Civil Strife Seen by Some as Necessary (washingtonpost.com): The fighting and looting by Iraqis reported in the wake of U.S. troops' charge toward Baghdad were expected by their commanders -- and are seen by some involved in formulating the war plan as a necessary part of the process of ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Military intelligence analysts have long predicted that the U.S. charge toward the capital would leave a rolling civil war behind it in the south, as an oppressed Shiite Muslim population rises up and takes revenge on local representatives of Hussein's heavily Sunni Muslim government. This fighting has the potential of eliminating large parts of the Baathist Party structure that rules Iraq and is a target of the U.S. offensive.
... They induced a "rolling civil war" by design?! They made no plans for occupation or administration? It's "not a concern"?
What the HELL were they thinking? Were they thinking at all? According to one of Our Glorious Leader's earlier speeches, one of the points of this mess is to produce democracy in Iraq. Surely a stable democracy, at this stage, will not be helped by a country that dissolves into civil war and separatist movements. And if you get to their real goal -- to create a stable country as a source of oil in Iraq so that we can take on Saudi Arabia and its official and unofficial funding of various terrorist movements -- then this appears to be even more lunatic. Pacifying the country now will be easier than pacifying it later, when the civil wars have gotten into full flow. (And I can but imagine the reaction in various Middle Eastern capitals when they try to digest simultaneously the concepts, "Oh, yes, we planned to protect Iraq's territorial integrity," and "Oh, yes, we knew this would start a civil war. Or three. And maybe a few separatist movements. Don't worry, no problems!")
To be sure, this "plan", such as it is, probably will serve the administration's purposes in many ways. Knowing that central authority is, at the very least, incommunicado, people probably will target the Secret Police and other loathed and despised parts of Saddam's regime ... all of whom will be better armed and better prepared than the Iraqi citizens at large, of course. Even if they attack in numbers large enough to overwhelm, this would not appear to be the sort of thing that would go well for the civilians.
And in the meantime, the US armed forces plan to leave unoccupied, unpacified, in many ways untouched, Basra behind their lines as they head for Baghdad, with supply lines strung out from Kuwait and getting longer.
Our fearless leaders are utterly and completely insane, or utterly and completely stupid, and I'm not entirely sure which. In any event, the soldiers in the field will be in for a much more difficult time than they thought.
Posted by iain at March 23, 2003 01:32 AMComments
