Chapter 163: Kurdish Dragon

The Sunday news shows all ran the footage from the Brooks and Shield interview, and the chattering classes all pontificated on what it meant. The liberals were rather unhappy with my barbaric worldview and the conservatives couldn’t understand why I hadn’t gone after Iraq in 2001 when I had my first chance. The only one who seemed to understand, or at least was able to express it cogently, was Bob Schieffer, on Face the Nation. He devoted his personal essay piece to it.

“President Buckman’s statement about sending down the thunderbolts of the gods has been one of the most talked about public statements of his presidency, by turns praised and ridiculed. The more bellicose among us loved it but many here in Washington considered it ill-advised and warmongering. How dare the President make a statement such as that? It must be the sign of a foolish and uncultured barbarian, and they wonder why his press secretary isn’t running around and apologizing for him.

I have known Carl Buckman for almost twenty years, since before he became a Congressman, and long before he became the President. While we don’t agree on a lot of things, he is not a foolish and uncultured barbarian. He is a warm, smart, sophisticated, and civilized man. He is most definitely not a warmonger. He is generous to a fault, and exceedingly gracious. He is loyal to his subordinates, perhaps too much so, and they return that loyalty. He adores his wife, dotes on his children, and even has a big, goofy dog that he drags around with him everywhere.

He is also one of the most ruthless men I have ever known, and I say that in a positive sense. You can see that in his personal life. When, both in junior and senior high school, he was attacked by bullies, he didn’t respond eye-for-an-eye. He destroyed his tormentors, crippling them. He extends that protection to those around him, as well. When his wife was assaulted in the Bahamas and a young mother-to-be was attacked in a diner in his hometown, those attackers were hospitalized and arrested. You may attack him once, but you will never do so a second time. You do not mess with Carl Buckman and get away with it.

If you want to know what the Buckman Doctrine is, that’s it in a nutshell. He takes his responsibilities very seriously. When he took responsibility for the nation, he became equally ruthless in dealing with threats to the nation. So, when he says that if you kill American citizens and soldiers and diplomats he will send down the thunderbolts of the gods, he means it. Speaking as a member if the so-called Washington elite, I am horrified. Speaking as an American citizen, that sounds pretty good to me.”

Will Brucis raised the topic at the morning staff meeting, and I had laughed and said I thought that Bob had me figured out, but there was no specific ‘doctrine’. When Will was asked later in the morning at the daily press briefing, he simply smiled and said, “There’s never been a discussion of any sort of Buckman Doctrine, so I can’t really answer that. I can say that the President disagrees with the characterization of Stormy as big and goofy. He considers Stormy big and loveable. We’ve begun taking suggestions and voting on them back in the offices.” That prompted a flurry of emails and letters offering other descriptions, generally favorable, of the mutt.

The late-night comics also had fun with this. Jon Stewart discussed it and then began scribbling out a note - ‘Note to Iran and North Korea: Don’t piss off Carl Buckman!’ Stephen Colbert did ten minutes on it, extolling the Buckman Doctrine, and then segued into his ‘Threatdown’ segment, where his Number One Threat (Bears) were warned by him to stay out of my neighborhood. Oh, brother!

After roughly a month had gone by, at the start of the second week of April, I was called to the Pentagon for a dog and pony show. The 1^st Armored from Fort Bliss in Texas, parent unit of the 1 ^st Brigade sent from Germany, had managed to get their gear onto transports and had sailed for Turkey, and the ships would be docking in Izmir shortly. The troops would follow on chartered commercial airliners. It would take another two weeks to offload the equipment, sort it out, and load them on trains and send them into Kurdistan, and then some additional weeks to prepare and practice. That one division was far more powerful than everything the Iraqi Republican Guard had available to stop them, no matter how they were combined, but effective combat action wouldn’t be able to take place until sometime in May. The Pentagon wanted to show me a different plan.

