« March 28, 2003 | Main
| March 30, 2003 »

March 29, 2003

A rose by any other name...
: Oh, gawd, I knew we'd regret ever calling this warblogging after 9.11.
Now we have "peaceblogging."
I'm just waiting for somebody to then try to rename warblogging, oh, I dunno... libertyblogging or freedomblogging or some such.
As my father says (the second time I've quoted him today): Let's not and say we did.
It's warblogging as in blogging about war. The term came after 9.11. Then everybody was for war against the people warring with us, right? Remember those days?

LINK | Comments (5)

The Battle for Baghdad: MOUT
: There's some sobering reading on a huge Army site dedicated to MOUT -- Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain, aka door-to-door urban warfare, aka the battle for Baghdad.
More than one article there starts with the quote from Sun Tsu in the Art of war:

Best policy in war--thwart the enemy's strategy,
second best--disrupt his alliances through diplomacy,
third best--attack his army in the field,
worst strategy--attack walled cities.

There are many papers about the fighting in Grozny, hardly a model for what we need to accomplish in Baghdad (i.e., we don't really want to level the place and still lose). And there are many lessons learned from Stalingrad, Somalia, Hue, Beirut, Belfast, and even the L.A. riots.
One policy paper says:

Urban areas pose significant force protection problems. The nature of urban terrain decentralizes and channelizes friendly forces, while adversaries engage a variety of targets — friendly forces, infrastructure, and noncombatants — behind the shield of the civilian population. Commanders must make thorough risk assessments, develop appropriate rules of engagement, implement strict antiterrorist measures, and execute well-designed deception plans to prepare for these problems.

This paper lists the scary characteristics of urban warfare:

: Cities reduce the advantages of the technologically superior force.
: Ground operations become manpower intensive.
: Ground operations become decentralize.
: Operations are time-consuming.
: Urban areas provide advantages to defenders, insurgents, and terrorists.
: Logistic support requirements are different and often more demanding in urban
areas....

Look at this chart and you can see clearly why Saddam wants to draw us into Baghdad and Basra and why we want to either fight in the desert to bomb targets in the cities.

Another paper looks at the urban-warfare lessons Iraq itself learned in its war with Iran. They learned precisely how hard door-to-door fighting is and that is why they would lure us into it.

Iraqi losses in the city of Khorramshar were so great they renamed it "Khunishar, The City of Blood."

This paper concludes:

Is successful MOUT in Iraq possible? It is, but this depends on the way the population responds to the presence of US or coalition troops. If the population turns against Hussein, anything is possible and MOUT becomes feasible. If they do not, US or coalition forces will be confronted with the worst kind of city fighting, that of not only the armed forces but also the people of Iraq.

Or as David Galbraith said today:"What is clear, however, is that everything hinges on an uprising." [MOUT via Derek Willis]

: Related: RAND publications on urban warfare.

: And get a load of this Rand study:

Members of RAND's urban operations team are analyzing deception in the animal and plant kingdoms to see how the domains of animal biology and behavior can teach further lessons in the military domain, specifically in urban operations.

: See also Saddam's strategy, below.

Future war
: Continuing the thread above, I come across a piece from the Army War College about the urban warrior of 2025.
More sobering words about today:

Current Army doctrine largely ignores the urban environment except within the context of small-scale stability and support operations. When it does address it, existing doctrine primarily examines the tactical level of warfare and presents urban conflict essentially as a series of small-unit combat actions designed to seize individual rooms and buildings. Little attention is given to the conduct of large-scale land operations on complex urban terrain or to the joint, coalition, and interagency integration requirements associated with it.

Note this, too, about the current tactical debate clearly going on over Baghdad:

The first option, and that which senior military officers have shown a special predilection toward in recent Army After Next wargames, is to avoid contesting for the cities altogether. To this way of thinking, US forces should seek to engage the enemy in open terrain where our technological superiority gives us an overwhelming advantage. Unfortunately, this option inhibits the ability of US forces to bring a military campaign to rapid conclusion and allows the enemy just the type of refuge he was seeking when he chose to enter the city. The enemy has control of the city and he is spared attacks from US forces.
An alternative option described as the "indirect approach" has recently been proposed by Major General Robert Scales. This approach requires the establishment of a loose cordon, or siege line, around an enemy-occupied city. Though rarely, or even never, actually entering the city, US and coalition forces would use precision weapons "to strike selected point targets, key leadership, and weapons of mass destruction" within the surrounded city. Eventually, the city would collapse upon the enemy, thereby causing his defeat.

The piece also paints a picture of the robowarrior of the future.

the 2025 Urban Warfighter System must be a revolutionary new man-machine fighting system with self-contained C4ISR [command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance], lethality, mobility, survivability, and sustainability far exceeding those of the current and near-term systems.

