Posted on 04/03/2003 11:55:19 AM PST by HumanaeVitae
In Al-Mussayib, central Iraq — The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armored vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments to defend the capital. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad.
How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truck loads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi Army deployed like this; the Americans may say they are “degrading” the country’s defenses but there was little sign of that here Wednesday.
That a Western journalist could see more of Iraq’s military preparedness than many of the reporters supposedly “embedded” with British and American forces says as much for the Iraqi government’s self-confidence as it does for the need of Saddam’s government to make propaganda against its enemies. True, there are signs of the Americans and British striking at the Iraqi military. Two gun pits had been turned to ashes by direct air strikes and a military barracks — empty like all the large installations that were likely to be on the Anglo-American target list — had been turned into gray powder by missiles. A clutch of telephone exchanges in the towns around Hilla had been destroyed; along with the bombing of six communications centers in Baghdad, the country’s phone system appears to have been shut down.
On a rail track further south, a train carrying military transport had been bombed from the air, the detonations blasting two entire armored vehicles off their flat-bed trucks and hurling them in bits down an embankment. But other APCs, including an old American 113 vehicle — presumably a captured relic from the Iranian Army — remained intact. If that was the extent of the Americans’ success south of Baghdad, there are literally hundreds of military vehicles untouched for a hundred miles south of the capital, carefully camouflaged to avoid air attack.
Like the Serb Army in Kosovo, the Iraqis have proved masters of concealment. An innocent wheat-field fringed by tall palm trees turned out, on closer scrutiny, to be traversed with bunkers and hidden anti-aircraft guns. Vehicles were hidden under motorway bridges — which the Americans and British do not wish to destroy because they want to use them if they succeed in occupying Iraq —and fuel trucks dug in behind deep earth revetments. At a major traffic intersection, an anti-aircraft gun was mounted on a flatbed truck and manned by two soldiers scanning the pale blue early summer skies.
As well they might. Contrails hung across the skies between Baghdad, Karbala and Hilla Wednesday. Above the center of Hilla, home to the ancient Summerian Babylon, a distant American AWACS plane could be seen circling high in the heavens, a tiny white dot indicating the giant scanner above the aircraft, its path followed by scores of militiamen and soldiers. Driving the long highway south by bus, I could see troops pointing skywards. If hanging concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully, fearing an air strike has almost the same effect. An Iraqi journalist beside me insisted that an American or British aircraft whose course we had been fearfully following from our vehicle was turning back toward the south and ignoring traffic on the main road. A few minutes later, it reappeared in front of us, flying in the opposite direction.
Driving the highway south, a lot of illusions are blown from the mind. There are markets in the small towns en route to Babylon, stalls with heaps of oranges and apples and vegetables. The roads are crowded with buses, trucks and private cars — far outnumbering the military traffic, the truckloads of troops and, just occasionally, the sleek outline of a missile transporter with canvas covers wrapped tightly over the truck it is hauling.
In the town of Iskandariyah, cafes and restaurants were open, shops were selling take-away ‘kofta’ meat balls and potatoes and the tall new television aerials which Iraqis now need to watch their national state television channel, whose own transmitters have been so constantly attacked by American and British aircraft. This was not a population on the edge of starvation; nor indeed did it appear to be a frightened people. If the Americans are about to launch an assault through this farmland of canals and massive forests of palm trees and wheat fields, it looked at first glance like a country at peace.
But the large factories and government institutions seemed deserted, many of the industrial workers and employees standing outside the main gates — for safety, I’m sure, in case of sudden air attack. At one point, only 20 miles south of Baghdad, there came the thump of bombs and the bus shook with the impact of anti-aircraft rounds. A series of artillery pieces to our right were firing at an elevation over our heads, the gun muzzles blossoming golden flame and smoke, the shells exploding above the canopy of gray smoke from Baghdad’s oil fires which now spreads 50 miles south of the city. The images sometimes moved toward the boundaries of comprehension. Children jumping over a farm wall beside a concealed military radio shack; herds of big-humped camels moving like Biblical animals past a Soviet-made T-82 battle tank hidden under palm branches; fields of yellow flowers beside fuel bowsers and soldiers standing amid brick kilns; an incoming American missile explosion that scarcely prompts the farmers to turn their heads.
On one pile of rubble north of Hilla, someone had fixed the red, white and black flag of Iraq, just as the Palestinians tie their banners to the wreckage of their buildings after Israeli attacks.
Was there a lesson in all this? I had perhaps two hours to take it all in, to wonder how the Americans could batter their way up this long, hot highway — you can feel the temperature rising as you drive south — with its dug-in tanks and APCs and its endless waterlogged fields and palm plantations. The black-uniformed men of the Saddam Fedayeen with red and black “kuffiah” scarves rounds their heads, whom I saw a hundred miles south of Baghdad, were kitted out with ammunition pouches and rocket-propelled grenades. And they did not look to me like a “degraded” army on the verge of surrender.
Of course, it all might be an illusion. The combat troops I saw may have no heart for battle. The tanks might be abandoned when the Americans come down the highway toward Baghdad. The fuel bowsers might be towed back to the capital and the slit trenches deserted. Saddam might flee Baghdad when the first American and British shells come hissing into the suburbs and the statues of the Great Leader that stand outside so many villages along the highway might be ritually sundered. But it didn’t feel like that Wednesday. It looked like an Iraqi Army and a Baath Party militia and the Fedayeen that were prepared to fight for their leadership, just as they have at Um Qasr and in Basra and Nassiriyah and Suq Al-Shuyukh. Or was it something else they might be fighting for? An Iraq, however dictatorial in its leadership, that simply rejects the idea of foreign conquerors? In the Iran-Iraq war, Sunnis and Shiites fought together and died together under the same dictator when they thought an Iranian occupation lay in store for them. In Hillah, in the province of Babylon, almost all the civilian victims of the latest cluster bomb raids by the Americans and or the British are Shiites, the men and women we expected to revolt against Saddam on our behalf.
The Americans and the British never expected this resistance. Nor, I suspect did many Iraqis. Nor did I ever expect to be driving this highway south of Baghdad beside a Third-World army that was preparing to defend its capital against its former colonial masters and the world’s only superpower. Perhaps the war will spare this beautiful countryside; perhaps the Americans will try to attack from the desert to the northeast through Ramadi. But “perhaps” is a dangerous word in time of war.
Even the Americans and British who so desperately believed in the vain “perhaps” of an Iraqi uprising must realize this now. Wednesday, I could only quote again my favorite Lawrence aphorism: That making war is like trying to drink soup off a knife.
(See also previous post).
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Sounds like the Iraqis have the above town well protected, has anyone ever heard of the place? I wonder what this guy will be writing by this time next week?
"Syria's defenses seem impenetrable, there's no way the American and British forces can..."
| Robert Fisk, on 4/3: Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truck loads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi Army deployed like this; the Americans may say they are “degrading” the country’s defenses but there was little sign of that here Wednesday. |
Associated Press, on 4/4: As they moved through the palm trees and irrigation canals southeast of Baghdad on Friday, U.S. troops left behind smoldering tanks and slain Iraqi soldiers. What the Iraqis left behind, on battlefields across the country, was just as evocative of the military success by coalition forces. Outside Baghdad sat an abandoned military complex, complete with tanks, armored personnel carriers and empty tents. Along a highway to the south sat the remains of a disappearing army: boots, berets and backpacks. |
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