Generals Talk Logistics
I should probably spend time convincing you that the United States should not go to war with Iran. A good place to start would be something Yglesias wrote yesterday:
It really is striking how un-optimistic the more optimistic views of Iraq are when you get down to it. Michael O’Hanlon thinks our strategy “probably can’t succeed” unless the political situation in Iraq magically alters. General Petraeus thinks he’s making so much progress that the war will need to continue twice as long again as it’s already gone on. More to the point, once you’re looking at that kind of time frame, all forecasts are nonsensical. We could leave tomorrow and ten years might be plenty of time for Iraq to descend deeper into civil war, for the civil war to end, and then for stability to emerge.
If O’Hanlon thinks that by 2011 we’ll only have drawn down to 100,000 troops, that suggests he doesn’t think total withdrawal will happen until, say, 2016/17 or so. In other words, nine or ten years.
which would make Iraq, even if successful, a fifteen-year war. You’ll find some administration defenders arguing that now and then the President allowed that there will be hard days ahead of us and suchlike back in late 2002, early 2003, but I defy you to claim that the Administration was trying to persuade Americans to embark on a decade and a half of war in Iraq. We were sold “greeted with flowers” and “reconstruction will pay for itself” and quickly down to 30,000 troops etc.
My point is that all this twaddle about contemplated action against Iran – it will be an air war only; it will be shock and awe against supposed nuclear sites or alleged “training camps”; we’ll let inspired “moderates” rise up and overthrow the mullahs for us – is propaganda of no worth. Once you start a war, you don’t really know where it ends.
So, is it going to happen? Robert Baer says he’s convinced it will. I’m wondering about the “Anbar Awakening.” One reason to make nice with the Sunni ultras of Western Iraq is if you figured you’d need to start moving a lot more supplies out of Jordan and Saudi Arabia instead of up the Tigris and Euphrates roads. Like, if you were about to create an awful lot of angry Shiites. You’d expect to see not just increased Sunni-US cooperation but increased traffic to Red Sea ports and a shift of logistical elements westward from Kuwait to the Jordanian and Saudi borders. So, is any of that going on?
Comment by Matt Stevens —
August 26, 2007 @ 11:24 am
The thing is, I remember posting (on my LJ) two simultaneous comments by administration figures, right before the war. One said we’d be out in three months. Another said we’d have to remake Iraqi society top-to-bottom, and it would take ten years. So you and those Bush defenders are both right, only because Bushies will say everything and anything from time to time.
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
August 26, 2007 @ 11:31 am
Well, “we’ve” sure made great progress on that remaking Iraqi society top-to-bottom. No denying that.
Comment by somebody —
August 26, 2007 @ 1:06 pm
I can’t believe that we’d be stupid enough to stay there just as long as we did in Vietnam. Unbelievable. They’re just making the comparisons easier.
Comment by Nell —
August 26, 2007 @ 1:19 pm
Wouldn’t you also see a reduction in the amount of stuff moving along the Shia highways? Or not necessarily?
There’s also murky stuff happening intermittently in the far north. Is bringing stuff in from Turkey a possibility? Things that make me go ‘hm; are:
- Novak’s leak a few weeks ago about U.S. military operations to kill and capture PKK leaders in northern Iraq/Kurdistan.
- Alleged Iranian shelling across the border to get at PEJAK, a PKK-split group that is operating in Iran and northern Iraq/Kurdistan.
I’d thought of those developments more in the way of opportunities to create the provocation that can “justify” a U.S. strike, but I can see the presence of U.S. mil in the north also as a cover for logistical buildup.
Comment by Nell —
August 26, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
#$&^%^!! Just had a linky comment eaten.
Short version: Might there also be logistical buildup via the north?
I’m thinking of Novak’s recent leak about U.S. military ops to kill/capture PKK leaders there.
Also recent stories in Time and ABC about murky cross-border operations between Iran and northern Iraq/Kurdistan, involving alleged shelling by Iran, a downed Iranian helicopter, operations by PEJAK, a Kurdish insurgent group in Iran and in the north that is a split from PKK.
I’d thought of those mainly as fine opportunities for the provocation needed to justify a U.S. strike on Iran, but now am looking at them also as possible cover for logistical buildup.
Will try the links again in a separate post.
Also, wrt shifting supply routes west and north: Would there also be a noticeable reduction in the southern route, or not necessarily?
Comment by Nell —
August 26, 2007 @ 1:28 pm
Why is Iran Shelling Iraq?, 20 August
questions about authenticity of leaflets warning of Iranian troops massed at border, 22 August
Comment by Nell —
August 26, 2007 @ 1:32 pm
Okay. It’s just not accepting the links embedded, so:
‘Why is Iran shelling Iraq ?’, 20 Aug
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1654449,00.html
(I’d have headlined that story “Is Iran shelling Iraq?” but hey, that’s just me.)
questions about authenticity of leaflets warning of Iranian troops massed at border, report of downed Iranian helicopter, 22 August:
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3504532
Comment by Nell —
August 26, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
Hm. Two more comments rejected, one with links embedded, one with the urls in text. Don’t make me post about this on my own blog!