It's fascinating and frightening reading.

LINK | Comments (0)

Sand storm
: Sand stars on the covers of The Economist and Der Spiegel, but with different perspectives. The Economist says: "The regime has not collapsed at once. Apart from that, the war against Iraq is going well." Der Spiegel says: "Superpower in the Sand. America's Stalled Blitzkrieg."

LINK | Comments (0)

Ew, Canada
: Aaron Bailey sums up all the news from the land that never makes news, Canada.
: Add this: Thousands at pro-American demo.
: And this: Chrétien loses points in polls; nation deeply divided over war.

LINK | Comments (2)

Buy me!
: If I could figure out the subtleties of this site, I'd actually make money on the stock market and I wouldn't have to work and I could blog all day long. Or as my father would say, "If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass everytime he flies." I never understood that, either.
Anyway, Blogshares lets you trade fantasy shares on blogs, which are valued based on their links.
If nothing else, a new game involving Blogs and ego is a sure way to get lots of links, just like this. [via Martin Devon]

LINK | Comments (1)

Matching bets
: Steven Johnson suggests that countries that we should put up "matching grants" for Iraq to spend as much on rebuilding as we spend on bombs.
I'll bet that by the time we're done, we'll be more than matching.

LINK | Comments (0)

Dum Poetry Jam
: Announcing Not In Our Name Music with some really bad rap against the war -- but, hey, it's free. Among the catchy ditties: Pledge of Resistance. [via Mosaikum]

LINK | Comments (0)

What, France worry?
: France has a terror alert system. Why? Don't they befriend terrorists? (Oh, come on, take a joke.)
They just upgraded the terror alert system to the American multicolor model: yellow, orange, red, scarlet (of course, they'd use a fancy color, they're French!).
Merde in France suggests a different palate based on the weather in Paris: light gray, gray, dark gray, and soot black.
Or may I suggest: Yellow, Yellower, Yellowest, and Sacre Blue.

: Update: Dan Hon has lots of French updates.

LINK | Comments (2)

Iraqi Idol!
: Via Adam Curry, Iraqi Idol, the TV show.

ALL NEW EXECUTIONS!!!
See what happens when Simon, Saddam, and others think you suck! Click here for execution photos!

LINK | Comments (0)

War swag
: You can buy Iraqi souvenirs on eBay, of course: Iraqi money with Saddam's mug.. Desert Storm patches... and more. [from Netzeitung]

LINK | Comments (0)

Ha....Ha....Ha.....
: Somebody with a sense of humor at Fox:

Fox News had its own response to the demonstrators. The news ticker rimming Fox's headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn't carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.
"War protester auditions here today ... thanks for coming!" read one message. "Who won your right to show up here today?" another questioned. "Protesters or soldiers?"
Said a third: "How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them."
Still another read: "Attention protesters: the Michael Moore Fan Club meets Thursday at a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and 50th Street" - a reference to the film maker who denounced the war while accepting an Oscar on Sunday night for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine."
The protesters said Fox's sentiments only proved their point: that media coverage, in particular among the television networks, is so biased as to be unbelievable.

[via Medien Kontor]

LINK | Comments (0)

Pope speaks
: He says:

Pope John Paul has said he hopes the war in Iraq will not set Christians and Muslims against each other.

Hmmm. Think that horse may have left the barn about a year and a half ago?

LINK | Comments (2)

Go, girl!
: Somebody let Julie Burchill out of her cage and I'm glad. She takes on Susan Sarandon:

I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to America The Beautiful, not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count?
Surely this is the most self-obsessed anti-war protest ever. NOT IN MY NAME! That's the giveaway. Who gives a stuff about their wet, white, western names? See how they write them so solemnly in a list on the bottom of the letters they send to the papers. And the ones that add their brats' names are the worst - a grotesque spin on Baby On Board, except they think that this gives them extra humanity points not just on the motorway, but in the whole wide weeping, striving, yearning world. We don't know the precious names of the countless numbers Saddam has killed. We're talking about a people - lots of them parents - subjected to an endless vista of death and torture, a country in which freedom can never be won without help from outside.

It would probably be better if I let it stand there: a powerful statement.
But then Burchill continues to make fun of stars and I can't resist that fun:

...is it a total coincidence that those stars most prominent in the anti-war movement are the most notoriously "difficult"and vain - Streisand, Albarn, Michael, Madonna, Sean Penn?...
Anti-war nuts suffer from the usual mixture of egotism and self-loathing that often characterises recreational depression - an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism in which you think you're scum, but also that you're terribly important, too....
What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people. But even those whose anti-war protests started in good faith now know that when Saddam's regime comes tumbling down, thousands of Iraqis will dance and sing with joy before the TV cameras, and thank our armed forces for giving them back their lives.
How embarrassing it will be for the peaceniks to have to explain to the celebrants how much better it would have been for them never to have been troubled by such joy!

