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<blockquote data-quote="BrownShark" data-source="post: 320187" data-attributes="member: 12148"><p style="text-align: left"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"><span style="font-size: 18px"><span style="color: black"><strong>Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down</strong></span></span></span></p><p></p><p> </p><p style="text-align: left"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"><span style="font-size: 10px"><span style="color: black"><strong>By Robert Parry</strong></span></span></span></p><p></p><p> </p><p style="text-align: left"><span style="font-size: 10px"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"><span style="color: black"><strong>March 30, 2003</strong></span></span></span></p><p></p><p> </p><p style="text-align: center"><span style="font-family: 'Eras Medium ITC'"><span style="font-size: 22px">W</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Eras Medium ITC'"><span style="font-size: 15px">hatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has “lost” the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world.</span></span></p><p></p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p style="text-align: center">That is the view slowly dawning on U.S. military analysts, who privately are asking whether the cost of ousting Saddam Hussein has grown so large that “victory” will constitute a strategic defeat of historic proportions. At best, even assuming Saddam’s ouster, the Bush administration may be looking at an indefinite period of governing something akin to a California-size Gaza Strip.</p> <p style="text-align: center">The chilling realization is spreading in Washington that Bush’s Iraqi debacle may be the mother of all presidential miscalculations – an extraordinary blend of Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking with a “Black Hawk Down” reliance on special operations to wipe out enemy leaders as a short-cut to victory. But the magnitude of the Iraq disaster could be far worse than either the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba in 1961 or the bloody miscalculations in Somalia in 1993.</p> <p style="text-align: center">In both those cases, the U.S. government showed the tactical flexibility to extricate itself from military misjudgments without grave strategic damage.</p> <p style="text-align: center">The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion left a small army of Cuban exiles in the lurch when the rosy predictions of popular uprisings against Fidel Castro failed to materialize. To the nation’s advantage, however, President John Kennedy applied what he learned from the Bay of Pigs – that he shouldn’t blindly trust his military advisers – to navigate the far more dangerous Cuban missile crisis in 1962.</p> <p style="text-align: center">The botched “Black Hawk Down” raid in Mogadishu cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers, but President Bill Clinton then cut U.S. losses by recognizing the hopelessness of the leadership-decapitation strategy and withdrawing American troops from Somalia. Similarly, President Ronald Reagan pulled out U.S. forces from Lebanon in 1983 after a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines who were part of a force that had entered Beirut as peace-keepers but found itself drawn into the middle of a brutal civil war.</p> <p style="text-align: center"><strong>The Bush Strategy</strong></p> <p style="text-align: center">Few analysts today, however, believe that George W. Bush and his senior advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have the common sense to swallow the short-term bitter medicine of a cease-fire or a U.S. withdrawal. Rather than face the political music for admitting to the gross error of ordering an invasion in defiance of the United Nations and then misjudging the enemy, these U.S. leaders are expected to push forward no matter how bloody or ghastly their future course might be.</p> <p style="text-align: center">Without doubt, the Bush administration misjudged the biggest question of the war: “Would the Iraqis fight?” Happy visions of rose petals and cheers have given way to a grim reality of ambushes and suicide bombs.</p> <p style="text-align: center">But the Bush pattern of miscalculation continues unabated. Bush seems to have cut himself off from internal dissent at the CIA and the Pentagon, where intelligence analysts and field generals warned against the wishful thinking that is proving lethal on the Iraqi battlefields.</p> <p style="text-align: center">Secretary Rumsfeld has emerged as the principal bully in enforcing Bush’s dangerous group think, a pattern that dates back to the war in Afghanistan when senior generals feared disagreeing with Rumsfeld. In one telling, though little-noticed passage in Bob Woodward’s <em>Bush at War</em>, Bush asks Gen. Tommy Franks for his opinion, only to have Franks defer to Rumsfeld.</p> <p style="text-align: center">“Sir, I think exactly what my secretary thinks, what he’s ever thought, what he will ever think, or whatever he thought he might think,” said Franks, who is now commander of U.S. forces fighting in Iraq.