By Michel Moutot
Middle East OnlineMarch 28, 2003
The US-led war in Iraq has run into trouble because of miscalculation, too much restraint and failure to assemble an overwhelming force at the outset, two leading US dailies said Friday. Allied forces are having difficulty reaching Baghdad because "the Bush administration misread the Iraqis," The New York Times said in a military analysis.
Confident that Iraq would opt for an "urban-centric" defense around Baghdad, "what the Pentagon did not understand was that the Iraqis planned to expand that strategy to include Nasiriya, Najaf, Samawa and other towns in southern Iraq." The other reason the war has been so vexing, the analyst said, was that "the Pentagon did not gather an overwhelming force to start the campaign."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides relied too much on high-tech military gear, thinking that "small, mobile but potent forces ... are the wave of the future," the analyst added. "But airplanes do not hold territory," and now the allied force is stretched too thin and "faces the prospect of a longer war." "The most important lesson we've learned in the first week of the Iraq war is that it's harder to kill a regime than it is to defeat an army," wrote The Wall Street Journal.
The effort, the editorial said, has been "defined by restraint," while the Iraqi forces have resorted to "grotesque tactics," of terrifying their own people into fighting, and a "strategy of disguise, ambush and delay." Recalling some expert's advice that "Arab cultures despise weakness in an adversary above all," the Journal suggests that the Iraqis "will only be impressed now if they see that the US will wage this war with everything that is needed to prevail.
"If civilians die because they were placed in front of military targets, the moral responsibility for their harm will rest with those who put them there," the daily said. "While in the near term we are likely to endure some nasty TV images, in the long run this US determination will save both Iraqi and American lives."
In a separate editorial, The New York Times said the United Nations "should become the overall trustee of Iraqi sovereignty in the period before Iraqis themselves resume control." Only then can the United States prove "that its intentions are altruistic" and "begin to heal the transatlantic rift."
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