The Saddam Hussein Commemorative Hardened Shelter

Balad, Iraq

0500Z 16 October, 1993

"Yusef! Get down here! Yella!"

          Abu Mazen. I hate that prick. Always shouting and strutting about without lifting even a trowel himself. Ba'athist pimp, no… son of a pimp. That is more fitting for his sort of scum. Still I suppose he is the one who gives me this job and keeps me from… Never mind, just go down and see what he wants.

"Yusef! You lazy dog, why do I bother with you? The work is even farther behind schedule than last week! Should I hire another foreman? I knew it was a mistake to allow a crew of Shia curs to build anything! If I had my way…"

I climb down off the blazing hot concrete that already starts to creep up the steep walls of the bunker my crew has been slaving over for the last year and a half. The rest of the bunker is still a skeleton of exposed girders laced with rebar. There are still large gaps in the superstructure with no support girders and it is those gaps that have Abu Mazen's hijab in a knot.

"Nam, saidi… I know that we are behind schedule but surely you cannot expect me to complete this bunker without the beams? I cannot finish without supplies!"

"Supplies? Bah! It is your laziness that holds up the project! The beams will arrive soon Insha Allah but you Shia goat-fondlers work too slowly no matter what! And clean this work-site up! It is a place for pigs!"

          Shia goat fondlers? Insolent kufr! I know that it is he who loves the boys who push sand with their chests. Still he is in Uday's favor and I cannot afford to have him turn on me or worse; for that whoreson Uday to notice Adara! Insha Allah she will be married next week in a proper ceremony and forever beyond the sickness that possesses Saddam's demon son.

"Nam, they will redouble their efforts saidi. I will see to the cleaning as well."

          Sigh. It is I…Yusef, Shaykh of the Janitors. Thanks to those boy-fucking Ba'athists.

Saddam must have felt very safe in bunkers. I say this because here at our airfield there are literally hundreds of them! Judging from the scale of the architecture, this place could have been built by the Cyclopes. Massive 3-meter thick walls give a claustrophobic feel to even the largest of these monolithic structures. Walk into one and you wonder where all the space went.

            These are relics of a time when the world held on to the delusion that it was possible to engage the United States in conventional warfare, from a time when it was possible to be located by the enemy and stay alive, and from a time when enough concrete could keep out a bomb. These assumptions are simply not true any more.

            This is one of the major reasons for the raging anti-American sentiment in the world today. The original Gulf War gave the world a taste of our potency and the second one made them gag on it. The U.N. (and the rest of the world) came to the sphincter tightening realization that they were utterly powerless against us militarily. Only China and the Former Soviet Union remained as potential nuclear threats and even that deterrent was and is fading quickly as our missile defense programs approach viability. Does China's vehement opposition to anti-missile technologies make a bit more sense now? It should.

There will never be another war like Korea, where China slipped literally millions of infantry across the Yalou River in secret. You could possibly slip a few squads across a border nowadays but that is the absolute upper limit. Even if you did somehow manage to sneak a million troops across a border to engage the U.S. military the scale of the resultant slaughter would be incomprehensible. Human wave attacks? Forget about it. Give me a hilltop with a mini-gun and the only limit to the number of troops I could hold off single handedly would be my supply of ammunition.

            Speaking of ammo, a modern US soldier carries a minimum of 210 rounds for his/her M16A2. If combat is expected you can double that. One soldier on a hill is not the easy mark for human wave attacks that they once were even without figuring in the devastating effects of crew served weapons, artillery, and close air support. Stand up an element of infantry of any size and it will be killed. Most likely they won't even see an American soldier before they buy it due to electronic monitoring techniques and overhead satellite coverage.

            The new rule for fighting Americans on the battlefield is: Don't.

Saddam's forces were obliterated in the most stunning rout ever seen on the face of the Earth. Our casualties to date are less than 0.25% of the troops who have served in this conflict. Read that again, 0.25%! That number has never been approached in the history of warfare. Never. It is akin to the Hand of God descending from Heaven and sweeping your enemy from the battlefield. It boggles the mind.

            Saddam never saw how useless his bunkers would be against the United States Armed Forces. He did not understand that no matter how thick the walls were we would still destroy them. After all you can't hide or move these bunkers. We can see them. If we know where you are you will perish and no amount of concrete and rebar will help you.

The only way you could hope to win against us is through the Vietnam model. This scenario assumes that we have invaded another nation and that the majority of the people in it hate us. If you have this on your side you stand a very good chance of beating the U.S. eventually. Good news for the Revolutionary home teams eh? Maybe not.

            It is a different story when the majority of the populace doesn't hate us or even *gasp* supports the United States occupation. Instead of Vietnam you get South Korea, the Philippines, Japan (the last case is a bizarre study in attitude reversal), and Iraq. That’s right, Iraq.

            If the people in Iraq were on the insurgency's side I would never eat another thing that was not airdropped to me. No trucks would dare drive the highways. It is freakishly easy to stop or destroy supply lines if even 30% of the people are willing to look the other way as insurgents place simple explosives made from the easily obtainable ordinance dumps that Saddam stashed everywhere in Iraq. Every base would be an island reachable only through air or by M1 tank convoy. Nothing else could possibly move. We would lose 100's of soldiers a day. That doesn't happen. Want to know why?

            The people here hate the insurgents.  They turn in bomb-makers, bomb-layers, arms cache raiders, and inciters to violence. They do it everyday in droves because they want to have what we have. They want schools for their kids, running water, electricity, uncensored newspapers, the Internet, and crappy shows on the WB. They want prosperity and they know the insurgency has something quite different in mind for them.

            We offer them hope, equality, prosperity, and freedom. The Jaysh Al-Madhi, Ansar Al-Sunna, and Fedayeen Saddam offer them a return to the 7th century. The people have spoken folks and they like this century much more than some bizarre anachronistic attempt to freeze the world in the Golden Age of Mohammed.