St. Petersburg Times January 12, 2003
The fire this time
BY DAVID BALLINGRUD and TOM DRURY
Once again Saddam Hussein squares off with an American president in a vast military mismatch. Does the Iraqi leader have any cards left to play?
Saddam Hussein is no more likely to win a second gun battle with the United States than he was the first, but he may get to decide what kind of loser he becomes.
And for the United States and its coalition partners, that makes a second war with Iraq potentially much more dangerous than 1991's Desert Storm.
"Right now Hussein has a cocked pistol shoved down his throat," said John Pike, military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org. "But that doesn't mean he has no options." Unfortunately for just about everyone, including the Iraqi people, Hussein's options are for the most part desperate measures designed to turn a military defeat into some kind of political victory.
Will he use chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops?
Will he attack Israel with missiles carrying chemical or biological weapons, trying to provoke some kind of massive counterattack that would inflame Muslims around the world?
Will he attempt to trap U.S. forces in a bloody, street-by-street "Battle of Baghdad" designed to erode support for the war in the United States and wherever else it exists?
"He could put troops in apartment buildings, in mosques and hospitals, and try to force U.S. soldiers to take the city one block at a time," hoping to inflict unacceptable casualties on U.S. soldiers and even his own people, Pike said.
In the first Gulf War, it was easy to spot the winner and the loser. The United States and its allies won when Iraqi troops were driven from Kuwait. The only question remaining was whether U.S. troops would press on to Baghdad and remove Hussein.
Goals might be more elusive in the sequel.
U.N. weapons inspectors continue to search the Iraq countryside for evidence of weapons of mass destruction - "No smoking gun yet," Chief Inspector Hans Blix said at week's end, while citing a lack of Iraqi cooperation - and the U.S. military buildup continues. Troops in the region or preparing to go there number about 150,000.
Hussein said last week his country is "prepared for everything." U.S. threats to disarm him, he said, "are the hiss of snakes and the barking of dogs."
Crossing the Euphrates
The U.S. Central Command isn't talking about its plans, but at the start the next Persian Gulf War would probably look a lot like the one that began with Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990.
Preceded by heavy bombing, lighting-fast U.S. armor would cross the Kuwait-Iraq border and race north across hard, flat ground to the Euphrates River. That's about where coalition forces stopped during the last war.
From the Euphrates, Baghdad is perhaps two days and one refueling stop away.
The conventional wisdom is that U.S.-led forces will encounter little opposition from poorly equipped and disspirited Iraqi soldiers garrisoned around the country, some with unpleasant memories of what happened in 1991. Hussein might not want his forces to engage the invaders, knowing that overwhelming U.S. air power would quickly destroy them.
The Iraqi military is believed to consist of 389,000 troops, with 650,000 reserves. About four years ago the Iraqi National Congress reported the location of Iraqi forces down to brigade level (a brigade consists of several thousand men), and they apparently have not moved a great deal since, Pike said.
For the most part, he said, they have stayed near provincial capitals, helping ensure Hussein's hold on power. Pike predicts they will stay out of the fight.
"There is some thinking that they might attempt a counterattack when U.S. forces reach the Euphrates," said Pike, founder of GlobalSecurity.org, "but I doubt it.
"When the fighting starts, (many Iraqi soldiers) will simply leave their vehicles. U.S. air power last time was not aimed at soldiers, it was aimed at vehicles. That was a good lesson for Iraqi soldiers to have learned. An armored division isn't very effective if the crews won't get in the tanks.
"Whatever road they travel on will become another "Highway of Death,' " he said.
Mitla Ridge, 1991
The reference comes from the first Gulf War and it is a grim reminder of not only the danger that Hussein is courting but the moral dilemmas of a nation as militarily powerful as the United States.
The 1991 conflict, which reversed Hussein's attempted annexation of Kuwait, was far longer in the preparation than in the execution. The allied air campaign began on Jan. 16 and by the time the ground war began on Feb. 24 110,000 sorties had dropped 85,000 tons of explosives on Iraqi forces in Kuwait and Iraq and on industrial targets inside Iraq.
By Feb. 26, under relentless ground, air and sea assault, the Iraqis were in full retreat from Kuwait City, forming a convoy of tanks, armored vehicles, trucks and troops on the 60-mile main road north from Kuwait to the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
They were sitting ducks for what London Observer correspondent Colin Smith called "one of the most terrible harassments of a retreating army from the air in the history of warfare."
Allied aircraft bombed the front and rear of the columns, stalling the retreat as it neared Mitla Ridge, then pounced on the scattering Iraqis. The destruction of 2,000 or so vehicles was spectacular, and the United States was sharply criticized for an uncertain Iraqi death toll that has been debated since.
Writing in the Fall 1998 Airpower Journal, Grant T. Hammond notes that the 146 combat deaths the United States suffered in the Gulf War "was so low that young American males were safer in the war zone than in peacetime conditions in the United States."
