Reality check for cocky US

By RUPERT CORNWELL

The strain is starting to tell, even on Donald Henry Rumsfeld, that formidable and remarkably well preserved 70-year-old who as Secretary of Defence is running the campaign in Iraq.

"How does anyone outside Government know what my views are?" he positively snarled the other day at a questioner who had the temerity to wonder whether the smaller, faster sort of war he advocated might be a mistake.

Outwardly, its's the pugnacious Rumsfeld of old, the steamrollering CEO who brooks no dissent.

Look more closely, however, and the lines of strain are visible. The tiredness is evident in the eyes behind those rimless spectacles.

And small wonder. For he is the man in the hot seat as, eight days into the Gulf War of 2003, a once cocksure America is forced to face the possibility it may be months, not weeks before a war sold as a virtual cakewalk, may finally be over.

Behind the daily recitations that "everything is going to plan", Pentagon officials grudgingly admit that the resistance has been greater and more tenacious than expected.

Admittedly, friendly fire apart, US and British casualties have been minimal. But the guerrilla hit-and-run tactics, coupled with the blinding sandstorms of the last two days, have slowed the advance. Supply lines strung out for 400km or more on jammed, inadequate highways have been stretched to breaking point.

But all of this raises a deeper question: Did Washington, seduced by the dream of a speedy and easy victory, put too few troops in the field? No, answer the architects of the strategy.

"Our plan is brilliant," General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proclaimed as the first doubts began to stir.

"We're on track, we're on plan. We think we have just the right forces for what we need to do now."

Experts beg to differ. They point out that the 250,000 troops deployed in and around Iraq are only half the force massed for Gulf War One - which moreover was fought in flat desert conditions ideal for US mechanised armour. The actual ground combat force is somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000.

The heavy forces in the field - the 3rd Infantry, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and the 101st Airborne (not yet fully deployed in Iraq) plus the British - are not enough, they say, even given total US/British domination in the air. The deficiency should be made up with the belated arrival of the 4th Infantry Division, which was supposed to have launched a second front from the north towards Tikrit, Saddam's family stronghold, and Baghdad itself.

That plan perished when Turkey refused to allow US ground troops to use its bases.

The 1000-man paratroop landing in Kurdish-controlled Iraq on Thursday is scant substitute for the 62,000 men the Pentagon wanted to mass along the Turkish border.

The 4th Infantry should be combat-ready sometime early next month. At that point it will move north to the front, allowing secondary forces to be released to guard supply lines. All of which is reasonable enough - except that it wasn't in the original script.

More than any other in history, this media-saturated war, with its unprecedented real time coverage from the front, has been a prisoner of expectations. Alas, expectations, exactly like financial markets, overshoot in both directions.

The optimism at the outset was excessive, fuelled by the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney who, three days before the war started, predicted on national television that the Republican Guard would do what Myers yesterday called the honourable thing, "and not fight at all".



Now the pendulum has veered back in the opposite direction. The war, it is said, will last months (raising the intriguing prospect that the US and Britain will be still slugging it out in Iraq when Messrs Bush and Blair meet the "peace trio" of Jacques Chirac, Valdimir Putin and Gerhard Schroeder at the June G-8 summit).

"Tell me how this ends," a gloomy senior US officer was quoted as saying in the Washington Post.

But Blair was surely no less correct when he insisted at his war council with President Bush at Camp David yesterday, that "an enormous amount" had been achieved.

"We've disabled Iraq's ability to launch an attack [against Israel] from the west. Our forces are within 80km of Baghdad, they've surrounded Basra, they've paved the way for humanitarian aid, and inflicted real damage on the Iraqi Government's command and control." But neither leader would commit to a timetable.

On Capitol Hill yesterday, Mr Rumsfeld warned that the Republican Guard was likely to defend the regime to the end. But will that take weeks, or months?

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq