"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 7th Adnan Infantry and finish them off. That will effectively surround them. Uh, what about prisoners, sir? We blew through the 1st 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 101st 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 shook 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 1st Armored and 2nd Strykers had managed to annihilate three Republican Guard armored and mechanized divisions. The British 7th 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 5th Baghdad Mechanized had made the only Iraqi offensive actions. Two brigades had attacked east into the 7th Armored, and another two had attacked south into the 101st. Both attacks were annihilated. It got better after that. The 173rd 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.
Those soldiers weren't making it back to Iraq, however. The 101st was blocking the way. They had thrown up roadblocks, and when Iraqi units approached those roadblocks, snipers would stop any vehicles they were operating. A Barrett .50 could blow through an engine block from a mile out, so Iraqi trucks and transports weren't going anywhere. As for the infantry walking, a Hum-Vee with a Ma Deuce stitching a line across the road was a convincing argument. Eventually the Iraqis would send out somebody who could speak English under a white flag, and the 101st would tell them the facts of life. We would bring in water, food, and medical supplies to designated relief areas, but to get there, the Iraqis would have to walk, and they would have to do so without any weapons. By then, a never ending string of C-130s was bringing in supplies via LAPES deliveries, and the 101st was sitting fat and happy. They had handily fended off several probing attacks from regular army units to the south; the soldiers of the 101st had taken almost no casualties, while the attackers reeled back bloody and beaten.
By now, we had casualties. No M-1s had been shot up, but the Guard had managed to blow up about a dozen Bradleys and Strykers, and an Apache had friendly fired on a couple of Bradleys. In addition to the losses from Azwya, we had another hundred dead and wounded, including the pilot of the Apache who, upon learning what had happened, went out behind his gunship and ate his Berretta. Casualties come in all shapes and sizes. I told the Chief of Staff to get Walter Reed and the psychologists warmed up.
An interesting question came up at that point. "Mister President, the 1st Armored out of Fort Bliss is deploying to eastern Turkey. They will need to sort out and then offload and move to the front."
"Do we really need to do that? It almost sounds like we are about done with this thing. Can we send them home?", I asked.
I got several very unhappy looks out of the professionals at that. "We can, but do we really want to? We are going to need those troops to invade Iraq, and probably more.", said General Pace.
"Why do we want to invade Iraq?" I looked around the room at the other faces. "That was a serious question. I am not trying to be flippant or rude. What is the benefit to the United States of invading Iraq? What do we get out of it and what will it cost? Why should we do this? The floor is open for discussion."
Several people wanted to answer this at the same time, so I held up a hand and pointed at General Pace and said we would go around the table clockwise until everybody had a chance to speak. The discussion went in several directions, none of them wholly unsuspected. We had several different views: