Tom Engelhardt
writes: At the cost of a quarter-billion dollars, the Pentagon launched
the most elaborate war games in its history, immodestly entitled
“Millennium Challenge 02.” These involved all four services in “17
simulation locations and nine live-force training sites.” Officially a
war against a fictional country in the Persian Gulf region — but
obviously Iraq — it was specifically scripted to prove the efficacy of
the Rumsfeld-style invasion that the Bush administration had already
decided to launch. Lt. Gen. Van Riper commanded the “Red Team” — the
Iraqis of this simulation -– against the “Blue Team,” U.S. forces; and,
unfortunately for Rumsfeld, he promptly stepped out of the script.
Knowing that sometimes the only effective response to high-tech warfare
was the lowest tech warfare imaginable, he employed some of the very
techniques the Iraqi insurgency would begin to use all-too-successfully
a year or two later. Such simple devices as, according to the Army
Times, using “motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating Blue’s
high-tech eavesdropping capabilities,” and “issuing attack orders via
the morning call to prayer broadcast from the minarets of his country’s
mosques.” In the process, Van Riper trumped the techies. “At one point
in the game,” as Fred Kaplan of Slate wrote in March 2003, “when Blue’s
fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with
suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped
the game, ‘refloated’ the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)” After three
or four days, with the Blue Team in obvious disarray, the game was
halted and the rules rescripted. In a quiet protest, Van Riper stepped
down as enemy commander. Millennium Challenge 02 was subsequently
written up as a vindication of Rumsfeld’s “military transformation.” On
that basis — with no one paying more mind to Van Riper (who, this
April, called openly for Rumsfeld’s resignation) than to Army Chief of
Staff Eric Shinseki when, in February 2003, he pointed out that
hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to occupy Iraq, the
“transformational” invasion was launched — with all the predictably
catastrophic results now so widely known. … Unfortunately for the
Bush administration, it turned out that, while you could fix the war
games and the intelligence, you couldn’t be assured of fixing reality
itself, which has a tendency to remain obdurately, passionately,
irascibly unconquerable. Yes, you could ignore reality for a while.
(The President, when being told a few hard Iraqi truths in 2004 by Col.
Derek Harvey, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior intelligence
officer for Iraq, reportedly turned to his aides and asked, “Is this
guy a Democrat?”) But you couldn’t do it forever, not when the Lt. Gen.
Van Ripers of Iraq refused to step aside and you weren’t capable of
removing them; not when you couldn’t even figure out, most of the time,
who they were. It was then that the fixers first found themselves in a
genuine fix, from which none of Washington’s movers and shakers have
yet been willing to extract themselves. (12/15/06)
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