And this is the guy the US said was such a great threat to the world?

But you have to wonder how the same group who lost the conventional war so fully has managed to humiliate the amazing US military and the US government.

Surely there was some planning for an insurgency by some senior Baathists. Or is the US military just incompetent at fighting guerilla wars?

Saddam didn't know a great deal about the world outside Iraq. He'd only spent time in Iraq and Egypt and had been dictator of Iraq for going on 25 years.

The evidence is that unlike someone like Quadafi, Saddam had a bad habit of killing or torturing anyone who told him he was wrong about anything. Therefore people tended to lie and tell him what he wished to hear. In this case he wanted to hear that France/Russia could stop the war or that Bush would be like his father and pull his punches if it did start.

So he ended up fighting the danger he knew the most about - the possiblility that another younger Saddam would use the crisis to grab power and make a deal with the US. The way to stop that was not to give them autonomy to make decisions.

I draw two conclusions from Foreign Affairs article, neither of which I would think was intended by the authors. One, that the American victory, in strictly military terms, is significantly diminshed: the opponent faced was not only ill prepared, it was farcically ill prepared: I don't think anyone can draw any useful conclusions regarding new American way of war as dreamed of by Rumsfeld from operation Iraqi freedom. Two, the phase IV failings are accented, especially as regards the oppurtunities lost to shut down Baghdad for the sake of security and the disbanding of the Iraqi army: it is not far fetched to imagine these guys would have been very willing participants in an intelligently run American occupation given the years of evil buffoonery they were subject to under Saddam. My faith in the competence of American foreign policy and it's various instruments has just taken another step backwards.

The question is who did he pay in the French and Russian Governments.

Sein:

The US military has avoided counterinsurgenicies for a while and their capacities and focus are mixed. But in the plans they drew up they did take into account many problems and committed enough troops to have some chance of securing large parts of the country.

They would also assume a massive foreign aid effort by State and other civilian organizations among the people.

Rumsfeld and his whiz kids reduced the troops, avoided discussion of potential problems and believed rebuilding could be managed by twenty something political correct people recruited from the Heritage Foundation site, people without experience, who could carry out their functions from behind the walls of the Green Zone.

These consisted primarily of awarding Iraqi, then US money to big American corportations, writing a flat tax for a country without income tax and various other utopian schemes.

Similarly the quite impefect functioning of the "intelligence community," State and others were replaced with a faith based model of the situation.

Strictly from a tactical point of view, Hamdani could have delayed the American advance had he been able to blow the Euphrates River bridges. However, the reinforcements he wanted would only have become casualties in short order; combined arms operations against organized formations are what the American army and air forces have trained for. Ironically or not, the former regime's failure to follow textbook advice accelerated the Iraqi collapse in 2003 while laying the foundation for the prolonged insurgency.

But you have to wonder how the same group who lost the conventional war so fully has managed to humiliate the amazing US military and the US government.

Counter-insurgency is just HARD, and much less amenable to the "throw lots of resources at the problem" approach that the American military generally uses. And of course, if the Americans leave, and whatever militias are there can no longer consider blowing up the occasional oil refinery or mosque to be "victory", then they'll suddenly look a lot less competent.

"One, that the American victory, in strictly military terms, is significantly diminshed: the opponent faced was not only ill prepared, it was farcically ill prepared: I don't think anyone can draw any useful conclusions regarding new American way of war as dreamed of by Rumsfeld from operation Iraqi freedom. "

This was was against an opponent which was at least one generation back in technology, with only a low level of industrial strength. Whose tactical ability had been found sadly (for them) in the first Gulf War.

In the meantime, the US military had the money and leisure to integrate those lessons into doctrine, and to advance another generation in technology. We went from proto-digital to digital, at least in aviation and major ground units (company-level and below not so much).

On top of that, we had air supremacy, and probably fielded more tanks, APC's and artillery pieces than the Iraqi Army had. And we knew all of those things.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi forces knew that, as well. That's why they generally didn't resist.

Seen in that light, a quick opening campaign was likely. The two major obstacles which I saw predicted were use of chemical weapons, and urban warfare. Since the chemical weapons were only in the speeches of the neo-conmen, that wasn'a a problem. And Saddam didn't have the forces/morale for conventional urban warfare.

