Iraq: Bush plans to replace US soldiers with more bombing.

Exactly how sovereign is Iraq's sovereign government?
While Bush makes public comments about withdrawing thousands of
US soldiers from Iraq starting mid-2006 to appease domestic opinion
and as Iraqis begin to defend their own freedom, what he doesn't
say is that he also plans to replace soldiers by an increase in US
aerial bombing attacks. By definition this will increase the number
of civilian casualties, already in the range of 30-100,000 depending
on who's figures you believe.

And what about covert US special forces operations going on inside
Syria? A deliberate provocation and pre-cursor to invading that
country, like the US/UK undeclared war against Iraq from 1991?
.........................................................................
worth reading...

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Where is the Iraq war headed next?
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051205fa_fact

In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that President
George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent
within his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq
next year. The Administration’s best-case scenario is that the
parliamentary election scheduled for December 15th will produce a
coalition government that will join the Administration in calling for
a withdrawal to begin in the spring. By then, the White House hopes,
the new government will be capable of handling the insurgency. In a
speech on November 19th, Bush repeated the latest Administration
catchphrase: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” He added,
“When our commanders on the ground tell me that Iraqi forces can
defend their freedom, our troops will come home with the honor they
have earned.” One sign of the political pressure on the Administration
to prepare for a withdrawal came last week, when Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice told Fox News that the current level of American
troops would not have to be maintained “for very much longer,” because
the Iraqis were getting better at fighting the insurgency.

A high-level Pentagon war planner told me, however, that he has seen
scant indication that the President would authorize a significant
pullout of American troops if he believed that it would impede the war
against the insurgency. There are several proposals currently under
review by the White House and the Pentagon; the most ambitious calls
for American combat forces to be reduced from a hundred and fifty-five
thousand troops to fewer than eighty thousand by next fall, with all
American forces officially designated “combat” to be pulled out of the
area by the summer of 2008. In terms of implementation, the planner
said, “the drawdown plans that I’m familiar with are condition-based,
event-driven, and not in a specific time frame”—that is, they depend
on the ability of a new Iraqi government to defeat the insurgency. (A
Pentagon spokesman said that the Administration had not made any
decisions and had “no plan to leave, only a plan to complete the
mission.”)

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s
public statements, is that the departing American troops will be
replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes
are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of
even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts
have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would
decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of
violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless
there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy
director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me.
Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around
Vice-President *** Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi
infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule
now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they
are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on
their success in the battlefield.”

He continued, “We want to draw down our forces, but the President
is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his
part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the
polling places in 2004.” The war against the insurgency “may end up
being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies
would still win,” he said. “As long as the Kurds and the Shiites stay
on our side, we’re set to go. There’s no sense that the world is
caving in. We’re in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq, and
eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to our message.”

One Pentagon adviser told me, “There are always contingency plans,
but why withdraw and take a chance? I don’t think the President will
go for it”—until the insurgency is broken. “He’s not going to back
off. This is bigger than domestic politics.”

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me
that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission
to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political
pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he
disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the
war is proceeding.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature
of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior
official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the
connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the
war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the
former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me
here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was
fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections;
Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the
man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection
as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another
manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a
lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in
the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the
war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The
President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he
couldn’t hear it.”

There are grave concerns within the military about the capability of
the U.S. Army to sustain two or three more years of combat in Iraq.
Michael O’Hanlon, a specialist on military issues at the Brookings
Institution, told me, “The people in the institutional Army feel they
don’t have the luxury of deciding troop levels, or even participating
in the debate. They’re planning on staying the course until 2009. I
can’t believe the Army thinks that it will happen, because there’s no
sustained drive to increase the size of the regular Army.” O’Hanlon
noted that “if the President decides to stay the present course in
Iraq some troops would be compelled to serve fourth and fifth tours
of combat by 2007 and 2008, which could have serious consequences
for morale and competency levels.”

Many of the military’s most senior generals are deeply frustrated,
but they say nothing in public, because they don’t want to jeopardize
their careers. The Administration has “so terrified the generals that
they know they won’t go public,” a former defense official said. A
retired senior C.I.A. officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one
of his colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour there.
The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings with enlisted men,
junior officers, and generals that “things were fucked up.” But in a
subsequent teleconference with Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept
those criticisms to themselves.

One person with whom the Pentagon’s top commanders have shared their
private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of
Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations
Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on
November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a
withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with
devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that the number
of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to
more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an
estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer “from what I
call battle fatigue” in the war, and he said that the Americans were
seen as “the common enemy” in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the
White House’s claims—that foreign fighters were playing the major role
in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers “haven’t
captured any in this latest activity”—the continuing battle in western
Anbar province, near the border with Syria. “So this idea that they’re
coming in from outside, we still think there’s only seven per cent.”

Murtha’s call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen
the White House’s resolve. Administration officials “are beyond angry
at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy—both on
substance and politically,” the former defense official said. Speaking
at the Osan Air Force base, in South Korea, two days after Murtha’s
speech, Bush said, “The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in
their war against humanity. . . . If they’re not stopped, the
terrorists will be able to advance their agenda to develop weapons of
mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, and to
break our will and blackmail our government into isolation. I’m going
to make you this commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch.”

“The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the
former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a
believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church
advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached,
leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They
keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be
anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances,
for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences,
most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon
Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war,
was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner
in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”



Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute
for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one
thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated
objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be
responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes
in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of
your own sect and blame someone else?” another senior military planner
now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be
targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”

“It’s a serious business,” retired Air Force General Charles Horner,
who was in charge of allied bombing during the 1991 Gulf War, said.
“The Air Force has always had concerns about people ordering air
strikes who are not Air Force forward air controllers. We need people
on active duty to think it out, and they will. There has to be
training to be sure that somebody is not trying to get even with
somebody else.” (Asked for a comment, the Pentagon spokesman said
there were plans in place for such training. He also noted that Iraq
had no offensive airpower of its own, and thus would have to rely on
the United States for some time.)

The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most
significant—and underreported—aspect of the fight against the
insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not
provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force,
Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was
routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of
the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height
of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. “With a massive Marine
air and ground offensive under way,” a Marine press release said,
“Marine close air support continues to put high-tech steel on target.
.. . . Flying missions day and night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft
of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on
the front line.” Since the beginning of the war, the press release
said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five
hundred thousand tons of ordnance. “This number is likely to be much
higher by the end of operations,” Major Mike Sexton said. In the
battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or
wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead,
but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the
bombardments.

In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have
increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile,
predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the
Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in
a significant discussion or debate about the air war.

The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and Air Force
warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs to avoid civilian
casualties. These bombs home in on targets that must be “painted,” or
illuminated, by laser beams directed by ground units. “The pilot
doesn’t identify the target as seen in the pre-brief”—the instructions
provided before takeoff—a former high-level intelligence official told
me. “The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot. Often you
get a ‘hot-read’ ”—from a military unit on the ground—“and you drop
your bombs with no communication with the guys on the ground. You
don’t want to break radio silence. The people on the ground are
calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify.” He added, “And we’re
going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?”

The second senior military planner told me that there are essentially
two types of targeting now being used in Iraq: a deliberate
site-selection process that works out of air-operations centers in the
region, and “adaptive targeting”—supportive bombing by prepositioned
or loitering warplanes that are suddenly alerted to firefights or
targets of opportunity by military units on the ground. “The bulk of
what we do today is adaptive,” the officer said, “and it’s divorced
from any operational air planning. Airpower can be used as a tool of
internal political coercion, and my attitude is that I can’t imagine
that we will give that power to the Iraqis.”

This military planner added that even today, with Americans doing the
targeting, “there is no sense of an air campaign, or a strategic
vision. We are just whacking targets—it’s a reversion to the Stone
Age. There’s no operational art. That’s what happens when you give
targeting to the Army—they hit what the local commander wants to hit.”

One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was optimistic that
“American air will immediately make the Iraqi Army that much better.”
But he acknowledged that he, too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting.
“We have the most expensive eyes in the sky right now,” the consultant
said. “But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores. Who is going to
have authority to call in air strikes? There’s got to be a
behavior-based rule.”

General John Jumper, who retired last month after serving four years
as the Air Force chief of staff, was “in favor of certification of
those Iraqis who will be allowed to call in strikes,” the Pentagon
consultant told me. “I don’t know if it will be approved. The regular
Army generals were resisting it to the last breath, despite the fact
that they would benefit the most from it.”

A Pentagon consultant with close ties to the officials in the
Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon who advocated the war said
that the Iraqi penchant for targeting tribal and personal enemies with
artillery and mortar fire had created “impatience and resentment”
inside the military. He believed that the Air Force’s problems with
Iraqi targeting might be addressed by the formation of U.S.-Iraqi
transition teams, whose American members would be drawn largely from
Special Forces troops. This consultant said that there were plans to
integrate between two hundred and three hundred Special Forces members
into Iraqi units, which was seen as a compromise aimed at meeting the
Air Force’s demand to vet Iraqis who were involved in targeting. But
in practice, the consultant added, it meant that “the Special Ops
people will soon allow Iraqis to begin calling in the targets.”

Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of
Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and who taught
for three years at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower
Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the air war “will get very ugly”
if targeting is turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially
true, he said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and
Marines have done—plowing through Sunni strongholds on
search-and-destroy missions. “If we encourage the Iraqis to clear and
hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the insurgents from
penetrating the cleared areas, it could be useful,” Pape said. “The
risk is that we will encourage the Iraqis to do search-and-destroy,
and they would be less judicious about using airpower—and the violence
would go up. More civilians will be killed, which means more
insurgents will be created.”

Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-trained Iraqi
Army would not necessarily be any more successful against the
insurgency. “It’s not going to work,” said Andrew Brookes, the former
director of airpower studies at the Royal Air Force’s advanced staff
college, who is now at the International Institute for Strategic
Studies, in London. “Can you put a lid on the insurgency with
bombing?” Brookes said. “No. You can concentrate in one area, but the
guys will spring up in another town.” The inevitable reliance on Iraqi
ground troops’ targeting would also create conflicts. “I don’t see
your guys dancing to the tune of someone else,” Brookes said. He added
that he and many other experts “don’t believe that airpower is a
solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the
ground with airpower didn’t work in Vietnam, did it?”



The Air Force’s worries have been subordinated, so far, to the
political needs of the White House. The Administration’s immediate
political goal after the December elections is to show that the
day-to-day conduct of the war can be turned over to the newly trained
and equipped Iraqi military. It has already planned heavily scripted
change-of-command ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American
flags at bases and the raising of Iraqi ones.

Some officials in the State Department, the C.I.A., and British Prime
Minister Tony Blair’s government have settled on their candidate of
choice for the December elections—Iyad Allawi, the secular Shiite who
served until this spring as Iraq’s interim Prime Minister. They
believe that Allawi can gather enough votes in the election to emerge,
after a round of political bargaining, as Prime Minister. A former
senior British adviser told me that Blair was convinced that Allawi
“is the best hope.” The fear is that a government dominated by
religious Shiites, many of whom are close to Iran, would give Iran
greater political and military influence inside Iraq. Allawi could
counter Iran’s influence; also, he would be far more supportive and
coöperative if the Bush Administration began a drawdown of American
combat forces in the coming year.

Blair has assigned a small team of operatives to provide political
help to Allawi, the former adviser told me. He also said that there
was talk late this fall, with American concurrence, of urging Ahmad
Chalabi, a secular Shiite, to join forces in a coalition with Allawi
during the post-election negotiations to form a government. Chalabi,
who is notorious for his role in promoting flawed intelligence on
weapons of mass destruction before the war, is now a deputy Prime
Minister. He and Allawi were bitter rivals while in exile.

A senior United Nations diplomat told me that he was puzzled by the
high American and British hopes for Allawi. “I know a lot of people
want Allawi, but I think he’s been a terrific disappointment,” the
diplomat said. “He doesn’t seem to be building a strong alliance, and
at the moment it doesn’t look like he will do very well in the
election.”

The second Pentagon consultant told me, “If Allawi becomes Prime
Minister, we can say, ‘There’s a moderate, urban, educated leader now
in power who does not want to deprive women of their rights.’ He would
ask us to leave, but he would allow us to keep Special Forces
operations inside Iraq—to keep an American presence the right way.
Mission accomplished. A coup for Bush.”

A former high-level intelligence official cautioned that it was
probably “too late” for any American withdrawal plan to work without
further bloodshed. The constitution approved by Iraqi voters in
October “will be interpreted by the Kurds and the Shiites to proceed
with their plans for autonomy,” he said. “The Sunnis will continue to
believe that if they can get rid of the Americans they can still win.
And there still is no credible way to establish security for American
troops.”

The fear is that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would inevitably
trigger a Sunni-Shiite civil war. In many areas, that war has, in a
sense, already begun, and the United States military is being drawn
into the sectarian violence. An American Army officer who took part in
the assault on Tal Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said
that an American infantry brigade was placed in the position of
providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for Iraqi
forces, most of them Shiites, who were “rounding up any Sunnis on the
basis of whatever a Shiite said to them.” The officer went on, “They
were killing Sunnis on behalf of the Shiites,” with the active
participation of a militia unit led by a retired American Special
Forces soldier. “People like me have gotten so downhearted,” the
officer added.

Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert
war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite
American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission
unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected
supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon
had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of
the tactic. “But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without
hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would
get away. When you’re fighting an insurgency, you have to strike
everywhere—and at once.”

--
"I fear that the Prime Minister has become unhinged.
He has always tended towards being messianic."
-- Michael Portillo on Blair / Sunday Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1879986_1,00.html
.