WASHINGTON, April 23 (UPI) -- Despite the quick war in Iraq, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Baghdad said Wednesday he gets upset when the victory is dismissed as "easy."
"I get very upset when I hear anybody say that this was so easy. There are 600-plus Americans who are dead or wounded in the course of this conflict, and it wasn't easy for them," said Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan said in a video-teleconference at the Pentagon. "I don't think you'll find anybody that says it was an easy fight. So if I sound a little emotional, I apologize, but there is nothing in wartime that's easy for that formation or for that pilot or for that ship when they're in harm's way."
The success says more about U.S. equipment, training and leadership than it does Iraqi weakness, he said. Key to the victory was the attacks on Iraq's buried fiber optics communications network, which left many Republican Guard formations with very little "situation awareness" of the battlefield. They did not know where they could safely move "which played right into the decisive lethality that both the ground and the air component were able to put on him," McKiernan said.
McKiernan commanded the more than 200,000 U.S., British and Australian soldiers and Marines, including hundreds of special forces, in the now-35 day-old conflict. The effort is transitioning from combat to stability operations, but has settled into neither.
Around 700 military police are deploying into Iraq to help restore order in the streets, and with the addition of those and other forces, McKiernan said his force is adequate to the task.
"I would caveat that, though, by reminding everyone that there aren't enough soldiers or Marines to guard every street corner and every facility in Iraq, so there's some risk-taking in some areas," he said.
About 125,000 of his troops are in Iraq proper. Others are in support positions in Kuwait and elsewhere.
"I am satisfied that I have had enough forces on the ground to execute the campaign very decisively to this point. And we have the additional forces we need for phase four (stability operations) flowing in now," he said.
McKiernan's priority is now restoring basic services: getting the power back on, getting water flowing, restoring medical services, getting transportation systems up and running and establishing law and order in the streets.
He said coalition forces have deliberately established a low profile during the Shi'a religious pilgrimage in Najaf and Karbala. More than two million Shi'a have participated.
"What we tried to do with our military is achieve the right balance of providing some security and an ability to react if something went wrong, but we basically stayed out of it because it is a Shi'a religious pilgrimage and they have been very good at conducting that operation themselves," he said.
McKiernan said he thinks the majority of Iraqis are glad to see the Americans.
"About a week ago, I took a fairly fast, low-level Black Hawk flight around about three-quarters of Baghdad. And I will tell you, as I looked down in every area -- Shi'a, Sunni, every area in Baghdad -- probably 80 to 90 percent of those on the ground were waving at me. Now we can all say that's just a false signal, but I'll tell you, it kind of made my heart feel pretty good."
McKiernan rejected the persistent criticism for ground forces failure to secure Baghdad's Central Bank and the National Museum of Iraq, among other facilities, from looters.
"There's a fundamental answer to that question, and the answer is that we had to fight our way into Baghdad," McKiernan said. "And so if some of the facilities became subject to looting over that period of time by Iraqis, I will tell you that our priority was to fight the enemy and to protect Iraqi people."
Combat operations are not completely over, however, McKiernan's forces still face sporadic attacks from paramilitary groups and regime hold outs.
There are some places where we continue to find pockets of regime resistance. We had some fighting last night in the Tikrit area," he said. "There's a second category of paramilitaries -- some of those, many of those are not Iraqi, they've come in from other countries -- they will continue to have to clear and deal with. And then there are a continued threat of protecting the force from suicide bombers or any other lethal threats that our forces might face."
McKiernan conceded the sheer numbers of those fighters was a surprise but said ground troops quickly adjusted their tactics to respond to the unanticipated enemy.
"The fact that we ended up fighting a lot of paramilitary or death-squad formations that were coming out of urban areas in the southern part of Iraq was probably not the most likely enemy course of action that we war-gamed against, but it was certainly a course of action that we war-gamed against," he said.
The lightning-fast strike on Baghdad from Kuwait commanded by McKiernan was intended to put unrelenting pressure on Saddam's regime, to prevent his forces from falling back and regrouping for a counterattack.
That strike stretched his potentially vulnerable supply lines almost 350 miles, a risk he accepted going in to the mission.
"We have overcome that risk," McKiernan said. "Most of our combat vehicles have driven in excess of a thousand miles to date. They have not run out of fuel. Our maintenance status is in good shape. Our logistics has been sustained and will continue to be sustained."
McKiernan bristled at news reports the third and fourth day of the campaign that his troops were taking an operational pause. They were bogged down by a massive sandstorm and had fought several pitched battles. They used to time to resupply and regroup. At the same time, air and special operations attacks continued to be carried out.
"That might seem like a pause if you're sitting there with that unit that day on the ground," McKiernan said. "I would refute any notion that there was any kind of operational pause in this campaign. There was never a day, there was never a moment where there was not continuous pressure put on the regime of Saddam by one of those components -- air, ground, maritime, Special Forces and so on."
McKiernan's mission was not just to topple Saddam but also to find his chemical, biological and radiological weapons. That search has been fruitless so far.
McKiernan counseled patience.
"Personally, I knew that this would be a long process, that we would not find the material for weapons of mass destruction right away," he said. "Probably what will most greatly assist in completion of this task is Iraqis coming forward and telling us information that leads us to where material or documents or equipment might be located."
His primary concerns are far more pedestrian, however.
"I'm just trying to get the lights and the water turned back on," McKiernan said.
