Posted on 12/05/2006 11:49:27 AM PST by Jomini
It is time for the American Army to withdraw from Iraq. Like the German Sixth Army, a few months before its annihilation at the decisive World War II battle of Stalingrad, U.S. forces now find themselves locked in an urban battle with a highly motivated local defender while depending upon an increasingly vulnerable supply line. This is a recipe for disaster.
The war is lost for America. It need not have been, but now it is. Like the Germans at Stalingrad, the Americans have frittered away their strategic advantages and now fight with the initiative ceded to the enemy. Just as Russian conscripts hurled themselves to their deaths in human-wave assaults versus veteran German infantry battalions, Mahdi warriors now blow themselves apart in suicide attacks against American checkpoints and convoys. Gradually these fighters reduce U.S. combat capacity while dictating battlefield tempo to their advantage.
Fourth-generation warfare experts from Iran have trained Shiite militias to negate America’s firepower advantage by attacking from crowded civilian areas and religious sites. U.S. forces must either accept high casualties to hold ground, retreat, or return fire into civilian zones. None of these options produces victory.
America controls fortified ground, but not the city streets and alleys. Like the Russian snipers at Stalingrad, the enemy moves with impunity in the sewers beneath the city and the rooftops above the boulevards, able to infiltrate any sector at will. The Americans, as the Germans in 1943, have become surrounded within a dense urban sprawl. The Iraq war has lasted longer now for America than World War II, yet the 10-mile road from the Baghdad airport to the fortified green zone is still not secure.
After almost four years of fighting, the primary communication route to the capital is still not secure. This visual makes it easy to understand the increasing difficulties in keeping the American Army in sufficient ammunition and fuel. Ultimately, the U.S. Achilles heel is the long and dangerous supply route from Kuwait.
Most American supplies in Iraq first reach Kuwait via the Iranian dominated Straits of Hormuz — a narrow channel that Tehran’s superior anti-ship weaponry can successfully interdict via their Russian designed Sunburn missiles. Once supplies reach Kuwait, they travel to Iraq along a treacherous route where some estimates calculate in excess of 500 civilian contractors have been killed.
To say this supply route is fragile is an understatement. It is not unreasonable to calculate it could be cut during a counteroffensive just as the Russians did to the German links in 1943. Without fresh supplies, a quarter-million German soldiers were surrounded and ultimately surrendered.
Without orderly withdrawal, a similar scenario will unfold eventually as time now works against the American forces. The enemy becomes bolder with each success and at some point, will counterattack. And, like the Russians at Stalingrad, the enemy will seek to orchestrate a battle of annihilation.
When that day comes, it would be wise for the American Army to be elsewhere.
Regardless of the decisions made, the status quo unlikely to remain in Iraq. God bless the American military in the difficult days ahead. If there was ever a time for a leader to stand up and rally the mission, this is it.
J
Sorry, but it is a royally asinine comparison. Stalingrad was a battle of annihilation between two large and organized armies. The US faces no such enemy in Iraq.
I find this nonsense. We are slaughtering these people in record numbers, and even the mullahs have to be wondering how many more they will lose before their calls for "jihad" start to get a deaf ear. When you add to that the Iraqi army getting up and conducting its own operations; and the incredible carnage that the NATO forces are unleashing in Afghanistan, a more realistic comparison would be Omdurman, 1898. And we are the Brits.
It's pap.
The Stalingrad analogy strikes me as silly for a wide variety of reasons.
The Stalingrad analogy is a very shaky one, which is not to say that things in Iraq are looking good.
Whoever wrote this tripe has absolutely no understanding of the battle on Stalingrad but obvioulsy hopes no one else does either.
"They've got us surrounded? Good. That means we've got targets in every direction."
-Chesty Puller
Just seems relevent. ;-)
That overwrought analogy about the supply line really got me.
Apparently, the Zhukov-wannabees at WND think Iran is willing to go to war every state in the Gulf, because that's what will happen if they shut down Hormuz.
The analogy falls apart. Neither side is fighting as either the Soviets or Nazis did. One because it can't, the other because it won't.
This guy obviously hasn't noticed that the most frequent victim of attack in Iraq these days is other Iraqi's. He must not be very up on our military if he thinks we could be cut off there without supply lines. He must be very young.
As people reach for historic military analogies, this one is a stretch beyond the beyond. Really, it's just too silly for serious considerations.
Really good point.
Thanks.
This piece is ridiculous on so many levels. First and foremost, at Stalingrad, the Germans were locked in bitter large-scale combat with a well-organized and well-led Soviet combined arms army numbering, the hundreds of thousands, not a rabble of gutless terrorists.
This is ridiculous. The murder gangs cannot even face an American squad in open battle without being massacred, the idea of a battle of annihilation is simply a moronic fantasy by the terrorists and their increasingly desperate supporters.
I should point out that this insane analogy has cropped up before, leftists like George Galloway frequently used it during the Battle of Fallujah, but it was the terrorists who were surrounded and destroyed.
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