I've been waiting for someone to deconstruct the fuel convoy story but I assume it has either not been reported fully in the US or things have just been too busy for it to attract the attention it might deserve.
Aussie ABC reporter Peter cave had a piece on last night's news that had me hauling my jaw off the floor.
It started with a view of the road between Fallujah and Baghdad and Cave telling the camera that at first they passed 6 army fuel tankers ablaze, then, a couple of kilometres further on, they found more.
Read the whole piece for yourself and then start thinking about this.
- It was on the road from Fallujah to Baghdad. Probably the most dangerous stretch of road in Iraq, and it was wholly under the control of the locals. No sign of US forces at all
- 9 fuel tankers were being driven, fully loaded, down this road with no armed escort.
- The were all attacked at liesure, with RPG's, not IED's and left to burn.
- An American hostage was not only taken, he was displayed to a foreign TV crew, casually, and with impunity
- The US forces to which the incident was reported had no idea where the convoy was
- They did not immediately mount any kind of rescue or control attempt
Now maybe I'm over-analysing this but it seems to me that the US military is very highly leveraged to mechanised force. A soldier can fight a bit longer when he's hungry, he can even fight when he's starving, but a truck or an APC or a tank or a humvee that is out of fuel just stops.
Fuel is not PX supplies, without it the army does not function and the troops just become footsoldiers, no better armed than the Iraqi insurgents. Yet these vehicles were completely exposed in the most dangerous part of the country. As well as losing the fuel, the army also lost the capacity of the vehicles to deliver tomorrow, and the day after. That looks like millions of litres of fuel supply capacity getting trashed in one hit. How often does that have to happen, how many tankers can the US army afford to lose before it affects the ability to run its machines?
It also could not respond to a very serious attack in which an undefined number of drivers and other people had been killed, wounded and, with confirmation from the TV crew, taken hostage.
How general is this problem? How actually close to not being able to protect itself, let alone project force into Iraq is the US?
There aren't any reinforcements to be had, they are under strength even with 135k troops in Iraq. And the level of opposition and aggression being unleashed against them is possibly higher than it was 12 months ago, and growing.
I've been saying that the US gets kicked out of Iraq for months. It looks to me as if they are now on the cusp of that. If the iraqis see the calls for ceasefire as a sign of weakness, if Abizaid calls for more troops and Rumsfeld has to admit they aren't there; how long will it take the resistance to shift to the end game and bring maximum force to bear?
What will be the outcome of that?