Category Archives: War Planning

Situation seriously FUBAR

Posted on by
Reply

Fog of war, indeed. The global sit­u­a­tion regard­ing Iraq has turned into a full-on cock-up.
Turkey — with the prompt­ing of the mil­i­tary — is hav­ing sec­ond thoughts on its vote Sat­ur­day. The U.S. announced the deploy­ment of 60,000 more troops to be sent to Kuwait, bring­ing the forces in the region almost up to Desert Storm lev­els (Then approx. 500,000 with coali­tion forces.) Tomor­row is Hans Blix’s big day at the U.N., where he will deliver another report on the sta­tus of Iraq’s com­pli­ance with UNSCR 1441. The United States con­tin­ues to work the phones for the votes on the Secu­rity Coun­cil, and per­haps most sig­nif­i­cantly, Pres­i­dent Bush has called an 8 pm EST news con­fer­ence in the East Room tonight.
This very well might be the moment the world has been dread­ing, in which Bush gives Sad­dam Hus­sein a final ulti­ma­tum — mainly so jour­nal­ists, aid work­ers and diplo­mats can use the next few days to leave the coun­try. White House spokesman Ari Fleis­cher said Bush’s open­ing state­ment in the East Room would address “the suc­cesses in the war against ter­ror as well as the impor­tance of dis­arm­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein.” He also said Bush still has not decided whether to wage war.
FUBAR in Turkey
Saturday’s vote by the Turks was unex­pected — or was it? — and the mil­i­tary mainly stayed out of the process. But now the Turk­ish mil­i­tary is sig­nal­ing its sup­port for U.S. plans.
Chief of gen­eral staff, Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, has sig­naled to par­lia­ment that the mil­i­tary would really, really like it if the par­lia­ment approved the Amer­i­cans’ request, despite the over­whelm­ing oppo­si­tion to the war. “It’d be a shame for some­thing to hap­pen to your lit­tle gov­ern­ment,” he told par­lia­ment as his picked his fin­ger­nails with a bowie knife. (Not really.) Turk­ish papers are full of the spec­u­la­tion that the Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party (AKP) gov­ern­ment will sub­mit a new pro­posal after Saturday’s par­lia­men­tary vote. Why didn’t the mil­i­tary speak up before? Ozkok remarked that the mil­i­tary had not made its views pub­lic ear­lier in order to avoid influ­enc­ing the par­lia­ment.
“If we had expressed our views, it would have amounted to pres­sur­ing the par­lia­ment for the approval of the res­o­lu­tion. It wouldn’t have been demo­c­ra­tic,” Ozkok said. (Cue rue­ful laugh­ter.)
In other words, Ozkok told par­lia­ment that the Turk­ish mil­i­tary believes in Turk­ish democ­racy — until it gets a vote it doesn’t like. Has he been tak­ing lessons from Don Rums­feld?
There is no doubt the civil­ian gov­ern­ment got the mes­sage, as Prime Min­is­ter Abdul­lah Gul said Ozkok’s com­ments were “rea­son­able.” Par­lia­ment speaker Bulent Arinc, who is pur­su­ing some agenda of his own, gave a more mea­sured response, say­ing he appre­ci­ated the general’s remarks and thought the tim­ing of the state­ment was “quite telling.“
Approx­i­mately 94 per­cent of the Turk­ish cit­i­zenry opposes a U.S. war with Iraq. Pres­i­dent Bush can’t deride those num­bers as he did the Feb. 15 marches, which brought tens of mil­lions of peo­ple to the streets world­wide, as a “focus group.” Ninety-four per­cent is the pop­u­la­tion. So it seems in order to plant the seeds of democ­racy in Iraq, the United States is pre­pared to ignore the democ­racy next door in Turkey and stomp the sapling in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?
Any­way, as far as plots by the Turk­ish mil­i­tary to uni­lat­er­ally invade Iraqi Kur­dis­tan if a north­ern front can’t be opened up in time (and make no mis­take — the Turk­ish vote sent the White House reel­ing and grasp­ing for alter­na­tives), who the hell knows what’s hap­pen­ing? But state­ments from Ozkok have made clear that the idea of a Turk­ish inva­sion into the region is def­i­nitely on the table.

