Inside The Strategy: 3 Flawed Assumptions

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War designed to fit a theory, as the Bush administration learned last week, can falter when key assumptions don't pan out. After months of selling its case, the Administration gave the impression it had devised a Teflon war: quick, easy, relatively bloodless. War boosters predicted that Iraq's leadership would snap, Iraqi forces would surrender, Iraqi citizens would welcome American soldiers with open arms. Now that the first week's fighting has sometimes failed to match those expectations, some experts are asserting that the U.S. was not prepared for some of the possible difficulties.

THERE WOULD BE LITTLE RESISTANCE

"The enemy we're fighting," said Army Lieut. General William Wallace last week, "is different from the one we'd war-gamed against." At least the commander of V Corps and the highest-ranking officer at the front was honest in assessing one of the most unsettling battlefield surprises: Iraqis are resisting vigorously. And they're doing so in ways that seem to have caught Washington off guard--that is, by embedding paramilitary forces behind the front lines to engage in guerrilla tactics that can't win the war but can dangerously drag it out. If the Pentagon's plan was to fight from the "inside out"--a lightning drive on Baghdad to decapitate the regime and then liberate the rest of the country--Saddam has counterattacked from the outside in. He let allied forces plunge deep inside Iraq, leaving their rear and flanks ill protected so that his forces could harass and ambush them. His aim was shrewd and twofold: to pester and wear down allied forces and lure the U.S. into inflicting politically costly civilian casualties.

That's not how the theologians predicted the campaign would unfold. The theory was that the initial display of military might by U.S. warplanes and ground troops would "shock and awe" the Iraqi military and high-ranking officials into the conviction that resistance was futile. The despot's regime, Administration officials insisted, was too "brittle" to survive such an onslaught. Iraqi troops would defect en masse, they suggested. Intelligence and military officers had selected likely turncoats among the military's highest echelons. Just two days before the opening salvo, Richard Perle, a leading war booster on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, predicted, "Even those closest around the [Iraqi] President will understand they have no chance in the face of what's coming after them."

But "shock and awe" has failed to deliver a knockout blow thus far. Punishing strikes damaged trappings of Saddam's power but failed to crack the regime. The thunderous barrage didn't break ordinary Iraqis either. Saddam's ghostly appearances on national television convinced his citizens--if not Washington--that he remained in control. Iraqis have endured bombing intermittently for more than 12 years and have learned resilience.