Comment by daveinboca —
August 26, 2007 @ 2:12 pm
I have lived ten years in the Middle East & read/speak Arabic having learned it in the Foreign Service Institute. The shallow vapid vacuous left resembles the Arab mind so closely they could be kissing cousins—which in the Arab world means MARRIED!!! Islamists reflect the hatred in the MSM for winners and America’s success across the board [25+% GDP of THE ENTIRE WORLD].
The left subsists on the large segment of loooozers & angry academics/know-better “helping-profession enablers” who want to reduce this country to a soup of mediocrity. The Arabs are already totally mediocre [and believe me I know]. Hence, the Dems/loons want us to become Arabs!!! And we should therefore not knock the CA-RAAAAZY Islamists who want to forcibly convert us to Islam and make our women into SLAVES. Are there any smart women on the left who have put two and two together?
I detest Rumsfeld & Cheney’s incompetence, but this war must be won. Or else the Democrats will be the new Dhimmis of the planet and inherit a terrorstorm. Don’t think they’ll stop if you give up.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 26, 2007 @ 2:18 pm
daveinboca-
As a proud dhimmi, I am forwarding your comment to my masters in The Caliphate. They’ll be on your doorstep shortly to take you to dhimmification camps.
Guys, face it: Daveinboca is right. We oppose this war because we want our women put in burqas. There is no other possible explanation.
Comment by G'Kar —
August 26, 2007 @ 2:47 pm
The trouble with the logistics question: it’s very difficult to move supplies across Iraq without running into Shiites. Even assuming the U.S. ships stuff through Saudi Arabia or Jordan, which would massively extend the supply lines now coming from Kuwait and Basra, unless they rolled as far north as Kurdistan, they’re still going to have Shiite issues. Granted, less than moving due north from Kuwait, but I suspect the Shiites would have little difficulty shifting their EFP attacks to where the supplies were going. Iraq is simply too fluid to prevent that.
Comment by Hesiod —
August 26, 2007 @ 3:44 pm
daveinboca, are you a parody, or are you just a fucking nutcase?
If you were in the foreign service, you’d think you would have a modicum of analytical skills. It seems, however, that you spent you entire time in the middle east processing visa applications in Amman.
Think about this for a minute, dumbass. All of us on “the left,” are against the encroachments on our freedoms being perpetrated by the Bush administration. So, why would we be in favor of such things if they were perpetrated by “Arabs,” who incidentally, are not all Muslims.
Something someone who spent time in the Middle East and who “speaks arabic” would know.
BTW, are the Iranians “Arabs?” Are you sure you are not Steven Den Beste? He who labelled Pakistanis, Indonesians and Iranians as “Arabs?”
Comment by josephdietrich —
August 26, 2007 @ 4:21 pm
I’m pretty sure the United States or someone very friendly with us will attack Iran. I can’t see any way around it.
Iran knows it’s on the “axis-o-evil’s” short list, so they want to develop nuclear weapons in self defense. No one with any power in the Imperial City wants this to happen, not trusting in MAD any more due to superstitious beliefs in the way the inscrutable “Arab mind” works (see the “knowledgeable” Arabic speaker’s comment above). Our good friend, Israel, really doesn’t want to see it happen. Furthermore, even if the Iranian regime wasn’t trying to build nuclear weapons for self-defense (which seems to me actually more crazy to me), there is no way they can convince the US and its good friend that this is the case. It would be the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” dog-and-pony show all over again.
The fact is, the only way the Iranian regime could ensure its own survival to the satisfaction of the US and its good friend is for it to dismantle itself. And what regime anywhere or anytime has ever actually done that all on its own? I just can’t see it.
So, we have this “problem” and it is not going to go away on its own. And the only tool that the US seems to believe it has in its toolkit any more is the military (hammer -> everything’s a nail and all that), so I think its obvious where this is going.
I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.
Comment by Anonymo —
August 26, 2007 @ 4:23 pm
I, for one, welcome our new Caliphate overlords, and remind them that as a trusted media personality, I could be useful in rounding up others to toil in their underground burqa factories.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 26, 2007 @ 4:37 pm
joseph-
What makes the “Arab mind” of the Iranians even more inscrutable is that they’re actually Persian. Which means they’re not only fanatical Islamofascists who only understand force and have a single-minded determination to destroy the world, but they’re also subtle and savvy players with cunning ways. So they’re doubly dangerous!
(Yes, the above was sarcasm.)
Comment by buermann —
August 26, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
Maybe he’s one of those Heritage foundation interns that was hired to run the CPA :p
“Would there also be a noticeable reduction in the southern route, or not necessarily?”
Look at a topological map. The route for any ground invasion would be through the south… Here’s a good one:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/iraq_rel99.jpg
That southwestern area (khuzestan) of Iran is also where most of the oil is, so it’d make sense to go there first.
But all the noise is about bombing the shit out of them, not sending in ground forces.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 26, 2007 @ 4:41 pm
Oh, I should add that as a physicist I would be especially useful to the Persian overlords of the Caliphate. I could work on the string theory used to calibrate the looms that make all those rugs.
