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 hroughout
the history of Western warfare, strategists have attempted to find
alternatives to the deadly tactics of annihilation. This trademark
Western propensity to focus its superiority in discipline, weaponry,
and logistics through head-on battles has historically shattered
enemies in a matter of hours. Indeed, when Western forces met foreign
adversaries that were the products of very different military traditions
— the Persians at Marathon (490 B.C.), the Aztecs at Tenochtitlán
(1521), or Mahdists at Omdurman (1898) — usually such hammer
blows resulted in a crushed enemy and the war's end. And even during
occasional setbacks such as Cannae (216 B.C.), Little Big Horn (1879),
and Adowa (1896), temporarily stunned Western powers rarely lost
the larger wars themselves.
Yet in internecine
fighting between European or Westernized powers, what had seemed
a decisive way of war turned into a bloodbath between like armies.
Whereas a few minutes of pitched battle at Marathon had checked
Darius I's entire invasion of Greece, Athens slugged it out with
Sparta for nearly 28 years. The Roman civil wars killed more Italians
than the prior three centuries of colonial campaigning had. The
Boers, for example, killed far more Englishmen in a single week
(December 11-16, 1899) of the Boer War — nearly 1,800 at Magersfontein,
Stormberg, and Colenso alone — than did the Zulus during the
entire war of 1879! We all know the sad history of the 20th century
when Western armies squared off against one another in Europe.
Consequently,
some Western strategists have always sought to avoid such costly
fighting. They preferred wearing down an enemy through indirect
attacks on his homeland, base of supplies, or allies — anything
in hopes of avoiding Pyrrhic victories in which winners lose as
many as the defeated. Sherman sought to avoid battle and instead
march through Georgia and the Carolinas, ruining property, demonstrating
the impotence of the Confederate government, and causing social
and psychological turmoil. He hoped to end the war without the carnage
of head-on charges that were going on in Northern Virginia between
Lee and Grant.
Advocates for
both strategies claim the moral high ground of reducing losses and
ending conflict decisively. The practitioners of annihilation —
throughout our own nation's history the more dominant and preferred
tactic — argued that victory was accomplished only if the enemy
was targeted, met head on, and wiped out in pitched conflict. Their
critics rejoin that too often such decisive battles end in the Somme
or Verdun rather than a Lepanto — and never completely rob
the enemy of its civilian infrastructure to the rear that ultimately
fuels war. Instead of mimicking an Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon,
they favored the more varied strategy of Pericles, Belisarius, or
Gustavus Adolpus. The great champions of the war of maneuver and
attrition — Hans Delbrück, B. H. L. Liddell Hart, and
J. F. C. Fuller who had seen the carnage of the First World War
— added that killing conscripted adolescents on the battlefield
in endless meat-grinders was not more moral than surrounding enemies
from the rear or bombing cities and civilian infrastructure.
Supporters
of Grant would argue that he destroyed the Southern army without
attacking civilians; Sherman's advocates would counter that their
hero preferred not to have adolescent draftees killed on either
side, and so unplugged the power to the rear that ran the war. Critics
of Grant's tactics of annihilation argue that he was a butcher;
Sherman's policy of attrition earns him the equally dark sobriquet
of a "barn-burner."
How does such
an age-old antithesis between direct and indirect attack apply to
possible action against Iraq — a battle that will not be waged
this time for the liberation of Kuwait, but for the far higher stakes
of Saddam Hussein's head. Confident traditionalists would point
out that Iraq is hardly a Westernized Soviet Union or China. Thus,
a sudden, head-on blow — massive air strikes, coupled with
armored columns, and perhaps airborne drops of special forces —
might knock the Hussein regime out of power in a matter of days.
If we were to annihilate the Iraqi air force, scatter the Republican
Guard, and destroy the military and psychological will of the enemy
to resist, in theory the bewildered country could be liberated in
a matter of hours rather than weeks or months.
A quick, decisive
battle would make it clear to the Iraqi population — and millions
in the surrounding region — that Saddam Hussein was utterly
defeated on the field of battle, rendering his tyrannical government
in the eyes of his subjects an object of humiliation rather than
fear. A stunned world — whether the U.N., the EU, or moderate
Arab states — would be presented with a fait accompli rather
than a swamp, and more likely would support rather than criticize
our victory.
