Supply Crisis in Baghdad

Read Steve Gilliard’s assessment of the condition of US supply lines in Iraq. The situation is so bad the CPA is almost reduced to eating MRE’s.

The New York Times reports:

On Saturday, travelers heading north to Baghdad on the main highway from Kuwait saw at least three highway bridges destroyed in a 60-mile section immediately south of the capital. Munadel Abdul Ellah, 44, a Hilla resident who drove to Baghdad on Saturday, said large numbers of American helicopters flew overhead and hundreds of troops patrolled the roads.

“It’s a very bad situation,” said Mr. Ellah, who spent nearly eight hours making a round trip that usually takes only two hours. “There were so many troops on the highway. It was like when they first came to occupy the airport last year during the war.”

American forces had already effectively lost control of long sections of the 375-mile highway leading west from Baghdad to Jordan. The road runs through the battle zone around Falluja, 35 miles west of the capital. Ambushes near Falluja and the adjacent city of Abu Ghraib have destroyed numerous convoys carrying fuel and other supplies for American troops in the past two weeks.

The attacks have also resulted in the kidnapping of about two dozen foreigners, including an American soldier, Pfc. Keith Maupin, 20, who was shown Friday in a videotape released by his captors.

The announcement on Saturday of the the closing of the highways running north to Turkey and south to Kuwait was accompanied by an American military statement saying that the routes “are damaged and too dangerous for civilian travel,” and that anybody driving on the closed sections could be subject to attack. “If civilians drive on the closed sections of the highways, they may be engaged with deadly force,” the statement read.
[…]
The general said American military supplies were less of a problem because there were “alternative methods” of delivering ammunition, food and fuel, presumably by air. But even at the bases, commanders have been rationing use of critical stockpiles and urging decisive action to ensure that road convoys get through.

But a senior American official said Saturday that the cutoff in supplies reaching the American occupation authority’s headquarters in Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace in central Baghdad were approaching a critical point. Canteens feeding 2,000 people, civilians as well as military personnel, may soon be forced to serve combat rations in plastic sleeves, known as meals ready to eat.

“We’re getting back to where we were a year ago,” he said, referring to the privations that American civilian and military officials lived with during the early weeks after the invasion brought American troops to Baghdad on April 9, 2003.