Yes, I’m a toady for the mullahs. I don’t actually know anything about them except for stereotypes, but the stereotypes are scary enough. Can you imagine how awful the truth must be?
Excuse me, I have to change my diaper.
Comment by bryan —
August 26, 2007 @ 4:45 pm
As someone who has lived all their lives in every middle eastern country and ascended to the heights of political mastery in all those countries and that speaks arabic and farsi and every language so fluently that I do not even know how to write in your western dog tongue I must say that a tall blonde infidel woman in a burqa is what I look forward to. Given that I did not say she had to be good-looking I suppose Ann Coulter will do. Also I just think dhimmi traitors are bad.
By the way if you are surpised that someone with my qualifications would also seem to be a raving nutcase with less intellectual capacity than might be assumed mandatory for my stated background let it be known that while on the internet nobody knows if you’re a dog or not, if you start barking at every blog post and pissing in the comment thread there is a very good indicator that you may well be of the canine disposition.
Comment by Nell —
August 26, 2007 @ 5:05 pm
@buermann: I didn’t mean for purposes of sending ground troops into Iran, I was responding to Jim’s hypothetical of wanting to minimize exposure to angry Shiites after U.S. bombing of Iran (whether of IRGC camps and facilities or of nuclear sites).
Comment by Jon H —
August 26, 2007 @ 5:15 pm
joseph writes: “Our good friend, Israel, really doesn’t want to see it happen.”
Good friend? Prove it. In evidence that they are not our friend, I submit that they have spied on us (Jonathan Pollard).
What have they done for us lately?
Comment by Jon H —
August 26, 2007 @ 5:19 pm
Hey Thoreau,
If we win, can I wear a burkah?
Comment by Thoreau —
August 26, 2007 @ 5:34 pm
Jon H-
You can wear a burqa, but you also have to wear a ball gag. You’re a dhimmi, whether you like it or not. Wanting to wear a burqa proves it.
Comment by sglover —
August 26, 2007 @ 5:34 pm
You forgot to mention how lefties always resort to sweeping insults and galaxy-spanning generalizations. They’re such loooozers (hope I got the right ‘o’ count there) that it’s the only kind of “persuasion” they can manage. Believe me, I know.
I wish somebody would explain to me just how this worked: According to people like ‘daveinboca’, it wasn’t so long ago that lefties were supposed to be swooning over ferocious secularists like Marx and Lenin and Mao. Then just a few years later, they somehow got all soft and gooey for 10th Century theology — an especially odd choice, since as we all know your basic leftie is a depraved, soul-less hedonist. And how come I’m not seeing any Osama t-shirts on campus?
Comment by sglover —
August 26, 2007 @ 5:35 pm
I didn’t make it through the whole comment, so I missed this gem:
Ummmmm…. Gotta be parody, right?
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 26, 2007 @ 6:19 pm
“Inherit the Terrorstorm” could be an awesome band name.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 26, 2007 @ 6:20 pm
“Inherit the Terrorstorm” would be an awesome band name.
Comment by Anonymo —
August 26, 2007 @ 6:51 pm
Yeah, I’m thinking it’s gotta be parody since he didn’t spell it DemocRATS or Dhimmicrats.
God I hate it when morons “learn” a word like “dhimmi” or “sharia” and start using it in every fucking thing they write.
Comment by Doug T —
August 26, 2007 @ 6:53 pm
Wait, a terrorstorm? I thought I was going to be inheriting a Thunderdome.
Comment by Ishikawa —
August 26, 2007 @ 8:46 pm
“Inherit the Terrorstorm” is the next SciFi movie of the week, starring Stephen Baldwin.
Comment by buermann —
August 26, 2007 @ 9:33 pm
Inherit the Terrorstorm! Is it a warning or a command?
I need to quit blogging, pick up my banjo, and start that band.
Comment by BruceR —
August 27, 2007 @ 2:42 am
And now, on public access radio, the banjo stylings of Inherit the Terrorstorm…
Comment by josephdietrich —
August 27, 2007 @ 4:20 am
Good friend? Prove it.
JonH, I didn’t want to overuse the scare-quotes in my comment. In truth, I believe Israel is our good friend insomuch as we are useful to them; but then that defines pretty much every relationship between every national government on Earth, so that is not particularly exceptional.
Comment by Hogan (not matthew) —
August 27, 2007 @ 9:00 am
I’m gonna get dhimmitude and inherit a terrorstorm? Man, that sucks. I thought it would be one or the other.
Comment by Barry —
August 27, 2007 @ 11:13 am
Comment by Thoreau —
“daveinboca-
As a proud dhimmi, I am forwarding your comment to my masters in The Caliphate. They’ll be on your doorstep shortly to take you to dhimmification camps.”
Too late; I’ve already got him reserved. And it won’t be for dhimmification; he’ll be a Unix programmer, so to speak
Comment by ajay —
August 28, 2007 @ 5:20 am
Or, possibly, they don’t think they can hold down Basra and Umm Qasr once the British have gone.
Well, gosh, Mr Rumsfeld, do you think you might have needed the allies after all?
Comment by Nell —
August 28, 2007 @ 5:25 pm
Fester throws cold water on these logistical speculations at the Newshoggers.