Op-Ed Columns

Retired Army Col. Patrick Lang asked who’s at greatest risk if either Lebanon or Iraq spirals out of control and the Shiite militias in Iraq, who up to this point have been told to leave American forces alone, decide to act against the 130,000 U.S. troops occupying Iraq.

However invincible the military of the world’s only superpower might seem, every army has its weak spot. Historically, it centers on logistics, the supply line tail that wags the dog. From Hannibal to Erwin Rommel, from Robert E. Lee to Kim Il Sung in 1950, it’s been ever thus.

The lifeline for American forces in Iraq is a 400-plus-mile main supply route that runs from Kuwait through Shia-dominated and Iranian-infiltrated southern Iraq to Baghdad and points north and west.

Along that route, trucks and tankers driven by third-country nationals — Turks, Pakistanis and others — haul 95 percent of the beans and bullets for our troops and 100 percent of the fuel that our tanks and Bradleys and Humvees gulp at staggering rates.

That route runs through the heart of Iraq’s Shiite Muslim south, an area now thoroughly infiltrated by Iranian Revolutionary Guards and under the sway of well-armed Shiite militiamen and Iraqi police who are often indistinguishable from the militiamen and sometimes the same people.

The lightly protected American convoys are vulnerable to ambushes, improvised explosive devices and even an occasional rocket-propelled grenade slamming into a fuel tanker.

In an article for The Christian Science Monitor, Lang asked what we could do if that supply route were cut. Only about 5 percent of the supplies for our troops in Iraq come in by air. With a huge effort, that could be doubled or perhaps even tripled, but an airlift couldn’t provide nearly enough food, ammunition and fuel to keep our troops on the job, even if the Sunni insurgents around Baghdad and Balad didn’t start trying to shoot down the supply flights or drop mortar rounds on the runways.

Would our military have to stop trying to end the sectarian violence in Iraq in order to keep its own supply lines open? How many troops and tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and helicopters would have to be diverted to such an effort, and would it be worth it?

There’s another strategic vulnerability farther up the chain: Supplies for our forces must first reach the main port in Kuwait by ships — ships that must transit the Strait of Hormuz past a gantlet of Iranian Silkworm anti-ship missiles and suicide torpedo boats.

Little wonder, then, that Iran and its ayatollahs have the nerve to thumb their noses at efforts to curtail their nuclear ambitions and to supply thousands of short- and medium-range missiles to their Hezbollah proteges in Lebanon.

The Bush administration marched us into Iraq in the belief that it could install a democracy in the heart of a volatile region, create a better and more peaceful Middle East and, in the end, make the world and the United States safer and better.

The armed force the president dispatched to do the job was too small by half, it left its supply lines unguarded from the beginning, and now it’s bogged down in a situation that’s only growing worse.

The crackdown we imposed on Iraq’s minority Sunni Arabs and the democracy we established in Iraq have unleashed the majority Shia to take revenge against the Sunnis who prospered and governed under Saddam Hussein’s bloody rule. The Sunnis are responding in kind, and the capital city of Baghdad has become a killing field where few are immune to the sectarian violence.

We Americans have always believed that democracy is the answer, but we’re discovering that there are places and people that are so scarred by their pasts that democracy and free elections can make things worse.

Witness Gaza, where Palestinians voted to install members of the militant Islamic group Hamas to run the Palestinian Authority. Witness Iraq.

The Bush people hope against hope that somehow it will all turn out right. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, touring the tinderbox, said that she saw in the smoking ruins of Lebanon the birth pangs of a new Middle East.

That reminds me of a sign that used to decorate the Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, Ga.:

“Hope is NOT a method unless you are the chaplain!”

Joe Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder.