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ANALYSIS
The make-believe and the real
war
By B Raman
The
projections of many non-governmental analysts, including
this writer, regarding the likely pace and outcome of
the war in Iraq have not come true in the first week of
the war. The assessments underlining the possibility of
an early collapse of the Iraqi resistance due to the
quantitative and qualitative superiority of the
coalition forces led by the United States have not been
borne out by the performance of both sides so far. The
Iraqis have done much better than one expected of them
and the Americans have faced much greater difficulty in
enforcing their will on the battlefield than one would
have thought.
One does not know what were the
secret and hence real projections to their political and
military leaderships by the intelligence collection and
assessment agencies of the US and the UK, as
distinguished from the policymakers' open and often
make-believe projections made with a view to influencing
public opinion on both sides. As such, it would be
difficult to judge whether they, too, went wrong and if
so, how far and why. However, from the initial
statements of President George W Bush of the US and
Prime Minister Tony Blair of the UK, it is apparent that
they are worried over public expectations of a rapid end
to the war and both have cautioned their people that it
is unlikely to be a walkover.
Having said that,
one has to underline that after seeing the difficulties
initially faced by the coalition forces, one should not
rush to the conclusion that the US and the UK may
ultimately find themselves in a quagmire and that the
Bay of Pigs, Vietnam or Somalia may be repeated. In the
initial stages of a war of this nature, things often do
not go according to expectations, and one should not,
consequently, swing to the other extreme of
under-projecting the chances of an outcome of the war
favorable to the US and the UK.
This war has
differed from the Gulf War of 1991 as well as from the
wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan in some significant
aspects. The weather has been an important factor in
dictating the initial pace. The 1991 war was fought
before summer had set in across the deserts. Weather was
not a worrisome factor in Kosovo either. In Afghanistan
the weather was an issue since the US-led military
action started just eight weeks before the onset of
winter. However, this did not create any special
difficulties for the US because it was fighting not
against a well-trained and well-experienced conventional
army, but against an ill-trained militia and a rag-tag
group of terrorists. The outcome of that war is still
uncertain and the military campaigns in Afghanistan and
Iraq are not strictly comparable.
The delay in
the US and the UK in coming to a decision to move
unilaterally after bypassing the United Nations led to
the military campaign being launched under unfavorable
weather conditions, which improved after D-Day, but
deteriorated again by March 25. The impact of the
frequent sandstorms on the pace of the war is likely to
be considerable. The ground campaign of 1991 and that in
Kosovo were preceded by days of pulverizing air action
which definitely had a negative impact on the morale and
motivation of the ground forces of the adversary. This
facilitated the ground action when it was launched.
In the present war, days before the onslaught
was launched, there was definitely intensified air
action in the no-fly zones to neutralize the
still-remaining air defense capabilities of Iraq, but
this was nowhere comparable to what had preceded the
ground action in 1991. This time, the air action
accompanied and did not precede the ground action. As a
result, the coalition ground forces, on entering into
battle, had to face an adversary whose command, control
and communications, ability to operate autonomously in
scattered small pockets without the need for centralized
operational directions from Baghdad had not been damaged
badly, and neither had morale and motivation, as was the
case when ground action started in 1991.
The
Iraqi armed forces have definitely drawn lessons from
their unsatisfactory performance of 1991 due to the
total disruption of their command, control and
communications consequent on the US's air action and
have apparently trained their forces for contingencies
where they may have to operate autonomously. That is
what those resisting the coalition advance have been
doing at various places in the south.
The
possibility that the Iraqis might have learnt the right
lessons from their humiliating experience of 1991 and
incorporated them into their self-defense strategy seem
to have been overlooked by the allied commanders. The
responsibility for this has to be shared by the Pentagon
as well as the Central Intelligence Agency.
It
was unrealistic on the part of the US planners to have
expected the Shi'ites of southern Iraq to rise in revolt
against the Saddam Hussein government and welcome the
invading forces as liberators. By Bush's unwise action
of last year in clubbing together Iran, Iraq and North
Korea in the so-called "axis of evil" and by the
irresponsible talk in US governmental and
non-governmental circles that Iraq was not the end, but
only the beginning of a campaign which might next target
Iran, the Bush administration created for itself a
situation where the Shi'ites of southern Iraq, with ties
of solidarity with their co-religionists in Iran, would
consider it wise not to facilitate the achievement of
the US objectives in Iraq. They may not like Saddam, but
they definitely do not like Bush either.
Many
rulers in the Gulf, who have been quietly helping the US
in its military action in Iraq, would not be too unhappy
to see the US caught in a quagmire. In their
calculation, this could teach the US a lesson and
inhibit its embarking on similar adventures in other
parts of the Islamic world, including their own
countries. Dissimulation comes naturally to them.
The first week of the war has underlined the
dangers of an unbridled psychological warfare (psywar)
campaign being waged by the coalition forces under the
US against the Saddam government. When many of their
initial claims, such as the firing of Scud missiles by
Iraq on Kuwaiti targets, large-scale surrenders in the
south, easy occupation of southern objectives without
major resistance, the public anger against Saddam etc
proved to be incorrect, large sections of the public
became disinclined to accept even claims, which were or
might be correct, such as the rapid advance made by the
US rapid action force towards Baghdad despite all the
difficulties encountered.
Within a few weeks of
the launching of the military action in Afghanistan, the
Bush administration realized how its over-demonization
of Osama bin Laden had proved counter-productive by
giving him a larger-than-life image in the eyes of
millions of impressionable Muslims all over the world
who started seeing in him not a terrorist but as a true
Muslim standing up to the might of the world's sole
superpower by the sheer force of his faith in his
religion and in his co-religionists.
A similar
campaign of over-demonization of Saddam has given him an
image of a valiant fighter against the sole superpower,
which is widely viewed in the Islamic world as
anti-Islam. Some of the most insightful accounts of the
state of mind of the Iraqi people have come not from the
so-called embedded and compliant journalists, but from
ordinary foreigners from the Third World, such as
nurses, humanitarian workers and students who have
chosen to stay behind in Baghdad even at the risk of
death as a mark of their solidarity with the Iraqi
people.
According to some of them, the vicious
campaign, without credible evidence, carried on by
Washington against the Saddam government on the question
of its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction
has had the unexpected result of giving ordinary Iraqi
soldiers a feeling of psychological parity with the
Americans. Saddam and the UN inspectors might deny the
presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but
many members of the public and the military have started
believing that this must be correct, and this has
removed any inferiority complex vis-a-vis the US in
their minds. They have been thinking and saying, "We
don't have to fear the Americans now. If the worse comes
to the worst, we can use these weapons against the
Americans." This has apparently fortified their morale.
B Raman is Additional Secretary (ret),
Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, and presently
director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former
member of the National Security Advisory Board of the
Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also
head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research
& Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence
agency, from 1988 to August, 1994.
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