Stardate 20030321.0014

(On Screen): My hope all along was that we might, somehow, either figure out where Saddam was or come up with a short list of places he might be, and bomb them all on the first night. If in doing so we managed to kill him, the entire prospect for the war would change radically for the better.

I've never said I thought it was certain, but I've said many times that I thought there was decent chance of it happening. And the first wave of bombing on Wednesday is now revealed as having been directed at a specific compound and command bunker in Baghdad where intelligence strongly suggested that top leadership could be found.

Given the political decision to give Saddam a final 48 hour warning, and for Bush to give that speech Monday night in prime-time in the US, it meant that on Thursday morning in Iraq the deadline passed a couple of hours before dawn. So from what I've read, the original plan was to wait and begin the real bombing Thursday night, when we'd have a full allocation of darkness with which to work.

But when the intelligence seemed to peg Saddam's location, our commanders right up to President Bush made the decision to gamble. He gave the order to start one night early, and was only able to give Tony Blair a couple of hours notice before doing so.

But under the circumstances I think Blair won't be too upset. Yes, there was a speech given shortly thereafter by someone who looked a lot like Saddam, but it's certain that Saddam has doubles, and there are enough odd things about that broadcast to suggest the possibility that either it was a double or that it had been recorded somewhat earlier.

It's still an open question whether he was in that complex when it was bombed, and if so what happened to him.

For my purposes, having him dead or having him seriously wounded are about the same; either way he won't be commanding the war. Which, if so, means that no-one in Iraq will be, and that it's going to be a hell of a lot safer for our men.

The US Army and Marines tend to push responsibility downward. We routinely delegate quite significant amounts of authority and responsibility to non-coms, for instance, and all of our non-com and officer cadre are trained to be able to operate without close supervision. They aren't so much given orders as assignments when in combat, and it is assumed that they'll figure out for themselves the best way to carry them out. This has been true for a long time, and one benefit of it is that if one of our units gets cut off, loses contact with higher command, then it will carry on anyway, trying to accomplish its mission and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise. That is an extremely powerful and useful ability to have in a military, and it's the reason why the easiest way, if you're in a hurry, to evaluate the quality of a given army is to see just how good its sergeants are and how much responsibility they're given.

The US, British and Australians (and the Israelis) trust their noncoms more, and give them more responsibility, than any other armies on the planet.

But this tendency to push authority down is almost wholly absent in Arab armies, and it's one of the reasons they tend to lose wars, especially against the Israelis. In order to create a military like ours, which does delegate so much power downward, there has to be a lot of mutual respect, both upwards and downwards. You have to have a strong sense of belonging to a team, and you have to have very strong dedication by everyone in the military from privates to generals to the mission of the organization. Unfortunately, the culture of the Arabs strongly works against any of those things happening.

Norvell De Atkine was a an officer in the US Army in the 60's and 70's and was assigned to various posts in the Middle East to be a liaison to Arab armies. This was a dual assignment; he was also supposed to become an expert in Arab armies. (This is common; many nations routinely attach military officers to their embassies to study other nations.) This article is the first of a series of memoirs about his experiences, and I'm looking forward to the others.

Last year he wrote an analysis titled "Why Arabs Lose Wars"; and talks about the fact that the Arabs do nearly everything wrong to try to create a dynamic and resilient military which can cope with the unexpected and win anyway. I won't try to summarize it because it's particularly relevant now that we're actually fighting directly against such an army.

What the Arabs do is to pull authority up as far as possible. As he points out, American trainers working with the Arabs concluded that a Sergeant First Class in the US Army has as much authority as a Colonel in an Arab army.

Decisions are highly centralized, made at a very high level and rarely delegated. Rarely does an officer make a critical decision on his own; instead, he prefers the safe course of being identified as industrious, intelligent, loyal — and compliant. Bringing attention to oneself as an innovator or someone prone to making unilateral decisions is a recipe for trouble. As in civilian life, conforming is the overwhelming societal norm; the nail that stands up gets hammered down. Decisions are made and delivered from on high, with very little lateral communication. Orders and information flow from top to bottom;