Posted on 04/04/2003 3:50:02 PM PST by blam
Day 16: A pivotal battle is won. But how many more now lie ahead?
By John Lichfield
05 April 2003
In the conventional war – the set-piece military one – yesterday was pivotal. That war is now, evidently, almost over. Baghdad will soon be surrounded; many hundreds of soldiers in the Republican Guard have surrendered; many others have died; Baghdad airport, a main strategic and psychological objective, has a new owner and a new name.
But is the war itself almost over? American and British political and military figures were at great pains to insist that it was not. They are evidently scared of taking another dip on the rollercoaster of public opinion, which has swooped, in the space of a fortnight, from excessive optimism to excessive pessimism and is now, possibly, soaring towards excessive optimism again. The problem, from the beginning, has been that a multiplicity of wars is going on in Iraq. The outcome of several of them remains uncertain.
It is now clear that the Iraqi regime and military, for whatever reason – incompetence, weakness, cunning – has not so much lost the set-piece military war as refused to fight it. US commanders reported some resistance in the outskirts of Baghdad yesterday and a brief, fierce battle with the Special Republican Guard for the Saddam international airport (now renamed by US Central Command as Baghdad international airport). Thousands of civilians were reported to be fleeing the capital. Gunfire and explosions could be heard in the southern outskirts.
But American soldiers in the attacking force were puzzled. Why were the Iraqis still using makeshift machine-guns and rocket carriers, rather than their heavy equipment? Where are the 60,000 soldiers of the Guard who were ringing the city? Where are their 600 tanks? Many bodies and ruined vehicles were counted by reporters travelling with US soldiers and marines who, by the afternoon, claimed to be well on the way towards throwing an armoured ring around the capital. But the scale of casualties and prisoners of war (2,500 members of the Republican Guard were said to have torn off boots and helmets before surrendering near Kut yesterday) did not add up to the "elite" force America thought it was engaging.
Where are the others? Have they melted back into the streets of Baghdad? Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, the unflappable, humourless spokes-man for US Central Command, who has become one of the most recognisable faces of the war, admitted that the Allies did not know.
The other, unconventional, military war, the guerrilla conflict, in which "irregular" troops try to tempt American and British forces into urban jungle warfare or make hit-and-run attacks on vulnerable outposts, is far from over. The second apparent suicide bombing of the war, in which three special forces soldiers were killed in a car-bombing at a desert checkpoint 100 miles north-west of Baghdad on Thursday night, was a grim warning that the Saddam regime still has a grip on some of its more fanatical supporters, whether from Iraq or from abroad.
A car approached the checkpoint near the Haditha dam, close to the Syrian border. A pregnant woman jumped from the car, screaming with fear. Three special forces troops approached. The car exploded, killing the soldiers, the woman and the driver. Allied commanders suggested later that this might not have been a suicide bombing but that the car might have been booby-trapped by militia loyal to President Saddam and detonated from some distance away.
Was this the kind of defence that President Saddam – or someone speaking in his name – had in mind yesterday when he said that American forces would be "crushed at the gates of Baghdad"? The Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf – another of the more memorable television faces of the war – read the statement on Iraq television.
"We are determined, God willing, to defeat them and destroy them on the walls of our capital," the statement attributed to Saddam Hussein said. "Fight them, oh brothers, and hit them night and day."
The Information Minister later gave a briefing on what appeared to be a quite different war in which the "American and British mercenary forces" had suffered "huge losses, definitely" and had been forced to retreat, "abandoning many of their weapons". He threatened that Iraq intended to commit "an unconventional act" against the "invaders" at Baghdad airport last night, but said this would not involve biological or chemical warfare.
Hours later, in the surprise of the day, President Saddam was shown on Iraqi television, mingling with cheering crowds and kissing a startled baby as he campaigned for victory. The defiant appearance by the Iraqi leader – or a lookalike – amid bomb damage in the capital, seemed to answer the challenge from the Bush administration that President Saddam should show himself to prove he was still alive.
Neither the minister's threat nor President Saddam's statement and televised walkabout was necessarily seen by Baghdadis. Power in the city has been cut since Thursday night. Running water was also cut off, raising fears for those in the city if the American military settles in for a long siege.
Brig Gen Brooks dismissed suggestions that an Allied bomb or missile had destroyed the capital's power supply. "It was not us," he said.
Another, even more amorphous, war – the propaganda war for the hearts and minds of most Iraqis and for public opinion in the Middle East and the wider world – had potential victories, but also defeats, for the Allies yesterday. The discovery of two caches of suspect powder and liquid, and chemical warfare manuals, at two sites just south of Baghdad, and some kind of underground complex beneath the airport, may offer the first proof that the regime had the weapons of mass destruction, which was the reason given by Washington and London for going to war in the first place. All previous "suspect" finds have proved to be harmless or inconclusive.