On the other
hand, those who argue for a ratcheting up of our present tactic
of attrition against Iraq call for more indirect attacks over a
long and sustained basis. The northern and southern fly zones would
be expanded — daily chipping away at Saddam Hussein's freedom
of operation. Each week he would continue to lose face among his
neighbors through his growing inability to rid his skies of loud
enemy jets. Indigenous resistance by Kurds, Shiites, and democratic
liberationist groups would be well supplied and encouraged —
ultimately by the insertion of rapid-moving American special forces
— to carve away territory on the ground and undermine the symbols
of Hussein's reign. Instead of trying to end his power in hours,
we would envision months of gradual erosion, as we slowly assembled
a coalition of supportive powers, and tightened boycotts, sanctions,
and blockades that ensured that few Americans would be killed in
pitched battles.
Both strategies
offer their respective advantages and drawbacks, both militarily
and politically — and are not always clearly antithetical rather
than complementary. My guess, however, is that Pentagon planners
may well opt for the far riskier and more dramatic strategy of annihilation.
While possessing Western weapons, the Iraq military is not Western
in the manner of its war making, as was shown in the Gulf War. There
is little chance of thousands of casualties in a mother of all battles
even should we meet head-on the remnants of his Republican Guard.
If overwhelming
force were applied to its key assets, both through air and ground
assault, the entire military could collapse in days. Past history,
the terrain of Iraq, and breakthroughs in U.S. bombing — as
evidenced in Afghanistan — suggest that another Vietnam would
be unlikely. In the long run a massive initial attack would invoke
less worldwide criticism than months of piecemeal attacks, in which
pictures of "millions" of starving Iraq children and U.N.
melodramatics could slowly sap even domestic support for the conflict.
We shall probably
see more of an air campaign akin to Afghanistan than what was unleashed
over weeks against Serbia. Massive air strikes would target barracks
and bases, command structures, rather than water, power, and sewage
that will only harm the welfare of the civilian population. In Afghanistan
we were able to destroy the Taliban, but keep the power grid and
water supplies of the major cities pretty much intact. Indeed the
wreckage that is now characteristic of the landscape there came
from decades of wars of attrition, rather than the attacks of aerial
annihilation that began on October 7.
Special operations
might be sent in to decapitate the officer corps of the Iraqi military
and the political elite loyal to Saddam Hussein. At the same time,
tactical air strikes by ground-support aircraft and helicopters
would accompany armored columns — perhaps 40-50,000 conventional
troops — in mobile pincer attacks aimed at preventing any concentration
of opposing troops and the assurance of a very public arrival of
forces of liberation.
Key to such
an overwhelming initial strike aimed at destroying the Iraq military
in one blow would be a commensurate political and cultural information
campaign. Before, not after, we go in, there would be some sort
of provincial democratic government of exiles already in place.
Radio, television, and print media then would more likely characterize
such an assault as a liberation rather than an attack, making it
clear that we do not want Iraqi land, oil, or even coerced alliance,
only the presence of a consensual government that will ensure that
the country is no longer a regional terror or a potential rogue
nuclear or biological state. The quicker we act, the less likely
would be missile attacks against Israel or gas used on the battlefield
— or even worse still. We should not expect help from our European
allies. Their public outrage and private acquiescence are enough,
coupled with the use of Turkish bases in the region.
If at all possible,
we should neither request nor accept direct or indirect aid from
Saudi Arabia. We move against Saddam Hussein to annihilate his murderous
and terrorist state, and so we must accept that the Saudis themselves
are forever tainted with terrorism — their citizens have killed
thousands of Americans, their elite has bankrolled the murderers,
and their government has either winked at or been negligently ignorant
of this iniquity. Indeed, the liberation of Iraq is the proper centerpiece
of our own evolving strategy toward encouraging radical changes
in Saudi Arabia in the post-9/11 world.
As a rule,
sober diplomats and wary veterans of battle often opt for more gradual
attrition, praying therein to avoid the slow enervation of a Vietnam.
Those uninitiated with "the terrible arithmetic" and confident
in firepower think they can pull off a war of annihilation that
won't end up like the butchery of Passchendaele or Okinawa. But
history rarely tells us in advance which problem calls for which
type of proper solution. All we can be sure of from the past is
that once the shooting starts few events transpire as originally
planned — and that the most astute minds of our enemies are
thinking just as hard to do to us what we seek to do to them.
So while our
own strategists are pondering their best options, a madman in Baghdad
with his life on the line is also conjuring up his worst strategies
— everything from sending missiles into Tel-Aviv, an alliance
with the tottering mullahs in Iran, and torching the region's oil
fields to preparing nerve gas for our troops, a Mogadishu-like shoot-up
in his capital, and terrorist attacks on our civilians.
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