Posted by
crosspatch on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 12:00:16 AM
There is evidence that Saddam's top command staff expected a long air campaign prior to a ground offensive. Apparently the Iraqi strategy was to play up casualties and damage from air bombardment in the arena of world opinion in order to get any ground offensive stopped before it could begin. But we took Iraq and indeed many military analysts completely off guard with a lightning fast advance that started at the same time as the air offensive.
Within a few weeks we had taken Baghdad and the Iraqi Army ceased to exist as a fighting force. But we had a significant problem. Saddam, his sons, and many of the high command of the military and Baath party had escaped capture or death. Now imagine if Hitler and most of his military command and high party officials had escaped capture at the end of World War 2. Things would have been much different. At the end of that war, we were able to place ex party members back into civil service positions. When it came time to reconstitute the German army, many former officers and men were reinstated. We could not do this in Iraq. These people had sworn an oath of loyalty not to the nation of Iraq but to Saddam Hussein and his sons and henchmen. We could not place these people back into responsible positions while Saddam and his cronies were on the loose. It would have been impossible to capture these people if the government, army, and police were manned with people who had sworn loyalty to this bunch. Instead, we were forced to purge the government and disband the army. In other words, we had to staff an entire national infrastructure with people that had absolutely no experience in government or military service.
This is what I consider to be an important detail that many critics of our war effort fail to appreciate and our government fails to explain to the people of this country. Until Saddam, his sons, and his cronies were caught or killed, we could not use the experienced Iraqi talent to run the country and the military. Instead we were forced to attempt to form a "National Guard" that fell apart as soon as they were tested by Baathist loyalists.
Even so, during this phase Iraq was relatively quiet compared to recent months. Then something important changed. Al Qaida sensed that there was a vacuum of power and the interim government was weak. Islamist insurgents began streaming into the country stirring up sectarian strife by staging attacks on Shiites in addition to the Iraqi police and fledgling army. They also targeted civilians and casualty rates began to climb. In addition to Shiites, they targeted Sunnis who supported the government. But it wasn't long before they overplayed their hand and the Sunnis began to turn against them.
In the meantime, in the US, the news media began playing on this prolonged strife as "proof" that we had been ill prepared to "keep the peace". I believe we were prepared to pacify the existing population and deal with Baathist dead enders but what is not reported by the media or explained by our government is who fundamentally the war changed. The war we find ourself fighting now is a completely different war than the one that started in February 2003. Al Qaida entered the theater of battle en mass and converted it from a pacification and security operation to a full blown anti-islamist insurgency. It was Afghanistan and Somalia added together and multiplied by four. Al Qaida decided that they could use a marginally popular war to hand the US a resounding defeat while the attention of the world was focused on the events in Iraq.