Semi-Daily Journal

"You have only to kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!"

And no, I don't think the White House leadership bears any comparison with the person who originally made this statement, but it is still grimly ironic. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein will not be cost-free by any means, for those who hadn't realized it.

And just to add a firm mea culpa, I did post much earlier that Saddam Hussein wouldn't last a second once the shooting began. Apparently, that statement is true if only the civilian Iraqui population were in question. Unfortunately, I did not take into account that much of the Iraqui army and all of its security apparatus has everything to lose. Time to be more restrained with predictions.

The quote... is from Dear Adolf, I presume?

GODWIN'S LAW VIOLATION ALERT!!

http://www.gulfwardrinkinggame.com/

Enjoy.

Er, well. Again, I only used it to illustrate the point that overconfidence in such trivia--invading foreign countries in order to destroy their governments--is as old as the hills. Don't forget the (?) corollary that intentional attempts to close discussion by invoking Mr. Godwin don't count.

Great, my throwaway about the current force being a comprimise between the Pentagon and the civilian's loony force is right.

Where are the Bay of Pigs comparisons?

This Washington Post article indicates the wealth of intelligence about the Fedayeen Saddam and guerilla resistance the administration chose to ignore.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34283-2003Mar26.html

Uh, I thought the quote was from dear old VI Lenin. Now there's a man who would have been far too shrewd to get in this mess - and who shot people who gave him wrong advice in matters of war.

Let's not overstate the military problem - the US will put the forces in place to subdue Iraq (note it is now "subdue", not "liberate"), and I think US casualties in the invasion itself will be politically tolerable. But they'll have to kill an awful lot of Iraqis and they are very likely to find themselves afterwards in the position of the Israelis (ie locked into occupying a foreign population in a spiral of violence and counter-violence that destroys all moral authority). Probably the best of a bad set of options for the US is to take Baghdad, declare victory and pull out real quick, leaving the Turks, Kurds, Iranians and Syrians to fight over the place. But its another great betrayal, and anyway if the ruthlessly pragmatic Israelis didn't have the sense to do this I doubt the Bushies will.

Osama bin Laden must be opening the non-alcoholic champagne about now.

So militarily this is a mere embarrassment - but its a complete political and humanitarian disaster. And I think I speak for most of the anti-war people when I say that saying that gives me no satisfaction *at all*.

Brad, Godwin's Law is suspended for this year, due to overload (google on 'appeasement').

More from today's Washington Post, this piece also on miscalculations regarding resistance and length of war.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33955-2003Mar26.html

No offense to the mea culpa crowd, but there was an enormous amount of stating with certainty what the uncertain future will bring during the pre-war debate. Politicians do it because they need to sell their policies, and they know that a world of uncertainty is not very appealing to voters. The rest of us are being a bit silly when we emulate their behavior.

By the way, I should admit to my priors. At a website flush with libertarians, liberals, conservatives, keynesians, neo-keynesians and the like, I am an agnostic. On issues profane as well as divine. Not just a doubter, but a firm and principled agnostic. I am well aware that I do not have answers, and also well aware when others pretend that they have answers. I am sure none of us knows what the future will bring, and equally sure much of the past is poorly understood.

But I digress. There is a variant of one of the answers DeLong is getting to his question. The Bush administration may be going for war on the cheap to improve the odds of more tax cuts, but the timing there seems a bit off. They simply stonewalled on the costs in the early days of this budget debate, and seem unlikely to veer from that path as the debate continues. Thus containing costs right now might not be overwhelmingly relevant to the tax cut effort. If, however, one sees the likelihood of a series of wars and lesser military actions, justified under the Bush doctrine, then the actual cost of the war is relevant. Proving that war costs can be lower than nay-sayers and former White House economics advisors maintain makes moving on to the next war less objectionable, from a budgetary point of view. We'll see.

Before pronouncing it all another Bay of Pigs, let's see how the coalition does over the next three-four days of combat with the Republican Guard Divisions near Karbala and Kut. That should pretty well define the ball game.

