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The United States: The Long Short War |
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Sunday, 19 June 2005 |
The selection of the title to these weekly chatters is very often more difficult than the writing of the letter itself, because I always try to embody in the title as much as I actually put in the piece itself. Making up mind as to what to call this week’s was relatively easy, I have just finished reading a small book by a well known and a widely published writer, TV and radio commentator, Christopher Hitchins. The book’s title was A Long Short War, which was acclaimed as an essential reading to those who are interested in understanding the greatest global crisis of the last decade of the last century which has bitterly divided the American people and many others all over the world.
The book is a collection of 24 short essays about the events which preceded the American war, which led to the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the dismantling of his regime. The book presented a sensible analysis of the crisis and a fairly convincing argument for the need to have a regime change in Iraq, and to pave the way for the reconstruction of our terribly damaged country and society and lay the grounds for a new democratic and law abiding regime. The hope was that the new regime, would respect the dignity and human rights of its own people and behave according to the accepted norms and values of international behavior making it the start of the rebuilding of the Middle East on more humane and democratic principles and gradually replacing its extant archaic, corrupt and contemptible regimes, which have been in power in certain case for decades by others more transparent and democratically elected regimes.
George W. Bush was evidently intent the moment he arrived at the oval office to finish Saddam and the problems he was creating after surviving his Kuwaiti debacle. “There is not going to be any more of the pin pricks and useless containment policies of the Clinton era”, Paul O’Neill the first Treasury Secretary in the junior Bush’s administration says in his memoirs that from the first instance it was about Iraq, it was about what we can do to change the regime eight months before the September 11. During the first National Security meeting ten days after the inauguration the question of Iraq was settled, there was a general agreement that Saddam was a bad person and that he needed to go, it was a question of when and how, never why and certainly never about why now. George W. Bush was exhorting his people, go and find me the way to do it. The drastic turn in the way the United States was viewing Saddam is a very intriguing and an extremely difficult attitude to fathom, Saddam was a very useful asset, he has been very carefully trained and prepared when he was a refugee in Cairo in the early sixties and his ascent to power in 1968 was the result of a very successful coup which was engineered by the CIA.
The decision to get rid of Saddam in spite of the great services he has rendered to the West and the United States in particular is a very big secret which is unlikely to be unearthed before many years. It is already deeply buried in the most sensitive archives of the CIA and those of its most trusted and reliable allies, it has a lot to do with America’s long term strategies and secret agendas. The go find me a way to finish the problem of Saddam went to the indefatigable and loyal administration guru Don Rumsfield in his capacity as Secretary of Defense and to his deputy Paul Wolfowitz the administration’s ideologue who became very well known later as the architect of the war against Iraq. The job was in turn turned over to General Tommy franks the Commander in Chief of the Tampa-ased U.S. Central Command, [Centcom] the regional command which covered twenty five countries in Northeast Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. The shock of September 11 and the pains and agonies it created momentarily changed the planning, the administration turned its cannons against Bin Laden and the Taliban, who were sheltering him and continued to refuse the American requests to surrender him over for trial compelled the American President to retaliate by force. Harried by Rumsfield General Franks prepared a task force in weeks to hit targets in Taliban controlled Afghanistan.
The Afghanistan job was accomplished by CENTCOM under the command of General Franks who had put together a battle plan that made extensive use of high tech precision weapons, as well as special forces, NSA technicians and CIA operatives with bags of cash to win the loyalties of some tribal leaders and high officials of the regime. The attack on the Taliban started on October 6, 2001. By November 12, Kabul has fallen the Taliban’s were in disarray, but Bin Laden and the Taliban leadership were no were to be found. Now that the Taliban’s have been finished with all efforts were turned toward Iraq. A plan, Operation Iraqi Freedom was prepared incorporating the main tenets of the one conducted against Bin Laden and his supporters was readied and to confirm the seriousness of the administration’s intents towards Saddam, CENTCOM set up late in November 2002 an operational base in Qatar in an air base near its capital Doha, for the first time in history, the Pentagon has established a command center outside America and started pouring men equipment warplanes and the other paraphernalia of war into the area at a time when there were a lot of diplomatic maneuverings at the United Nations and big and small capitals and a kiss of death to Hans Blick’s Unmovic which went into the country at the eleventh hour and stayed there for few weeks apparently only to justify the hefty salaries they were receiving from Iraqi assets. All of these maneuverings in which the Americans themselves participated ostensibly to prevent the looming war were nothing but charades allowing the American generals enough time to finish their preparations.
Operation Iraqi Freedom started on the March 20, 2003 at 5:33 A.M. Iraqi time targeting the farms of two Saddam’s daughters on the outskirts of Baghdad. It was alleged that the Pentagon had reliable information that Saddam was there for a meeting with his two sons, four 2000 pound bunker buster bombs were dropped on the complex which destroyed practically everything but apparently Saddam has left the place a short time before the attack! This was followed by a coordinated land and air attack which involved two massive columns of army personnel and vehicles hurrying north to Baghdad from their bases in northern Kuwait which was associated of an extremely heavy aerial bombardment plus dozens of cruise missiles, the President aides informed the leadership of congress of the initiation of the hostilities and also informed the rulers of Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, but failed to inform the British prime minister America’s staunchest and most loyal ally he and his cabinet heard about it from the radio and television after the event.
The war lasted twenty days even less than what the original planners had anticipated. George W. Bush declared in a nation wide address that the war has ended it had lasted less than three weeks. This was supposed to be the start of a serious work on the reconstruction of Iraq and the return of peace and stability to the already greatly damaged country, but it was not to be like that.
The Americans made some incredible mistakes which encouraged a serious armed opposition against their presence and started at the beginning as small skirmishes, but eventually grew as a result of those mistakes into a very lethal resistance, a classical guerilla war which is dragging the United States into a real quagmire. The short war is already a much longer one than was feared at the beginning, and is threatening to go on for much longer. The short war is already two years long.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Baghdad June 18, 2005
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