Bush's three-front blunder ( "a blunder of Hitlerian proportions".)

Bush's three-front blunder
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush's State of the Union address appears to confirm other indications in recent weeks that he is not merely sending more troops to Iraq to do more of the same, but has adopted a new strategy of fighting all three major Iraqi Arab political-military forces simultaneously.

Bush hinted strongly that he has decided to make Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army a major military target of the increased US troop presence in Baghdad, while continuing to wage war against both al-Qaeda and its Sunni extremist allies, on one hand, and the non-jihadi Sunni resistance, on the other.

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One veteran military expert on Iraq, retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, said Bush's new policy is a "war against all" in Iraq and called it "a blunder of Hitlerian proportions".

Macgregor likened the policy of fighting all three Iraqi anti-occupation forces at once to Adolf Hitler's insistence on continuing a two-front war against the Soviet Union and the Allied powers during World War II, which is widely regarded as having ensured the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Macgregor is no stranger to military planning in Iraq. He led combat troops in destroying a brigade of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard troops in the most significant tank battle of Desert Storm in February 1991 and prepared a proposal for a limited-duration attack on Baghdad at the request of a personal representative of then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld in autumn 2001.


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IA31Ak01.html

Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.

:argh: