March 27, 2003
THE SPECIAL FORCES WAR:
The triple war (David Warren, 3/27/2003)[A key front of the war is the] almost invisible airborne and special forces campaigns, in which British, Australians, Poles and others, including local forces, not yet acknowledged, have been playing very important roles, seizing and destroying or disabling the Iraqi regime's most lethal military and terror assets, and hunting for the "leadership targets"....The Pentagon planners have, thus, enlisted the media without their full knowledge in exhaustively covering what I suspect may be a series of feints. And Saddam's remaining loyalists, cut off from most of their own sources of information in the field, are obliged to focus their attention only on what they can see -- more and more exclusively through the eyes of the media....
[The coalition] is using tactics much like those which were so successful in Afghanistan. Indeed, the overall strategy in Iraq is beginning to resemble the Afghan one ...
They take out the struts upon which the regime is supported, and seem to make no dramatic progress until the moment when suddenly the whole thing comes down, almost simultaneously in many different cities.
Special-ops guys are having disproportionate effect (Jed Babbin, NRO, 3/27/2003)
[Iraqi leaders] don't want to go out [of their bunkers], because they--and the Saddam Fedayeen--are being outfought inside Baghdad. A small--how small I didn't even ask--bunch of special-ops guys are doing their job exceedingly well. Which is to say that for their small number, they are having a disproportionate effect on the enemy. That's a polite term to describe the work of the scout-sniper. Reconnaissance is always the prime mission, and locating targets for immediate and later strikes is very important. But if we can kill a few Fedayeen every time they stick their noses above ground, pretty soon they won't want to. A suppressed sniper's rifle can drill you from several hundred yards away or across the street, and the guys near you won't know where it came from.
When the war is over, we will likely learn that special forces and the Iraqi resistance working with air power were the heart of the war effort.
AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR:
The IO Options (Martha Brant, MSNBC, 3/26/2003)
Every day coalition forces are bombarding Iraqi cities and towns with leaflets, nearly 30 million of them since October and counting. The latest message: Stay Home!THEY WANT CIVILIANS off the roads and bridges. With Iraqi paramilitary troops dressing as civilians and, in some cases, using them as human shields, it is even more imperative that the United States get that message out.
The more civilians stay home, the easier it is to take out the bad guys.
All in all, the war seems to be going fabulously well.
MORE: Help Iraqis Arise (William Safire, New York Times, 3/27/2003)