As things stood, we were currently in a stalemate position across the front. Republican Guard units were on Kurdish soil with two wings poised to wrap around Kirkuk. The Iraqis were still bombarding the front lines and Kirkuk but were increasingly forced to operate at night. Nobody was advancing, the Guard because they didn’t have enough combat power, and the Americans and Kurds because they didn’t have the mobility. The European-based units were forming up in the Kurdish rear, along with the Screaming Eagles, which were also forming up. Before things slowed down, the Iraqis had managed some reinforcements to the Guard, so they were operating at almost the strength they had prior to the attack. Meanwhile the nightly Scud attacks had ended. The best guess was that while the Iraqis had about a hundred missiles at the start of the war, only about half had worked (missiles are quite fragile and tricky) and they had run out of missiles to launch.

Fortunately, the gas attacks had also run down, probably because rear area bombing had destroyed the chemical depots and manufacturing facilities, or because interdiction had slowed transport to a crawl. The Pentagon had modified some drones so that they had a chemical signature detection capability. While they were initially used to map out areas of chemical weapon contamination to avoid, probes inside Iraq showed areas with three really major mustard gas spills, one at an army base where it was suspected that the gas was being stored and loaded onto shells, one at a fertilizer factory that had been destroyed, and one on a road that had been bombed one night. In all three locations it was seen that the Iraqis were avoiding those areas, and routing traffic around and away from them.

The Pentagon’s plan called for an armored envelopment of the envelopment, sort of. As it stood, the British had the 7^th Armored, a brigade of Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior armored fighting vehicles on the eastern pincer, and we had deployed both the 1^st Brigade of M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradleys and the 2^nd Stryker Cavalry, a brigade of Strykers, which I had never really seen before, on the heavier western pincer. The 101^st was also ready to move into action. These outfits would be the offensive punch needed to destroy the Republican Guard.

In Phase One, to be launched in the dead of night, the 101^st would be airlifted into blocking positions south of the Guard units facing the Kurds and Americans. They would form the anvil upon which the hammer of the armored units would land. Then, at dawn, Phase Two would begin. The Brits planned to swing wide to the east and come in on the Iraqis from the Iraqi right flank. The Americans planned to smash straight forward into the Republican Guard starting in the west, and then to swing eastward and roll them up from the Iraqi left flank. If the Iraqis tried to run, they were going to either run into the 101^st to the south or the Brits to the east or the American and Kurdish infantry to the north.

I stared at the computer simulation at the Pentagon. I knew our equipment was good, and that during the Gulf War we had blown through Iraqi positions like shit through a goose, but this was beyond that! During the Gulf War we had enjoyed massive combat superiority. The killing was going to be done by the armored formations. As it stood, we planned to assault six armored and mechanized divisions of highly motivated troops with two heavy brigades and one light brigade. Audacity didn’t begin to cover this idea!

“You plan to take them head on?” I questioned. I looked over at the Army Chief of Staff, and the Army colonel who had given the presentation. I could see from Colonel Buford’s uniform that he was an armored officer himself, probably up from Fort Knox, the home of the armored corps. “I know I’m just an over-aged battery commander, but I always thought you wanted to attack when the odds were in your favor, not the other way around!”

It was the colonel who answered. “Yes, sir, I know. To be fair about it, that’s how I was taught, too. The difference is the equipment we have now. The stuff we have now, it’s like science fiction! I had a platoon of M-1s back in the Gulf War, and when we hit the Iraqis at 73 Easting, we never knew they were there until we rolled in on them. We were just better than them, with better equipment and training. Now ... sir, our training and equipment is even better, and we know where they all are! We have recon drones all over the front, with cameras and laser designators and GPS. Sir, before I came to this assignment, I had a training battalion out at Fort Knox, where we developed the doctrine and tactics for this. Since then, we have been spreading the training out. When we go over the ridge and into a Republican Guard area, they won’t know we’re coming, but we will know where every one of their vehicles is! We’ll be able to blow them away before they even know we are coming at them! We can do this and do it now!”

I looked at the other officers and they were all nodding in agreement. I was suddenly hit with a wry observation. “You know what they say about military intelligence, Colonel? We bet your life?” He bristled at the implication. “Settle down, Colonel. It’s nothing personal. From my point of view, I’m the one you want to bet their lives. So, what do we do if this doesn’t work, hmmm? What happens if the Republican Guard doesn’t just sit there and act like targets?”

