A rchive Date
[ 23-01-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_jan23.html
Answering the critics
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
January 23, 2003
"The caravan passes, and the dogs bark." This old Central Asian saying was a favourite of Josef Stalin, from whom I now borrow it. The meaning: get on with things and ignore the inevitable baying of critics.
But this once I will reply to critics, both in this paper, and in the U.S., who have repeatedly cited statements I made in columns - some over a decade old - in an effort to attack my credibility. The Sun's editors like to encourage columnists to attack one another in the belief it sells newspapers.
However, I - and many readers - find such behaviour demeans the newspaper.
Anyone can take statements or figures out of context and make them appear wrongheaded. But recall an old Hungarian saying (thanks to George Jonas), "even the devil cites the Scriptures to make his point."
Most often dug up from the graveyard of old news is my claim in 1990 that the U.S. could face 25,000 casualties in a war with Iraq. In fact, the U.S. lost only 148 dead. The figure I cited did not come from thin air. It was the best estimate at the time by Pentagon war planners and was based on a full-scale invasion of not only Kuwait, but Iraq as well.
But the U.S. never invaded Iraq, except for a small incursion into the desert near Basra. In a still secret deal, the Iraqi Army was allowed to withdraw - largely unmolested - from Kuwait ahead of advancing U.S. troops. President George Bush Sr. wisely decided not to invade Iraq for fear of large numbers of U.S. and Iraqi casualties. To repeat, the 25,000 figure was based on the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the face of the largely intact Iraqi Army and was a reasonably accurate estimate at the time.
Few Americans died because there was very little ground combat, but the number of American, British, and French soldiers who saw action in Kuwait and are now suffering from varying degrees of the mysterious Gulf war syndrome runs into the tens of thousands.
Some estimates say as many as 80,000 U.S. troops were affected by symptoms of nerve gas poisoning. The syndrome was most likely caused by Iraqi nerve gas dumps foolishly blown up by U.S. troops and/or exposure to radioactive dust from the 320 tons of depleted uranium munitions used by the U.S. in Kuwait and southern Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are similarly ill, many with various forms of cancer.
Next, Afghanistan. Critics crow that my prediction that war in Afghanistan would prove bloody and extremely difficult was dead wrong. The U.S. just walked in after some heavy bombing and crushed the Taliban. But I repeatedly said that getting into Afghanistan was easy. It took the Soviets only a few days in 1979; there was almost no resistance at first. The hard part about Afghanistan is getting out.
Right now, the U.S. is getting stuck deeper and deeper into a growing guerrilla war against Afghans that is being covered up or ignored by the American media. The country is in chaos, the war is costing the U.S. billions, and there is no light at the end of the Afghan tunnel. After a year, 9,000 U.S. troops are engaged in almost daily combat, nowhere is it safe, except for Kabul, and there is a growing jihad among Afghans against U.S. occupation forces.
Just, in fact, what happened to the Soviets. Serious, anti-Soviet resistance did not begin until two years after Moscow invaded. Russia, by the way, just gave $100 million in new arms to their proxy force, the Northern Alliance, which is led by chieftains of the old Afghan Communist Party, all notorious war criminals and, more lately, drug dealers, who make the boorish Taliban appear almost benign.
Finally, Korea. A local critic claims my recent assertion that a full-scale Korean war could cost the U.S. 200,00-250,000 casualties (that's dead, wounded, and missing) is "extreme." The figures are not mine.
Once again, they come from the Pentagon's own estimates of a peninsular war, made in 1993, based on the need for the U.S. to repel a North Korean invasion of South Korea, or to invade North Korea directly. Today, the North Korean Army is larger, better armed, more deeply entrenched, has 800 heavy missiles and a few nuclear weapons.
There. My comments are now put back into proper context. The caravan moves on, and the dogs, I'm sure, will still bark.
Eric can be reached by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com or visit his home page
 World Fact Book (CIA]
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