LINK | Comments (1)

Michael Moore, political arsonist
: Michael Moore is really going over the edge. Variety reports on his next movie:

The project will depict the allegedly murky relationship between President Bush's father and the family of Osama bin Laden. And it will suggest that the bin Laden family was greatly enriched by that association.
Moore is making a deal with Mel Gibson's Icon Prods. to finance "Fahrenheit 911," a documentary that will trace why the U.S. has become a target for hatred and terrorism. It will also depict alleged dealings between two generations of the Bush and bin Laden clans that led to George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden becoming mortal enemies....
"The primary thrust of the new film is what has happened to the country since Sept. 11, and how the Bush administration used this tragic event to push its agenda," Moore said. "It certainly does deal with the Bush and bin Laden ties. It asks a number of questions that I don't have the answers to yet, but which I intend to find out."...

We all know crisis queens. Moore is a controversy queen.

Double negatives
: I don't make fun of Moore because he's against the war. I make fun of him because he's so make-funnable.
I just found his piece about his Oscar speech in which he argues that the boos weren't directed against him:

...before I had finished my first sentence about the fictitious president, a couple of men (some reported it was "stagehands" just to the left of me) near a microphone started some loud yelling. Then a group in the upper balcony joined in. What was so confusing to me, as I continued my remarks, was that I could hear this noise but, looking out on the main floor, I didn't see a single person booing.
But then the majority in the balcony – who were in support of my remarks – started booing the booers.

: See also Jim Treacher, who's seen the light thanks to Michael Moore and now knows how this war should end. [via au Currant]

LINK | Comments (4)

Saddam's military strategy: delay
: The Scottsman argues that Saddam's entire strategy is -- shades of Vietnam -- delaying our progress to make us more unpopular.

Despite the US’s unchallenged military strength, its criteria for success are more readily assailable: it requires few casualties, a swift campaign, no use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), no exporting the conflict to the rest of the region (especially Israel) and, perhaps most importantly, the approval of Iraqi civilians to bestow retroactive legitimacy on the war in the absence of a second UN resolution.
Saddam might not yet have played the WMD or Israel wildcards, but his strategy appears predicated upon trumping the Americans in every other one of these areas....
The nature of this resistance suggests that Saddam has learnt from his mistakes of 1991 and has adapted his tactics accordingly. Like all good revolutionaries, Saddam understands that guerrilla warfare can be maintained almost indefinitely: a drawn-out conflict will cause maximum difficulty for Mr Bush, whose domestic support will wane should the war prove too costly in terms of lives, time or budget.
No doubt encouraged by the anti-war demonstrations across Europe and the US, Saddam knows both that this war is unpopular and that western leaders are hostage to public opinion in a way he is not.
Incapable of defeating the US militarily and of stepping down from power to forestall a fully-fledged attack on the capital, Saddam has only one real route of escape: to make the war so politically costly to the US that it is obliged to withdraw.
What we will see in the next stage is a tug of war - George Bush will race for Baghdad and Saddam Hussein will seek to slow him down. The next phase of the war is not really about controlling territory, then, it is about controlling time.

Which is also to say that all the talk about this less-than-two-week-old war going slowly only plays into Saddam's hands. [via the Christian Science Monitor]

LINK | Comments (2)

Bon temps my ass
: Our correspondent in New Orleans reports much fun over Jacques Chirac down in Louisiana:

It is, if you don't know, the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial. On Dec. 20, there is to be a climactic ceremony in Jackson Square, in which Presidents Bush & Chirac are supposed to kiss each other's cheeks and get all gooshy.
The thought of which sickens good ol' boys everywhere.
So my boy State Rep. Almond Gaston Crowe, of Crowley, is filing legislation to UN-invite the head Frog from attending the event. Not to be outdone, a credible contender for this year's governor's race has jumped on the bandwagon. And yesterday, Gov. Mike "Duckblind" Foster opined on radio that he may beat 'em all to the punch and do it by executive order. We like Mike. The first thing that pops up on the gov's homepage, in fact, is a poll asking Louisianans about dissing Chirac . . . last I looked, 54 percent want him disinvited. I suspect a high percentage of the other 46 percent is from frantic poll-stuffing by the state tourism board and the Bicentennial Commission, which is freaking out that their premiere event of 2003 is going down in flames.

See the original Times-Picayune story on Nola.com here.
: Update: A French trade delegation canceled a trip to New Orleans next month.

LINK | Comments (0)