The Turk­ish offi­cial [speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymity] said that Turkey’s gen­er­als were skep­ti­cal of the abil­ity of the United States to ensure that the Iraqi Kurds did not try to break away if the Sad­dam Hus­sein were deposed.
In his remarks, Gen­eral Ozkok alluded to those con­cerns, and sent a terse warn­ing to the Kurds of north­ern Iraq.
“I remind them of our legit­i­mate right to defend our national inter­ests, and I hope they will be pru­dent and coop­er­a­tive,” Gen­eral Ozkok said. “Those who want to replace peace with con­fronta­tion will also take the respon­si­bil­ity and bear the con­se­quences.” [From the New York Times]

The State Depart­ment is cer­tainly tak­ing the risk of a Turk­ish inter­ven­tion seri­ously, with spokesman Richard Boucher empha­siz­ing that a uni­lat­eral move on north­ern Iraq can not be allowed:

QUESTION: What about the demon­stra­tion in north­ern Iraq by the half a mil­lion Kurds? They’re afraid that the United States is doing a deal maybe with Turkey. What can you say to these peo­ple who are wor­ried?
MR. BOUCHER: I think the first thing I would say is that we have been in touch with peo­ple in north­ern Iraq. You know that we had a del­e­ga­tion at the con­fer­ence of the out­side oppo­si­tion, and we have been meet­ing over time fre­quently with the peo­ple who live in north­ern Iraq. And we’ve always been inter­ested in their wel­fare and their safety. The United States has a very strong record on that point.
Sec­ond of all, I’d say that we’ve always, we’ve dis­cussed very inten­sively with Turk­ish author­i­ties the sit­u­a­tion in north­ern Iraq, in par­tic­u­lar in the con­text of these agree­ments we’ve just reached. And I think the basic out­look there, the basic prin­ci­ples that apply to the United States Gov­ern­ment and the Turk­ish Gov­ern­ment of look­ing for an Iraq that’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive, where all the peo­ple of Iraq can be rep­re­sen­ta­tive and play a role in their gov­ern­ment, but that stays together as a uni­tary state, those are prin­ci­ples we’ve all adopted and that is our out­look on the sit­u­a­tion. We’ve also, I think, made very clear that we would intend to coor­di­nate any mil­i­tary activ­i­ties very closely with the Turk­ish author­i­ties and that we have opposed uni­lat­eral inter­ven­tion from any quar­ter in north­ern Iraq.
QUESTION: On that, a follow-up on that last sen­tence. Do you think that now the Turk­ish forces will not enter inde­pen­dently of United States forces? That’s what everybody’s talk­ing about in north­ern Iraq and in the Mid­dle East.
MR. BOUCHER: As I said, I think first of all, our record on the safety of the peo­ple who live in north­ern Iraq has been quite well estab­lished over the years, and we do con­sider their safety in every­thing we do. We’ve been in close touch with the Turk­ish Gov­ern­ment. We would need to coor­di­nate any mil­i­tary moves with them and they with us, and we’ve always been opposed to uni­lat­eral moves into north­ern Iraq.

