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TWO CENTS'
WORTH
The war that could destroy both
armies
By Henry C K Liu
The
undeclared US war on Iraq ended some six months ago in a
matter of weeks, mostly through bribery of an Iraqi high
command infiltrated by US special operations that had
been embedded during years of better relations in the
Iran-Iraq War and military cooperation with its US
counterpart, making treasonous plots possible. That may
explain why the US high command had been so confident of
a quick victory in defiance of mainstream military
logic.
The Iraqi rank and file had also been
demoralized by psychological pressure from relentless
"shock and awe" strikes launched from locations safely
beyond retaliatory range. Yet like Napoleon Bonaparte,
who upon entering Moscow was astounded by his inability
to find the czar to confirm an honorable victory, US
President George W Bush, by his dubious war policy to
assassinate an opponent chief of state by smart bombs,
was unable to find Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in
Baghdad from whom to accept an honorable surrender. It
is now plain for all to see that while the world's sole
superpower may be able to topple a foreign government by
the use of less-than-honorable force and force its
leader to go underground, it is another matter to occupy
a nation one-tenth its size to set up a puppet
government to bring peace and order, even for a country
the allegedly oppressed population of which US "experts"
on Iraqi politics had predicted would welcome a US
invasion with flowers and hugs instead of
rocket-propelled grenades.
It is interesting and
instructive to compare the 19th-century British
subjugation of India, a country 10 times the size of
Britain, with a mere 75,000 expeditionary troops
transported across oceans with slow sailing ships, with
the quagmire the United States is facing in Iraq with
100,000 air-lifted combat soldiers. The British did not
claim to liberate India from its numerous principalities
ruled by maharajas. Instead, it built a political unit
in the British Empire to incorporate the separate
princely states that had existed in pre-British India.
There was no sudden regime change. The British did not
face resistance until decades later, when the adverse
effect of being non-white subjects of the British Empire
dawned on thinking Indians, who gradually took up the
European concept of nationalism as an anti-imperialism
ideology. Britain solved the problem by having Queen
Victoria assume the title of Empress of India (she was
never Empress of the British Empire) and kept India for
another century.
The new proponents of "empire"
would do well to note that the world has changed since
the Victorian era. Arab nationalism, promoted first by
Western imperialism during World War I as a
destabilizing force against the Ottoman Dominion, is a
genie that cannot be forced back into the bottle at the
pleasure of neo-imperialism in the 21st century.
The Iraqi army has been destroyed by the second
Iraq War, with its treasonous high command sheltered by
a secret US protection program, and its common soldiers
joining the ranks of the unemployed at home under US
occupation. Resistance in the form of guerrilla attacks
against foreign occupation is now being waged by an
aroused civilian population. Not only Sunni loyalists to
Saddam, but Shi'ites, who constitute some 60 percent of
the population and were expected by US "experts" on Iraq
to be tolerant, if not ecstatic, about a US "presence",
if not liberation, have formed guerrilla cells of armed
resistance against US occupation forces. This is
understandable, since the United States has made clear
that it will not permit a Shi'ite majority to dominate
any new Iraqi government, democracy or no democracy.
Theocratic democracy is only tolerated in Christian
nations.
Last Friday, four more US soldiers were
killed in one of the latest clashes with militant
Shi'ite clerics working for Mahmoud al-Hassani. Mahmoud
is an ally of Muqtada al-Sadr - the son of a revered
Shi'ite cleric who was killed in 1999 - whose forces
clashed a week earlier with US soldiers and killed two
of them. Muqtada proclaimed his own government in Iraq
during his weekly sermon on the previous Friday, October
10, in Kufa, near Najaf, a city south of Baghdad
considered holy by the Shi'ites. This pattern of attack
on US occupation forces can be expected to escalate. If
the Shi'ites turned in large numbers against US
occupation, the effect could be explosive both in Iraq
and in domestic US politics.
The Associated
Press has started a report on the number of daily US
deaths in Iraq. According to the Department of Defense,
as of Friday, October 17, a total of 336 US service
members had died since the beginning of military
operations in Iraq, up from 326 a week earlier. Since
May 1, when Bush declared that major combat operations
in Iraq had ended, at least 198 US soldiers have died in
Iraq, 63 more than the 132 killed in war combat. Since
the start of military operations, at least 1,536 US
service members have been injured as a result of hostile
action, according to US Central Command. Non-hostile
injured numbered 335. At the rate of 10 war deaths per
week, the US military is looking at a death rate of 520
per year of occupation, not counting likely catastrophic
incidents as the resistance gains experience and
support.
The United States faces a lengthy,
open-ended military occupation of Iraq, requiring more
than 100,000 troops. In a mid-August briefing, General
Tommy Franks, then head of the Central Command,
suggested that the length of the US military presence in
Afghanistan could end up rivaling the 50-year US
presence in South Korea. As Iraqi and Afghan resistance
mounts as a natural reaction to foreign occupation, more
US troops will inevitably be needed in response,
increasing the statistical prospect for higher
casualties.
The United States possesses the
best-trained and best-equipped offensive force in the
world, which it spends about US$400 billion annually to
sustain, more than the combined total of all other major
military powers. Yet there is no more eroding effect on
an offensive force than duties of occupation. Soldiers
are ideally non-thinking, order-taking killing machines,
and as such cannot be effective police officers. Good
policing requires members of the police force to think,
evaluate and make moral judgments, which in turn makes
them ineffective soldiers. Killing opponent soldiers on
the battlefield is honorable by military code, while
killing civilians by armed police, even in self-defense,
turns any police force into a tool of oppression. This
has been a military truism from the time of the Roman
legions down to the German Wehrmacht.