The colonel hit a button on his computer and showed two different variations on the ops plan, to allow for disengagement and containment moves, to keep the Republican Guard in a killbox (his word, not mine) and either reduce them slowly or hold long enough for further forces to arrive. My biggest concern was the 101^st, stranded between the Republican Guard to the north and the regular Iraqi army to the south. What if they were assaulted from both sides?

“Sir, this is not going to be the Battle of the Bulge, where the 101 ^st got stuck in Bastogne and surrounded. The Iraqis simply don’t have the firepower, and they will be getting hammered by close air support. Additionally, we have no intelligence at all that indicates that regular army units are involved in this. They aren’t even moving,” I was told. “I’ve been in contact with the G-3 of the 101^st, and he concurs with this plan. This is what they are there for, deep insertion and strategic control.”

“When are you going to be ready to do this?” asked Frank Stouffer. “When does the President need to decide by?”

I nodded at Frank. It was a fair question, and I turned to face the officers.

“The units can be in place for kickoff 2200 local time Tuesday April 11. We will need a go/no-go decision as soon as possible to make sure everything is finalized, today if possible. If we delay, sooner or later even Saddam Hussein is going to realize the mess he’s in and try backing out. Once that happens, we lose any chance of destroying them,” said the Chief of Staff.

I glanced at Frank, who gave a subtle shrug. I looked at the officers and said, “Give me a few minutes, please.” Everybody filed out, leaving me sitting there, staring at the screens. They simply stared back.

I knew what my answer was going to be even before they left, but it scared me. I remembered the movie Patton, in which Patton, played by George C. Scott, argues with Omar Bradley, played by Karl Malden. Patton was pushing for greater speed in the conquest of Sicily, pushing his men to the breaking point and beyond, and arguing that the faster they moved, the better it was. They would face higher casualties now, but the war would end sooner, and ultimately there would be far fewer casualties overall. It was a heartbreaking calculus, but it was also absolutely true.

It was entirely possible that at some point Saddam Hussein would wake up and realize he had stuck his dick into a grinder, and it might be a good idea to stop turning the crank and pull out. That would leave us back where we started from, with no resolution and a lot of dead Americans I would need to avenge somehow. That was unacceptable. I wanted to destroy Saddam Hussein, and to do that, we would first need to destroy the Republican Guard.

I called the others back in. I didn’t bother sitting down; this was going to be a very short conversation. “The operation is approved, as planned. General, tell the boys, from me, ‘Good hunting!’ What’s the name of this thing, anyway?”

“We’re calling it Kurdish Dragon, sir.”

Kurdish Dragon? Where the hell do they come up with these names? I nodded and left.

Tuesday was full of routine meetings and photo ops, and I stayed away from the war. I was simply informed that preparations were nominal, whatever that meant, and that the planned assault was still on. I couldn’t bear to stay up late and kibitz from the Situation Room, and Marilyn wasn’t about to let me drink anything stronger than iced tea, so I stayed up to watch Stewart and Colbert and then went to bed. The next morning, before my regular staff meeting, I was told during my Brief that the attack was ‘nominal’ and proceeding. I took that to be good, and simply asked for a quick briefing that afternoon. I was informed they would have a briefing in the Situation Room at 4:00 PM, and that it would be a good idea to bring everybody who needed to learn what was happening. I wasn’t quite sure how to take that, but I thanked him and promised to be there.

I went down to the Situation Room at 4:00, accompanied by John McCain, Frank Stouffer, and Will Brucis. Tom Ridge was already there and waiting for us, and I could tell that he had been chatting with the briefing officer, who I noticed was the same Colonel Buford who had presented the plan to us two days ago. “Colonel Buford, it’s been two days now since you showed us your plan, and about one day into it. How is it going so far?” I asked.

