Posted on 09/26/2002 8:59:12 PM PDT by Pokey78
BASRA, Iraq — To understand why an invasion of Iraq may not be the cakewalk that the White House expects, pay $20 (round trip) and board an Iraqi Airways flight that soars from Baghdad straight through the American-enforced "no-flight zone" to Basra on the southern tip of Iraq.
American war planes are authorized to shoot down any aircraft that venture into it, but the Iraqis around me were cool as ice. They knew that U.S. fighters would never attack a civilian aircraft, insha'allah, and that the U.S. military could only bluster.
"Sometimes the American Awacs planes warn us on the radio," explained an Iraqi pilot who was amused at my anxiety. "They say, `You are entering a no-fly zone and must turn around.' We reply, `This is Iraqi air space and we're going to fly through it.' "
That American restraint is Iraq's ace going into war. Iraq knows that the United States cannot bomb schools, mosques and residential neighborhoods, and so it has plenty of places to hide its army. In the last gulf war, we were able to destroy an enemy that was out in the open desert, but this time Iraq seems intent on a different approach.
From Basra I drove to the Kuwait border on the "highway of death," to see how Iraq will guard what may be a principal invasion route for American troops. The only military presence was a few guards on the edge of Basra, amounting to what you'd expect at the entrance to an urban U.S. high school.
So does this mean that Iraq is poorly prepared for an invasion? I don't think so.
Instead of protecting its borders, Iraq will hide its army within its cities, where air strikes are effective only at an unacceptable (for America) cost in civilian deaths. Saddam has a hiding place for himself that is better than Osama bin Laden's caves at Tora Bora: the teeming city of Baghdad, with five million inhabitants, where he already never spends two consecutive nights in the same place.
"The Americans are good at bombing," one Iraqi official mused. "But some day, they will have to come to the ground. And then we'll be waiting. Every Iraqi has a gun in his house, often a Kalashnikov. And every Iraqi has experience in fighting. So let's see how the Americans do when they're fighting in our streets."
That could be a nightmare. As the last gulf war showed, a bombing campaign can knock out bridges and barracks, but unless we're incredibly lucky, we won't kill Saddam, trigger a coup or wipe out his Republican Guard forces. We'll have to hunt out Saddam on the ground — which may be just as hard as finding Osama in Afghanistan, and much bloodier.
Our last experience with street-to-street fighting was confronting untrained thugs in Mogadishu, Somalia. This time we're taking on an army with possible bio- and chemical weapons, 400,000 regular army troops and supposedly seven million more in Al Quds militia.
Karar Hassan, a 22-year-old member of the militia in the city of Najaf, said he had just completed a training session in street fighting, including fighting house to house and even from trees. "I'll fight them till my last drop of blood," he added, in the kind of boast that is heard everywhere in Iraq.
"If someone tries to threaten us, we know how to respond," said a farmer named Hakim al-Khal in the bazaar of Karbala, and then he reached under his shirt and brandished a handgun.
Most Iraqis seem to have no love for Saddam, and the great majority will probably spend the war hiding under their beds. But if even a tiny proportion of the braggarts are serious, then look out. Moreover, some tribes are armed with mortars and large-caliber machine guns, so that even if they could not stop tanks rolling through to Baghdad, they could seriously hurt an American army of occupation.
Perhaps the American invasion will be a breeze after all. The Iraqi army is less than half the strength it was when it crumpled in a 100-hour ground war a decade ago, and U.S. forces are much stronger now. But if we're going to invade, we need to prepare for a worst-case scenario involving street-to-street fighting, with farmers like Mr. Khal taking potshots at our troops.
Is America really prepared for hundreds of casualties, even thousands, in an invasion and subsequent occupation that could last many years?
We better not go. </sarcasm>
IIRC, they asked this question about Afghanistan.
Yo, NYT: leave the discussion of strategy to the grownups, willya?
NYTimes sure doesn't want Saddam out.
No one in our military ever thought of this stuff, so Eleven-Star Field Marshal Nicholas D. Kristof has condescended to give them advice.
(Multiple expletives deleted).
No occupation of cities alone. Make deal with army there.
Maybe a battle in Tikrit.
Stupid-ass New York Times....when did the White House EVER say invading Iraq would be a cakewalk?
On the other hand, Kristof does have a way of scaring Washington politicos who think he knows something.
Am I wrong, but does the NYTimes regulars sound more and more juvenile of late? Kristof, Friedman, Dowd.
That American restraint is Iraq's ace going into war. Iraq knows that the United States cannot bomb schools, mosques and residential neighborhoods, and so it has plenty of places to hide its army. In the last gulf war, we were able to destroy an enemy that was out in the open desert, but this time Iraq seems intent on a different approach.