The United
States maintains 1.5 million active troops, with a
reserve of 2 million. There are more than 300,000 US
troops currently deployed around the world in 120
countries. Incoming National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice told the New York Times shortly after
the 2000 election, "The United States is the only power
that can handle a showdown in the [Persian] Gulf, mount
the kind of force that is needed to protect Saudi
Arabia, and deter a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. And
extended peacekeeping detracts from our readiness for
these kinds of global missions." Incoming Secretary of
State Colin Powell also weighed in, stating that "our
plan is to undertake a review right after the president
is inaugurated and take a look not only at our
deployments in Bosnia but in Kosovo and many other
places around the world, and make sure those deployments
are proper. Our armed forces are stretched rather thin,
and there is a limit to how many of these deployments we
can sustain."
Since World War II, the United
States has gradually set up a global military "base
network" backed by locally based military bases. In
order to push its global strategy, the total number of
such military bases (facilities), big and small,
exceeded 5,000 at their peak, half of which were located
overseas, with troops surpassing 610,000. The US
military has also formed an overseas base layout
featuring a combination of points with lines and
multi-level disposition, the control of main strategic
points and vital passages on the sea. After the Cold
War, because of the limitation of its national defense
expenses and popular opposition in the host countries,
the United States repeatedly reduced its troops
stationed overseas. US troops abroad had shrunk to
247,000 people before the second Iraq War. At the end of
the Iraq War, the US Army announced its plan to set up
four military bases in Iraq. Up to now it still has more
than 100,000 troops stationed in Iraq and it will keep a
considerable scale of forces there for a long time to
come.
Since the events of September 11, 2001,
the United States has looked upon terrorism and the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as the
greatest threats to its national security, thinking that
the main threat comes from the "unstable arc-shaped
region" encompassing the coastal areas of the Caribbean
Sea, Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle
East, South Asia and the Korean Peninsula. The US
Defense Department has drastically adjusted the
disposition of its overseas troops around this "unstable
arc-shaped region" to cope effectively with a global
"preventive" war.
Advance disposition is a
deployment concept of positioning in advance a
considerable number of weapons and equipment in overseas
bases, doing the defense and garrison work with very
small forces. When a crisis erupts, US forces will be
sent by quick transport to the crisis region and, by
relying on the advance installed weapons and equipment,
quickly generate combat effectiveness in the crisis
region and carry out operational tasks. Currently, US
forces have deployed equipment and materials for two
army divisions in Europe and four marine expeditionary
brigades each in Norway, Guam, Diego Garcia and the
Atlantic. In addition, US forces have 12 mobile
advance-storage ships in the Mediterranean and Indian
Ocean regions.
In recent years, the United
States has notably increased its input in key bases by
constantly rebuilding and expanding. US forces
transferred part of the facilities originally positioned
in the Philippines' Subic Base to Guam, and built the
largest US ammunition-storing facility, strategic
bombers and strategic missile nuclear submarines base in
the Far East. The US Navy's Northeast Asian bases group
centered on Yokosuka, Japan, has been strengthened
continuously. The expanded Diego Garcia Base now serves
B-2 strategic bombers. US forces have drafted a plan for
constructing a marine "floating island", one formula of
which is to construct a joint movable ocean base (JMOB).
The JMOB can reduce existing army units' dependence on
forward bases and can reduce onshore military logistic
facilities to the minimum. It can also selectively
provide assistance to shore army units. And JMOB can
provide an all-directional joint operational platform
for the expeditionary troops. Under the circumstance of
no combat task, the different modules of the JMOB can be
used separately. In the unstable and constantly changing
security environment, its separate parts can provide
low-risk yet very strong mobile capacity for US troops.
Judging from the plan for the adjustment of the
disposition of forces recently released by the Defense
Department, US overseas military presence has witnessed
the trend of development in the direction from the
"forward-leaning presence" to the "in-depth presence" or
to the "elasticity presence". For example, after the
eruption of the Korean nuclear crisis, the United States
began to reconsider the question of stationing troops in
Northeast Asia. The United States moved its 37,000
troops stationed in the Republic of Korea (ROK) out of
the long-range-artillery attacking scope of the North
Korean army and plan to cut further the scale of the
entire US troop contingent in the ROK.
The New
York Times in an October 5 editorial titled "An
overstretched army in Iraq" began with the sentence:
"Now that it is clear the United States faces a lengthy
military occupation of Iraq, requiring perhaps 100,000
troops for the foreseeable future, it is possible to
begin calculating how the war may damage the American
armed forces." It went on to warn that "the burden of
occupation will start to strain severely the army's
capacity to deploy trained and rested combat forces
worldwide in a matter of months".
For the long
term, not only will the lives of thousands of military
families be disrupted, the army reserve system behind
the United States' move to a smaller, volunteer army
three decades ago will be put at severe risk and "the
global reach of American foreign policy will almost
inevitably be diminished", said the Times. Nearly half
of the army's 33 combat brigades are now in continuous
harm's way in the Persian Gulf region. Replacing all of
them with fresh units would leave the army hard-pressed
to meet its obligations elsewhere, including Afghanistan
and the Korean Peninsula.
A congressional study
last month found that unless major adjustments are made,
the army will be forced to shrink its occupation force
to less than half, including cutting "other
international commitments". The Iraq War shows that a
superpower empire cannot be maintained without a massive
occupational force, something that the US lacks. The
Times observed that this is "another regrettable
consequence of the unilateral way America went to war in
Iraq".
A reader wrote on April 7: "If you want
Asia Times Online to be taken seriously, you might want
to consider not using any more items from Henry C K Liu
[The war that may end the
age of superpower, Apr
5]...Suggestion: Reread his article six months from now
as a test of his ability to prognosticate."
Six
months have passed and I repeat: This war may end the
age of superpower.
Henry C K Liu is
chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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