“Mister President, thank you for coming. Phase One of Operation Kurdish Dragon took place the other night. There were no losses, although we did have a few mechanical problems. The 101^st was airlifted to their landing zones and have taken control of the road network south of Kurdistan. They are now in fortified positions with good supply. Phase Two, the assault phase, began this morning at 0600 local time, or 2200 last night Washington time. Right now, it is midnight local time in Kurdistan, and operations are slowing for the night. Beginning this morning, the British 7^th Armored began by departing their go line and moving south from a position just west of Sulaymaniyah. They skirted the eastern edge of the Republican Guard positions and have now maneuvered into a position where they can begin turning west, assaulting the Iraqi right flank. They destroyed roughly half a brigade of the 7^th Adnan Infantry during this maneuver, mostly screening units.” As he said this, a computerized map of Kurdistan was thrown up on the big screen, and a blue arrow began to grow and move on the right-hand side of the map, marking a giant curve around the Iraqi units designated in red.

“Part of our thinking was that by having the Brits move first, it would attract their attention, and perhaps get them to focus in a direction opposite from where we would be attacking. That occurred two hours later, when the 1^st Brigade and the 2^nd Strykers attacked, here, just west of Azwya.” A second blue arrow began moving south on the map to the west of Kirkuk, only this one was headed directly towards the westernmost Guard position, rather than trying to maneuver around it.

“How did that go, Colonel?” I asked.

“Quite well, sir. The 1^st Brigade took direct aim at the 1 ^st Hammurabi Armored Division, using the 2^nd Strykers as a reserve. By the end of the day, the Hammurabi Division had been destroyed completely, and the 1^st Brigade was resupplying and preparing for the assault on the 6^th Nebuchadnezzar Mechanized,” he answered.

I nodded with a grimace. “How bad were our losses, Colonel? Will we be able to deal with the 6^th Nebuchadnezzar?”

“We don’t have any, sir.”

“Well, when will you have the details on the losses? How can we be sure they will be able to move if you don’t know about the losses?”

Colonel Buford gave me an odd look. “You misunderstand me, Mister President. We didn’t have any losses. The 1^st Brigade and the 2 ^nd Strykers destroyed the Hammurabi Division with no American losses.”

I stared at the Colonel in disbelief! My jaw dropped and I couldn’t speak, even though John McCain and Tom Ridge were asking questions excitedly, and Frank and Will tried to understand. After a moment I waved them into silence and asked, “Are you serious? One heavy and one light brigade attacked a dug in enemy division and destroyed it without any friendly losses? That’s... impossible!”

The watch team in the Situation Room was smiling broadly, and Colonel Buford simply nodded and said, “I told you the other day, sir. What we are doing now is like science fiction!”

“But... how?”

Before the colonel could answer that, Will Brucis interjected with a question. “Excuse me, but neither Frank nor I served. I just don’t understand what these units are. What’s the difference between a brigade and a division? I need to know if I am going to tell the press what is going on.”

I nodded. “Colonel, you want to give the civilians a quickie answer?”

He smiled and nodded. “Okay.” He turned to the side where Frank and Will were sitting. “You build an army by putting together pieces of smaller units. At the most basic level you have tank companies, which are mostly tanks, and infantry companies, which are mostly soldiers plus some vehicles to drive them around in. A tank company might have from a dozen to a dozen-and-a-half tanks, and an infantry company might have 100 to 200 soldiers. With me so far?”

Both men nodded.

Colonel Buford continued, “Everything else gets built up bigger and bigger. A tank battalion usually has two or three tank companies plus an infantry company, and an infantry battalion would have two or three infantry companies plus a tank company. A brigade is made up of a mix of battalions, and a division is made up of a mix of brigades. At the top, you have something called a corps, which is made up of several divisions. Until this morning, the Iraqi Republican Guard had two corps of three divisions each.”

Frank turned to me and asked, “Where were you in this?” as he motioned up and down with his left hand.

I motioned down at the bottom. “I had an artillery battery, which is sort of like an artillery company, the same level of troops and organization the colonel is talking about.”

“So, this Hammurabi Division was bigger than the brigade which attacked it?” asked Will.

I answered, “Will, back when I was young and foolish and in the army, the standard rule of thumb was that if you were planning on making a successful attack, you needed odds of at least three to one to pull it off. In other words, to destroy a division, we would have to attack with three divisions. Follow me?” He nodded. “So, we just did the reverse! We attacked with the equivalent of about a brigade-and-a-half a division of about three brigades! That’s impossible!”

