[A-List] Venik answers some questions concerning www.iraqwar.ru and other matters

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

Answering some questions
I would like to thank everyone for visiting my site and
commenting on my translations of the Russian military intelligence
reports published by www.iraqwar.ru I am happy to say that
during the past week or so I received close to 2,000 e-mails
from people visiting my site who thank me for the translations.
(I also got two e-mails with negative comments, but, I guess,
one can't make everyone happy.)

I appreciate all feedback - positive and negative - and I am
sorry for not being able to respond to most of the e-mails
in a timely manner. To remedy the situation I will answer
some of the most frequent questions I receive.

Naturally, most people are wondering where these Russian military
intelligence do reports come from and why does the GRU allow such
materials to be published. My answer to both questions is: I don't
know. The GRU is a huge and complex organization with tens of
thousands people working there. This military intelligence agency
does not report directly to the Russian government. The agency's
activities are dictated by national security interests as perceived
by the Russian Ministry of Defense and the General Staff of the
Russian Armed Forces.

The daily GRU reports you see on www.iraqwar.ru come from an anonymous
source. At first I had my doubts as to the origin and accuracy of
these reports. But I found them to be very detailed and technically
accurate, especially against the background of near-complete information
blackout in the mainstream media. Several days into the war these GRU
reports proved to be extremely accurate in their analysis of the current
situation in Iraq and predictions for the near future. In my mind this,
at the very least, confirms that this information is based on actual
intelligence data coming from the combat zone and analyzed by
professional military experts. As to "who, where, why and
how" - your guess is as good mine.

Another question I frequently receive is why these GRU reports
concentrate
so much on the coalition side of the conflict, while providing only
limited insight into the Iraqi tactics and situation. A possible war
between Russia and Iraq is not very high on the Russian military's list
of concerns. A war between Russia and the US, on the other hand, has
been more than just a possibility for well over fifty years.
Naturally, the Russian military intelligence is concentrating on its
most powerful, even if not the most likely, potential enemy.

Many people would like to know what the Iraqi Air Force is doing. And
so do me. So far there hasn?t been a single word in the news about
any actions by the Iraqi combat aviation. What I find even more
surprising, however, is the absence of any coalition claims of
destroyed Iraqi aircraft. During the first Gulf War and all the
subsequent US and British attacks against Iraq Pentagon claimed
destroyed Iraqi aircraft and damaged airfields. Previously we have
seen many images of such attacks but now there is a near-complete
silence in this regard.

Based on Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence reports just
prior to the war, Iraqi combat aircraft - namely the MiG-25 long-range
supersonic interceptors - were frequently testing the coalition
anti-aircraft defenses by probing the "no-fly zones". No Iraqi plane
has been shot down in these incidents. Numerous attempts by the US
Air Force to intercept the fast-flying Iraqi "Foxbats" have failed.
Western military analysts believe that the Iraqi Air Force still
has about 50-75 fully-operational fixed-wing aircraft, including
MiG-25 and MiG-29 fighters as well as Su-25 and Mirage F1 attack
planes. And in Iraq's case, as we've found out, Western analysts
have a tendency to underestimate

A similar interesting situation is observed with the Iraqi air
defenses: while the skies over Baghdad light up every day with
dense anti-aircraft artillery fire, SAM launches have been extremely
rare. At the same time we know that during the past two years Iraq
has been constantly launching SAMs at the US and British aircraft
patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq. In 1999 Pentagon sources
reported that Iraq had around 445 SAM missile launchers of all types a
nd about 2,000 hand-held anti-aircraft missiles, plus some 6,000
anti-aircraft guns. Since then the US and British warplanes attacked
a number of suspected Iraqi SAM sites. However, considering the
unimpressive performance of the NATO air force against Yugoslav air
defenses in the spring of 1999, one can conclude that Iraq's air
defense potential in 2003 was close to the numbers cited by
Pentagon in 1999.

According to the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, just
during the first quarter of 2002 Iraq fired more several hundred
SAMs against the US and British aircraft. Westerner military analysts
noted that these remarkably ineffective SAM launches might have been
intended to mislead Pentagon as to the true potential of the Iraqi
air defenses. It has been reported that most of the Iraqi launch
sites terminated guidance signals well before their missiles could
have struck their targets. As a point of reference one can take the
loss of 63 US and 12 allied combat aircraft, as reported by
Pentagon, during the first Gulf War.

At the same time the analysts noted the equally unimpressive rate
success of the anti-radiation missiles launched in response by the
British and the US planes. Some analysts suggested that Iraq may
be testing methods and equipment to counteract the anti-radiation
missiles such as the US-made HARM and the British ALARM. Both
types of missiles have been found intact in Yugoslavia and might
have been studied by the Iraqis given the defense cooperation
between the two countries during Milosevic's presidency.

What we have seen in Iraq so far in term of air defense activity
are the timely warnings of US air strikes provided by Iraq's grid
of early-warning radars that operate in tight coordination with
each other and with a large number of decoy radars; we have also
seen considerable AAA activity over Baghdad but a relatively small
number of reported SAM launches. These observations are difficult
to explain, especially given the absence of any significant
SAM-kill claims by the coalition.