This one bears watch­ing.
Mean­while, back at the U.N. …
Bush and Sec­re­tary of State Colin Pow­ell have been work­ing the diplo­mats, hop­ing to wran­gle nine votes and no vetoes from France or Rus­sia, although the lat­ter seems increas­ingly unlikely. Why work the lines so hard if another res­o­lu­tion is “unnec­es­sary” as the White House has con­tended for some time and it looks like a fight the U.S. is going to lose? Well, because domes­tic sup­port for the war increas­ingly hinges on whether the U.N. approves it or not. And that applies even more so for Tony Blair, who could be toast with­out one — espe­cially if Blix comes back tomor­row and says, as is expected, that Iraq is mak­ing progress and tak­ing con­crete steps toward coop­er­a­tion.
All in all, it’s a con­fus­ing time, and if this is the White House’s plan for decep­tion via con­fu­sion, it’s work­ing well. No one seems to know what’s hap­pen­ing with Turkey, the troops and north­ern Iraq, what it will take to get the U.N. on board or even if Tony Blair will be prime min­is­ter at the end of the shoot­ing. The Amer­i­cans’ time table for war is slip­ping by the day, as the moon grows brighter and April’s heat grows nearer. Bush can’t afford to wait much longer. If the Secu­rity Coun­cil fails to approve the U.K.-U.S.-Bulgarian res­o­lu­tion, Bush may be ready to throw up his hands and roll the dice on thou­sands (mil­lions?) of lives, the geostrate­gic bal­ance and his pres­i­dency.
ASIDE: For a good roundup of the U.S. order of bat­tle, check out this story from an old col­league of mine.

Did the Turkish vote signal a more sinister agenda?

Posted on by
4
03cnd-span-kurds.2.jpg
In Erbil, in Kurdish-controlled north­ern Iraq, thou­sands protested against Turk­ish plans to move into the region dur­ing an American-led inva­sion of Iraq.
 (© 2002 Getty Images)

This week­end, the Turk­ish par­lia­ment rejected the United States’ offers of bil­lions of dol­lars in loans and grants for host­ing up to 62,000 troops to be used in a north­ern front in the upcom­ing inva­sion of Iraq. The vote, 264−250−19, was a squeaker — but four shy of the absolute major­ity needed to pass.
At the time, I said that if the Turk­ish mil­i­tary stayed out of this polit­i­cal process, it might be a good sign that the world was wit­ness­ing the begin­ning of a more mature Turk­ish democ­racy, one that isn’t held hostage to the threat of a mil­i­tary “inter­ven­tion” by the gen­er­als who are leery of irri­tat­ing the United States.
But dis­turb­ing reports from Strat­for (Paid reg­is­tra­tion req.) indi­cate there may have been a more omi­nous rea­son for the vote. British intel­li­gence, accord­ing to Strat­for, believes the vote was engi­neered by the Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party lead­er­ship when mem­bers were allowed to “vote their con­science.” As it stands, Par­lia­ment, rather than the exec­u­tive branch of the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment, is respon­si­ble for reject­ing U.S. troops. This allows the Turk­ish mil­i­tary to ease the pres­sure from Wash­ing­ton by claim­ing inno­cence in the mat­ter — “What can we say, my friend? We are a democ­racy.” And if U.S. troops are denied the north­ern route, Turkey will have a free hand when war breaks out.

The strat­egy is to cause U.S. forces to invade Iraq from the south only — leav­ing the Kur­dish north at Turkey’s mercy in the event of war. If the United States attacks, Turk­ish forces — claim­ing to act in the inter­est of pre­vent­ing anar­chy — would launch their own action against Kur­dish areas in the north. Within sev­eral days, sources say, the Turks would crush the Kurds; mean­while, U.S. bomb­ings would weaken Iraqi forces in the north. Once the regime in Bagh­dad and the army began to weaken, Turk­ish forces would fall upon Iraqi gar­risons — and paint their own actions as proof of Turkey’s alliance with the United States. [From Stratfor]