I looked over at Colonel Buford, but it was one of the watch officers who stepped in at that point. “It’s more like attacking four brigades’ worth. The Republican Guard has top priority on equipment and manpower. For instance, a regular Iraqi Army armored brigade has three tank battalions of three tank companies each, while the Republican Guard has three tank battalions of four companies each. It’s like getting a free tank battalion. The same thing happens with their mechanized brigades. In effect they are at least a quarter stronger than an equivalent regular army unit.” Colonel Buford nodded in agreement.

“So, how did they do it?” asked Frank.

Excellent question! Colonel Buford fiddled with a keyboard and a close-up of a tactical map showed on the screen. “This is just an example from something we have been practicing. This isn’t from today. Anyway, this is an enemy battalion down here, spread out in a defensive position...” He used a laser pointer to start showing dots on the map. “ ... and here are the American positions of a tank company with some M-1s and Bradleys. The important thing is that before the battle even starts, we’ve had drones flying over the entire area, and have every enemy position pinpointed. More than that, those positions are downloaded into the computers in each American vehicle. When they attack, they will already know where the enemy positions are. When they roll into battle their guns will already be pointed at the enemy! They just need to find them in their sights and pull the trigger, and then move on to the next shot.”

“And that’s what they did?” asked Frank. “How many tanks did they destroy?”

“A Republican Guard armored division might have, on the books anyway, about 400 T-72 tanks, and about 250 BMPs, or some other armored personnel carriers. They also have about 12,000 or 13,000 troops. In reality, they don’t have that many T-72s, so they have maybe half that many and fill out the rest with older T-55s and T-62s. For all practical purposes the older tanks are nothing but moving targets, but against light infantry they are still pretty dangerous. From what we have been seeing, the Hammurabi Division doesn’t have any tanks left, and only a couple of dozen infantry vehicles.”

“How many soldiers did we have attacking?”

“Nowhere near as many. An American heavy armored brigade probably has about 100 tanks, tops, and maybe 5,000 troops. Believe me, they were on the short end of the ledger!” said the Colonel.

“What about the soldiers? Can’t they keep fighting?”

John McCain answered that one. “It doesn’t work that way, Frank. Combat is actually quite specialized. Tankers without a tank are just really lousy infantry. It’s the same for artillerymen without their guns.” I nodded agreement with that, since I knew just how right he was. “As for the infantry, most of their gear is on the vehicles, and right now they don’t even have food and water. They might as well just sit down and surrender.”

“The 1^st Brigade deployed in a single long line, with the 2 ^nd Stryker right behind them as the reserve. The M-1s and Bradleys blew away the T-72s and BMPs and then kept rolling, blowing straight through the lines, and the Strykers came through on their asses, blowing away anything left over, like BMPs and trucks. Meanwhile, the drones kept reporting what was ahead of them, and the Apache gunships were shooting at things and watching the flanks. The plan now is to pivot to the east and smash the next division on the lineup, the 6^th Nebuchadnezzar. That shouldn’t be any worse, because they suffered severely when attacking the 82^nd in Azwya a few weeks ago.”

“And nobody was hurt? We didn’t lose anybody?” I pushed.

“We lost about half a dozen tanks and Bradleys from mechanical problems, thrown tracks and the like, and probably a couple of dozen guys got banged up bouncing around inside them. You always get that sort of thing,” he answered. He hesitated another second, and then added, “Mister President, these guys are really amped up. The 1^st Brigade has taken to calling themselves the ‘Thunderbolt Brigade’, and the 2^nd Strykers went in carrying a couple of battalions of Kurdish Peshmerga, and they are calling themselves ‘Task Force Thunderbolt.’ They even renamed the forward operating base in Erbil ‘Forward Operating Base Thunderbolt.’ When you were on television and called them the thunderbolts of the gods, they loved it! These guys are ready to invade Baghdad and just keep going!”

“Holy shit!” I muttered. I looked over at Tom Ridge and John McCain, both Viet Nam veterans. “Do you believe this?”

