Eye on Iraq: Three wars at once

By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst

"WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 (UPI) -- "One war at a time," U.S. President Abraham Lincoln famously said when dismissing a proposal to risk war with the British Empire, the most powerful nation on earth, when he already had his hands full waging the U.S. Civil War. But as the United States heads for a full-scale confrontation with Iran, it risks fighting three separate wars simultaneously in the same theater of operations.....

However, even while U.S. policymakers await hopefully but uncertainly to see the results of Petraeus' new strategy, they're also hunkering down for a looming confrontation with Iran over its refusal to heed United Nations Security Council Resolution 1737 of Dec. 23 and abandon its nuclear development program......

The Iranians would have other forms of retaliation available too. In the event of a U.S. air strike on their new nuclear centrifuges and other faculties, they would almost certainly unleash the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the highly popular Iraqi Shiite leader, which is particularly strong across southern Iraq and in the Sadr City Shiite poor neighborhoods of Baghdad, where 2 million people live.

But if the U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft strike Iranian nuclear facilities, then Washington policymakers could end up directing three separate but overlapping wars at the same time.....

Historically, even the finest armies have often been unbalanced, caught by surprise and even annihilated when they were forced to fight very different kinds of enemies simultaneously or in quick succession......

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the greatest British combat commander of World War II, always emphasized the importance of balance in full-scale army formations deployed to fight major land battles. But if an army's operational and planning energies are focused on defending their lines of communication, maintaining control of large cities, or in fighting and suppressing large irregular forces, then they may be disastrously distracted from the main axis of conventional attack against them.

If U.S. forces in the Iraq-Iran region are forced to fight two or three major but very different campaigns simultaneously within a small geographical area, they will run the risk of confusion and dispersal of effort that could generate this kind of dangerous distraction."