This front page story from Sunday's London Times by Mike Franchetti is a must read. Seems like a credible story, and is getting a lot of attention outside the US. Seems to me like it shows how the US is using exactly the wrong tactics. You don't drive right through a town just because the highway does. Take a freaking detour. It's not exactly the Himalayas. Its a flat barren desert. Bridges are the only real problem and tend to be near cities, but we have the capability to build our own bridges in a matter of days, not weeks. Sounds like we should have taken that approach, not counted on towns like Nasariyah to raise the white flag, when Saddam has tens of thousands of mercenaries spread around the country, just hoping we will take the main highways where they are sitting and waiting for us. Where was the CIA? Were they fooled?
Hopefully we will rethink our tactics and keep anything like this from happening again. Instead of telling people to stay in their homes, we should have been begging them to leave so they wouldn't get caught in the crossfire. I hear they are starting to do that now, changing the message in the leaflets. At the same time, the Saddam loyalists are terrorizing people so they're afraid to leave now. Basra should be the example to follow though, not Nasariyah, when we go into Baghdad. That's not to say the approach the British are taking in Basra is perfect either. We need more special forces on the ground working the scene. Most importantly, the front line soldiers need interpreters there with them who can speak the language and work with local opposition to organize the townsfolk and weed out Ba'ath party supporters. We can not just sit on the outskirts of town, and wait to see how the situation unfolds. Once again, I support this war, but really do not agree with the way that they are doing it. Who besides Bush would have gone along with such a simplistic, monocultural battle plan as this?
I hope this level of complexity in my view is not just dismissed as second guessing. I think the whole problem is over simplification, and overlooking all the non-military details, on the part of our military planners, combined with massive cross-cultural breakdown in communicating with the Iraqi people. Oh well, here's the article, I hope more American's will see it, and that it will change our tactics. The advantage to embedded reporters is that we hear the story as it happens, and can influence it to change things for the better. Good luck organizing a support the troops but use different tactics rally. I doubt I could fit that on a poster board, or generate a buzz and mass movement around a position that's not so black and white. Regardless, one thing is for sure. With all the debate over whether to go in or not, there was almost no discussion of how. We left it all up to the same folks who brought us Vietnam. It's too late to pull out, or Saddam will massacre what opposition there is, just like in 1991. I only hope we will use this pause to rethink many of our tactics.
Here are some of the most disturbing parts reprinted by UPI:
Posted by Mike at March 31, 2003 11:58 PM | TrackBack
One such report from An Nasiriyah was prominently displayed on the front page of the Sunday Times, whose embedded reporter detailed the death of a dozen Iraqi men, women and children from "young American Marines with orders to shoot anything that moved."Reporter Mark Franchetti said the U.S. Marines he had crossed into Iraq with a few days ago were "bright-eyed, small-town boys" who had expected a welcome, or at least a swift surrender.
Instead they had found themselves lured into a bloody battle in which several Marines were killed, wounded, missing or captured.
While one Marine lieutenant reportedly almost cried as he buried the body of a baby girl killed by his Marines, Francetti quoted Cpl. Ryan Dupre as saying: "I am starting to hate this country. Wait until I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him."