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Breaking news – Kuwait. Iraq has launched a new type of Scud missile at the coalition forces deployed in Kuwait. Details are sketchy at this time, but it appears to be a new and improved Scud type missile. The CIA is investigating just how and from whom Saddam acquired this new technology.  April 7th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 ‘Chemical Ali’ is dead at the age of 64, killed in a true ‘coalition’ attack: blown apart by an American bomb called in by a British forward air controller. He has now gone to join the unquiet ghosts of the 200,000+ Kurdish and Iraqi people whose murder he was personally responsible for supervising. Two hundred thousand people… that would be as if Janet Reno had ordered about 2,600 Waco massacres. There are several intellectually viable reasons for opposing this war but I assume that the anti-war protestors who marched against it on the grounds that the cost to Iraq’s people would be intolerable will be distraught to learn of his death, as this fine specimen of humanity would still be alive today if they had gotten their way, continuing to ply his dark trade across that unhappy land called Iraq. I would spit in a million of their faces if I could because the perpetuation in power of ‘Chemical Ali’ and his evil brethren was the reality of what they were marching for. April 7th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
April 7th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. April 6th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. April 6th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bags and coffins piled deep bursting with skulls and bundles of human bones; catalogues of photos of corpses, burned and swollen and mutilated; a shooting gallery complete with bullet-hole-riddled wall and custom-made drainage ditch… Those Ba’athists were nice people, alright. But these days we are no longer forced to brood over each new tragedy, “How awful, Christ, what a world.” Instead, we can think, “Someone is doing something about this shit at last. Thank God.” Thank God and thank the British and American soldiers and their leaders. The world is changing. April 5th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mark Steyn is in good form in today’s Telegraph. Reading the opening paragraph of his opinion piece whilst having afternoon coffee, I had to struggle to contain its flow…
And another dig at the blogosphere’s favourite punchbag:
April 5th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
Nice one! Update: British mechanised forces are now reported as fighting Fedayeen irregulars 7 km inside Basra! April 5th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reports coming in on the wires that about 2,500 Republican Guards have surrendered to American forces, while other US forces are closing in on Baghdad. Interesting to see that gold and oil prices are skidding down while stock markets are chugging higher. Amazingly volatile state of the financial markets. My prediction – if this war really looks to be won, expect the Dow to hit 9,000 by Labor Day. Meanwhile, shares in Robert Fisk plc are suspended, pending Chapter 11. April 4th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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! April 3rd, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yes, I am alive and well. Reality is an omnipresent force for those of us who survive in the financially iffy feast and famine world of consultancy. Sometimes you are 3 months behind on your rent and then there are times with so much work you can’t take time to come up for air. This is one of those head down, get the money while you can times. I’m presently in an office deep in darkest Connecticut over looking a picture postcard river scene with colonial style houses and lawns facing it. I’m working 12 hour days to finish up one project before I go on to another in Manhattan and then San Francisco. I’ll not see Belfast again until June. I don’t really have time to write this, but I’m doing so anyway because I’ve become so fed up with the ignorance of the “professional” punditry. I obviously never went to journalism school. Perhaps thankfully. Instead I have studied technical subjects and delved deeply into history, particularly that of WWII. Where are the pundits with a real perspective? Why not a comparison with Omaha beach at +14 days? I’ve not time to check the numbers right now, but I know as a certainty there were more Americans dead in the first hour of the landing than we have lost in the entire war in Iraq to date. There may even have been more dead getting out the door of a single landing craft but I cannot prove that without research that would be very costly in terms of billeable time. We certainly had not reached Paris in two weeks. If you turn things around and look at the opening days of Blitzkrieg after the end of the “Phoney War” period, not even France fell in two weeks of fighting. One might look at the time and cost in lives of Iwo Jima, a tiny and otherwise rather useless spec on the Pacific map. A thousand US Marines died in the first wave. More followed. The surf ran red with American blood, bodies and body parts filled the surf like jelly fish. It took a very long bloody fight before that dismal spec was secured. It was not a job of hours or days. The instant a journalist asks the question “Why is it taking so long?”, I write off their intellect as nonexistant. I read the DOD press briefing transcripts and I see these moronic queries on a daily basis. I know such people are full of self-importance. I doubt they realize we are actually laughing at them. Let us look at the reality of the war. This snippet from DefSec Rumsfeld on “This Week with George Stephanopoulis” is one of the better summaries I’ve seen of exactly how amazing this campaign has been:
I am not going to suggest the war is easy, or that it will be over quickly. There is still Baghdad to be dealt with. There will be many months clearing pockets of resistance by people who will have nothing to lose because their remaining mortal life span in a democratic Iraq will be quite limited. When all is said and done, this campaign is one for the history books. Never before have so few defeated so many so quickly. I now return to professional work, still in progess. April 2nd, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. April 1st, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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