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…
This war is over. The only question now is whether a new provisional government is installed before the BBC and The New York Times have finished running their exhaustive series on What Went Wrong with the Pentagon’s Failed War Plan and while The Independent’s Saddamite buffoon Robert Fisk is still panting his orgasmic paeans to the impenetrability of Baghdad’s defences and huffily insisting there are no Americans at the airport even as the Saddam International signs are being torn down and replaced with Rumsfeld International.
And another dig at the blogosphere’s favourite punchbag:
As I wrote back then, apropos Robert Fisk’s massive bulk loo-paper purchase in the run-up to war, “I can’t say this strikes me as a 25-roll war”. By the time you read this, Tariq Aziz and the last five Ba’athists in Baghdad may be holed up in Fisk’s Ba’athroom, and he’ll be hailing the genius of their plan to lure the Americans to their doom by leaving his loo rolls on the stairwell for the Marines to slip on.
I think this is one of Steyn’s very best pieces, and one of the best analyses of the war I’ve read from anybody, both funny and deadly serious.
I had the rather strange experience of spending the first four days of the war in Poland, and being totally dependent upon the BBC 24hr TV channel for news of what was happening.
When Private Potts of the Paras cut his finger on a sardine tin on the first Friday evening, you should have seen the consternation this was apparently causing in London and Washington, shaking the resolve of the Coalition to its foundations. It was quite a relief to get home and learn that my team was actually winning, I can tell you, rather than merely being “lured” like Living Dead extras towards Baghdad, there to be slaughtered on Ground of Saddam’s Own Choosing.
That “pause” was a pause only by the Media. They paused when they realised what prats they had made of themselves over the first weekend. Meanwhile the Coalition was pausing its way at about 40 mph towards Baghdad.
As soon as it’s all over bar the isolated sieges of nutters, the Big Media will launch a futile hunt for tens of thousands of Iraqi dead bodies, to prove that the war was really a USA and allies war crime.
When they don’t find nearly enough, which they won’t, they’ll switch to saying that the completeness of the Saddamite collapse proves that he was no threat in the first place.
And the answer to that is that Muhammed Atta and his pals wouldn’t have made much of a showing against the 3rd Infantry or the Marines (Royal or Unroyal) either. But as it was, unmolested by such things, they managed to make quite a nuisance of themselves.
Don’t bother me. I’m still stuck in the Afghanistan quagmire.
Brilliant. Thanks very much for pointing out this piece.
Looks like I’m going to have to start reading Steyn more often.
Steyn errs when he writes that this war justifies Rumsfeld’s light-on-troops strategy. In fact, it does the opposite. Rumsfeld’s supporters had been expecting the war to last only a single week; the sheer “shock and awe” of the initial bombardment would eliminate Iraqi resistance.
The key assumption behind Rumsfeld’s thinking was that few Iraqi soldiers would actually fight; most would surrender or desert almost at once. Very few have. The ones that have fought have been defeated with little difficulty, but the coalition-as-liberators scenario Rumsfeld envisaged didn’t happen.
Saddam’s loyalists are still in possession of all of Iraq’s major cities. The coalition can dislodge them if it has to, but can it do so without large civilian casualties? Doubtful.
Does this have implications for the others in the so-called “axis of evil”? Not in the slightest. Iraq was the weakest of the three. Iran and North Korea have larger and better-equipped conventional forces than Iraq did, and both have a functioning air force, which Iraq did not. North Korea also has working nuclear weapons, and has a city of 10 million people within artillery distance.
Oh, Tyrone, lad, you’re dreaming about Iran and North Korea. Iran fought Iraq for eight years and never got close to what we did in two weeks. And Kommander Kim’s Freak Show has a military stuck in 1952…with the equiment to match.
Iraq still has ragtag bands of goons running about with AKs, a few RPGs and even the odd towable artillery piece. They are a pain in the ass, but that’s about it.
To continue Jeffersonian’s correct argument:
John Keegan has asked a very good question: where are those 6 armoured RG Iraqi divisions ? We do not know, because they aren’t fighting. Rumsfeld was exactly right. There is no war in Iraq. Just sporradic guerilla attacks and a couple of suicide bombings.
Iraqi cities haven’t been occupied ? Very good. No need to. A waste of effort. Just go for the head, Saddam, the rest is irrelevant.
This is a brilliant campaign, and more so for being opportunistic and (apparently ? ) unplanned.
Jacob,
Most of the Republican Guard and Fedayeen are dead when they ran under the tracks of American Abrams and Bradleys, or deserted when their heavy equipment met American airpower on a tank to PGM basis.
The Al-Guardian says as much here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,930315,00.html
My own take on the situation is titled “A Very Victorian War” over on Winds of Change here:
http://windsofchange.net/archives/003290.html