Philadelphia Daily News March 28, 2003
'Asymmetrical Warfare'
Saddam Using Vietnam-Style Tactics; Playing To World Opinion
By William Bunch
JUST 12 years ago, Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi army suffered one of the most humiliating military defeats of the 20th century.
In the first Persian Gulf War, the world's fourth-largest army acted as sitting ducks, exposed in the desert sands to the air power and superior tanks of America and its allies. The Iraqis crumbled in just 100 hours of ground combat, amid a sea of white surrender flags.
Saddam retreated to his world of hidden palaces and underground bunkers. He woke up at 3 a.m., swam laps, read books on military history and his idol, Joseph Stalin - and spent a lot of time thinking about what went wrong in 1991.
When an urban mob killed 19 U.S. Marines in Somalia and forced the Americans to retreat in 1993, he paid attention. When anti-Israel terrorists set up paramilitary legions of suicidal fanatics in the early to mid '90s, he copied them. When Yugoslavians fought the United States and NATO in 1999, he hired them as consultants to get their advice.
And so when U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq last week, a 65-year-old dictator that most viewed as a "dead man walking" showed he had some life left, after all.
His new Vietnam-style tactics of guerrilla warfare won't defeat America on the battlefield, but it may prolong the war while Saddam fights a battle for global public opinion.
"He's intelligent, and he's a survivor," said Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism analyst at the Washington-based Investigator Project. Kohlmann is one of many analysts expressing grudging praise for the efficacy of Saddam's strategy - if not its morals - as the war enters its second week.
Journalist Mark Bowden, who has profiled Saddam's brutal regime, wrote yesterday in the New York Times that he had devised "a strategy both cunning and cruel, and it may work."
It's far too early to suggest that Saddam has outsmarted the Pentagon war machine or the president he ridiculed last week as "little Bush." But while U.S. war planners mapped out a futuristic "shock and awe" strategy never tested under fire, Hussein looked back to what worked for Ho Chi Minh, his idol Stalin, and the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu.
Saddam's strategy is 180 degrees different from 1991. Rather than confrontation in an open battlefield, it relies on "asymmetrical warfare" - unorthodox guerrilla and terror tactics to harass and pin down U.S. troops while blurring the lines between civilians and soldiers.
Paramilitary troops loyal to Saddam mingle among women and children, cruise the desert unnoticed in pickups, bring down a U.S. helicopter with small arms fire from under palm trees, and fake a surrender before spraying U.S. Marines with bullets.
Saddam and his generals hope these paramilitaries, known as Fedayeen Saddam, or "those willing to die for Saddam," will ultimately take part in deadly urban warfare for control of Baghdad.
Indeed, many experts have wondered if Saddam's ultimate goal is to relive the bloody 1942-43 Battle of Stalingrad, in which Stalin's Soviet army lost as many as 1 million men but defeated the German 6th Army in the worst urban battle ever.
They speculate that Saddam is banking on a "Baghdadograd" strategy that allows coalition forces to push through the outer defense only to be caught between the Baghdad defenders and a rear-guard action by Republican Guard troops.
It wouldn't be the first time that Saddam has emulated the late Soviet tyrant. Saddam's cult of personality and much of his state security apparatus - blamed for the torture, imprisonment or death of tens of thousands of political prisoners - is directly modeled after Stalin. The Iraqi dictator has been known to quote Stalin: "If there is no person, there is no problem."
But military strategists say that Saddam figured out by the mid-1990s that to have any hope of repelling a second U.S. assault, he would have to study the guerrilla tactics that worked for the Vietcong and apply them to the Iraqi desert.
"He's trying to activate the Vietnam syndrome," said Gregory Urwin, the Temple University military historian. "If he could show some bodies and show some POWs, he figured he could shake America's confidence in a way that people would rise up and say, 'No more war.' "
Kohlmann, the terrorism expert, said "Saddam was impressed by what he saw in Mogadishu," where in 1993 a street mob downed two U.S. helicopters.
The next year, Kohlmann said, Saddam decided to create his own paramilitary force and base it on similar units in the terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The Fedayeen Saddam, run by the dictator's brutal son Odai, was a motley crew at first, but over time they received terrorist-camp training and even wore black attire that evoked the Vietcong. Showered with more money and privileges than most Iraqis, the Fedayeen - numbered from 25,000 and 60,000 - grew fiercely loyal to Saddam.
Now that the war is here, the Fedayeen are not only battling U.S. troops, but they are also threatening to kill any Iraqi troops who want to surrender and any citizens who show support for the Americans.
They cruise the desert highways in Toyota pickups, eluding the satellites and air power that destroyed so many tanks and armored personnel carriers in 1991.
Experts say there's no way these tactics can defeat the U.S. and British troops, especially with tens of thousands more soldiers en route to the Gulf.
But Saddam apparently thinks they can prolong the war and boost both American and civilian casualties to the point where there is growing distaste for the war - in the United States and around the world.
"He's waiting for us to get to Baghdad, under the theory that enough guys are willing to go down with him that he'll force us to battle one house at a time," said John Pike, of globalsecurity.org, a military think tank.
"We were gambling we could hit him in the head with a ball-peen hammer," he said, " and the whole thing would fly apart."
Copyright © 2003, Philadelphia Daily News
