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Posted to Archives (Press Releases)
US SUPPLY LINES IN IRAQ VULNERABLE; FORCES FACE
ENCIRCLEMENT, POCKETING, DECIMATION
Webster G. Tarpley
Both the Bush administration and its Congressional critics are ignoring the most dramatic variable in Iraq; this is the growing danger that US forces could have their supply lines cut between Kuwait and Baghdad. This would lead to the pocketing or encirclement of the US army and marines, leading to the decimation of US troops and their annihilation as an effective fighting force.
Today, all attention is on Baghdad, or else on the fighting in Anbar province. White House and the Kagan-Keane American Enterprise Institute report focus obsessively on the neighborhoods and streets of the Iraqi capital, promising that new tactics there will win the war there. In the meantime, the deadly threat of a logistical nightmare is slowly emerging hundreds of miles to the south. The US forces arrayed in Baghdad, the Sunni triangle, and Anbar province require vast quantities of fuel, ammunition, food, water, and medical supplies. These supplies arrive by freighter at the port of Kuwait and are loaded onto truck convoys. The trucks are driven by Turks, Pakistanis, Filipinos, and other south Asians. Convoys of 30-40 trucks then proceed by road to Baghdad, using roads on either side of the EuphratesRiver. Sometimes there is a US military escort; other times private military contractors provide guards. Trucks must pass through towns like Nassiriyah and Najaf, among others. The road trip is about 400 miles. Most of the way there are two main roads, which makes some 800 miles of highway that must be defended and patrolled. Long-distance high-tension electricity lines are also highly vulnerable.
Originally, this area was supposed to be guarded by a multinational force drawn from Bush’s so-called coalition of the willing. But the “coalition of the willing” has disintegrated, leaving a dangerous void. The 2,400 Poles say they are in the process of leaving. The 1,800 Italians completed their departure on December 2. The South Koreans are reducing their contingent from 3,300 to 2,600. The Australians have come down from 2,000 to 1,400. The 1,650 Ukrainians, the 1,345 Dutch, and the 1,300 Spanish are long gone. Also gone are assorted smaller forces. All in all, in excess of 12,000 coalition troops have already departed from the south-central Euphrates area, or are in the process of leaving – at least one full division. That leaves 7,200 British forces. The Daily Telegraphreported on January 11 that the UK would pull out around 2,700 troops from southern Iraq by the end of May after turning over control of the Maysan region to Iraqis in February. At this point, the critical US supply line in southern Iraq will be virtually defenseless.
The US appears determined to attack the Mahdi Army of Muktada Sadr, which counts 60,000 Shiite nationalist fighters. If this attack occurs, one of Sadr’s options will be to cripple the US forces by ordering his men to attack the US supply lines.To defend these supply lines would require tens of thousands of soldiers which the US simply does not have. If Bush makes good on his threats and attacks Iran, the cutting of these supply lines will be almost inevitable. Therefore, the only rational policy is to begin an orderly withdrawal before encirclement turns mere retreat into rout and annihilation.
Parallels to the greatest encirclement in history – the 1942-3 battle of Stalingrad -- are many and uncanny. In both cases, urban street fighting came to be regarded as decisive. In both cases, the invaders were tactically superior to the defenders. Today the US southern flank and supply line is guarded by private contractors; then the Wehrmacht used poorly equipped Romanians and Hungarians to guard its flanks against the Soviets. When the ring closed in November 1942, the German high command forbade the generals on the scene to retreat. The result was the annihilation of the German Sixth Army.
ILLUSTRATION
DOCUMENTATION
William S. Lind,“Third and Final Act,”antiwar.com, October 31, 2006: “…The structure of our position in Iraq could lead to that greatest of military disasters, encirclement…. The danger arises because almost all of the vast quantities of supplies American armies need come into Iraq from one direction, up from Kuwait and other Gulf ports in the south. If that supply line is cut, our forces may not have enough stuff, especially fuel, to get out of Iraq. American armies are incredibly fuel-thirsty, and though Iraq has vast oil reserves, it is short of refined oil products…. There are two ways our supply lines from the south could be cut if we attack Iran. The first is by Shi'ite militias including the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades, possibly supported by a general Shi'ite uprising…. The second danger is that regular Iranian Army divisions will roll into Iraq, cut our supply lines, and attempt to pocket us in and around Baghdad.”
Patrick Lang, “The vulnerable line of supply to US troops in Iraq,”Christian Science Monitor,July 21, 2006: Hostilities between Iran and the United States or a change in attitude toward US forces on the part of the Baghdad government could quickly turn the supply roads into a "shooting gallery" 400 to 800 miles long….The volume of "throughput" would probably be seriously lessened in such a situation. A reduction in supplies would inevitably affect operational capability. This might lead to a downward spiral of potential against the insurgents and the militias. This would be very dangerous for our forces…it seems unlikely that air resupply could exceed 25 percent of daily requirements. This would not be enough to sustain the force.
Joseph L. Galloway, “What if our supply lines are cut?”Arizona Daily Star, August 6, 2006: “However invincible the military of the world's only superpower might seem, every army has its weak spot. Historically, it centers on logistics, the supply line tail that wags the dog… The lifeline for American forces in Iraq is a 400-plus-mile main supply route that runs from Kuwait through Shia-dominated and Iranian-infiltrated southern Iraq to Baghdad and points north and west….Along that route, trucks and tankers driven by third-country nationals — Turks and Pakistanis and others — haul 95 percent of the beans and bullets for our troops and 100 percent of the fuel that our tanks and Bradleys and Humvees gulp at staggering rates…. That route runs through the heart of Iraq's Shiite Muslim south, an area now thoroughly infiltrated by Iranian Revolutionary Guards and under the sway of well-armed Shiite militiamen and Iraqi police who are often indistinguishable from the militiamen and sometimes the same people…. The lightly protected American convoys are vulnerable to ambushes, improvised explosive devices and even an occasional rocket-propelled grenade slamming into a fuel tanker.
John Robb, “What’s Next in Iraq,” globalguerrillas.typepad.com. Wednesday, September 20, 2006: “In this near term conflict, we are likely to see a repeat of the lightly manned defensive hedgehog used successfully by Hezbollah against Israel.If placed along critical US military supply routes or immediately outside US mega-bases, and augmented by informational superiority (a combination of better local intelligence and advanced signals intercepts), these defensive tactics would extract a heavy toll on US troops….
Raymond Barrett, “A tougher journey to stock US troops in Iraq,” The Christian Science Monitor, January 8, 2007: “…with the possibility of increasing US forces by some 20,000 combat troops seeming more likely, the supply route from Kuwait will be ever more vital. ‘A very big proportion of the food and water [used by the US military] comes from Kuwait,’ says Robert Soussa, the managing director of Kuwait & Gulf Link Transport Co., a group heavily involved in this logistics business. ‘There are hundreds of fuel tankers a day ... shared between many companies. They don't have many [petrol] refineries in Iraq, the Kuwait government supplies them with petrol,’ he says….Soussa adds that the upsurge in violence has impacted the logistics business. "Because of the incidents in Iraq, they have reduced the number of trucks [per convoy],’ he says. The rise in violence has affected the flow of convoys traveling into the country. ‘[There are usually] eight movements in a day, but nowadays it's reduced to five. In one movement there are about 45 trucks," the businessman says. ‘The supply line from Kuwait is absolutely crucial. You cannot supply the level that is required by air,’ says Paul Rodgers, professor of peace studies at BradfordUniversity in West Yorkshire, England, who has written monthly security briefings on Iraq since 2003.Professor Rodgers says that a more substantial US combat presence in Iraq could cause insurgents to avoid direct confrontation and intensify attacks on supply lines.‘In the longer term, they [insurgents] may respond [to a troop surge] by attacking the supplies, rather than the troops themselves, he says.
James Glanz, “Iraq Insurgents Starve Capital of Electricity,” New York Times, December 18, 2006: “Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have effectively won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut off the capital from the major power plants to the north, south and west.“Now Baghdad is almost isolated,” Karim Wahid, the Iraqi electricity minister, said in an interview last week. “We almost don’t have any power coming from outside.”
Alternate:
Patrick Cockburn, “Baghdad is under siege,” London Independent, 1 November 2006: “Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militias to complete the encirclement. The Sunni insurgents seem to be following a plan to control all the approaches to Baghdad. They have long held the highway leading west to the Jordanian border and east into Diyala province. Now they seem to be systematically taking over routes leading north and south. […]In some isolated neighbourhoods in Baghdad, food shortages are becoming severe. Shops are open for only a few hours a day. "People have been living off water melon and bread for the past few weeks," said one Iraqi from the capital. The city itself has broken up into a dozen or more hostile districts, the majority of which are controlled by the main Shia militia, the Mehdi Army.