NEW YORK, March 30: As the American and British forces in Iraq are gearing up for a long military campaign to dislodge Saddam Hussein from power a commander of American ground forces in the war zone has conceded that the war that they are fighting is not the one they and their officers had foreseen.

The plan of “Shock and Awe” has neither produced shock nor awe and the experts and military strategists are questioning whether or not the American planners underestimated the resolve of the Iraqi people in opposing an invasion of their country.

Before the war Richard Perle, the former head of Pentagon’s policy planning, credited with planning the Iraqi campaign compared the Iraqi campaign to MRE — short for Meals Ready to Eat, a freeze-dried Army field ration in which the ingredients are there and you just have to add water, in this case US support.

Testifying before the US Congress in 2000, Perle insisted, “We need not send substantial ground forces into Iraq when patriotic Iraqis are willing to fight to liberate their country.”

Last year, he conceded that the US troop requirement might go as high as 40,000. Now it seems that 300,000 troops are not enough and the campaign is no MRE.

Together with Paul Wolfowitz, Perle is the primary intellectual architect of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. Exercising his influence through his many proteges, whom he’s placed in key jobs throughout the Pentagon and elsewhere.

Prompted by Perle’s thinking Vice-President Dick Cheney in a policy making speech had predicted that Saddam Hussein’s government would prove to be “a house of cards.”

As the New York Times put it “this has not happened yet.”

Besides US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is coming under intense scrutiny as it becomes apparent that the military campaign is going to be long. In his interview on Sunday with ABC TV Rumsfeld refused to predict whether the war could last longer than six months.

As the NYT said “street-by-street fighting in the rubble of Baghdad and other cities — an eventuality that American strategists have long sought to avoid — now looks more likely.”

Saddam Hussein’s aides have promised savage resistance. If it materializes, it could produce large coalition casualties, challenge American resolve, and equally large Iraqi civilian casualties, with dire consequences for the coalition’s attempt to picture itself as the liberator of Iraq. A heart-rending picture of a wounded two-year-old was widely published today after a Baghdad market was ripped apart by an explosion Iraqi officials attributed to a coalition bomb.

Besides the Times noted “Saddam Hussein could escape, denying the war effort a definitive totem of victory. It sounds improbable, given the terrifying array of force available to the coalition, but other notorious figures remain at large despite intensive manhunts, including the wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden.”

The hunt for weapons of mass destruction could prove futile — a development that would make the war look like a wild-goose chase. Of course, all that is a worst case prognosis. As the war in Afghanistan showed, hard military slogging can give way suddenly to victory. But will victory in Iraq take the shape the United States so badly needs?

Some retired top brass are voicing in public an opinion harboured in private by some current top military officers — that Rumsfeld’s bold vision of a sleeker, high-tech military prompted him to take unnecessary risks in the size and nature of the force sent to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“At the end of the day the question arises: why would you do this operation with inadequate power?” retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who commanded an infantry division in the Gulf War and later headed all US military forces in Latin America, told Reuters news agency in an interview.

“Because you don’t have time to get them there? But we did. Because you don’t have the forces? But we did. Because you’re trying to save money on a military operation that will be $200 billion before it’s done?”

“Or is it because you have such a strong ideological view and you’re so confident in your views that you disregard the vehement military advice from, particularly, Army generals who you don’t think are very bright.”

In developing a war plan to use in Iraq, Rumsfeld firmly rejected the advice of many top officers that he field a force more in line with the half-million troops used in the 1991 Gulf War. Rumsfeld favoured a much smaller force. Analysts said Rumsfeld and war commander Gen. Tommy Franks reached a middle ground, fielding a force about half the size of the 1991 one.

“Rumsfeld basically cut in half what the Army said that it needed for the war. Basically, he has the view the Army is too big, too heavy, too cumbersome,” said analyst Lawrence Korb of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as assistant secretary of defence in the Reagan administration.

Rumsfeld on Sunday in an interview said that resistance “has been in pockets quite stiff. It’s going to get more difficult as we move closer to Baghdad,” where President Saddam Hussein’s most trusted and battled-tested Republican Guards are waiting.

“I would suspect that the most dangerous and difficult days are still ahead of us,” he said. Rumsfeld would not say when the fighting might cease.

“We’ve never had a timetable. We’ve always said it could days, weeks or months and we don’t know. And I don’t think you need a timetable,” Rumsfeld said.