Scotland on Sunday April 13, 2003
21 Days That Shook The World (Pt I)
By Ian Mather
FOR a relatively small US-British force to seize a country the size of France, including its capital, in just three weeks, while suffering only 125 deaths through combat and accidents is not just an epic military success. It is hard to believe.
For it has been accomplished in defiance of one of the basic rules of war: to guarantee a successful attack you need three times as many troops as the defenders. The Iraqi armed forces numbered 400,000, the Allies just over 100,000 on the ground in Iraq.
There were times when it seemed to many pundits like military madness. When the American line of supply reached over 200 miles from Kuwait towards Baghdad, one critic on the American Right, William Lind, of the conservative Free Congress Foundation in Washington, said the campaign looks like a balloon on a string, with a single army division deep in Iraq and a slender thread of a supply line connecting it to its food, water, fuel, and ammunition. No classical strategist can see the picture without his hair standing on end. But, in the end, it was the doomsters who were routed along with the Iraqis. The more hysterical naysayers even predicted Armageddon, with the Iraqis unleashing poison gas and germs and President George W Bush responding by ordering nuclear strikes. It did not happen. There were dire warnings of an ecological disaster and world oil prices through the roof as the Iraqis set fire to the oil fields. That did not happen either. The world braced itself for missile attacks on Israel, leading to war engulfing the entire Middle East. The missiles never arrived.
Even if things go wrong from now on, as well they might since the aftermath was always going to be at least as difficult as the war itself, the Iraqi campaign will be studied as a classic.Yet it did not go according to plan. It started with a missed opportunity equivalent to an open goal, and later on there were some very wobbly moments.
It began 24 hours before it should have done. The CIA gained information from an impeccable source, probably an agent on the ground, that Saddam and his sons were in a Baghdad building. Washington said it was a rare window of opportunity and, shortly afterwards, some 40 Tomahawk missiles launched from ships in the Gulf and Red Sea, accompanied by precisionguided bombs dropped from F-117 Stealth fighters, destroyed facilities believed to contain Iraqi military leaders.
A pattern that was to become all too familiar quickly emerged. First, reports were that Saddam had been killed. Then it was said that senior Iraqi officials had been killed, or maybe wounded. Finally it was revealed that the wily Iraqi leader had escaped by a few minutes. Saddam's survival was highly unwelcome.
The US and Britain had hoped that by removing the Iraqi dictator and his leading henchmen at one fell swoop they would cause the regime to implode. The chance of winning the war without more shots being fired in anger had gone.
So British and American land forces poured into Iraq from their staging points in Kuwait as Allied air forces unleashed shock and awe from the air against leadership targets, such as palaces, military headquarters and command and control centres. The aim of the air war was to destroy the leadership while trying to persuade the Iraqis that this was not a war against them and entice them into rising up and overthrowing the regime.
This, too, did not work. The Iraqi people remembered well the Gulf War in 1991, when the Allies who had liberated Kuwait urged them to rise against Saddam, only to stand by while they were brutally massacred by Saddam's forces.
Instead, there were two surprise developments, one good and one bad. The good surprise was that the coalition forces were able to seize the southern Iraqi oil fields virtually intact. The Iraqis managed to set only a handful on fire. Already, all but two have been repaired by UK-US-Kuwaiti firefighting teams. The financial benefits for the future reconstruction of the country are incalculable.
The bad news was that the Iraqi armed forces did not surrender in their thousands as they had done in 1991. It had been hoped that they might even surrender in complete units led by their officers. They could then have been turned into a police force to keep law and order among their own people in areas taken by the coalition forces. The absence of any back-up plan for law and order in the immediate aftermath of the fighting is proving to be a big weakness in the Allied war plan.
Even so, the Americans set off at a cracking pace northwards towards Baghdad. The British 1st Armoured Division headed towards Basra. The division was part of a 45,000-strong British force - including almost a quarter of the British Army, a Naval task force led by the Ark Royal and more than 100 aircraft - that was to concentrate mostly on the south of Iraq.
The US 3rd Division, moving up the west bank of the Euphrates, travelled 250 miles to within 100 miles of Baghdad. The US 1st Marine Expeditionary Force peeled off across the Tigris on a more easterly route towards the Iraqi capital. Pockets of resistance were bypassed to be dealt with later.
