war criminals, in order
to vindicate their bankrupt strategy, shall try to produce a
victory by intensifying their already unspeakable crimes
against the Iraqi people. They feel that they have enough
military power to compensate for their staggering
miscalculations of the resistance, and will wade through rivers
of blood to avoid the ultimate humiliation of defeat.
The worldwide anti-war movement must do all possible to show
total solidarity with the Iraqi people and whatever is
necessary to stop this criminal war.
Reprinted from the April 10, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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