First reports suggested that the Americans may have made the propaganda gold-find they have been waiting for. A later report suggested that the substances might be more conventional explosives.
On the debit side of the propaganda war, Arab television stations showed footage of Iraqi civilians, including small children, with horrendous injuries, said to have been inflicted when US artillery shells or bombs hit a village near the airport on Thursday night. The Iraqi authorities said that 80 civilians had been killed and 200 injured in the shelling and bombing. Adam Ingram, the British Armed Forces minister, urged the media to ignore such claims from a "lying regime" but a Reuters correspondent in Baghdad sent a first-hand report of the shelling of a village with dozens of casualties on Thursday night.
Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, tried to justify the use by the British and American forces of cluster bombs – those which divide into dozens of smaller bombs – despite the protests of human rights groups that unexploded canisters will present a danger to human life for many years to come. US Central Command in Qatar said it was investigating reports that cluster bombs had killed at least 11 civilians in Hillah, 60 miles south of the capital.
Mr Hoon said cluster bombs were essential for tackling enemy vehicles or infantry spread out over the battlefield. "They are a perfectly legal weapon and they have an entirely legitimate military role," he told the BBC.
Tony Blair is to make a personal intervention in the war to win the support of the Iraqi people. Downing Street announced that thousands of leaflets were being printed in Arabic in which Mr Blair gives a personal guarantee that the Allies are fighting for a "new, free and united Iraq".
More than two weeks into the war, the publication of a leaflet signed by Mr Blair suggests that previous efforts in the campaign to win over the people are not working as Britain and America had hoped.
The foreign ministers of France, Russia and Germany had lunch in Paris yesterday. Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister, said that the UN must play a central role in the post-war rebuilding of Iraq but acknowledged that the US and Britain must take the lead at the start. Talk of "a" central role for the UN, rather than "the" central role was seen as an attempt to narrow differences with Washington.
Mr Ingram also made an interesting and lengthy statement defending the relatively softly-softly tactics of the British troops ringing Basra, Iraq's second largest city.
Mr Ingram said that the British had chosen deliberately not to try to capture the city, despite superior firepower. They had instead adopted a dual policy of raids against the militia holding out in the city and its suburbs, and of humanitarian operations – to persuade the people of Basra that the British soldiers had come as friends, not as enemies. "Our restraint should not be interpreted as weakness," he suggested. "It comes out of our commitment not to harm the Iraqi people."
After days of complaints from the battlefield by British commanders and junior troops, startled by the occasional brutality of US tactics and the individual behaviour of some American soldiers, it was tempting to see this statement by the British Government as aimed at Washington rather than the people of Iraq.
Brig Gen Brooks was asked at his daily press conference in Qatar whether the Americans could learn anything from the "patience" of the British forces surrounding Basra. After at first appearing to dismiss the question, he conceded that the British and the Americans had much to "learn from one another".
He refused to discuss how America intends to deal with the problem of Baghdad – a city of about five million people – when it had taken US Marines the best part of two weeks to subdue the town of Nasiriyah, home to only 200,000 people. He only suggested that American tactics would be "deliberate and thoughtful".
Other US commanders talking to journalists, on and off the record, said that there would be no question of a frontal attack on Baghdad, as it could lead to hundreds of civilian and American casualties. They suggested that commanders in the field had other plans – probably involving limited attacks on strongpoints and attempts to foment a rebellion by the capital's Shia population against President Saddam's regime.
"We are going to try to isolate Baghdad," one US Marine commander said on the road from Kut to the capital. "We're going to surround Baghdad and start taking chunks out of where the enemy are."
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, said that American troops might isolate Baghdad while work began on forming an interim, post-Saddam government from among Iraqi opposition figures. This may begin as soon as next week.
"When you get to the point where Baghdad is basically isolated ... you have a country that Baghdad no longer controls," General Myers said at the Pentagon. He estimated that President Saddam's regime had lost control of 45 per cent of Iraq's territory. Other commanders put that figure at around 80 per cent.
Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Rutter, whose infantry battalion was helping to secure Baghdad airport after a sharp overnight battle in which 350 Iraqi troops were said by the US to have been killed, told the Associated Press that the fall of the airport would "send a message" to Baghdadis. "We're here, and they can rise up and deal with the regime appropriately," he said.
But what if the people of Baghdad take the same view as the people of Basra in the south? Despite efforts by British troops to encourage a rebellion in the second city, the response seems to have been: "Come into the city first and prove that the Saddam regime is finished."
Britain, as Mr Ingram said, is prepared to play a long game of cat and mouse in dealing with Basra. His comments seem to suggest that the British Government is worried that its senior ally may not have the same patience.
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