Dear Derrida Derider,

I am interested in the method by which you come to the assessment that cutting and running is the best of a bad set of options for the US in Iraq. Seems that, after betraying Kurds and Shiites a decade ago, threatening to betray Kurds to the Turks this time in return for staging rights, the aforementioned Bay of Pigs, South Vietnam -- maybe I've missed some here -- we need to start behaving in a more steadfast manner. The cost of foreign action and the level of cooperation from foreign parties seem likely to be directly related to our reputation for honoring our pledges, for finishing what we start. There is always the temptation to wait till it is more convenient to show steadfastness, but our savvy allies and would-be supporters might notice that we are steadfast only when the cost is low. That seems unlikely to breed much reciprocal steadfastness or risk-taking on their parts.

Nope, that's definitely Hitler, not Lenin.

K Harris --

Would you say, then, that Hitler was being steadfast when he attacked Russia in 1941, despite his generals begging him not to do so?

Or that he was being "steadfast" when, at a time when the Eastern and Western fronts were collapsing, he made sure that the death camps had the best equipment and mechanized support?

The much-vaunted "Iraqi opposition" is led by a group of men who either haven't been in Iraq in over thirty years, or who were born elsewhere (and who have the rotten moral fibre of a typical exiled Cuban Batista backer). They were the ones who forged the "evidence" of a nonexistent Iraqi nuclear program. They were the ones that told the eager PNAC crowd that the Iraqi people would welcome them with open arms and legs.

Nobody else besides them (and the insane Ariel Sharon) much wants this war now -- not even the Kurds, now that Bush has tacitly given the Turks, their mortal enemies, the green light to hunt them down in Iraq like dogs. The Kurds might not care for Saddam, but for the past ten years, he hasn't been able to touch them. The Turks, however, have a long a brutal history of killing Kurds.

Speaking of GODWIN'S LAW VIOLATION ALERT!!,

how did we miss this beaut:

" a crowd gathered in Louisiana to watch a 33,000-pound tractor smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CD's, tapes and other paraphernalia. To those familiar with 20th-century European history it seemed eerily reminiscent of. . . . But as Sinclair Lewis said, it can't happen here."

Are we establishnig truth by democratic vote here? I say the quote is "Hitler", and have an interesting Google cite:

Hitler said this to one of his generals, We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down, but shortly later he also stated, At the beginning of each campaign one pushes a door into a dark, unseen room. One can never know what is hiding inside.

So, that notorious waffler Hitler, trying to have it both ways.

Sorry about thre Hitler diversion - substance, ho!

Micky Kaus observes (without links, but, as another wise man said, you could look it up) that it was not just Afghanistan that was a quagmire until it wasn't. The Kosovo bombing campaign teetered on the brink of debacle-dom, until suddenly it became a huge success.

Secondly, I found a bunch of news services (the NY Times, the BBC, CNN, ABC News, and an NBC affiliate.) echoing this story from early March:

The Pentagon ordered about 60,000 more troops to the region, bringing to over 250,000 the number of American forces deployed on land, sea and at airfields within striking distance of Iraq, officials said today. That has long been considered a magic number — the quarter-million troops the military would like in place before any invasion begins.

My post is cleverly titled "Do You Believe in Magic?", but it could also have been called "Protect The Rear Area", and I would not have been referring to our extended supply lines. Some of what we are hearing about "not enough troops" is absolutely standard, predictable bureaucratic rear-area protection, aka CYA. No plan Bush approved was going to have so many troops that some General somewhere would not have been wishing for more.

Which is not to impugn the sincerity of the critics, BTW, but simply to point out that it might be a bit early to conclude that this plan was half-baked and doomed to failure from the outset.

Re Iraq:Order of Battle
If the force structure is not sufficient to minimze US casualties, the blood of our troops will be on the heads of Rummy and Wolfie, along with the brass who went along with this unnecessary risk. Thank god we didn't try to do it with 80m troops like those two military geniuses originally suggested.

Leave it to an economist to cut thru "the fog of war" planners.

"...but shortly later he also stated, At the beginning of each campaign one pushes a door into a dark, unseen room."

Hmm. I didn't know about that second Adolf quote. Maybe "shortly later" was right after Stalingrad. :-)

" a crowd gathered in Louisiana to watch a 33,000-pound tractor smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CD's, tapes and other paraphernalia. To those familiar with 20th-century European history it seemed eerily reminiscent of. . . . But as Sinclair Lewis said, it can't happen here."

Well just to disagree with Krugman here, this is an old, old habit in the U.S. I hazily recall politicians in many states encouraged the burning of Beatles records and stuff after John Lennon made anti-(Vietnam)war statements. Anyone have some documentation?

I don't want to read anything more about damned Hitler. He s not the topic of this thread and he doesn't deserve as much attention . Fascism does. And if it doesn't what are we after in Iraq??? And if that's not what we're after, stop being surprised, Iraqis aren't kissing American soldiers' feet...

Andres -

While the Beatles, and specifically John Lennon, protested Vietnam, this wasn't the impetus for the burning and banning of Beatles' albums. What did trigger this venomous response was John Lennon's out of context quote: "We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity."

Here's a link that documents the episode in a succinct manner:
http://www.beatlesinthe.us/usapology.html

Nothing Jesus loves more than censorship.

A classic case of applying Project Management theory to plan a war, and then forgetting 990,000,000 out of 1,000,000,000 existing war-related variables. (The planners probably thought 10e+6 is a lot.) And when this happens, no math, no probability calculations, no computational models, no matter how precise, can predict the outcome.

Luckily for Americans, US advantage in firepower is ímmense. So brute force will probably cover up planning mistakes. But at a higher price than initially projected.

What I'd like to know right now is, how efficient are those Russian GPS-scrambling devices? If they work, well... many US technologies are affected to a degree.

siko
Europe

Diogenes,

It’s going to be tough to have a real discussion if you willfully (I assume) mistake my point. To what ally had Hitler made a commitment to invade Russia? What group within Russia put itself at deadly risk to assist Germany in invading Russia? The context of my “steadfastness” comments was along those lines. We have made commitments, failed to honor them, then allowed those to whom we’d made commitments to die, in full view of the world. In that world, we (even under the Bush doctrine) may need to seek out allies and ask them to take risks on our behalf. Hitler’s decision to ignore his generals’ advice, though important, was not particularly relevant to the world’s impression of Germany’s willingness to fulfill diplomatic and security commitments to other groups and nations. As I understand it, Saddam killed 50,000 Kurds and Shiites after US forces under Bush I withdrew, because they took Bush at his word and rose up against Saddam. Certainly, Kurds in the autonomous region are willing to fight now, but many have been fighting for years, already at risk of their lives. Their willingness to continue fighting now is not a strong argument that our earlier failures to live up to commitments have gone unnoticed.

Whether the war is a good idea is debatable, but now that war is underway, it strikes me as wholly unethical to stack up bodies and then leaving the region to suffer the consequences of our action in our absence. I don’t want to be there, but there we are. Now, let’s try to make the best of it, in Iraq and in the wider world. Letting the UN take a big role seems like a winner all around. It deflects some attention from the US, makes our intentions seem less self-serving, starts patching up diplomatic damage and helps assure that the political advantage perceived by Karl Rove to any given course of action is not the weightiest point in any discussion of Iraq’s future.

As to the issue of Turks in Kurdish Iraq, yes, Bush was on the verge of stabbing the Kurds in the back again, but seems to have reversed himself when the Turks disappointed him. More to the point, I’m not sure you are in a position to know what the Kurds want. My guess is that it depends on which Kurd you ask. Nor am I sure what your "Turks in Kurdish Iraq" point had to do with my “steadfastness” argument.

I think it was always planned to add to the forces present in Iraq as part of the peace-keeping effort -- perhaps paradoxically, it takes far more troops on the ground to keep a peace than fight a war. However, it seems a little disingenuous to describe the new troops as being for that purpose, when 'peace-keeping' in Southern Iraq is basically not that dissimilar from fighting a guerilla war.

