What if Shia turn against U.S.?
By Joe Galloway
08-05-2006
... 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. From Hannibal to Erwin Rommel, from Robert E. Lee to Kim Il Sung in 1950, it’s been ever thus.
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, 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.
In an article for The Christian Science Monitor, Lang asked what we could do if that supply route were cut. Only about 5 percent of the supplies for our troops in Iraq come in by air. With a huge effort, that could be doubled or perhaps even tripled, but an airlift couldn’t provide nearly enough food, ammunition and fuel to keep our troops on the job, even if the Sunni insurgents around Baghdad and Balad didn’t start trying to shoot down the supply flights or drop mortar rounds on the runways.
Would our military have to stop trying to end the sectarian violence in Iraq in order to keep its own supply lines open? How many troops and tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and helicopters would have to be diverted to such an effort, and would it be worth it?
There’s another strategic vulnerability farther up the chain: Supplies for our forces must first reach the main port in Kuwait by ships — ships that must transit the Strait of Hormuz past a gantlet of Iranian Silkworm anti-ship missiles and suicide torpedo boats.
Little wonder, then, that Iran and its ayatollahs have the nerve to thumb their noses at efforts to curtail their nuclear ambitions and to supply thousands of short- and medium-range missiles to their Hezbollah proteges in Lebanon...
Bookmarks