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The latest reports on SkyNews are showing large crowds of ecstatic Iraqi civilians greeting the British mechanised troops deep inside Basra. One clip showed jubilant Iraqi children and young men clambering over a Challenger 2 tank and shaking the hands of the vehicle’s bemused commander and driver.
On a less happy note, one British soldier was killed earlier by a booby trap, so it is too soon to regard the Basra operation as completely ‘done and dusted’ but it seems clear that to all intents and purposes, the city has indeed fallen.
British forces have overrun Basra, with 16 Air Assault Brigade taking the north of the city, 7 Armoured Brigade taking Central Basra and 3 (Royal Marine) Commando Brigade taking Southern Basra.
Although the British military authorities are studiously avoiding actually saying that ‘Basra has fallen’, it seems clear from all the reports I have seen from the journalists inside the city itself that this is indeed the case, bar the inevitable mopping up of isolated die-hard elements. Fedayeen Saddam resistance is being described as sporadic and uncoordinated and at one point a reporter with SkyNews said several thousand jubilant people mobbed the British as they pushed deep into the city.
Although fighting is continuing, it seems clear that Ba’athist Socialism is dying with a frightened whimper rather than a defiant roar. The Fedayeen are discovering that two decades of murdering civilians has not prepared them for fighting some of the most fierce and professional troops in the world.
‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.’
– O’Brien speaking to Winston, Chapter 20, 1984 by George Orwell
As three British mechanized battlegroups smash their way into central Basra and the Americans are showing they can intrude into the capital city Baghdad itself regardless of Iraqi resistance, the reports coming out of the Iraqi Information Ministry are starting to sound more and more like the articles which appeared in ‘Der Panzerbar’ (The Armoured Bear) in 1945.
Der Panzerbar was ‘The news journal of the defenders of Greater Berlin’ in the last few weeks of World War II. Right to the end it was filled with increasingly fantastical claims that victory was being snatched from the jaws of defeat, even as Soviet infantry were remorselessly inching their way ever deeper into the Third Reich’s capital city.
That we should hear echoes of Nazi Germany’s dying days from the mouths of Ba’athist Socialism’s doomed spokesmen is interesting but hardly surprising. Iraq has long been Orwell’s ‘Room 101’ writ large, but reality itself is not a matter of opinion, only our understanding of it. Objective reality is coming to Iraq and it is coming at bayonet point no matter how much ‘Ba’athist truth’ and its apologists around the world try to pretend otherwise or wish it out of existence.
Or in this case, the Shatt Al Arab waterway. The ever flexible and innovative Royal Marines have taken to small fast boats to show it dominates even the waterways right around Basra, at one point helping out an astonished local fishermen who was having engine troubles.
This and other tactics show a couple centuries of colonial experience are serving the British military well, illustrating the way to ‘hearts and minds’ is a mixture of well armed ferocity when challenged and common helpfulness otherwise. Keeping the focus on the fact this is an anti-Ba’athist war, not a war against Iraq, UK forces in Basra are reacting cleverly to propaganda targets of opportunity, as reported in the Washington Times:
In another incident, when an Iraqi colonel was fatally shot in his vehicle, British troops found a thick wad of local currency. Instead of handing it in to officers, the troops decided to dole the cash out to wide-eyed local youngsters, a monetary variant of candy handouts.
Nice one!
Update: British mechanised forces are now reported as fighting Fedayeen irregulars 7 km inside Basra!
We have belatedly started adding additional links to a great many interesting blogs in the Samizdata.net sidebar (31 added so far today). More will be added later tonight as well as culling a few inactive ones.
The fact Turkey did not allow a US ‘Northern Front’ to be launched from its territory could in the not-so-long-run prove very detrimental to what it views as its ‘national interests’.
The Turkish state in very uneasy that in the aftermath of a collapse of the regime in Baghdad, Iraq itself may fall apart, with the Kurds in the north declaring an independent Kurdistan. The Turks (and Iranians) fear this as it will greatly embolden the Kurdish separatists in South-Eastern Turkey (and also in parts of Iran).
So, ask yourself which scenario is more likely to lead to the collapse of Iraqi national integrity post-Saddam:
- A powerful heavily armed US force of 40,000 or more rolls into Northern Iraq, assisted by about 50,000 lightly armed anti-Saddam Kurdish guerillas from various factions… Ba’athism collapses eventually but US forces are in position to maintain order in the North and keep a reign on the political situation when Mosul and Kirkuk fall, ensuring that the Kurdish factions which can tolerate the notion of an autonomous Kurdistan within Iraq are not pushed out (or ever wiped out) by those demanding nothing less that Independent Kurdistan.
- or… A lightly armed force of not more that 2,000 allied paratroopers and special forces is operating in Northern Iraq, assisted by 50,000 lightly armed anti-Saddam Kurdish guerillas from various factions. Ba’athism collapses eventually but when Mosul and Kirkuk fall, the majority of the forces which arrive are Kurdish Peshmerga whose political views are very hard to judge.
So hands up who thinks that option 2 is vastly more likely to lead to Kurdish separatists doing exactly what the Turks fear?
If Mosul or Kirkuk fall to the Kurds alone, will the US be willing to shoot their way into those largely Kurdish cities if they are not invited in? What if the local (armed) Kurds politely say “Greetings honoured American soldiers! As we have taken care of the local Ba’athists, your noble, fraternal and well armed presence is not needed here, thank you very much, and have a nice journey home oh glorious brothers in arms”. I really doubt the US wants to fight the Kurds for what is a messy internal matter. Of course if the troops turning up at the outskirts of Mosul and Kirkuk are Turks, get ready for a war-within-a-war from the moment the two forces come within sight of each other.
Only time will tell what the outcome will be but if the Turks do not get their nightmare scenario materializing, they should thank their lucky stars because their actions made it far more likely to occur.
I suppose we will know in a few weeks!
Pentagon planners must have been grinding their teeth with irritation when the Turkish parliament refused to allow a US division to unload in a Turkish port and move into Northern Iraq. Clearly having major US assets approach from an entirely different strategic direction would have enormously complicated the Iraqi military’s defensive dilemmas. In the event, the Iraqi army has been able to concentrate its the majority of its efforts against the allied moves in the south. Although it seems that allied special forces have run riot in the west of the country, that is really just desert of little real strategic importance to Iraq’s national cohesion. So far so good for the bad guys (well, sort of).
And yet…
The army which has attacked Iraq is much smaller than the one which ejected Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. The thinking here was clearly that the advances in technology and war fighting generally meant that a much smaller but ‘smarter’ force was all that was required to defeat Saddam’s armies in the field. The down side to this is that the sheer size of Iraq means that lines of communications are far longer than was the case in 1991 and in addition are running through enemy territory almost entirely… and there are far less troops to keep them secure.
If the allies have made any miscalculations, it is not with regard to the Iraqi army or Republican Guard: although both have resisted, they have been signally unable to prevent the overrunning of nearly half of Iraq and in every major battle so far against US and UK forces, their formations have been smashed and the survivors thrown back.
No, the unknown and more importantly, the unplanned for factor is the Fedayeen Saddam and sundry Ba’athist militias. These irregular forces, like all, irregular forces, have little real combat power but are able to disrupt logistics, cause irritation out of all proportion to their numbers and equipment, and most importantly for Saddam’s cause, maintain Ba’athist authority and political presence in areas nominally under the control of the allies. I lost track of how many times the allies reported that “The US Marines have taken Umm Qasr” day after day. What, again?
In reality it was only in the last two days that the Fedayeen and Ba’athist infrastructure in Umm Qasr had been sufficiently crushed by Royal Marines doing painstaking house to house clearances that Iraqi civilians felt safe enough to openly apply for jobs with the allied forces in the port city.
Similarly, the roads north to the bulk of the US forces are being called ‘ambush ally’ by the rear echelon troops tasked with the essential logistic task of keeping the heavy divisions rolling and shooting around Karabala and Nasiriyah.
And so if the tank, artillery and AFV heavy Iraqi units around Baghdad are not really what is causing the allies difficulties, then the fact irregular forces are able to attack overstretched supply lines is the thing that should be worrying us, give the lack of absolute numbers of infantry the attacking allied armies.
Well, the forces that would have moved into Northern Iraq are about to arrive in Southern Iraq. If my guestimates are correct, their ships should be reaching the appropriate Gulf ports any time now.
In Northern Iraq, they would have faced much the same problems as their colleagues in the south… but deployed in the south, they will increase the feet-on-the-ground per square mile considerably, which can only be very bad news indeed for the Fedayeen.
Perhaps this cloud has a silver lining.
…no, that does not mean what you think.
The casualties in question are Fox New Channel reporter and all round buffoon Geraldo Rivera, who has been booted out of Iraq by the military for the committing the cardinal sin of any war correspondent… he revealed sensitive information live on television. It is interesting how the CCN article I spotted this in buries the fact en-passant at the bottom of a much larger article. My Grandmother had pretty much the perfect summation of our ol’ buddy Geraldo back in December 2001.
The other casualty is Peter Arnett who has been fired by NBC/MSNBC for being a ‘useful idiot’.
The sun is shining, the birds are singing and the world is back running in well oiled grooves… now if only the same thing would happen to the odious Robert Fisk.
Ten days onto the offensive, it is clear that the Wehrmacht is exactly where the French want them, as evidenced by their pause to refuel their tanks and rearm with more ammunition.
We are told by various reporters that the war is bogging down. that casualties are ‘heavy’, that Iraqi resistance is ‘stiff’. We hear that thing are going badly and the allied military leaders have miscalculated.
Yet although the allied forces have taken loses, for sure, and each of those is a tragedy, the cold facts are that in military and historical terms, UK and US casualties have been insignificant, trivial in fact.
The allies have overrun a huge chunk of Iraq, killing thousands of Iraqi soldiers and paramilitary militia, smashing the Ba’athist Socialist infrastructure of repression and hammering targets of military importance at will. The fact that not everything has gone the way UK and US planners expected will not be an earth shattering surprise to them as there is a well known military axiom that they will all be very familar with: “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy”.
It seems that any war which does not result in single figure losses and which is not over in time to not interfere with the screening of the Oscars is going to be deemed a ‘catastrophe’ by a media which knows nothing about either military affairs or history. The British took 58,000 casualties (one third of them killed) on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. That is what ‘heavy casualties’ means.
British forces are continuing their aggressive incursions into Basra, capturing some senior Iraqi Army Officers and killing a Republican Guard colonel in the process.
My guess is that the object of this is keeping the Iraqi forces off-balance and probably trying to demonstrate to the population of Basra that Ba’athist control is decaying daily… hence the day before yesterday’s foray into the city by British Challenger Tanks for the decidedly non-military objective of blowing up a statue of Saddam Hussain in a public square with the tank’s 120mm gun!
Aqui hay algo para personas que hablan Español, quienes son unos ‘utiles idiotas’. Esta presentación ha sido creada por algunos que no lo son.
(Although it helps if you speak Spanish, the meaning of the presentation can be understood by anyone.)
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