What would Patton say about the war in Iraq?

When Patton went operational on Aug. 1, 1944, he traveled nearly 400 miles in little more than 30 days. Bradley and Eisenhower complained that he was bypassing resistance, was violating pre-Normandy planning, and was not part of the strategic effort to hit German industrial centers in the Ruhr. Patton answered back that his success was having a psychological effect in causing the collapse of entire armies and offering new potential alternatives--with only brief windows for critical exploitation--that might change accepted realities and vault the Allies across the Rhine before the shortened days, poor weather, stiffening German resistance, and extended Allied supply lines could come into play to stifle the American advance by autumn. His lesson? When there is an opportunity for exploitation--one-quarter of Fallujah taken or terrorist Muqtada al-Sadr reeling--hesitancy and conventional thinking can forfeit unforeseen advantages and offer a collapsing enemy a reprieve that will end up costing far more casualties later. Beware of a false sense of forbearance that can turn deadly.

Patton had two phrases that he used almost ad nauseum. The first, from French statesman Georges Danton, was "Audacity, always audacity, still more audacity." The second was "the unforgiving minute," from writer Rudyard Kipling, referring to certain times in war when the collective will of a people or an army can, without warning, collapse--critical moments that must be capitalized on. Unlike Eisenhower and Bradley, who thought the August, 1944, collapse of the German army was likely and thus the war would end before Christmas, Patton knew that if the Panzers were saved from near death, they could be ready to kill again and under far more favorable conditions. That is exactly what happened at the Falaise Gap. Later at the Seine River, near the Siegfried Line, and when attacking the Bulge, Patton saw that a sweeping hook, rather than a head-on assault, might bring on a total collapse, but only if risks were taken and old plans ignored in light of new realities. Again, the conservative, doctrinaire approach of cautious attack proved the far more costly tactic.

These lessons also apply in recent times. In the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein put almost 250,000 Iraqi troops in bunkers in the sand, and even after weeks of U.S. bombing they remained operational. In response, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf marched hundreds of miles around the flank, leaving many of the entrenched Iraqi positions behind and headed toward Basra, his long flanks covered by air support. Although we copied Patton's tactics, we forgot their purpose--stopping at the so-called Highway of Death because of the television images of "thousands" of enemy dead. Pentagon staffers worried at the time that 20,000 enemy soldiers had been killed, thus causing a global uproar. We know now that the real number was in the hundreds, and that when we stopped before Basra, fleeing Iraqis did not, and they killed thousands of virtually defenseless Shiites and Kurds over the next few weeks. During the next 12 years, Anglo-American pilots flew thousands of missions in Iraq's no-fly zones, all as a precursor to the second Iraqi war. In short, we forgot Patton's most important lesson: The purpose of outflanking the enemy is to demoralize and annihilate him, thus removing the reasons to go to war in the first place.