Fighting a different war
In May 2003 US President George W Bush declared that the fighting was over. Nearly one year
on it continues in a different fashion.
When Global Defence Review 2003
went to press, US and UK forces were massing
on Iraq’s borders and the Middle East was on the
brink of another major conflict.
On 19 March 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom
was launched and on 1 May, America’s President
George W Bush declared that the fighting was
over. But it was not. A new battle had just begun,
one that US forces in particular were not prepared
for, the battle to keep the peace in a shattered
and lawless country.
Although the Iraqi armed forces had been soundly
beaten, and the country’s dictator overthrown, the
forces of the so-called ‘Coalition of the Willing’
were now an army of occupation, the United
Nations confined to the side-lines and not yet
involved in any peace-keeping operations.
However, no weapons of mass destruction have
been found in Iraq, but another deadly weapon that
the Operation Iraqi Freedom planners had not
foreseen or prepared for, has been the suicide bomber.
As after every recent major conflict, defence
administrators and military planners have begun
to indulge in a period of navel-gazing, to learn
the lessons that should be learned.What this
means is that the US and UK will carry out
yet more defence reviews that will cancel,
or at least delay, many defence
programmes that are in the pipeline, and there is
much to reassess.
First, there has been an obvious failure to deliver
and dissect accurate up-to-date intelligence on
Iraq, both of the human and airborne type.While
the Coalition of the Willing forces were well
protected against NBC weapons, their state-of-theart
land and air vehicles were less well protected
against the humble, and accessible, RPG and
man-portable SAM.
With an American presidential election looming,
other rogue states, and those in the ‘Axis of Evil’
in particular, are unlikely to be subjected to USled
invasion in the near future. However, the final
outcome of Operation Iraqi Freedom will be
watched with keen interest by military planners
and defence industries around the world.
David Oliver, Editor
