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October 3, 2004
REVIEW: Pyrrhic victory in Iraq
THIS book seeks to put in perspective the US invasion of Iraq while comparing the two Gulf wars the United States has waged against an unequal adversary since the 1990s.
The writers who have vast military experience have given a graphic battlefield account of the war which reinforces the faith of the warriors in Carl Von Clausewitz’s concept of outnumbering the adversary by employing all the modern inventions of warfare. But in the days of Clausewitz the effects of war was generally on the battlefield and its periphery. Had he lived today, he too would have been appalled by the collateral damage the lap-top warriors have caused in Iraq and Afghanistan by resorting to this strategy.
Through a combination of tactical and operational virtuosity in the second Gulf war, the Baathist regime was obliterated. “On the simplest level, the war that broke out on March 19, 2003, resulted from the failure of the United States’ policy makers to seize the victory its armed forces had so decisively won in the winter of 1999.”
Analyzing the day-to-day tactical and logistical decisions of the infantry and the air command against the “brutal Saddam regime”, the authors have shown their subjective approach while dealing with Saddam’s war against Iran before the first Gulf war. While Saddam was condemned for brutalizing his own people, they did not mention, perhaps deliberately, the US role in providing Saddam with some of the lethal power that killed a large number of Iranians. They have also not discussed the morality of war and the devastating collateral damage the Iraqi people had to suffer on account of the decade old sanctions, which not only endangered their life but also sapped their ability to resist a “tyrant”.
The intelligence on Saddam’s WMD programme before the war was ambiguous. Yet the Americans remained vehement on this issue and it is only now that they have conceded reluctantly that no trace of the WMDs could be found in Iraq. Perhaps control over oil and not democracy and freedom was the objective of the American expedition.
The book has a traditional neo-con approach on world politics. The authors write, “History had not ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. A ‘clash of civilizations’ between portions of the Islamic world and the West now seemed very real. That clash had little to do with poverty; the suicide pilots had come from the Arab middle classes and had enjoyed many material privileges. Nor was the Islamic world reacting to the aggressions of the crusader West, as former president Clinton suggested in October 2002. During 13 centuries of relations between Christianity and Islam, most of the time Islam has been the aggressor. The central problem lay in the fact that history was asking the Islamic world to adjust to modernity in barely eighty years — a condition that the West had taken well over five centuries to create.”
They also discuss the devastating impact of war on the US troops while dealing with graphic detail the advantage the “lap-top” soldiers enjoyed with enhanced air power and the commanders had the ability to see and sense the battlefield with extraordinary clarity through ECMs and other remotely operated devices. The account also deals with the futuristic technologies that would enable military forces to “lift the fog of war”.
The authors are of the view that if the Americans wish to gain political results from their military actions in the future, they must pay particular attention to how their low-tech enemies define victory and defeat. That calculus may prove very different from their own. This is already becoming evident in Iraq.
It is acknowledged that “at the end of the day, the Iraq war of 2003 was not just about oil or the stability of the Middle East, though these were important factors, to be sure. Nor was it primarily about the liberation of the Iraqi people or even about the need to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction. Rather, like the operation in Afghanistan, the Iraq war was a clear demonstration to the entire world that the United States, in the wake of September 11, has the capacity and will to defeat rogue states and confront those who threaten the vital interests of the American people”.
The US has won the war but not the peace in Iraq and it has already been contemplating to stay there longer than the stipulated time though the United States’ record of nation building has not been its forte over the past forty years.
The events of September 11 profoundly altered the view that the United States is immune from the troubles besetting the rest of the world. American operations in Afghanistan represented a realization that both air and ground forces must be enlisted in the fight — a departure from the “distant punishment” approach of the Clinton administration. While it was all very fine to overthrow the Taliban and clean out the nest of Al Qaeda terrorists, the question then arose: what were US forces to do in Afghanistan once they had accomplished their purely military mission?
The United States could not simply leave the country and risk a resurgence of the Taliban. Something had to be put in its place, and like it or not, that something required a commitment to nation building. A failed effort in Afghanistan would not have had an enormous impact on the delicate balance among the nuclear powers India and Pakistan and the soon-to-be-nuclear power Iran.
In Iraq, by contrast, an American failure to provide something substantially better than Saddam’s regime could well have a catastrophic impact on the continued flow of the world’s oil supply; the activities of international terrorists, and the chances for an end to hostilities between warring factions throughout the region. The authors presume that postwar failure in Iraq would suggest to much of the Islamic world that their only viable path to the future must lie with the fundamentalists rather than with those who wish to bring stability and modernity.
The authors point out that hard as it may be to believe, Saddam’s regime could claim some genuinely devoted supporters, some of whom went on to participate in organized guerrilla attacks against American soldiers after the war.
The Iraq War: A Military History
By Williamson Murray and Major-General Robert H. Scales, Jr.Royal Book Company BG-5, Rex Centre Basement, Zaibunnisa Street,
Karachi-74400
Tel: 021-565 3418, 567 0628
Email: royalbook@hotmail.com
ISBN 969-407-303-0
312pp. Rs595
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