With U.S. forces tied up in the south and the Kurds paci­fied, Turkey would move between 250,000 and 300,000 troops to encir­cle the rich oil-fields of Kirkuk and Mosul, allow­ing them to then say to the world and to the EU — to which Turkey aspires for mem­ber­ship — that it has pre­vented Amer­ica from occu­py­ing the entirety of Iraq.
Back­ing up this hypoth­e­sis are media reports from the Turk­ish press. The Turk­ish paper Cumhuriyet reported yes­ter­day that Chief of Gen­eral Staff Gen. Hilmi Ozkok “cau­tioned Prime Min­is­ter Abdul­lah Gul against any adverse devel­op­ments that could emerge in north­ern Iraq and threaten Turkey?s national secu­rity in the event of a war.” Meet­ing with Gul on Sun­day, Ozkok report­edly told the pre­mier that con­sid­er­ing the sit­u­a­tion after Parliament?s refusal of the pro­posal, “urgent mea­sures should be taken in order to pre­vent the estab­lish­ment of a Kur­dish state in the region.” Also, Turkey’s For­eign Min­is­ter Yasara Yakis said the Iraqi Kurds’ burn­ing of the Turk­ish flag in protest of a pos­si­ble Turk­ish inva­sion was “a provo­ca­tion.“
Amer­ica could be fac­ing a dread­ful choice: Inter­vene in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan and north­ern Iraq — and gain the oil-fields — by engag­ing Turk­ish forces on Iraqi soil or stand down and accept a par­tial vic­tory?
The thought of NATO allies Turkey and the United States actu­ally com­ing to blows is almost incon­ceiv­able. Most likely, some kind of deal would be worked out, allow­ing the Turks a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the oil rev­enue from the region. But the treat­ment of the Kurds would be more wor­ri­some.
I’ve been assured by Kur­dish friends and sources that if the Turks come into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, they will have a fight on their hands. The recent demon­stra­tions tend to back that up. But despite my friends’ promises of a “slaugh­ter” and a guerilla cam­paign, I sus­pect 250,000 heav­ily armed Turks with NATO train­ing would be able to quell 70,000 pesh­merga light infantry the Kurds cur­rently field. (Let’s give them 150,000 to account for new recruits.) How quickly the Turks would pre­vail is open to con­jec­ture, how­ever. The last Kur­dish war lasted from 1984 – 1998, and Iraqi Kur­dis­tan is even more moun­tain­ous than south­east Turkey.
(Already the Kurds are cir­cling the wag­ons. The Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment announced that that the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan and the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party would form a Joint Higher Lead­er­ship coun­cil that would coor­di­nate polit­i­cal, mil­i­tary, admin­is­tra­tion and for­eign and domes­tic pol­icy. KDP pres­i­dent Mas­soud Barzani and PUK secretary-general Jalal Tal­a­bani will chair the coun­cil.)
Addi­tion­ally, an extended cam­paign by the Turks in the north would cause the Ira­ni­ans to move in to pro­tect their inter­ests in the region, too. (The Aya­tol­lah Sayed Mohammed Baqir Al-Hakim’s Badr Brigade of the Supreme Coun­cil for Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq has already moved in.) With­out the Amer­i­cans to play ref­eree, every­thing north of Bagh­dad and Tikrit will fall into bloody civil war.
Now we see why those ships are still idling off the Turk­ish coast and the United States is hop­ing to per­suade Turkey to allow U.S. troops. A chaotic north­ern Iraq isn’t in anyone’s inter­ests. But I won­der if any amount of cash would be enough to per­suade the Turks, because if their plans do include seiz­ing the north­ern Iraqi oil-fields (cov­eted for years,) they won’t need the Amer­i­cans’ money.
ASIDE:I’ve writ­ten sev­eral times about Turkey’s plans for Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, includ­ing here, here and here. At one point, back in Octo­ber, I said, “Keep watch­ing the Turks. They hold the key to all of this.” Seems I was right after all…
ASIDE II:By the way, why has the United States and Europe still refused to pro­vide gas masks or pro­tec­tive gear to the Kurds in the case of chem­i­cal attacks, since they’ve been attacked with chem­i­cal weapons before? Could it be that Turkey has effec­tively sealed the bor­der, mak­ing it extremely dif­fi­cult to get human­i­tar­ian sup­plies into the region?

