The men with the brave hearts who went to war in August 1914 thought they would be home by Christmas. The Nazis thought they could sweep through the Low Countries in 1940 and bring a swift end to fighting in Europe. The Americans thought more troops in 1965 would bring the Vietnam War to a decisive conclusion. The soldiers of the multinational coalition that mobilized to fight Iraq in 1991 thought they would be battling in Kuwait for months. They were all wrong.
So it should be no surprise, as the third week of Gulf War II begins, that this conflict has brought surprises. War always does. The first casualty of war isn't truth, but expectations, and this conflict already has made a casualty of expectations. This struggle is no minute waltz -- and while there is little reason now to believe it will become a dance marathon, there is every indication that many steps remain before it concludes.
That, more than any single troop movement, pocket of resistance or desert battle, is emerging as the central fact of this war, affecting not only the course of the conflict but also its character, significance and aftermath.
Great Britain and the United States didn't count on Saddam Hussein being able to rally his country (or even to survive the first day's missile attacks). They didn't count on the Iraqi people resisting the allied incursion; or on the difficulty in maintaining supply lines in the desert; or on obstacles on the way to Baghdad; or on the likelihood of the use of suicide bombers, until now mostly a terrorist tactic, as a tool of war in conflict between states.
Nor did the two countries fully comprehend the most terrifying prospect of this new Gulf war -- the notion that weapons of mass destruction might be converted from frightful, forbidden implements of conflict into symbols of nationalism that could be used, to the applause of the masses, to keep invading forces at bay. Such a development would provide unprecedented peril to allied combatants and would upend the moral calculus of the West.
That is the danger stalking in the words of Iraq's Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, who, after last weekend's taxi suicide bombing, said, "Any method that stops or kills the enemy will be used."
The Bush administration is arguing that it never promised a brisk war, but Vice President Dick Cheney expressed the prevailing attitude last month when he said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that the war in Iraq would be a matter of "weeks rather than months."
He could still be right, of course. But the public isn't so sure. A week ago, a majority of Americans expected the war to last two months; now, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, a majority believes it will last three months. "If there really is fierce resistance, this war will be that much worse," says Gary J. Bass, a Princeton University specialist in international affairs. "You hope that the people who made the decision to go to war considered that it might go longer than we expected. The people who want to do these things always say that they will be fast and easy."
In truth, the Pentagon expected defense from Iraq's army, but not defiance from Iraq's people. American military strategists believed that, because of the success of aerial bombing in the first Gulf war, in the Balkans and in Afghanistan, "shock-and-awe" air strikes would bring Iraq to its knees. They did not. At the heart of the American strategy was the conviction that the Iraqis would rise up against their leader. They did not.
One explanation might be found in the seminal study of air warfare, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which was released in 1945. It noted that in what it called "a determined police state" -- a term used to describe Nazi Germany but just as useful to describe contemporary Iraq -- the "people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident." It is also possible, however, that people shuddering from fear find it hard to embrace the very people who are bombing them.
Either way, the uprising that the Americans wanted didn't occur even as the uprising that the United States dreaded did -- in streets throughout the Arab world. In a short war, allied occupation of an Arab nation would soon have become a fait accompli. In a longer war, it is a fate awaiting Iraq, and as such a great boon for Islamic extremists and a great rallying point for Arabs outside Iraq.
In truth, no one knows whether the war will be long or short -- or even how the two should be defined. If Iraq collapses in two weeks, the United States and Britain could still claim a swift victory. But it is clear that the optimistic scenarios spun by military strategists in both nations haven't run their course.
Right now the war in Iraq doesn't look fast or easy. The allied threats -- that the United States and Britain will topple Saddam Husssein and that his supporters will suffer the consequences of being on the wrong side of history -- seem to be steeling Iraq for a longer struggle, creating an Iraqi identity that barely existed in a country created by British cartographers and sowing a dangerous pan-Arab nationalism.
And that may be the biggest blow the allies have encountered yet. "If this war goes on a long time, it may be more difficult for the administration to sustain the narrative that this was a war of liberation and it may be more difficult to reverse Arab public opinion," says Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who now directs the Center for International Relations at Boston University. "A long war is a big problem even if it is successful." Indeed, the longer it takes to win the war, the easier it becomes to lose the peace.
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