Evidently the reason we didn't put more troops on the ground before the campaign started is that the Rumsfeld-led Defense Department has some crackpot new theory of warfare, under which large numbers of troops are not required--see, for example: http://slate.msn.com/id/2080745

It is probably a VERY GOOD THING that this is coming apart the way it has, before we had a disaster. Hopefully, we'll pause, consolidate, and bring reinforcements before trying to take Baghdad house-to-house. Or, I suppose, we might get "lucky" and have the Iraqis come out and fight us in the open--in which case somebody else will teach us the fallacy of these notions at some future date.

Doubtless economics experts contemplate all this with a sense of deja vu, remebering the administration's forays into innovative economic policy.

Well, it is worth recalling the number of righties who insisted that high altitue bombing alone would never succeed in Kosovo. Also, the number of folks who wondered how the heck the rag-tag Northern Alliance plus some Special Forces could hope to prevail in unconquerable Afghanistan when 100,000 Soviet troops had failed.

That said, as an armchair observer I am definitely finding our current situation to be a white-knuckle experience, and I hope to heaven that we know what we are doing. It strikes me as way too early to concludee that the plan being used was so bad as to deserve all this ridicule.

On the always-important topic of record-burning, do not forget the artist formerly known as "Cat Stevens", who turned Muslim and seemingly backed the fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, if I can believe my Google.

"However, in 1989, [Yusuf] Islam [nee Cat Stevens] made world headlines when the press used his explanation of Islamic law and ruling on blasphemy to mean he supported the Ayatollah's fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. The headlines which read "Kill Rushdie Says Cat Stevens," caused angry reactions from fans and deejays who destroyed his albums in protest. "

There is a happy ending - he later re-released a boxed set of his early work, allowing fans with short memories to replenish their collections.

http://www.islamfortoday.com/vh1catstevens.htm

Ah, Yusuf Islam. I remember that.

One inventive DJ played "Peace Train" with war sounds--exploding bombs, overflying aircraft, machine guns, et cetera--in the background. It worked quite well...

I think one thing that has been assumed in the thread is the idea that more troops is better and leads to fewer casulities. My comments may be counter-intuative, but that's never slowed a dashed off theory before.
I haven't kept up the last few days, so this may be no longer true, but early, the majority of coalition deaths and injuries were not caused by enemy action, but by accidents and misdirected fire. It seems to me that more troops in the invasion, the higher the probability of accidents and misdirected fire simply due to density. There is a minimum spacing between aircraft/units, and the closer the units are to the minimum, the higher the chance of collision.
I think that we often forget that we're talking about invading a country that is about a half again as large as Arizona, and we went through a very small area of that country (with the stipulation that we could have used a larger area with effective diplomacy before the hostilities).
The casulties caused by enemy action have been more of the 'last stand' variety, i.e. how many of the attackers survived any of the recent fire-fights? I question if having more troops would have reduced the number of casulties from these types of actions. This thread is assuming that they would be intimidated by over whelming force, but there is no evidence that the Iraqis believe that they can win a battle, just make the price high enough to be unacceptable to the coalition.
On the other hand, denser concentrations of troops are at greater risk from artillery/missle and chemical/biological weapon attacks. I don't know that Iraq has, or is capable of using these weapons, but I believe that the administration is convinced that they do exist and are a threat.
The US/UK also had a limited space for reserves, with the original invasion force straining the resource of the host country, Kuwait (again, could be larger with effective diplomacy).

In summation, hubris involved with the small size of the force. But the hubris is evident in the diplomacy before the conflict rather that trying to force more units throught the same area. I challenge the notion that more troops would provide fewer casulties.

MWD

I want to point out here that *a lot* of pro-war bloggers, right, center, left; are expressing what is to me a surprising amount of shock and ambivalence over the outcome of events. Yet I'm not shocked at all, and I am mightily unhappy about the whole thing. Contemplating this, I am leaning toward the most plausible explanation being that all these people to a large degree trusted the public pronouncements of the pro-war administration types, before all other evidence.

Yet the outcome here is directly analagous to the outcome of *everything* this administration has attempted to do. I think DD said it best on his blog,

" 1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. It wasn't in some important way completely f***ed up during the execution."