Email from Turkey and mixed news on the terror front

Posted on by
Reply

Imme­di­ately after yesterday’s vote that rejected U.S. requests to use Turkey as a stag­ing area for a north­ern front, I emailed my old friend Aykut about the devel­op­ments there. His email fol­lows:

Dear Chris,
This is also a very big sur­prise for us. Per­son­ally, I am proud of being a cit­i­zen of a coun­try which shows her dig­nity like this. Our deputies show that the Turk­ish par­lia­ment is not an approval office and Turkey is not a coun­try for sale…
Shortly the story is this: In fact, AKP [Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party] gov­ern­ment had decided to bring the deci­sion to the par­lia­ment last Thurs­day, but sud­denly on the last minute they changed their mind and decided to bring it today [Sat­ur­day]. Some ana­lysts claim that the AKP lead­er­ship did not want to take all of the respon­si­bil­ity and wants to share it with the National Secu­rity Com­mit­tee which was going to meet on Fri­day. You know The National Secu­rity Com­mit­tee is a con­sti­tu­tional insti­tu­tion in which the Pres­i­dent and the gen­er­als are rep­re­sented as well as the the mem­bers of the civil gov­ern­ment. (Suit­abil­ity of such insti­tu­tion in democ­ra­cies is another sub­ject of debate). But the National Secu­rity Com­mit­tee did not even men­tion about this deci­sion in their con­clu­sion report. So they wanted the AKP gov­ern­ment to take the all the polit­i­cal respon­si­bil­ity by them­selves. In fact you know AKP holds the 2/3 of the par­lia­ment. We knew that Erdo­gan had some dif­fi­cul­ties of per­suad­ing some of his own deputies. There are demon­stra­tions all around Turkey. More than 50.000 peo­ple gath­ered in Ankara today, but still nobody was think­ing about such a result. Now, the prime min­is­ter with some other min­is­ters are in the meet­ing. It seems that they are going to bring the deci­sion to the par­lia­ment next Tues­day one more time. But we know that there are min­is­ters in the gov­ern­ment in fact they are against this deci­sion, so you see, last week we were sure that this deci­sion would def­i­nitely be passed, but now nobody knows what will hap­pen. Tomor­row [Sun­day] AKP will declare what are they going to do… It will be a very inter­est­ing week.…
When some­thing inter­est­ing hap­pens in here, I will write.… Stay well.…

Well, as we now know, the AKP has shelved any plans on intro­duc­ing a new pro­posal on Tues­day as Aykut thought yes­ter­day.
“The pro­posal has been delayed to an open-ended time. There is no pro­posal for the fore­see­able future,” said Eyup Fatsa, deputy head of AKP. Turkey, how­ever, wants to mend fences with the United States, and may intro­duce a new plan in par­lia­ment if the United Nations Secu­rity Coun­cil approves the U.S. and U.K. pro­posal sub­mit­ted Mon­day last week. A vote on that pro­posal won’t be com­ing for another two weeks in all like­li­hood, how­ever, so even if Turkey does intro­duce a new troop deploy­ment pro­posal, it will likely be too lit­tle too late.
Which could be the Turks’ plan all along! If Turkey had the polit­i­cal cover of a UNSC res­o­lu­tion but no time to make the troop approval logis­ti­cally fea­si­ble, the Turks could always say, “Look, we approved your troops. Too bad things didn’t work out time-wise. Maybe next time.“
In other hap­pen­ings, it’s very, very good news that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mas­ter­mind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Wash­ing­ton, D.C., was cap­tured in Pak­istan. Also, intel­li­gence offi­cials said he was “car­ry­ing the names and phone num­bers of mem­bers of al-Qaeda sleeper cells in North Amer­ica.” The most dis­turb­ing detail about his life, how­ever, was that he appar­ently learned “flaw­less” Eng­lish at Chowan Col­lege, a Bap­tist uni­ver­sity in North Car­olina. Also, and per­haps most per­sonal for me as a jour­nal­ist, he appar­ently ordered the killing of Wall Street Jour­nal reporter Daniel Pearl, and may have been the man who slit his throat.
There are con­flict­ing reports of where he is or who has cus­tody of the sus­pect. An unnamed Pak­istani gov­ern­ment min­is­ter said he had been handed over to U.S. cus­tody shortly after his arrest, along with two other al Qa’ida sus­pects, in the Pak­istani city of Rawalpindi on Sat­ur­day. But Pak­istani Inte­rior Min­is­ter Faisal Saleh Hayat denied this.
“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is in the cus­tody of Pakistan’s law enforce­ment agen­cies and until we have sat­is­fied our­selves, after the inter­ro­ga­tion process, of the nature of his activ­i­ties in Pak­istan, there is no ques­tion of hand­ing him over to any­one.“
He is also, accord­ing to Hayat, still in Pak­istan.
But there are dis­turb­ing aspects to his arrest. The same Reuters story said another unnamed source, this time for the U.S. gov­ern­ment, expected Mohammed to be “interrogated” — read, “tortured” — in an undis­closed for­eign coun­try. I under­stand the neces­sity of it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it or approve of it.
And a P.S. to every­one who says mak­ing war on Iraq will make the world safer from ter­ror­ism should know that al Qa’ida recruit­ment is up all over Europe, and the war hasn’t even started yet.

