From Belfast to Baghdad via Basra
British forces left behind to staff the checkpoints, control the roads and occupy the cities here in southern Iraq say the military campaign for them has taken on the feel of a Belfast-style guerrilla war.
The dusty cities of Iraq are a world away from the gloomy back streets of Belfast. But decades of conflict in Northern Ireland have given British troops plenty of experience in guerrilla warfare, sharpening their senses for some of the scenarios they now face in Iraq … There is a generation out there who still remember doing night patrol in Belfast with camouflage cream and night sights. The Americans have done the training but we have the practical application, our troops are mentally tuned.” … The British military has lost about 500 soldiers in Northern Ireland of around 3,700 people killed in total since the conflict flared at the end of 1969. Numbers of troops in the British-ruled province, which IRA guerrillas want united with Ireland to the south, have gone from 6,100 in 1969 to a height of 25,700 in 1972 and 13,500 now.
Given that the UK had to emplace some 20K troops for 25+ years to police around 1 million Irish, and given the unsettlingly familiar pattern of stiff anti-US/UK violence emerging within southern Iraq, this could be a very messy, very costly occupation indeed. Apparently, Tommy Franks displays the same kind of unbridled optimism that deluded Westmoreland and Abrams in Vietnam. Then again, thanks to Saddam’s Stalin-like purges, Franks is not facing a military genius like Vo Nguyen Giap or a political genius such as Gerry Adams… at least not yet. A prolonged, conflicted occupation, however, would create the ruthless Darwinian conditions necessary for such an Iraqi leader to emerge.
Military analysts said on Monday that Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, may be taking unnecessary risks in the strategy he is employing, including stretching supply lines, allowing concentrations of enemy forces in the rear of his advancing troops, and using an invasion force that simply may be too small for the task at hand.
“The force is so light that it probably has the lowest ratio to enemy forces of any major ground campaign we’ve fielded in the last century,” said military analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute think tank in Virginia.
In essence the United States is attacking a dozen Iraqi divisions with two divisions of its own, he said. Divisions generally are composed of roughly 15,000 troops.