Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) March 30, 2003
Long siege of Baghdad is possible
By Bill Glauber, Stephen J. Hedges and Douglas Holt
In many ways, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces have fought an unconventional battle that is setting up a strategic showdown both sides now seem to expect:
A siege of Baghdad.
The Iraqis surrendered the deserts and took to the cities. They avoided the front and attacked the rear. Iraqi Republican Guard divisions are in place around the city.
Saddam is on defense, not offense.
If U.S. and coalition forces can quickly overwhelm Republican Guard divisions south of Baghdad, it would send a strong signal to Iraq's remaining military establishment that the end is near, analysts say. That could finally trigger the sort of surrenders that the Bush administration has talked about and hoped for but has yet to see, they say.
Approaching just such a pivotal battle, U.S. military leaders are counting on a combination of superior tanks, artillery, swift maneuvers and a punishing aerial bombardment to keep the elite Iraqi divisions boxed in place, where they must fight or capitulate.
"This whole thing could be decided in the next seven to 10 days," said retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who led a tank assault during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
On the other hand, Saddam may be aiming for a bloody showdown in Baghdad, analysts say.
Inflicting casualties upon his enemy and horrifying the world with civilian deaths could wear down coalition forces and the American public's appetite for war, they say. Saddam's hope is for protracted fighting that leads to a negotiated settlement and his staying in power.
"His strategy is to survive as much as he can by delaying the onslaught," said Saber Al-Suwaidan, former commander of the Kuwaiti air force who spent seven months in an Iraqi prisoner-of-war camp during the first Gulf War.
"He will try to create an atmosphere against civilians where the whole world will say, 'Stop this war! Cease fire!' " Al-Suwaidan said.
Lessons learned
Charles Heyman of Jane's Fighting Armies said Saddam's regime also has learned from other conflicts, such as Somalia, where bands of fighters harassed U.S. forces and brought down two Black Hawk helicopters in the middle of the capital, Mogadishu. He also pointed to Yugoslavia, whose history was marked by partisans operating behind the lines to battle the Germans during World War II.
And Saddam has learned from his own past mistakes, no longer leaving his army exposed in the desert, as in the 1991 Persian Gulf War during a hasty retreat from Kuwait.
Indeed, Saddam's tactics owe much to his political hero -- Josef Stalin.
"Think World War II," said William Eagleton, chief of the U.S. interests section in Baghdad from 1980-84. "The only person I know he has cited as a role model is Josef Stalin. Remember the first year of the war, the Germans moved into Russia and Stalin looked finished."
But by 1943, the German advance expired at besieged Stalingrad.
A difficult, entrenched fight with Republican Guard troops could bolster Saddam domestically, especially within his own Baath Party government. His irregular Fedayeen Saddam, which delivers harassing fire along coalition supply lines and determined resistance in Iraq's southern cities, could be energized.
Iraqi officials have said their strategy is to draw U.S. forces into urban fighting in Baghdad's streets, where American armor would be less effective.
Saddam's forces
While few in the West expect Saddam to survive the coalition onslaught, his tactics have forced U.S. commanders to pour in more troops for the intense fighting that may lie ahead. Guerrilla tactics by Saddam's army of irregulars in the south, combined with gritty sandstorms and a long supply line, apparently have slowed the U.S. advance.
Even more sobering, Saddam still may be able to call upon the bulk of his troops for the defense of Baghdad. In 2002, Iraq was estimated to have an army of about 375,000 troops and about 2,000 tanks, most of which were two to three generations old.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert from Britain's Warwick University, said, "Anything that can fight is in Baghdad."
Dodge visited Baghdad in September and interviewed Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister.
Aziz told Dodge, "People say to me, 'You are not the Vietnamese; you have no jungles and swamps to hide in.' I reply, 'Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles.' "
Dodge said the Iraqi war plan bears all the hallmarks of Saddam's strategic thinking, banking on survival through street fighting yet still angling to retain control over troops he can't completely trust.
In fact, one reason the Republican Guard divisions are posted so far outside Baghdad is that Hussein doesn't completely trust the forces.
