TWO CENTS' WORTH
The war that could destroy both armies
By Henry C K Liu

The undeclared US war on Iraq ended some six months ago in a matter of weeks,
mostly through bribery of an Iraqi high command infiltrated by US special
operations that had been embedded during years of better relations in the
Iran-Iraq War and military cooperation with its US counterpart, making treasonous
plots possible. That may explain why the US high command had been so confident of
a quick victory in defiance of mainstream military logic.

The Iraqi rank and file had also been demoralized by psychological pressure
from relentless "shock and awe" strikes launched from locations safely beyond
retaliatory range. Yet like Napoleon Bonaparte, who upon entering Moscow was
astounded by his inability to find the czar to confirm an honorable victory, US
President George W Bush, by his dubious war policy to assassinate an opponent
chief of state by smart bombs, was unable to find Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein in Baghdad from whom to accept an honorable surrender. It is now plain for
all to see that while the world's sole superpower may be able to topple a
foreign government by the use of less-than-honorable force and force its leader to
go underground, it is another matter to occupy a nation one-tenth its size to
set up a puppet government to bring peace and order, even for a country the
allegedly oppressed population of which US "experts" on Iraqi politics had
predicted would welcome a US invasion with flowers and hugs instead of
rocket-propelled grenades.

It is interesting and instructive to compare the 19th-century British
subjugation of India, a country 10 times the size of Britain, with a mere 75,000
expeditionary troops transported across oceans with slow sailing ships, with the
quagmire the United States is facing in Iraq with 100,000 air-lifted combat
soldiers. The British did not claim to liberate India from its numerous
principalities ruled by maharajas. Instead, it built a political unit in the British
Empire to incorporate the separate princely states that had existed in
pre-British India. There was no sudden regime change. The British did not face
resistance until decades later, when the adverse effect of being non-white subjects of
the British Empire dawned on thinking Indians, who gradually took up the
European concept of nationalism as an anti-imperialism ideology. Britain solved
the problem by having Queen Victoria assume the title of Empress of India (she
was never Empress of the British Empire) and kept India for another century.

The new proponents of "empire" would do well to note that the world has
changed since the Victorian era. Arab nationalism, promoted first by Western
imperialism during World War I as a destabilizing force against the Ottoman
Dominion, is a genie that cannot be forced back into the bottle at the pleasure of
neo-imperialism in the 21st century.

The Iraqi army has been destroyed by the second Iraq War, with its treasonous
high command sheltered by a secret US protection program, and its common
soldiers joining the ranks of the unemployed at home under US occupation.
Resistance in the form of guerrilla attacks against foreign occupation is now being
waged by an aroused civilian population. Not only Sunni loyalists to Saddam, but
Shi'ites, who constitute some 60 percent of the population and were expected
by US "experts" on Iraq to be tolerant, if not ecstatic, about a US
"presence", if not liberation, have formed guerrilla cells of armed resistance against
US occupation forces. This is understandable, since the United States has made
clear that it will not permit a Shi'ite majority to dominate any new Iraqi
government, democracy or no democracy. Theocratic democracy is only tolerated in
Christian nations.

Last Friday, four more US soldiers were killed in one of the latest clashes
with militant Shi'ite clerics working for Mahmoud al-Hassani. Mahmoud is an
ally of Muqtada al-Sadr - the son of a revered Shi'ite cleric who was killed in
1999 - whose forces clashed a week earlier with US soldiers and killed two of
them. Muqtada proclaimed his own government in Iraq during his weekly sermon on
the previous Friday, October 10, in Kufa, near Najaf, a city south of Baghdad
considered holy by the Shi'ites. This pattern of attack on US occupation
forces can be expected to escalate. If the Shi'ites turned in large numbers
against US occupation, the effect could be explosive both in Iraq and in domestic US
politics.

The Associated Press has started a report on the number of daily US deaths in
Iraq. According to the Department of Defense, as of Friday, October 17, a
total of 336 US service members had died since the beginning of military
operations in Iraq, up from 326 a week earlier. Since May 1, when Bush declared that
major combat operations in Iraq had ended, at least 198 US soldiers have died
in Iraq, 63 more than the 132 killed in war combat. Since the start of military
operations, at least 1,536 US service members have been injured as a result
of hostile action, according to US Central Command. Non-hostile injured
numbered 335. At the rate of 10 war deaths per week, the US military is looking at a
death rate of 520 per year of occupation, not counting likely catastrophic
incidents as the resistance gains experience and support.

The United States faces a lengthy, open-ended military occupation of Iraq,
requiring more than 100,000 troops. In a mid-August briefing, General Tommy
Franks, then head of the Central Command, suggested that the length of the US
military presence in Afghanistan could end up rivaling the 50-year US presence in
South Korea. As Iraqi and Afghan resistance mounts as a natural reaction to
foreign occupation, more US troops will inevitably be needed in response,
increasing the statistical prospect for higher casualties.

The United States possesses the best-trained and best-equipped offensive
force in the world, which it spends about US$400 billion annually to sustain, more
than the combined total of all other major military powers. Yet there is no
more eroding effect on an offensive force than duties of occupation. Soldiers
are ideally non-thinking, order-taking killing machines, and as such cannot be
effective police officers. Good policing requires members of the police force
to think, evaluate and make moral judgments, which in turn makes them
ineffective soldiers. Killing opponent soldiers on the battlefield is honorable by
military code, while killing civilians by armed police, even in self-defense,
turns any police force into a tool of oppression. This has been a military truism
from the time of the Roman legions down to the German Wehrmacht.