The after­math of Sept. 11 and the prospect of war in Iraq have increased the num­bers of angry anti-American young men who have been pushed into the embrace of Islamic extrem­ism, accord­ing to counter-terrorism offi­cials. Extrem­ists are muscling into Euro­pean mosques, cre­at­ing new places of wor­ship and win­ning con­verts. … A war in Iraq could turn many mod­er­ate Mus­lims into extrem­ists and drive many extrem­ists over the line between mali­cious intent and action, experts say.
“The strat­egy of the ter­ror­ists is to cre­ate a clash of civ­i­liza­tions,” [Jean-Louis] Bruguiere, [France’s top anti-terrorist judge] said. “And they will use the war to incite vio­lence against the West. A war will have a direct impact on the level of recruitment.”

This is one of my main crit­i­cisms against a war with Iraq. There are much bet­ter ways of deal­ing with ter­ror­ism, as the arrest of Mohammed shows, than embark­ing on mil­i­tary adven­tures with only the most pollyanna-ish of con­se­quences envisioned.

Turkey says no to U.S. deployment — Is this the start of real democracy in Turkey?

Posted on by
2

In the span of a few min­utes this morn­ing, the Turk­ish par­lia­ment approved the deploy­ment of 62,000 U.S. troops, 255 war­planes and 65 heli­copters in a squeaker vote (264 to 250 with 19 absten­tions) only to have the vote nul­li­fied a few moments later by speaker of par­lia­ment Speaker Bulent Arinc because a major­ity of leg­is­la­tors present had not voted in favor. He then shut down the par­lia­ment until Tues­day.
This will throw some sand in the gears of the U.S. war machine, to say the least, as Turkey appar­ently refuses to stay bought. The $15 bil­lion in loans and grants — and the right to run roughshod over Iraq’s Kurds — isn’t enough.
Believe it or not, this is cause for hope, and not for any rea­sons hav­ing to do with stop­ping the war, which is a train that left the sta­tion some time ago. No, this is cause for hope the world is wit­ness­ing the grow­ing pains of a mature Turk­ish democ­racy.
About 94 per­cent of the Turk­ish pub­lic is opposed to a war on Iraq, since the coun­try suf­fered so in the first one. Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party (AKP) leader, Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan, urged party leg­is­la­tors to side with the United States and approve the deploy­ment, since Turkey needs assis­tance from the IMF and the World Bank, two insti­tu­tions dom­i­nated by the United States. The gen­er­als in Ankara also backed the vote, see­ing that Turkey is a major pur­chaser of Amer­i­can mil­i­tary hard­ware and the U.S. was the country’s most reli­able ally in the war with PKK sep­a­ratists from 1984 – 1998. Plus, the Amer­i­cans were going to let the Turks have Iraqi Kur­dis­tan.
But the unruly Turk­ish par­lia­ment — and espe­cially AKP deputies — defied their party leader and lis­tened to the Turk­ish pub­lic, diss­ing the United States on its No. 1 for­eign pol­icy issue. The dan­gers of this to Turk­ish par­lia­men­tar­i­ans are great and those who voted against the res­o­lu­tion are brave men and women.