A 1995 revolt against him from one guard division prompted Hussein to purge the ranks, but the mistrust lingers.
"The reason they're outside of Baghdad is that Saddam is afraid of a couple of them," said Michael Vickers, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "The key objective is to either break those divisions or get them to surrender, not to let them retreat into the city."
Preparing for battle
The U.S.-led forces are preparing for the battle ahead. The 16,500-soldier 3rd Infantry Division is maneuvering about 50 miles southwest of the Iraqi capital, and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force is moving north from embattled Nasiriyah. The 3rd Infantry has about 230 Abrams M-1 tanks, 348 M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 24 Apache attack helicopters.
Elements of the Army's 16,000-member 101st Airborne Division are deploying to the south and west of those forces. Its specialty is air assaults with helicopters.
Additionally, as many as 12,000 U.S. troops may now be in western Iraq, securing airfields there. Those include members of the 82nd Airborne and Special Operations forces. Military officials say the troops have secured two important western airfields and could be deployed in an attack on Baghdad.
The Republican Guard's Medina armored division has taken up positions north of Karbala, about 40 miles from Baghdad. It has an estimated 200 Soviet-era T-72 tanks, about as many armored personnel carriers and about 8,000 to 10,000 soldiers.
The Nida mechanized division is thought to be 20 miles southeast of central Baghdad, near the Shayka Mazhur airfield. A third division, the Hammurabi, is near Fallujah, 30 miles west of the capital.
Two other Republican Guard divisions also are well outside Baghdad to the north, and another moved just before the fighting began from Mosul to Tikrit, Hussein's hometown.
Unknown deployments
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday that some Republican Guard units appeared to be repositioning their defenses.
"We do have some indications that some of the Republican Guard divisions are relocating," he said. "And exactly where, we're just going to wait and see."
Military analyst Anthony Cordesman cautioned against assuming that the Republican Guard divisions fight as cohesive units. The Medina Division, he said, may not be the only force to be reckoned with in the 50 miles that stand between the U.S. forces and Hussein's seat of power. Different brigades are dispatched to defend different areas, he said, and Republican Guard units are frequently commingled with regular army forces.
"No one outside the intelligence community really knows the mix of Iraqi forces in the south," said Cordesman, senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"Nobody has seen one word about bomb damage assessment, or one word of an entire corps of regular army forces in the south that is somewhere, that's been bypassed or identified," he said.
U.S.-led planes have spent the last several days bombing Republican Guard positions south of Baghdad, preparing the way for an assault. Initial reports suggest the Medina Division has concealed its tanks and artillery in wooded areas, revetments and in buildings, making them tougher to spot.
On Friday, Myers showed what he described as Medina Division tanks and other equipment sprinkled inside a densely populated residential area 30 miles south of Baghdad.
"The Republican Guard has not gone on the offense yet," Myers said. "They are dug in, dispersed."
American strategy
U.S. forces will try to determine the Iraqi positions from intelligence gathered by commandos, forward artillery and air attack controllers, images beamed from Predator aerial drones, and observations from scouting helicopters and fighter aircrews.
Still, it may take some initial advances from U.S. forces to expose the Republican Guard positions. Once identified, the ground force will slow its advance and allow a combination of precision air strikes, Apache attacks and artillery barrages to strike Iraqi positions.
"They'll start with air and attack them with rockets, then Apaches and then they'll hit them with ground forces," said David Grange, a retired Army major general and chief operating officer and vice president of the McCormick Tribune Foundation. "And while they're on the ground, they'll keep hitting from the air."
Being so far from Baghdad makes a safe retreat into the city nearly impossible. In contrast with the open desert of southern Iraq, the terrain near Baghdad is both agricultural and residential, with many irrigation ditches and a limited number of roads.
If there is a retreat, heavy vehicles would be forced into columns and onto roads, making them easy prey for Apache helicopters, A-10 tank-killing aircraft and other coalition planes.
"The notion that somehow or another the Republican Guard would crawl back into Baghdad, I've never subscribed to that," said John Pike, executive director of Globalsecurity.org, a military think tank. "It's not good tank country."
Copyright © 2003, The Deseret News Publishing Co.
