Shifting Strategies: US has Slipped Up on All Counts

The war in Iraq is poised to enter its third week on Thursday April 3 and global consciousness has been inundated with a plethora of repetitive graphic visuals and incessant sound-bytes thanks to continuous audio-visual coverage.
Discrete bits of information have been provided by intrepid journalists some embedded with US-led troops and others not so fettered.But while there appears to be an overload of snapshot like data inputs, this does not necessarily add up to a composite whole of accurate knowledge about the big picture.
Did everything go as per plan as Washington claims or was there some inadvertent skidding on banana peels? A preliminary review of the last two weeks reveals the centrality of assumption and assessment as the key conceptual elements, and the degree to which they were misplaced that have led to the outcome of the Iraq war to date. Some of the key assumptions on the US side that merit scrutiny are those that may be deemed strategic for they determined the war plan and its prosecution on March 20.
In hindsight it appears that the US plan was predicated on a north-south pincer that would advance towards Baghdad and here the co-operation of Turkey was pivotal. However, this was not forthcoming and at the last minute the US had to embark upon the military campaign with one axis-cum-access denied to it. The US army’s 4th infantry division deemed to be the most hi-tech in the world is now being re-routed through the Suez Canal and may take another fortnight to reach the theatre of operations. The assumption about Turkish support for the US war effort was obviously misplaced.
Related to this was the decision to initiate the war on March 20 based on a CIA intelligence assessment that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was in a certain building complex. This was the target of opportunity and hypothetically if the ordnance delivered had decapitated the Iraqi supremo, the principal US war objective of regime change would have been realised. One presumes this was the reason why president Bush took the decision to “go� even before his ground troops had acquired the necessary critical mass but two weeks later it is evident that this assessment was either incorrect or the ordnance ineffective.
The third assumption on which the war plan appears to have been made pertains to the mood of the Iraqi people and the nature of the local militia. It was presumed that the use of precision-guided munitions by way of missiles from distant ships and aerial bombardment would generate paralysing shock and awe in the Iraqi military and that the local people would rise in revolt against the Saddam regime. It was expected that they would welcome the US forces as liberators particularly in the south of Iraq where the Shia population has been ruthlessly punished for the still-born revolt in the wake of the 1991 war for Kuwait.
But it now appears from the resistance being offered in southern Iraq that the efficacy of the militia and domestic nationalism was either under-estimated or ignored. At this stage, there is little doubt that US forces will innovate tactically for it is a tenet of military history that the first thing that gets jolted in combat is the war plan. But what merits scrutiny at this stage of the war are the assumptions that are in the realm of the strategic and the degree to which they were misplaced.
Currently there is a fair amount of criticism being levelled against US defence secretary Rumsfeld and it is being suggested that he ran roughshod over his more conservative generals and advanced the war plan with less than the desired troop level since he assumed that the Saddam regime was a paper-tiger. There is little doubt that his assumption about Iraqi defences and Baghdad’s ability to take recourse to asymmetric warfare and suicide bombers will be reviewed both now and well after this war is over.
The primary US assumption is that the vast imba-lance between the Iraqi military and the US-led coalition forces will lead to an inevitable victory and this is not invalid. But wars are fought to realise political objectives and the mother of all assumptions that borders on certitude is the rationale for this war — a deviant regime that sought WMDs while supporting terrorism had to be crushed. The Bush team is convinced beyond any shadow of doubt that this military vic- tory will not only remove Saddam Hussein but lead to the spread of a liberal democratic ethos in the Arab world and erase the regional incentive to acquire WMDs.
However, it is evident that well before the end of the war the central political objectives have been irreparably lost. Iraqi nationalism has been resurrected in a manner that few could have imagined and virulent anti-US sentiment has spread across the Islamic world from the Maghreb to Indonesia, thereby increasing the motivation for potential terrorists. In many of these states, the rulers who have supported Washington are alienated from their people and the post-war scenario will see greater repression or the ascendancy of right-wing Islamic radicalism. And as for WMDs, current US unilateralism may well usher in greater covert proliferation among putative aspirants.
In many ways this is the ultimate irony that in a war yet to reach its denouement, the ideological objectives for which it is being waged have already been lost.