Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

President Bush said he was certain weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq prior to the March 2003 assault on Iraq.  Yet his war plan was not one to contain those weapons.  The 1990 offensive in Iraq met the definition of containment:  to hold back or within fixed limits, to check the power, expansion, influence.  The plan created by Schwartzkopf in 1990 used several hundred miles of the northern border of Saudi Arabia as a staging ground for troops, from the Persian Gulf along the Kuwait/Saudi border to Ratha in Saudi Arabia.  When the troops on the Southern Iraq border began to move they went north and east;  cutting off escape for the retreating Iraq army and fragmenting their forces with 4,000 U.S. tanks, 1,700 helicopters and 251,500 troops from the Persian Gulf States of U.A.E., Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and Oman.  Even Afghanistan contributed 300 troops.

The war plan for the March 2003 offensive cut the number of U.S. troops in half from 500,000 to 200,000.  Allied troops were reduced from 251,500 to 30,000.  Because no Persian Gulf nations joined in the March 2003 offensive all troops had to enter Iraq from the Northern border of Kuwait.  It took three weeks to reach Bagdad.  Three weeks with no troops on the borders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria or Turkey.  Time that might have allowed WMD to disappear.  With all the troops and heavy equipment entering through one narrow border and no allies surrounding Iraq there could not be an effort to contain WMD.

There were five heavily traveled routes maintained well enough for heavy equipment to move out of Iraq.   They were put in place by the United Nations Oil for Food Program and were used to move food and oil field equipment into Iraq.  They were at Judayyidat "Ar" in Saudi Arabia;  Trebil, Jordan;  Walid, Syria;  and Zakho, Turkey.  None of these exits could be shut off because none of the Countries that held these common borders supported the Bush II war effort.  If the war had been fought to contain the weapons of mass destruction, it would have encircled the enemy then moved from all sides into the center.  Of course, many of the weapons Saddam was accused of having could have been transported by burro or jeep out of the Country where no regular crossings could be monitored.  And maybe that was a reason the Iraqi neighbors did not want to eliminate Saddam.  It would be better having the weapons in Iraq under his control than exiting Iraq where they could find their way onto the same black market that  nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union have been discovered.

The question arises, again, with all the intelligence and the absolute certainty exhibited by the President and his closest advisors why did the U.S. Military fight a war with no effort at all toward containing the weapons of mass destruction.  A clue might be found in the plan for the Afghanistan war in the prior year.  The objective of the Afghanistan war was to remove the Taliban  and capture or eliminate Osama bin Laden.  Bush chose to go to war in Afghanistan with no allies from a Western Nation.  

Instead an alliance was made between the CIA and a group of Afghan warlords known as the Northern Alliance.  A loose group of war lords who had brutally controlled Afghanistan before the Taliban brutally controlled Afghanistan.  It was known before the Afghanistan war was begun that the leaders in the Northern Alliance could probably "be bought off by the Taliban."  (BUSH AT WAR;  Woodward, p.35). We had the sympathy of the world after September 11, why did we fight a war with allies we had to bribe rather than allies that were with us in ideology?  Again, according to Bush at War the president is impatient.  The President expected the military to be ready on his time table.  "I can be an impatient person" Bush said. (p157)  

The CIA was given between $125Million and $200Million to arm the Northern Alliance.  This Alliance was paid by the CIA to protect the borders of Afghanistan so that the al Qaida could not escape.  Unfortunately, this mix of war and free market capitalism did not contain the enemy.  The Bush administration knew before the first shell was launched that the military buildup alone had scattered al Qaida.  They fled into Pakistan, they dispersed into the country side, they disappeared back into their lives.  It is several years since the war to contain AlQaida and to take out Osama bin Laden began and neither objective has been achieved.  Instead, the AlQaida is now operating in Uzbeckistan, Iraq, Spain, Great Britain, Indonesia and probably still in the United States.

Paul O'Neill tells us the planning to eliminate Saddam Hussein began early in 2001.   By March 2003 the Bush administration had accumulated a tremendous amount of intelligence on Iraq.  According to Bob Woodward's Sunday, March 23, 2003, article the CIA began operating paramilitary teams in Iraq in June 2002.  The military was operating in Northern Iraq as early as January 30, 2003, according to Jamie McIntyre of CNN.com/world.  In order to increase surveillance in the Afghan/Iraq areas the National Reconnaissance Office which already controls all U.S. Government satellites bought up all images from the two companies that fly commercial imaging satellites when the planning for the Afghanistan campaign began.   A new agency was created, the Transformational Communications Office in September 2002, to coordinate all the intelligence.

George Bush said in an interview with Tim Russert on February 8, 2004, that the weapons he believed were in Iraq "could have been transported to another country".   With all the satellite technology controlled by the U.S. Government, when the President says the weapons may have moved to another country, he should be taken seriously.   The best that the American people might hope for is that this President was lying about weapons of mass destruction.   Because if he believed he was telling the truth why did the military plan make no attempt to contain those weapons?  If the President was telling the truth and fought two wars in two years that failed to contain either one of his objectives, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq would surely be two of the greatest military defeats in history.