Subscribe Patton on Iraq
posted in political by jon on 2004-10-26
Excellant article discussing the strategy and tactics we SHOULD befollowing in the Iraqi conflict, using Patton as an example.Excerpt below:
Hillsdale CollegeThese lessons also apply in recent times. In the first Gulf War, Saddam put almost 250,000 Iraqi troops in bunkers in the sand, and even after weeks of U.S. bombing they were still operational. In response, General Schwarzkopf marched hundreds of miles around the flank, leaving many of the entrenched Iraqi positions behind and headed toward Basra, his long flanks covered by air support. But although we copied Patton's tactics, we forgot their purpose - stopping at the so-called Highway of Death because of the television images of "thousands" of enemy dead. Pentagon staffers worried at the time that 20,000 enemy soldiers had been killed, thus causing a global uproar. We know now that the real number was in the hundreds - and that when we stopped before Basra, fleeing Iraqis did not, and they killed thousands of mostly defenseless Shiites and Kurds over the next few weeks. And over the next 12 years, Anglo-American pilots flew thousands of missions in the Iraq no-fly zones, all as a precursor to the second Iraq war. In short, we forgot Patton's most important lesson: the purpose of outflanking the enemy is to demoralize and annihilate the enemy, thus removing the reasons to go to war in the first place.
