Friday, March 17, 2006
Operation Swarmer: The Truth
More and more it seems I'm going to have to rethink my position on the war in Iraq. There's just too much of this sort of failure happening now:
Four Black Hawk helicopters landed in a wheat field and dropped off a television crew, three photographers, three print reporters and three Iraqi government officials right into the middle of a scene of carnage. Iraqi soldiers draped across blazing humvees, their hopeful green and red Iraqi flags riddled by bullets, had just been ambushed from a farm now littered by a half-dozen dead cows and a sobbing woman huddled by the remains of a mud oven.
The press, flown in from Baghdad to witness what the Iraqi officials and U.S. Army commanders explained was the "largest air assault since 2003" in Iraq using over 50 helicopters to put 1500 Iraqi and U.S. troops on the ground, saw instead a demonstration of the inability to come to grips with an elusive and deadly enemy. In exchange for heavy losses the Coalition Forces netted only 48 suspected insurgents, 17 of which had already been cleared and released. The area, explained the officials, has long been suspected of being used as a base for insurgents operating in and around Samarra. It apparently remained a defiant symbol of the Resistance.
But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation instead of employing "Air Assault" (a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area), turned instead to become the greatest carpet bombing campaign of the war. White Phosphorus, napalm and high explosive was used time and again in response to frantic calls from panicked American commanders in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a demonstration of impotent fury. The U.S. and Iraqi commanders said that they had met "heavy resistance". They had met more than that.
Read the whole thing.
Four Black Hawk helicopters landed in a wheat field and dropped off a television crew, three photographers, three print reporters and three Iraqi government officials right into the middle of a scene of carnage. Iraqi soldiers draped across blazing humvees, their hopeful green and red Iraqi flags riddled by bullets, had just been ambushed from a farm now littered by a half-dozen dead cows and a sobbing woman huddled by the remains of a mud oven.
The press, flown in from Baghdad to witness what the Iraqi officials and U.S. Army commanders explained was the "largest air assault since 2003" in Iraq using over 50 helicopters to put 1500 Iraqi and U.S. troops on the ground, saw instead a demonstration of the inability to come to grips with an elusive and deadly enemy. In exchange for heavy losses the Coalition Forces netted only 48 suspected insurgents, 17 of which had already been cleared and released. The area, explained the officials, has long been suspected of being used as a base for insurgents operating in and around Samarra. It apparently remained a defiant symbol of the Resistance.
But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation instead of employing "Air Assault" (a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area), turned instead to become the greatest carpet bombing campaign of the war. White Phosphorus, napalm and high explosive was used time and again in response to frantic calls from panicked American commanders in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a demonstration of impotent fury. The U.S. and Iraqi commanders said that they had met "heavy resistance". They had met more than that.
Read the whole thing.
