Dash to Baghdad Left Top U.S. Generals Divided

[cal04]

The war was barely a week old when Gen. Tommy R. Franks threatened to fire the Army's field commander.
From the first days of the invasion in March 2003, American forces had tangled with fanatical Saddam Fedayeen paramilitary fighters. Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, who was leading the Army's V Corps toward Baghdad, had told two reporters that his soldiers needed to delay their advance on the Iraqi capital to suppress the Fedayeen threat in the rear.

Soon after, General Franks phoned Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, the head of allied land forces, to warn that he might relieve General Wallace. The firing was averted after General McKiernan flew to meet General Franks. But the episode revealed the deep disagreements within the United States high command about the Iraqi military threat and what would be required to defeat it.

The dispute, related by military officers in interviews, had lasting consequences. The unexpected tenacity of the Fedayeen in the battles for Nasiriya, Samawa, Najaf and other towns on the road to Baghdad was an early indication that the adversary was not merely Saddam Hussein's vaunted Republican Guard. The paramilitary Fedayeen were numerous, well-armed, dispersed throughout the country, and seemingly determined to fight to the death. But while many officers in the field assessed the Fedayeen as a dogged foe, General Franks and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld saw them as little more than speed bumps on the way to Baghdad.

Three years later, Iraq has yet to be subdued. Many of the issues that have haunted the Bush administration about the war — the failure to foresee a potential insurgency and to send sufficient troops to stabilize the country after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled — were foreshadowed early in the conflict. How some of the crucial decisions were made, the behind-the-scenes debate about them and early cautions about a sustained threat have not been previously known.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/international/middleeast/13command.html?hp&ex=1142226000&en=6d9e5888362acdbb&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[acmavm]

1. They blame this on incompetent generals all the time. And don't get

me wrong, we had some doozies. But hell, does anyone think that the inability of overpower and occupy the country is because the Iraqi people DON'T WANT US THERE??????????

[Warren Stupidity]

2. No quite a few people (even here) continue to not get this simple

and obvious point. Our occupation was doomed from the moment we started rolling towards Baghdad.

[NNN0LHI]

3. These Fedayeen are the few dead enders that Rumsfeld spoke of...

...three years ago. They showed us how desperate they are today when they blew one of our tanks to smithereens. They can run but they can't hide alright.

Don

[madrchsod]

4. what the fuck ? the new york times finally decided to print this?

i read about this about 6-8 months into the war in the proceedings magazine.
http://www.usni.org/proceedings/procurrenttoc.htm
we could have taken baghdad and won the people to our side but we decided to destroy baghdad instead of liberating it and provide security..

[carpetbagger]

5. Not surprising.

I think there are some legitimate debates there. I don't think it made a bit of difference at the end whether the Fedayeen were tackled before or after the fall of Baghdad, in the end. Where we failed was in not having a sufficient force package to take charge of Iraq after the advance. Remember, we had light casualties and wary but sincere approval for a few months in the spring of 2003. The Fedayeen were dead-enders. They were able to become active again, and gain followers, because of our failure to rule in Iraq.

My guess is that these battles have more to do with divisions in military strategy that run far deeper than the individual tactical decision. The old, WWI/WWII/Korea style of fighting, which was also the style of the Gulf War, was two lines of troops against each other, advancing and retreating like the tides. Many strategists propose realignment of the army into a more sector-occupation-two dimentional setup. I think that was what was going on, maybe with some pollyanna input from Rumsfeld and Franks.