Raiding Baghdad

This is a map of Baghdad. Look at it closely. If you do, you will notice a road which circles around the outer edge of Baghdad, pulls close to the Tigris and then leads to the airport. It is in red on this map.

Claims by the Coaltion that they were "in the heart of Baghdad" can be disproven if you look at the map.

All they did today, besides getting a soldier killed, was prove they can drive on a highway.

Here are some hints to know when the war is being won, or coming to a close:

We control several cities. Which means there is limited resistance, US troops can drive through town and not get shot at, and can install some kind of occupational government.

Thousands of prisoners are being sent to POW camps. I don't mean thousands in total, I mean thousands in a single engagement. You should see lines of POW's marching down the highway in long files.

Hundreds of tanks and APC's are burning in front of Coalition positions. The battlefield should look like a junk yard. A Republican Guard division has 400 tanks at a minimum. If you don't hear reports of hundreds of tanks being blown away, it didn't happen.

Claims of destroying enemy divisions without either an abatoir of dead or thousands of prisoners, simply cannot be trusted. A division is about 8-10,000 men in the Iraqi Army. The usual calculus is that once a division loses 30 percent of their men, they are no longer effective. Anyone seen 3,000 POW's taken in one day? More importantly, there should be hundreds of military vehicles destroyed or disabled. Not pickups, not cars.

Any claims of military victories without concrete evidence of Iraqi units surrendering en masse, cannot be trusted. We're not fighting the Japanese Imperial Army.

As I sit here, I'm watching A Bridge Too Far. In the summer and fall of 1944, it was believed the German Army had collasped. Everything was fine until the two SS Panzer Divisions popped up.

And that leads to my final point. Until there is a logical explaination as to the dissappearance of the Iraqi Army from the field, assume it is in hiding. US commanders are claiming they are destroying divisions and they don't have the scale of prisoners they should. The math doesn't add up.

If an army is collapsing, there would be signs. Desertions, and the like. Without that. they're hiding and that's not a good thing.

Posted April 05, 2003 08:23 PM | Comments (59)