The United States maintains 1.5 million active troops, with a reserve of 2
million. There are more than 300,000 US troops currently deployed around the
world in 120 countries. Incoming National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told
the New York Times shortly after the 2000 election, "The United States is the
only power that can handle a showdown in the [Persian] Gulf, mount the kind of
force that is needed to protect Saudi Arabia, and deter a crisis in the
Taiwan Strait. And extended peacekeeping detracts from our readiness for these
kinds of global missions." Incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell also weighed
in, stating that "our plan is to undertake a review right after the president
is inaugurated and take a look not only at our deployments in Bosnia but in
Kosovo and many other places around the world, and make sure those deployments
are proper. Our armed forces are stretched rather thin, and there is a limit to
how many of these deployments we can sustain."

Since World War II, the United States has gradually set up a global military
"base network" backed by locally based military bases. In order to push its
global strategy, the total number of such military bases (facilities), big and
small, exceeded 5,000 at their peak, half of which were located overseas, with
troops surpassing 610,000. The US military has also formed an overseas base
layout featuring a combination of points with lines and multi-level disposition,
the control of main strategic points and vital passages on the sea. After the
Cold War, because of the limitation of its national defense expenses and
popular opposition in the host countries, the United States repeatedly reduced its
troops stationed overseas. US troops abroad had shrunk to 247,000 people
before the second Iraq War. At the end of the Iraq War, the US Army announced its
plan to set up four military bases in Iraq. Up to now it still has more than
100,000 troops stationed in Iraq and it will keep a considerable scale of
forces there for a long time to come.

Since the events of September 11, 2001, the United States has looked upon
terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as the greatest
threats to its national security, thinking that the main threat comes from the
"unstable arc-shaped region" encompassing the coastal areas of the Caribbean
Sea, Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia and the
Korean Peninsula. The US Defense Department has drastically adjusted the
disposition of its overseas troops around this "unstable arc-shaped region" to cope
effectively with a global "preventive" war.

Advance disposition is a deployment concept of positioning in advance a
considerable number of weapons and equipment in overseas bases, doing the defense
and garrison work with very small forces. When a crisis erupts, US forces will
be sent by quick transport to the crisis region and, by relying on the advance
installed weapons and equipment, quickly generate combat effectiveness in the
crisis region and carry out operational tasks. Currently, US forces have
deployed equipment and materials for two army divisions in Europe and four marine
expeditionary brigades each in Norway, Guam, Diego Garcia and the Atlantic. In
addition, US forces have 12 mobile advance-storage ships in the Mediterranean
and Indian Ocean regions.

In recent years, the United States has notably increased its input in key
bases by constantly rebuilding and expanding. US forces transferred part of the
facilities originally positioned in the Philippines' Subic Base to Guam, and
built the largest US ammunition-storing facility, strategic bombers and
strategic missile nuclear submarines base in the Far East. The US Navy's Northeast
Asian bases group centered on Yokosuka, Japan, has been strengthened
continuously. The expanded Diego Garcia Base now serves B-2 strategic bombers. US forces
have drafted a plan for constructing a marine "floating island", one formula of
which is to construct a joint movable ocean base (JMOB). The JMOB can reduce
existing army units' dependence on forward bases and can reduce onshore
military logistic facilities to the minimum. It can also selectively provide
assistance to shore army units. And JMOB can provide an all-directional joint
operational platform for the expeditionary troops. Under the circumstance of no
combat task, the different modules of the JMOB can be used separately. In the
unstable and constantly changing security environment, its separate parts can
provide low-risk yet very strong mobile capacity for US troops.

Judging from the plan for the adjustment of the disposition of forces
recently released by the Defense Department, US overseas military presence has
witnessed the trend of development in the direction from the "forward-leaning
presence" to the "in-depth presence" or to the "elasticity presence". For example,
after the eruption of the Korean nuclear crisis, the United States began to
reconsider the question of stationing troops in Northeast Asia. The United States
moved its 37,000 troops stationed in the Republic of Korea (ROK) out of the
long-range-artillery attacking scope of the North Korean army and plan to cut
further the scale of the entire US troop contingent in the ROK.

The New York Times in an October 5 editorial titled "An overstretched army in
Iraq" began with the sentence: "Now that it is clear the United States faces
a lengthy military occupation of Iraq, requiring perhaps 100,000 troops for
the foreseeable future, it is possible to begin calculating how the war may
damage the American armed forces." It went on to warn that "the burden of
occupation will start to strain severely the army's capacity to deploy trained and
rested combat forces worldwide in a matter of months".

For the long term, not only will the lives of thousands of military families
be disrupted, the army reserve system behind the United States' move to a
smaller, volunteer army three decades ago will be put at severe risk and "the
global reach of American foreign policy will almost inevitably be diminished",
said the Times. Nearly half of the army's 33 combat brigades are now in
continuous harm's way in the Persian Gulf region. Replacing all of them with fresh
units would leave the army hard-pressed to meet its obligations elsewhere,
including Afghanistan and the Korean Peninsula.

A congressional study last month found that unless major adjustments are
made, the army will be forced to shrink its occupation force to less than half,
including cutting "other international commitments". The Iraq War shows that a
superpower empire cannot be maintained without a massive occupational force,
something that the US lacks. The Times observed that this is "another
regrettable consequence of the unilateral way America went to war in Iraq".

A reader wrote on April 7: "If you want Asia Times Online to be taken
seriously, you might want to consider not using any more items from Henry C K Liu [<A HREF="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED05Ak01.html">
The war that may end the age of superpower</A>, Apr 5]...Suggestion: Reread his
article six months from now as a test of his ability to prognosticate."

Six months have passed and I repeat: This war may end the age of superpower.

Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.

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