Tom threw his hands up in the air. “I mean, I get reports on this, and I’ve been to the bases to see the troops and all, but this ... I mean, I’ve been told about this, but you just don’t believe it.”

“Same here,” admitted the Vice President.

I looked over at Will Brucis. “We want to be real low key on this. I can see several possible outcomes. For one thing, tomorrow this may all break down and the Iraqis could hand us our cranks on a platter!” John snorted in amusement at that but nodded his head. “For another thing, even if that doesn’t happen, it might not work out so well, and we could still get stuck in a mess. And finally, I want to destroy the Republican Guard, not just win. If we start bragging, people are going to start thinking we should stop, like in ‘91. Nobody gets away free on this!” I thought for a second. “What’s the feeling from the press on this whole thing? What are you hearing the most from them?”

He gave me a wry look. “Probably the biggest thing is that we did this whole thing without inviting them to the party!”

“Excuse me?”

“They spend half their time comparing this to the Gulf War in ‘91. In that one Saddam Hussein was polite enough to give us six months to prepare, and every journalist in the world showed up and was officially embedded and linked up with a unit and given free satellite time. This time? We had the absolute rudeness to have a war and not invite the press! Not a one of them had ever even heard about Kurdistan before this and couldn’t have found it on a map with a laser pointer and a GPS. It is going way too fast for most of them, and we never geared up for public relations. Now it looks like we are going to defeat the Iraqis before the network anchors have managed to unpack their bags. Some of them are simply freaking out about that!”

I stared at Will for a moment and then broke out laughing. “Unbelievable! They are complaining because we are winning without giving them a chance to tell us how to do it.” I looked over at McCain. “And you want to be President? Have you lost your mind?”

John returned the laugh. “No more than you did.”

I shook my head. “I was a simple boy once, growing up in the Baltimore suburbs. How did I ever land here?” I turned back to the military people and stood up. “Gentlemen, ladies, I appreciate the information. Nothing you have told me here today makes me want to change the plan. Colonel, let the brass know that I want to keep the pressure on! Turn up the heat! Crush them!”

“Yes, sir. The plan is that by this time tomorrow the British will have begun swinging west, and they plan to hammer the 7^th Adnan Infantry and finish them off. That will effectively surround them. Uh, what about prisoners, sir? We blew through the 1^st Hammurabi and left a lot of stranded Iraqis behind. Should we collect them?”

I snorted. “What prisoners? No, I am not being quite that bloodthirsty. Send them home. Disarm them and point them south. They can walk. The 101 ^st can pen them up before they get back home. If they don’t like that, they can try walking north and taking it up with the Kurds. I want them out of the war for good.”

He nodded his head earnestly. “Understood, sir!”

At that, the briefing was over, with plans for another in a day or two. As I went back upstairs with John, I commented, “That colonel, I think this ops plan is his. If it works out, he’s not going to be a colonel much longer, and I won’t have to do a thing about it. He’ll be getting a boot upstairs.”

He snorted and smiled. “If it doesn’t work out, he won’t be a colonel much longer either.” He drew a thumb across his throat and made a gurgling sound.

“With your shield or on it, John. With your shield or on it.”

We had our next major briefing in five days, with the full National Security Council at the Pentagon. The progress was simply astonishing. After six days, the 1^st Armored and 2^nd Strykers had managed to annihilate three Republican Guard armored and mechanized divisions. The British 7^th Armored had decided to get in on the fun, and while they weren’t quite as dialed into the drones, they had already managed to savage major parts of two divisions in the eastern corps. The 5^th Baghdad Mechanized had made the only Iraqi offensive actions. Two brigades had attacked east into the 7^th Armored, and another two had attacked south into the 101^st. Both attacks were annihilated. It got better after that. The 173^rd Airborne had managed to become motorized, with the help of transport battalions which Germany and Norway committed as part of their NATO obligations, and they were putting pressure on from the north. The Germans also offered, as did Norway, assistance with chemical weapons decontamination. The Republican Guard was being penned in and destroyed, and all they had to show for it were a lot of footsore soldiers marching home without any weapons.