I have to ask all of you who trusted these guys, especially if you read Brad's blog, why'd you do that? Why would war be easier than economic policy?

As for the outcome, I'm not a doubter; the Dept. of "Defense", wasteful as it is, is going to get the job done, and we're gonna "win", and "win" in a month or two, and our casualties will be relatively modest. (Not true for the Iraqis tho) But what that "win" is going to mean, I have no idea, but I very much doubt it's going to look anything like neocon paradise.

MWD, while you may have a point about too dense concentrations of troops leading to friendly fire casualties, I think you overestimate how dense things are. I saw a guy on the news the other night point out that the distance from Kuwait to the front was now roughly the same as the distance from St. Louis to Chicago. That's a lot of room--they could fit a few more troops in there. And even if we didn't have the troops on the ground in Kuwait, we could have staged up their equipment, maybe in ships offshore, if necesary Why launch the attack with the 4th Division's equipment still in the Mediterranean? Brad talks about the 1st Cavalry or 1st Armored, but unless there's a couple of division's of equipment somewhere near Iraq it could be quite a few weeks before those divisions are deployable--generally, that stuff has to come by ship, although the troops themselves can be flown in.

The policy of pre-emption will end with Iraq. Imagine the lessons similar states will take from this engagement. Iran, Syra, North Korea?

Remind me why we had to go to war, why we could not have continued inspections, and trade controls, and no flight zones.

MWD, while you may have a point about too dense concentrations of troops leading to friendly fire casualties, I think you overestimate how dense things are. I saw a guy on the news the other night point out that the distance from Kuwait to the front was now roughly the same as the distance from St. Louis to Chicago. That's a lot of room--they could fit a few more troops in there. And even if we didn't have the troops on the ground in Kuwait, we could have staged up their equipment, maybe in ships offshore, if necesary Why launch the attack with the 4th Division's equipment still in the Mediterranean? Brad talks about the 1st Cavalry or 1st Armored, but unless there's a couple of division's of equipment somewhere near Iraq it could be quite a few weeks before those divisions are deployable--generally, that stuff has to come by ship, although the troops themselves can be flown in.

"Well, it is worth recalling the number of righties who insisted that high altitue bombing alone would never succeed in Kosovo."

Well, it didn't, did it? What happened was that Serbian will collapsed when they realised that a ground offensive was about to start (involving Russians - remember which troops reached the centre first). And you still can't call a bet that comes off - about will collapsing - a success of the military methods in their own right.

"....people like Richard Perle and Ken Adelman believed that Iraq could be conquered and Saddam Hussein overthrown by a blow with the equivalent of a feather...."

"I did post much earlier that Saddam Hussein wouldn't last a second once the shooting began..."

"let's see how the coalition does over the next three-four days..."

"A classic case of applying Project Management theory to plan a war,.." etc. etc. etc.

Geeze people, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it took 10 days to win in Grenada for cryin' out loud. Things must be going wrong if Iraq doesn't fold faster than Grenada??

It seems there are even more armchair general second guessers out there than there are second-guessing armchair football coaches. ;-)

Does anyone think they really know what is going on? As I've pointed out before, most of the journalists writing about this war knew nothing of the military before it and are just repeating whatever "meme" seems catchy at the moment for the latest news cycle. They are much worse even than economics journalists! True fact!

Meanwhile, all the "embedded" reporters are providing great anecdotal stories and absolutely zero information about the big picture -- somebody at the Pentagon deserves a medal for thinking up that idea! -- while the generals' briefings are providing negative information about the big picture, zero plus disinformation.

E.g.: before complaining about the military units that aren't there, try to get a count of those that are. Folks at various military sites are trying to do it and tallying up all the units that have "disappeared" -- shipped out from the US some long time ago but, according to the Pentagon, never arrived anywhere else. It's quite a list. Where are they?

Also consider the "unexpected fierce resistance" from the fedayeen that seems to be impressing so many people -- and Saddam's "surprise" strategy of sending them out of Baghdad to attack all along our supply lines. A Times story I read about it last night, telling how it has slowed us down to take care of it, described it this way...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/26/international/worldspecial/26CND-INFA.html

"Iraqi forces continued to attack in what soldiers described as futile, almost fanatical assaults against M1-A1 tanks and Bradley armored fighting vehicles.