Only one side fought, he said. Iraq's planes, those that survived the 43 days of air attacks that preceded the ground assault, fled to Iran, and its small navy steered clear of battle.
"In many ways we won a battle - the battle of Kuwait - and not a war," said Hammond, a professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.
Furthermore, perhaps the Iraqis were not beaten as badly as we thought, writes Hammond.
"The two hundred thousand Iraqi casualties turned out to be more on the order of a fifth of that number, perhaps as low as eight thousand killed. Most members of the vaunted Republican Guard - with over half of the best armor in the Iraqi army and 70 percent of Iraq's troop strength, according to the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency - fled north to Basra and were neither killed or captured," he wrote.
A Siege of Baghdad
This time around, military analysts say, Hussein's best bet for inflicting military and political damage on the United States might lie in making a stand in Baghdad - a city of 5-million people - with enough loyalist forces to put up a fight with potentially devastating loss of troops and civilians.
Indeed, U.N. emergency planners have warned of a humanitarian crisis if a ground war becomes protracted. As many as a half-million Iraqis could be seriously injured in the early stages of a war, and almost a million could become refugees in neighboring countries, according to a U.N. analysis.
Another 2-million might lose their homes but remain in Iraq, the U.N. warned. Typically, small children will suffer most. Thousands of Iraqi children have died because of two major wars, civil strife and a decade of U.N. imposed sanctions, according to the United Nations Childrens Fund.
Exactly how many troops will remain loyal to Hussein when the guns begin to fire is uncertain, but there are reports than thousands are enrolled as so-called "men of sacrifice."
"These are people who have dipped their hands in the blood of the regime," Pike said. "They have no future in a post-Saddam society, and they know that. These are dangerous guys."
Retired Rear Adm. Stephen H. Baker, a senior fellow at the independent Center for Defense Information and a veteran of Operation Desert Storm a decade ago, thinks U.S. forces will do whatever it takes to avoid fighting in Baghdad, including laying siege to the city.
"Many days of intense combat and many failed tactics and strategies would have to have occurred before U.S. military leaders decided that U.S. forces should be heavily engaged in . . . urban warfare," he wrote in a Jan. 3 article, "The Iraq Game Plan."
"To avoid this, any U.S. campaign in Iraq is intended to be decisive, swift and psychologically devastating for Iraqi forces. It is hoped that a blitzkrieg attack moving swiftly will have a tremendous snowball effect, rapidly collapsing the regime and ending hostilities."
But if it doesn't?
Cornered and desperate, Hussein is a very dangerous man, Baker acknowledged.
"All indications point to the fact that life, as he knows it, is going to rapidly change for the worse, and probably within the next 60 days."
Therefore, he said, the Iraqi leader might be planning a long list of spectacular if self-destructive actions, and not only in Baghdad. Crews could torch oil fields, as in the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait in 1991, and demolish dams along the Tigris and Euphrates, flooding the southern Iraq desert with billions of gallons of water.
Scud missile batteries might be set to launch autonomously and simultaneously. Some might be loaded with chemical and biological warheads. Some might be preprogrammed to target American facilities in Kuwait and Qatar. Others might target Israeli cities (Iraqi Scuds hit Tel Aviv in 1991) in an attempt to evoke a massive and perhaps nuclear response from that country, bolstering propaganda that America and Israel are at war with Islam.
Baker concludes this list of horribles with an optimistic statement that U.S. Central Command planners "have no doubt looked at these worst-case scenarios in detail for quite some time. Tactics have been tailored to prevent, circumvent or minimize the impact of all of the wild cards mentioned above."
Another wild card is Saddam Hussein's reading of American intentions and willingness to fight. Various plans for his voluntary exile are being floated; does he understand what will happen if he stays?
With U.S. troops streaming into the Persian Gulf region, President Bush's determination seems clear enough, but Hussein has missed signals before.
Not long before the Gulf War, the Iraqi president met with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Baghdad, London-based journalist Said Aburish reports in his book Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge.
When Hussein asked whether Western threats to attack him were real, Arafat gave no clear answer but directed the question to an adviser, who said the threats were real, citing cover stories on Hussein in Time and Newsweek.
"At this point," Aburish writes, "Saddam turned to his own advisers and asked them why no one had told him that he had been the subject of these stories."
But U.S. intelligence officials say demoralized Iraqi military members, if not Hussein, have a clear sense of the peril they face. One of them, an expert on Iraqi military capabilities, spoke to reporters at a December briefing on the condition he not be identified.
"The Gulf War defeat is an advantage we have now that we didn't have in 1991," he said. "We have history on record. We showed them what we can do to them, and they remember that."
- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Sources include Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm by Dilip Hiro and Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge by Said K. Aburish.
Copyright © 2003 St. Petersburg Times