</p> <p style="text-align: center">So, instead of recognizing their initial errors and rethinking their war strategy, Bush and his team are pressing forward confidently into what looks like a dreamscape of their own propaganda. At least from their public pronouncements, Bush and his aides continue to insist that their pre-war judgments about the Iraqi civilians wanting U.S. “liberation” were correct, with the people kept in check by fear of Saddam Hussein’s “goons” – as Fox News likes to report – or “death squads” – as Rumsfeld says.</p> <p style="text-align: center">Once Saddam is killed, this latest reasoning goes, the Iraqi people will begin celebrating like some Mideast version of the flying monkeys in “The Wizard of Oz,” who were transformed into happy creatures once the Wicked Witch of the West was dead. However, there is little empirical evidence to support Bush’s deferred rosy scenario of thankful Iraqis.</p> <p style="text-align: center"><strong>Saddam as Martyr</strong></p> <p style="text-align: center">It would seem at least as likely that even success in killing Saddam would not stop Iraqi resistance and indeed could deepen the hole that Bush is digging.</p> <p style="text-align: center">Remarkably, in the first week and a half of the war, Bush has managed to make the unsavory Saddam into a cult-like hero across the Arab world. His death would make him a martyr. Even Arabs who disdain Saddam and his brutality take pride in the fact that Iraqis are standing up to the military might of the United States, the world’s preeminent superpower.</p> <p style="text-align: center">Among the many historical facts that Bush may not know is that Arabs have bitter memories of how Israel crushed a coalition of Arab armies in the Six-Day War in 1967. Already Saddam has held out against the Americans and British for a longer period than that. Plus, the bravery of Iraqi fighters – some of whom have charged into the teeth of fearsome American firepower – is stirring Arab nationalism.</p> <p style="text-align: center">In a region where Palestinian teenagers have been strapping bombs to themselves to kill Israelis – and now some Iraqis appear to be adopting similar tactics to kill Americans – there is little reason to believe that eliminating Saddam will somehow make Iraq submissive to U.S. authority.</p> <p style="text-align: center">While the Bush administration once talked about administering Iraq for a couple of years after victory, that timetable was based on the pre-war assumptions that the war would be a “cakewalk” and that the Iraqi population would welcome U.S. troops with open arms. After that easy victory, a U.S. proconsul administration would weed out Saddam loyalists and build a “representative” government, apparently meaning that the U.S. would pick leaders from among Iraq’s various ethnic groups and tribes.</p> <p style="text-align: center">However, now, with civilian casualties rising and a U.S. “victory” possibly requiring a blood bath, the timeline for the post-war “reconstruction” may need lengthening. Instead of a couple of years, the process could prove open-ended with fewer Iraqis willing to collaborate and more Iraqis determined to resist.</p><p></p><p> </p><p style="text-align: center">PART one</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="BrownShark, post: 320187, member: 12148"] [LEFT][FONT=Verdana][SIZE=5][COLOR=black][B]Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down[/B][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/LEFT] [LEFT][FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2][COLOR=black][B]By Robert Parry[/B][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/LEFT] [LEFT][SIZE=2][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=black][B]March 30, 2003[/B][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/LEFT] [CENTER][FONT=Eras Medium ITC][SIZE=6]W[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Eras Medium ITC][SIZE=4]hatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has “lost” the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world.[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER] [CENTER]That is the view slowly dawning on U.S. military analysts, who privately are asking whether the cost of ousting Saddam Hussein has grown so large that “victory” will constitute a strategic defeat of historic proportions. At best, even assuming Saddam’s ouster, the Bush administration may be looking at an indefinite period of governing something akin to a California-size Gaza Strip. The chilling realization is spreading in Washington that Bush’s Iraqi debacle may be the mother of all presidential miscalculations – an extraordinary blend of Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking with a “Black Hawk Down” reliance on special operations to wipe out enemy leaders as a short-cut to victory. But the magnitude of the Iraq disaster could be far worse than either the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba in 1961 or the bloody miscalculations in Somalia in 1993. In both those cases, the U.S. government showed the tactical flexibility to extricate itself from military misjudgments without grave strategic damage. The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion left a small army of Cuban exiles in the lurch when the rosy predictions of popular uprisings against Fidel Castro failed to materialize. To the nation’s advantage, however, President