Some people writing me are wondering about the accuracy of the
coalition claims of Iraqi military and political leaders supposedly
being killed in coalition air strikes mainly against targets in
Baghdad and Basra. Among these is the recent claim of up to 200
killed Iraqi special operations troops during an air strike
against a Ba'ath party's building in Basra.

I do not wish to pretend to understand the logic of the Iraqi
troops. Speaking for myself, however, I will have to say that the
Ba'ath party headquarters in Basra would not be my first choice
as a hiding place. I think this should be obvious to anyone
familiar with the concept of an aviation bomb.

Therefore, when the official statements by the coalition command
talk about Iraqi military or political leaders being killed in
strikes against various Iraqi government and military buildings
in Basra, Baghdad and elsewhere - large, unprotected, stationary
targets with known coordinates that already have been attacked more
than once - I choose to treat such claims with skepticism. Thinking
that the enemy is that much dumber than you cannot possibly be the
recommended approach to winning wars. I seriously doubt that Saddam
Hussein spends his afternoons drinking tea with his military's high
command in the garden of his Baghdad residence.

The progress of the war, if you can call it that, is also being
misrepresented, to put it mildly. The mainstream media in the
West seems to be entirely content with swallowing whatever information
it?s given by the US and British officials, even when this information
makes no sense whatsoever. I was just reading an AP report on Yahoo
news from March 31 entitled ?U.S. Moves to Within 50 Miles of
Baghdad? and I had this strange feeling of deja-vue. Sure enough,
after entering the title of this story into the Yahoo search engine
I got the following title: ?Troops March Within 50 Miles of
Baghdad? also from AP dated March 26. Perhaps they were marching
in different directions: the first time toward Baghdad and the week
later ? away from Baghdad? I don?t know and I don?t think the AP
knows either.

The situation in the media coverage of the war is unlikely to
improve. Pentagon is adding further restrictions on the flow of
information from Iraq that is already a trickle and the US mainstream
media seems to be engaged in a very bizarre show of self-censorship.
Most of you already know about the decision by NBC and by the
National Geographic to fire Peter Arnett - a Pulitzer Prize-winning
Vietnam War reporter and one of a handful of Western journalists
still remaining in Baghdad.

The reason for this drastic measure by the NBC and the National
Geographic was Arnett's interview to the Iraqi television in which
he said that the coalition's original war plans have failed and now
they are searching for alternatives. By giving this interview Arnett
did not brake any laws and he told the truth - exactly what a journalist
should do. However, it seemed that the NBC and the National Geographic
expected Arnett to push Pentagon's propaganda instead as NBC is
doing here in the States.

And there is no explanation and no excuse for the National Geographic
getting in the middle of this - I always thought this magazine was
about geography, not about the Department of Defense information
war efforts. Today I called to cancel my National Geographic
subscription: I like the photos but I don't like corporate politics.

The US Army Central Command came down like a ton of bricks
on... Heraldo, of all people. Apparently Heraldo had the misfortune
of someone watching his news broadcast where he drew lines in the
sand of the Iraqi desert illustrating the outlines of the Arabian
Peninsula and some countries located there. Pentagon accused Heraldo
of revealing secret military plans. I understand that Pentagon is
fighting an information war (mainly against its own people), but
this is just ridiculous.

My personal view of the war is simple: I believe it should end as
quickly as possible. The US and the UK should bite their pride and
to withdraw as many of its troops from Iraq as they have left as
soon as possible. This will save lives on all sides and this will
save everybody a great deal of money and aggravation. Of course
none of this will happen for no government is in business of
saving lives or money.

Finally I would like to address al the questions regarding
reproducing translations of my articles from www.iraqwar.ru
and requests for interviews: you can freely use my translations
for non-profit educational use without my expressed consent as
outlined in the copyright section of this page. I don not hold
any rights to the original reports by "Ramzaj" appearing on
www.iraqwar.ru. I do not give any interviews. If you have any
questions you can e-mail me, however, due to the large number
of e-mails I receive, it may be some time before you get a response.

Some people have offered to mirror my Web site: this is not a
good idea. My site is close to 100Gb and if you configure your
Web mirroring application to follow all links, you will definitely
overload the server. Also, there is an automatic process on the
server adding unnecessarily active IPs to the "access denied" list.
You wouldn't want to get on that list. If you need to mirror the
reports about the war in Iraq, do so from the main page of my site
and limit your mirror to one level below the index page.

I cannot and will not accept any money from anyone. I
appreciate your desire to help, but I only invest my free
time into the projects like aeronautics.ru and iraqwar.ru.
If you are feeling charitable, you may want to contact JERA
Systems firm in Moscow - it's a small private IT company that
provides my site, the Iraqwar.ru, the VIF2.ru military history
portal and numerous other projects with free hosting and free
technical support. They can probably use your help as the
unexpected sharp increase in Web traffic put a real strain on
their servers and network, slowing down their commercial
projects. You can e-mail them at info@xxxxxxx

Also, the Iraqwar.ru project needs volunteers who can submit
interesting news reports. The site publishes samples of news
reporting from a variety of sources, but we would like to widen
the scope by including materials written by private citizens and
news published by local media around the world. If you are willing
to help, then go to www.iraqwar.ru, register and submit your
materials. The site can also use English- and Russian-language
editors (not necessarily professionals - simply people with good
language skills) to review submitted information and approve it
for publication on a volunteer basis. The project is a non-profit
educational resource.

Venik
March 30, 2003


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