"Cpl. Benjamin R. Richardson, who was among the engineers who went to the bridge, said he saw two civilian vehicles with armed Iraqis drive straight toward Americans. A tank drove simply over one of the vehicles without firing a shot, while a Bradley raked the other vehicle with gunfire."

Now I'm not a military expert either -- but personally I'd *much* rather have these lunatics drive Toyotas into tanks today than be shooting out of windows in the civilian quarters of Baghdad later. Even if it slows the tanks down a bit, eh?

So if this is the "unexpected resistance" we are meeting, maybe it's a good thing in the big picture? And if rushing these lunatics out of Baghdad to harass our forces this way all along our line is Saddam's unexpected strategy, maybe would should say "bring it on! more, please!" Just a what-if speculation.

But even if it really *is* the case that 50,000 fedayeen are engaging in accelerated Darwinian selection and our generals are exultant about it, they'd *never* say so to the press, because Saddam might be watching Fox news. So they'd stand stone faced and say "we can deal with it, it's not too bad", while the embedded reporters would keep reporting "it's much, much worse than anyone expected", and many news viewing armchair analysts would say, "the damn generals are just covering their asses, why didn't they expect this???"

And the same uncertainty is in near every other story line being reported in real time.

The point is, nobody is going to know what is really going on or have any real idea what the good moves and blunders have been -- and no doubt there have been both -- until the war is over. Until then, it's just fascinating viewing.

No, I'm not particularly impressed with the tactics of the feyadeen, either. But I am impressed with their courage and determination. How long before some one of them says, "Hey, wait. When they come into our cities, and think things are relatively quiet, let's strap dynamite to our bodies and fight our way into the mess tent"?

We are effectively putting 200,000 Americans--equivalent population of a small city--into a medium rich with suicide bombers. I think the West Bank, or Algeria between 1954-62, is looking awfully fair a comparison.

Way back when we walked barefoot in the snow to school every day, before the internet and the microwave had even been invented, there was a guy named Robert MacNamara who applied rational business practices to the military. How did that turn out? Rumsfeld sound like a reincarnation, and Macnamara isn't even dead yet.

OK, J Goodwin, so the quote was from Adolf, not vladimir Ilyich. But I was tentative about it - note the "Um" and "I thought". The quote from Lenin I confused it with was "All revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door"

Brutally crushing resistance, declaring victory and then hightailing it outa there is a truly rotten option - on moral, reputational and short-term practical grounds. Its just that the others are even worse.

OK, J Goodwin, so the quote was from Adolf, not vladimir Ilyich. But I was tentative about it - note the "Um" and "I thought". The quote from Lenin I confused it with was "All revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door"

Brutally crushing resistance, declaring victory and then hightailing it outa there is a truly rotten option - on moral, reputational and short-term practical grounds. Its just that the others are even worse.

Jack Shafer on the war news cycle. Ha, he's much more succinct than me. ;-)

"When Johnny Apple says we're thwarted, we must be on the verge of winning."
http://slate.msn.com/id/2080772/

Stage 1: Our smart bombs are so dang smart, there's no way we can lose against some backward little country like this.

Stage 2: Oh gosh, the enemy can fight too! We hadn't thought of that! What do we do?

Stage 3: Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, et al., are the *real* geniuses. It's fighting unconventional warfare that shows real brains. We're being forced to fight on the enemy's terms. What can we do now?

Stage 4: "Unconventional warfare turns out to be unconventional for a reason: It is a superb form of suicide". We win. Aw, we knew all along we couldn't lose -- see stage 1. And now we forget the whole experience so we can repeat it next time.

"But I am impressed with their courage and determination. How long before some one of them says, 'Hey, wait. When they come into our cities...'"

The ones who are killing themselves on the highways aren't going to be saying anything to anybody later. And apparently they are killing themselves in great numbers.

Here's another story about a US armored column being attacked by Toyotas and riflemen for 72 hours straight...

"Sgt. Wheatley said he didn't know how many Iraqis he took out. 'I wouldn't even begin to guess. Probably 30-35. During that one stretch of road.'"...

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/27/sprj.irq.front.wheatley/index.html

If these are the guys we expected *would* be defending the city much as you said, and Saddam's great insight has been to instead throw them away on guerilla-style attacks like these to demoralize us Americans watching TV as if this was Vietnam again, then this is great for us and also for the civilians in Baghdad, and we should give him a big thank you.

Even though the generals can't acknowledge any such thing at any news conference. And even though it is indeed very stressful for Sgt. Wheatley, and slows his column down, which is all that the embedded reporter reports.

I don't know that, though. Time will tell.

Ok, I have been wondering about the Rumsfeld - McNamara parallel as well. Really smart civilians who think they know everything and over-rule their Generals don't always work out. McNamara's "whiz kids" also mirror the Wolfowitz-Perle "Axis of... whatever". That said, the alternative view, "trust the brass", doesn't sit well either.

Anyway, just to annoy zizka, I will provide this link on the comparison.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4390

Diogenes, from what I can tell, the Kurds in northern Iraq still support the war. They're asking a Canadian reporter what's wrong with Canadians -- why aren't they supporting the war?
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=afe9ed76.0303240831.417b7055%40posting.google.com

Arthur, I think what it boils down to is this. If Saddam Hussein's not willing to disarm, and if the stability of the region is a vital interest of the US and its allies -- i.e. you don't want the guy who set the Kuwaiti oil fields on fire to have nukes -- then there were basically two options, both bad: (1) continue the sanctions, which have been a humanitarian and political disaster (remember that US troops are based in Saudi Arabia to enforce the sanctions and the no-fly zones, enraging Osama bin Laden), or (2) go to war. I think war was the least bad option.

The next question is, even if war is the least bad option, why now? Saddam isn't likely to have nuclear weapons (which are much more dangerous than chemical and biological weapons) for a few years, and he may be assassinated or weakened for some other reason in the meantime; why not wait?

Here the problem is that invading Iraq requires the tacit cooperation of Iraq's neighbors, notably Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt. They've already gone way out on a limb, and they're not going to be willing to do it again. So it's now or never.

A third question is, why the US? If Saddam Hussein is a regional threat, why does the US need to get involved? Why not let the regional players handle it? (As Andrew Northrup put it, the US isn't the world's mother, responsible for cleaning up everyone's messes.)

I think that'd certainly be preferable; in general, regional threats should be dealt with by countries in the region, not by the US. But I don't think anybody else has the military power to take on Iraq.

A better diplomatic posture would have been for the US to keep its head down and get somebody else to take the lead in pushing for war (maybe Britain, maybe Kuwait, maybe the GCC). Then the US would be in the position of offering to help solve somebody else's problem, rather than pushing for war against the opposition of pretty much everybody else. But it's too late now.

"Overthrowing Saddam Hussein will not be cost-free by any means, for those who hadn't realized it."

It could be "cost-free." Give me $10 billion ...that's $1,000,000 for 10,000 people, or $10,000 for 1,000,000 people)... and I won't need a single U.S. or British soldier.

I'll pay Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam Hussein in less than a month, with less than 1000 total Iraqi casualties.

To paraphrase what Zeke (later the Scarecrow) told Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz...the U.S. is behaving like it doesn't have any brains at all. Why isn't an economist in charge of getting rid of Saddam Hussein?

Mr. Bahmer, what is it with you and this idée fixe of yours? We've read it too many times already! Can't you give it a rest for a while?

Jim Glass makes some very powerful points that the backseat drivers and monday-morning quarterbacks ought to take in. Just because you see hysterical newsreels on TV, and read the overwrought reports of sheltered journalists (and infantrymen) exposed to warfare for the first time, does not mean that there is some sort of disaster in the making.