Why? Turk­ish democ­racy has always existed under the spec­tre of mil­i­tary coups. If the civil­ian gov­ern­ment got too unruly, the mil­i­tary would step in and take con­trol to pro­tect the sec­u­lar nature of the repub­lic and its inter­ests, as it did in 1960, 1980 and 1997. To their credit, the gen­er­als never wanted to rule Turkey for its own sake; they gen­uinely believed they were uphold­ing the ideals of Kemal Mustafa Atatürk and quickly turned power back over to a more pli­able civil­ian gov­ern­ment. How­ever, this pater­nal atti­tude has stunted Turk­ish democ­racy and retarded its pace in reach­ing Atatürk’s goal of a West­ern, sec­u­lar democ­racy with a seat at Europe’s table as an equal.
And now, we are faced with another cri­sis. If the gen­er­als don’t step in and push the AKP out of power as they did with the Wel­fare Party, another Islamist polit­i­cal group, in 1997, the world could be see­ing the peo­ple of Turkey enjoy­ing true democ­racy for the the first time in the his­tory of their young repub­lic. Turkey would enjoy a gov­ern­ment with­out the threat of a parental mil­i­tary step­ping in and “fix­ing” things. The coun­try would finally be able to let its own very capa­ble cit­i­zenry make deci­sions through the bal­lot box — and it would be forced to live with their deci­sions. That’s the def­i­n­i­tion of true democ­racy, and the cit­i­zens of Turkey have wanted it — and deserved it — for far too long.
Make no mis­take. If this vote sticks and the mil­i­tary stays out of it, it will not be easy for Turkey. They are heav­ily depen­dent on the IMF and World Bank for eco­nomic assis­tance and the United States will no doubt retal­i­ate for Turkey’s “treach­er­ous” actions, a.k.a., lis­ten­ing to the will of the peo­ple. (The United States has already threat­ened to retal­i­ate against Ger­many and France.) The eco­nomic dam­age from a war in Iraq will be high, pos­si­bly higher than the $100 bil­lion Turkey says it has suf­fered since 1991. But I sus­pect that if Turkey defied the United States on this issue, it might find itself more wel­come in Europe’s bosom when France and Ger­many look a lit­tle more kindly on the Turks…

Gen. Franks in theater… Prelude to war?

Posted on by
Reply
preview21.jpg
The hull of a destroyed Iraqi tank is back­lit by the burn­ing Al Ahmadi oil­fields, which were set on fire by retreat­ing Iraqi troops in 1991 after the first Gulf War. (®) 1991 Allan Tan­nen­baum

Gen­eral Tommy Franks, the man who will run the war against Iraq, arrived Tues­day at his com­mand post in Qatar, accord­ing to Reuters. Camp As Sayliyah will be the for­ward posi­tion for com­mand­ing U.S. and allied forces against Sad­dam Hussein’s army when hos­til­i­ties begin. Nor­mally based in Tampa, Fla., the com­man­der of Cen­tral Com­mand is expected to stay in Qatar “until the Iraq cri­sis was over,” accord­ing to offi­cials in Florida.
But a senior Cen­tral Com­mand offi­cial said Franks would be return­ing to Florida in a few days. “Mod­ern com­mand and con­trol does not require him to be here all the time,” the offi­cial said. “Don’t place a lot of impor­tance on where he is … Good mil­i­tary com­man­ders focus on strate­gic sur­prise.“
More­over, Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald Rums­feld said last week that U.S. troops are in posi­tion and ready. More than 200,000 troops are in the region, with 105,000 in Kuwait alone. More will surely fol­low, assum­ing Turkey approves the deploy­ment of up to 62,000 troops (although it will take a cou­ple of weeks to bring them up to speed.)
Strat­for engages in some intrigu­ing spec­u­la­tion con­cern­ing the con­flu­ence of events and peo­ple in the region:

… achiev­ing strate­gic sur­prise in this war is going to be tough. What can be a sur­prise in this war is tim­ing. Every­one is focused on mid-March as the begin­ning of the war. While it is not nec­es­sary for the senior com­man­der to be present at the bat­tle­field, it has cer­tainly been stan­dard prac­tice in the U.S. mil­i­tary that the com­man­der be as close to the bat­tle­field as pos­si­ble. Even with superb infor­ma­tion flows, a com­man­der needs to be seen by his troops, and he must have the abil­ity to move about the bat­tle­field to absorb real­i­ties that the finest dig­i­tized infor­ma­tion doesn’t pro­vide. Finally, given the cul­ture of the U.S. mil­i­tary, it is just hard to imag­ine a senior com­man­der stay­ing behind in Tampa while a mul­ti­di­vi­sional force under his com­mand engages the enemy. It just isn’t the way it’s done.

This brings me back to March 1 as the pre­ferred attack date, as it’s a new moon. Fur­ther­more, as the moon waxes, it will remain below the Iraqi hori­zon until 4 a.m. or so until mid-March. Many sig­nals will be gleaned from Franks’ trav­els. If he does return to Florida in a few days, it’s unlikely an attack will occur in early March and mid-March is the likely date. But if he stays…
Of course, Franks’ jet­set­ting could be part of a plan to throw Iraq off bal­ance, as they’re quite capa­ble of mak­ing the same analy­sis of the general’s move­ments as Strat­for and oth­ers are. And while it’s prefer­able for Franks to be in the region when the bat­tle is joined, it’s not a require­ment, espe­cially as he could be there in hours. With America’s empha­sis on blitzkrieg–like “shock and awe” bat­tle tac­tics, if I were Sad­dam and knew Franks was on his way over, I’d skip town. By then, how­ever, it will prob­a­bly be too late.
A word on “shock and awe:” I’m all for end­ing wars quickly and with the min­i­mum amount of peo­ple dead, but this strat­egy looks like one that has been drawn up by some­one who has never seen ground com­bat. Sig­nif­i­cantly, the only mem­ber of Bush’s War Coun­cil who is actively for the war and has seen active duty is Rums­feld, who was a navy pilot from 1954 – 1957, con­ve­niently miss­ing the Korean War. Rums­feld is also one of the archi­tects of the “shock and awe” the­ory of mod­ern war­fare. As a friend of mine in the infantry told me, “Things look a whole lot dif­fer­ent on the ground than when you’re look­ing at a lit­tle com­puter screen at 20,000 feet. They don’t know what it’s like.“
Of course, inter-branch rival­ries are well know, but he has a point. The cur­rent plan, as pub­lished, calls lfor 800 Tom­a­hawk attacks on Bagh­dad and 3,000 smart bomb attacks across the coun­try in 48 hours. Assum­ing a 90% accu­racy for the smart bombs and Tom­a­hawks, that’s still 80 stray cruise mis­siles and 300 mis­tak­enly bombed tar­gets. And hell, since the “smart” in smart bombs and cruise mis­siles relies on accu­rate intel­li­gence data, 90% accu­racy is prob­a­bly giv­ing a lot more credit than is due. Remem­ber that lit­tle mat­ter of the Chi­nese Embassy in Bel­grade back in the last war? The bomb hit pre­cisely where it was sup­posed to go, but the mil­i­tary had the wrong infor­ma­tion on the tar­get. And that was one foul-up. How many will there be in Bagh­dad, a city the size of Paris with 4.5 mil­lion peo­ple? As I said, 80… At least.
I know civil­ians die in war. It’s tragic but also unavoid­able. (Unless you don’t go to war at all, but that’s not very likely is it?) But when al-Jazeera broad­casts footage of the vic­tims of bombed mosques, hos­pi­tals and orphan­ages to the world, angry Mus­lims won’t care that Sad­dam placed mil­i­tary tar­gets next to a mosque and thus shares respon­si­bil­ity for its destruc­tion and civil­ian deaths. All they’ll see is a bomb cas­ing with a “Made in the U.S.A.” label on it. And we’ll have made al Qa’ida’s recruit­ing job easy.