This will be true only so long as the US population believes that Saddam is only a mild danger to the US, and that the Iraqi people are as much his victims as anyone.
If Saddam demonstrates that he is a threat to the safety of US citizens, and the Iraqi populace show the sort of fanatical support for him that this article suggests, things will be very different.
From Victor Davis Hanson's "Soul of Battle":
[O]n March 9, 1945, a 400-mile-long trail of 334 B-29s left their Marianas bases, 3,500 newly trained airmen crammed in among the napalm. The gigantic planes each carried ten tons of the newly invented jellied gasoline incendiaries. Preliminary pathfinders had seeded flares over Tokyo in the shape of an enormous fiery X to mark the locus of the target. Planes flew over in small groups of three, a minute apart. Most were flying not much over 5,000 feet above Japan. Five-hundred-pound incendiary clusters fell every 50 feet. Within thirty minutes, a 28-mile-per-hour ground wind sent the flames roaring out of control. Temperatures approached 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The Americans flew in without guns, and LeMay was not interested in shooting down enemy airplanes/ He instead filled the planes with napalm well over their theoretical maximum loads. He wished to destroy completely the material and psychological capital of the Japanese people, on the brutal theory that once civilians had tasted what their soldiers had done to others, only then might their murderous armies crack. Advocacy for a savage militarism from the rear, he though, might dissipate when one's house was in flames. People would not show up to work to fabricate artillery shells that killed Americans when there was no work to show up to. Soldiers who kill, rape, and torture do so less confidently when their own families are at risk at home.
The planes returned with their undercarriages seared and the smell of human flesh among the crews. Over 80,000 Japanese died outright; 40,918 were injured; 267,171 buildings were destroyed. One million Japanese were homeless. Air currents from the intense heat sent B-29s spiraling thousands of feet upward. Gunners like my father could see the glow of the inferno from as far away as 150 miles as they headed home. The fire lasted four days. My father said he could smell burned flesh for miles on the way back to Tinian. Yet only 42 bombers were damaged, and 14 shot down. No single air attack in the history of conflict had been so devastating.
Unfortunately for the Japanese, the March 9 raid was the beginning, not the end, of LeMay's incendiary campaign. He sensed that his moment - a truly deadly man in charge of a huge democratic force free of government constraint - had at last arrived, as the imperial Japanese command was stunned and helpless. All the old problems - the weather, the enemy fighters, the jet stream, the high-altitude wear on the engines, political limitations on bombing civilians - were now irrelevant. There was to be no public objection to LeMay's burning down the industrial and residential center of the Japanese empire - too many stories about Japanese atrocities toward subjugated peoples and prisoners of war had filtered back to the American people. To a democratic nation in arms, an enemy's unwarranted aggression and murder are everything, the abject savagery of its own retaliatory response apparently nothing.
Suddenly, all of Japan lay defenseless before LeMay's new and unforeseen plan of low-level napalm attack. To paraphrase General Sherman, he had pierced the shell of the Japanese empire and had found it hollow. LeMay had thousands of recruits, deadly new planes, and a blank check to do whatever his bombers could accomplish. Over 10,000 young Americans were now eager to work to exhaustion to inflict even more destruction. Quickly, he upped the frequency of missions, sending his airmen out at the unheard-of rate of 120 hours per month - the Eight Air Force in England had usually flown a maximum of 30 hours per month - as they methodically burned down within ten days Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka before turning to smaller cities. His ground crews simply unloaded the bombs at the dock and drove them right over to the bombers, without storing them in arms depots. Between 300 and 400 planes roared out almost every other day, their crews in the air 30 hours and more each week. Missions over Japan, including preliminary briefings and later debriefings, often meant 24 consecutive hours of duty. Benzedrine and coffee kept the flyers awake.
They're increasingly dull, childish, and stark raving mad.
The U.S. military will not blow Baghdad, a beautiful city filled with ancient treasures, to smithereens. There will not be door-to door fighting a la Stalingrad.
Saddam's outpost troops will be annhilated, his missile sites destroyed in the first three hours and the oil fields will be occupied. His railroads, highways, bridges and factories are already pinpointed and will be blown to bits. His puny air force will never get off the ground and the skies above Baghdad will be controlled.
Saddam's mighty legions and his Praetorian Guard will sit around the city playing pinochle by candlelight till the bottled water and camel Spam runs out. Agents provocateurs will be working via radio, pamphlets and rewards to undermine morale among the populace and provoke mass defections of Saddam's home defense troops.
At least, that's how I see it, with some variations here and there. Our President and his war advisors had to use daisy cutters in Afghanistan, but will use the stilleto in Baghdad.
It's a whole new world of warfare, and canny adults are now in charge.
Leni
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.