One may argue with Rumsfeld's theories (as I do), but there is no real evidence as yet that his views are really to blame for what difficulties there may be (and I don't count a delay of a few days before attacking Baghdad as any sort of "difficulty"). FWIW, some sources are saying that the real blame for the 4th Infantry division being delayed lies with - guess who? - General Tommy Franks! It seems Cheney and Rumsfeld had wanted the 4th I.D. moved south to Kuwait weeks ago, but Franks insisted on waiting a little longer to see if the Turks might agree to a northern front at the last minute.

There's no way of verifying that this is true, but the same goes for a lot of the other gossip going around in the name of fact. The bottom line is that even those of us with a solid understanding of military matters have a very poor grasp of what is really going on at present, or where the various Allied units are currently located. This, I might add, is as it should be. Saddam and co. have access to the same sources of information as we do, and if a little frustration is the price we have to pay to preserve some element of strategic surprise, I have no complaints on that score. This isn't a movie being made for our entertainment, after all.

"Jim Glass makes some very powerful points..."

Why, thank you!

"Just because you see hysterical newsreels on TV, and read the overwrought reports of sheltered journalists (and infantrymen) exposed to warfare for the first time, does not mean that there is some sort of disaster in the making."

Information bias is important to beware -- even when the information comes from first-hand sources. We are seeing a ton of all different kinds of it now, and I'd think people in an econ forum would be attuned to it, but I guess not.

One kind we are *certainly* seeing in today's war reporting is "we know only our own problems" bias. From there it's just one short mistaken step to assuming our side must be doing poorly, because the other side doesn't have such problems.

My favorite example of this is from U.S. Grant's autobiography. He said that at the very start of the Civil War, in his first command, he was ordered to lead a charge on horseback up a hill to take a Confederate artillery position. He protested, "We'll all be killed! Can't we just go around?" To which the answer was "Take that hill now!"

So he lead the charge up the hill, terrified, hanging down beside the side of his horse as cover, not looking where he was going, hoping the horse would take at least the first shot. Then to his wonder the horse arrived at the top of the hill and nothing had happened. He looked around and saw that the Confederates, seeing these crazed horsemen charging them, had concluded "We're all going to be killed!" and had broken and ran.

Grant said that experience taught him the single most important lesson he learned in the entire war -- that the other guy has problems and reasons to be afraid too. If you keep that in mind as a commander, he said, you'll have the confidence to win with what you've got, problems and all, instead of becoming another McClellan. And if you know it as an observer -- his observers second-guessed him with fervor from Washington -- you'll be able to avoid all the hair pulling and nail chewing and looking for someone to blame of Jack Shafer's stages 2 & 3 when your side hasn't won a major campaign stretching over several hundred miles in less than a week.

Anybody want to speculate about any unexpected problems that Saddam's side might be worried about around now?

"Anybody want to speculate about any unexpected problems that Saddam's side may be worried about..."

No takers. OK, I'll start.
~~
New intelligence suggests a series of Iraqi missiles have misfired and hit residential areas of Baghdad, Downing Street says.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said information had been received which indicated Iraq's air defence commander has been sacked...

"Civil defence workers have been instructed to remove Iraqi missile fragments which fell on residential areas before journalists arrive on the scene."

The spokesman stopped short of saying Iraq was responsible for the explosions that killed around 65 civilians in two Baghdad markets this week. But he said the intelligence gave fresh reason for "scepticism" over Saddam's claims that the Coalition was to blame for the blasts...

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-1085612,00.html
~~~
BTW, NY Times correspondent John Burns in Baghdad visited the site of the market that was hit supposedly by a cruise missile, killing all those civilians, and told the PBS News Hour that it definitely did not look like a cruise missile hit to him, and it also didn't really look like a bomb hit, and he "couldn't say" what he thought it might have been.

So here's a suggestion for Saddam's unexpected problem #1: He's flattening his own city, and his people know it.

Anyone have a speculation for #2?

I don't know Jim. From the latest news, Saddam Hussein's biggest unexpected problem may be that he is dead. And yet the Baath loyalists refuse to acknowledge this and are continuing to fight. No one is saying we'll lose this war (which seems to be the straw man in all your tediously long postings) but that it's not going to be easy or costless. Make of that what you will.

neener neener neener