John Kennedy applied what he learned from the Bay of Pigs – that he shouldn’t blindly trust his military advisers – to navigate the far more dangerous Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The botched “Black Hawk Down” raid in Mogadishu cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers, but President Bill Clinton then cut U.S. losses by recognizing the hopelessness of the leadership-decapitation strategy and withdrawing American troops from Somalia. Similarly, President Ronald Reagan pulled out U.S. forces from Lebanon in 1983 after a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines who were part of a force that had entered Beirut as peace-keepers but found itself drawn into the middle of a brutal civil war. [B]The Bush Strategy[/B] Few analysts today, however, believe that George W. Bush and his senior advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have the common sense to swallow the short-term bitter medicine of a cease-fire or a U.S. withdrawal. Rather than face the political music for admitting to the gross error of ordering an invasion in defiance of the United Nations and then misjudging the enemy, these U.S. leaders are expected to push forward no matter how bloody or ghastly their future course might be. Without doubt, the Bush administration misjudged the biggest question of the war: “Would the Iraqis fight?” Happy visions of rose petals and cheers have given way to a grim reality of ambushes and suicide bombs. But the Bush pattern of miscalculation continues unabated. Bush seems to have cut himself off from internal dissent at the CIA and the Pentagon, where intelligence analysts and field generals warned against the wishful thinking that is proving lethal on the Iraqi battlefields. Secretary Rumsfeld has emerged as the principal bully in enforcing Bush’s dangerous group think, a pattern that dates back to the war in Afghanistan when senior generals feared disagreeing with Rumsfeld. In one telling, though little-noticed passage in Bob Woodward’s [I]Bush at War[/I], Bush asks Gen. Tommy Franks for his opinion, only to have Franks defer to Rumsfeld. “Sir, I think exactly what my secretary thinks, what he’s ever thought, what he will ever think, or whatever he thought he might think,” said Franks, who is now commander of U.S. forces fighting in Iraq. So, instead of recognizing their initial errors and rethinking their war strategy, Bush and his team are pressing forward confidently into what looks like a dreamscape of their own propaganda. At least from their public pronouncements, Bush and his aides continue to insist that their pre-war judgments about the Iraqi civilians wanting U.S. “liberation” were correct, with the people kept in check by fear of Saddam Hussein’s “goons” – as Fox News likes to report – or “death squads” – as Rumsfeld says. Once Saddam is killed, this latest reasoning goes, the Iraqi people will begin celebrating like some Mideast version of the flying monkeys in “The Wizard of Oz,” who were transformed into happy creatures once the Wicked Witch of the West was dead. However, there is little empirical evidence to support Bush’s deferred rosy scenario of thankful Iraqis. [B]Saddam as Martyr[/B] It would seem at least as likely that even success in killing Saddam would not stop Iraqi resistance and indeed could deepen the hole that Bush is digging. Remarkably, in the first week and a half of the war, Bush has managed to make the unsavory Saddam into a cult-like hero across the Arab world. His death would make him a martyr. Even Arabs who disdain Saddam and his brutality take pride in the fact that Iraqis are standing up to the military might of the United States, the world’s preeminent superpower. Among the many historical facts that Bush may not know is that Arabs have bitter memories of how Israel crushed a coalition of Arab armies in the Six-Day War in 1967. Already Saddam has held out against the Americans and British for a longer period than that. Plus, the bravery of Iraqi fighters – some of whom have charged into the teeth of fearsome American firepower – is stirring Arab nationalism. In a region where Palestinian teenagers have been strapping bombs to themselves to kill Israelis – and now some Iraqis appear to be adopting similar tactics to kill Americans – there is little reason to believe that eliminating Saddam will somehow make Iraq submissive to U.S. authority. While the Bush administration once talked about administering Iraq for a couple of years after victory, that timetable was based on the pre-war assumptions that the war would be a “cakewalk” and that the Iraqi population would welcome U.S. troops with open arms. After that easy victory, a U.S. proconsul administration would weed out Saddam loyalists and build a “representative” government, apparently meaning that the U.S. would pick leaders from among Iraq’s various ethnic groups and tribes. However, now, with civilian casualties rising and a U.S. “victory” possibly requiring a blood bath, the timeline for the post-war “reconstruction” may need lengthening. Instead of a couple of years, the process could prove open-ended with fewer Iraqis willing to collaborate and more Iraqis determined to resist.[/CENTER] [CENTER]PART one[/CENTER] [/QUOTE]
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