Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance

Chapter 4. Postwar Europe

Even without any pincer of American ground troops from the north, Saddam Hussein was defeated in a swift, three-week march on Baghdad. What was billed in advance as a “shock and awe” campaign of overwhelming military power worked, if not in precisely the way planned. Night goggles and other Buck Rogers wizardry enabled the infantry and air support to fight not only in darkness, but also in the sandstorm that engulfed the troops early in the campaign. Hussein fired no chemical or biological weapons at the approaching armies or at Israel. There were no columns of refugees streaming into Turkey or Jordan. Unexpectedly, the Republican Guard did not put up stiff resistance, though unexpectedly the fedayeen did, before they were overwhelmed by American and British firepower. There was muted rejoicing, especially among Shiites, as tanks entered Baghdad and routed the hated Baathists, though nothing like the rapture in Kabul as boys could again fly kites, men could shave their beards, and girls with shining eyes could go to school to learn how to read. The worst-case scenarios of the skeptics did not come to pass. American commandos got to the oilfields fast enough to prevent their being set ablaze en masse as in 1991. There was no nightmare of house-to-house fighting. The Turks did not seize Mosul, nor did Iranians seize Sulaymaniyah . The Arab street did not erupt, either in Cairo or in Islamabad. Intifada violence was no worse than usual. Precision weapons worked as well as they had in Afghanistan, even in an urban environment (in which Iraqi forces chose not to make a stand). In fact, they worked better; in the clarity of the desert and in a real rather 75 chapter four Postwar Europe 04-7153-3 ch04 11/4/03 10:31 AM Page 75 than a failed state there were no steep alpine valleys and murky loci of authority where one U.S.-allied warlord could easily slip the Americans “intelligence” that would loose satellite-guided JDAMs onto a wedding party of a rival warlord. Unfortunately, the search for the Iraqi president also worked just as well as in Afghanistan: Saddam Hussein vanished, just like Osama bin Laden before him. As of this writing, neither he nor any of his DNA remains had been found. Initially, the victory in half the time it took to pacify Afghanistan produced the same kind of jubilation in the Pentagon that the Afghan operation had set off.America’s lean twenty-first-century cavalry, defying conventional military dependence on mass, had prevailed again with speed and flexibility and net-centric gizmos.1 Major combat was declared finished on May 1. U.S. forces could be moved out of Saudi Arabia and deployed instead to a suddenly friendlier Iraq—and not a moment too soon, as terrorist violence hit the Saudi kingdom too, killing twenty-nine in a western housing compound. The downside was that now America owned Iraq, with a section of it sublet to Britain. And the new owner, with no experienced colonial service to draw on, did not know how to run the country. For Iraqis liberated from Saddam Hussein’s oppression, freedom first took the form of unbridled looting of abandoned palaces and occupied hospitals, as American soldiers stood by passively. “Stuff happens,” shrugged Rumsfeld. The American administration flirted with introducing an instant free-market economy, then on second thought did continue distributing food to the 60 percent of the population dependent on handouts. But for long months there was no restoration of reliable electricity or running water for city dwellers in the searing heat—nor were there jobs for demobilized soldiers, who took their grievance to the streets. The Eighty-Second Airborne was not in the business of escorting kindergartners to school, or ginning up the economy with workplaces, or policing the neighborhood. Tanks on the streets of Baghdad turned out to be a clumsy and counterproductive way to maintain the civil order the population demanded. The American soldiers and reserves on the spot had neither the numbers of personnel nor the training to make good riot police. Mass roundups Postwar Europe 76 04-7153-3 ch04 11/4/03 10:31 AM Page 76 after the daily hit-and-run attacks angered innocents who got swept up. Reported murders multiplied thirty-fold in Baghdad. Rapes and abductions of women increased.2 Nasty and just quirky rumors spread like...