"The question is who did he pay in the French and Russian Governments."

posted by: Robert Schwartz

Since the USA (not the GOP) would have been better off by heeding French advice, your question doesn't make sense.

Dr. Hemlock was in the war in 2003 and 2004 and concurs with many of the comments made here.

Apart from some sharp fights at al-Hillah and Kut for the Army and Marines, the "war" part of the war was pretty anti-climactic. The Fedayeen Saddam and the more organized "foreign fighters" did pretty well. Some of the Republican Guard acquitted themselves well. The Iraqi Army didn't.

What hasn't been the press accounts of the new Trainor book, but will undoubtedly be in the book, is that we didn't WANT to fight the Iraqi Army -- that is, the regular, conscript Army. We wanted that to stay intact, to become the core of the "new" post-Saddam army. In fact, we leafletted the regular army's bases, telling them to just hold in place, stay away from their vehicles and weapons, and we'd be around to take their surrender in a minute or two.

Even at the highest levels of command there wasn't much stomach for the idea of slaughtering those poor S.O.B's who'd got shangai'd into the army -- the same ones who'd been in such a hurry to surrender in '91.

I take issue with certain commenters talking about how the military didn't plan for enough troops in certain areas. This may still have been true, but a large part of the military plan involved the 4th ID (our most modern at that point I believe) coming down from the north - which was then prevented by the Turks immediately preceding the invasion. With this political decision, the entire 4th ID had to be taken on ships around to the other side of Iraq, which takes time. Thus half of the planned invasion force was simply unavailable when we invaded.

Even after this, the Special Forces (and Peshmerga) did a remarkable job in the north of taking territory and maintaining order, mainly by calling on retired military officers to take over security. Sometime later the seemingly rather foolish decision to disband this force was made. (While it is hard to say what the effect of leaving Ba'athists eligible for national government may have been, it is quite clear that in the Sunni Triangle everyone competent was an ex-Ba'athist.)

It's also not really a counter-insurgency in the traditional sense, epitomized in most peoples minds by Vietnam. Post-Fallujah, there is no opposing force holding territory. In particular, most of what is referred to as the insurgency is not only like 10 different groups, not driven by nationalistic, but either sectarian (al-Sadr, the ex-Baathists) or larger non-Iraqi concerns (foreign jihadis, the Iranians.) And of course, a large part of what gets reported in the media here is really just organized crime and the like (Saddam emptied the jails of ~150,000 criminals before the invasion.) Thats not to say there isn't something bigger going on, as the events of the last week and a bigger look clearly prove otherwise, but in a city the size of Baghdad 10-20 murders a day is not evidence on its own of something larger.

If your enemies can win merely by existing, and you can't massacre everyone in the area, you will most likely lose. That is why we are losing to the insurgency.

When it comes to perceptions off the mark, Saddam scores high. But isn't Bush competitive? To think the Middle East could be democratized by the power of example, the war wouldn't be prolonged and aid the Islamist cause, Iran wouldn't emerge as a chief beneficiary--who was the greater fool?
It's frightening enough that a third-rate backwater dictator can have such distorted perceptions. It's rather more frightening that the leader of the world's only superpower can.

Amazing. So according to bishopmvp, the insurgency doesn't really exist?

10-20 murders a day....how about 10x that?

Iraq has been a debacle for the USA. Bush still either does not realize that or has decided to not tell the people of the USA the truth about the reality of the situation there.

Bishopmvp mostly misses the point. Yes, SF and the peshmerga (mostly the latter) did do a great job in the north. But of course the north was already largely pacified to begin with, was/is generally populated with a relatively homogenous group with a shared interest in stability (since they were already prospering), and -- most importantly -- the center of mass was south: the Basra-Baghdad-Tikrit axis.

That's where we indeed committed too few troops. 4th ID was going to come down from the north in this kind of grand pincer movement in anticipation of a Stalingrad-redux on the streets of Baghdad.

That does/says nothing about the fundamental problem -- namely, that too few troops were available for Phase IV (the SASO part). In fact, Cobra II called for rolling transitions in the fight -- we'd been in Phase III here, Phase IV there -- so obviously people understood that SASO would be essential. They just didn't resource it. Why? Too few troops.