Northern Iraq, where the US had been deprived of a Turkish corridor, remained a sideshow for the time being. Caution was the keyword here. Everything possible was being done to avoid provoking Turkey to intervene to stop the Kurds from occupying the northern oil fields. American special forces, mixing with Kurdish peshmergas, attacked Iraqi positions in the north and made modest gains. The US 4th Infantry Division, which had been earmarked for the northern front, was obliged to sail away from Turkey and take the long way round to Kuwait via the Suez Canal.
Away from the TV cameras, US and British special forces secured key airfields in western Iraq and searched for so-called Scud boxes: areas from which the Iraqis might launch Scud missiles at Israel. But most attention was focused on the thrust north towards Baghdad. At first things went smoothly. American commanders reported that Iraqi units were cut off as a result of the bombing campaign and were no longer fighting as a coherent force. Then, as the war reached the end of Week Two, the questions came crowding in.
Were the Allied supply lines dangerously overstretched? Where were the Iraqi military formations ? Had they set a trap to lure the Allies into bloody street battles in the towns and cities?
The Fedayeen, paramilitary Ba'ath party members loyal to Saddam - sometimes in black uniforms, sometimes in civilian clothes - harassed the coalition forces from sniper positions among civilian buildings.
The most lethal blackspot was near the strategic town of Nasiriyah. A stretch of road between two bridges over the Euphrates became so dangerous that the Marines labelled it a turkey shoot - and they were the turkeys, exposed to Iraqi fire. Seven marines were killed here and another nine were either killed or captured.
The Allied rear area too presented unexpected problems. Civilians in the south, mostly Shi'ite villagers, proved restive. took the British five days to subdue Umm Qasr, Iraq's only seaport. Without Umm Qasr, humanitarian supplies could not be brought in to relieve the desperate shortages brought about by the abandonment of the United Nations' aid programme on which 60% of the Iraqi population depended.
The lack of humanitarian aid did not help. Bureaucratic snarl-ups slowed crucial supplies of food and water. In Basra there were embarrassing scenes as aid destined for remote villages was besieged before got to its destination and carried off by young Iraqi men who looked perfectly healthy and well fed.
After 12 days of shock and awe in which 8,000 precision-guided missiles and bombs were unleashed, the coalition forces still could not claim complete control of single Iraqi city between Baghdad and Kuwait.
The US problems in Nasiriyah and elsewhere coincided with a pause in the advance. This would have been necessary in any case. The Americans had moved so far so fast that they had out-run their supplies.
Fierce sandstorms were adding to their problems. They needed to stop, wait for their supplies and rest before the final assault on Baghdad.
Armchair critics on both sides of the Atlantic pounced. The Allies had gone into Iraq with too few troops, they said. The intelligence had been bad because it had told them to expect the regime to collapse immediately. The Allies had expected the population to rise up against their oppressors, and that had not happened either. The Allies had misread the tactics of the Iraqi army and now they had no idea where they had gone.
Some bad news gave a certain credence, for a while, to the critics' chorus. On March 29, a suicide bomber in a taxi killed four American soldiers in what was feared might be the prelude to a Palestinian-style war, using the 'H' (human) weapon. Jittery American troops then shot dead seven women and children at a military checkpoint.
A US supply column took a wrong turning near Nasiriyah, some soldiers were killed immediately and others were captured and paraded only to be killed later. The only survivor was supply clerk Jessica Lynch, who was rescued from hospital in a daring US special forces raid that already has Hollywood producers vying for film rights.
The death toll among Iraqi civilians continued to mount. It included at least 11 deaths at a market in Baghdad. Cases of friendly fire proliferated to such an extent that more British troops were killed by socalled "blue on blue" than as the result of hostile action. This was the low point of the war. Armchair generals "embedded in TV studios", as US vice-president Dick Cheney was later to put it, handed out the blame.
Anti-war spirits in the media, from the BBC to CNN, lapped up the gloom, giving it more significance than it ever deserved.
When Bush and Blair met at Camp David to discuss the progress of their perilous expedition, the dramatic momentum of the Shock and Awe offensive seemed to have dribbled away into a maddening series of apparent log-jams across the field of battle.
Blair had arrived hoping to move the campaign strategy on to the festering question of what would happen to Iraq after the war, particularly what role the UN would have; but the agenda refused to shift from the action - or inaction - on the ground.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, found himself on the defensive.
An article in The New Yorker claimed that Rumsfeld, a civilian, had "micromanaged" the war plan, overruling his top generals, including General Tommy Franks, who is running the war. The generals, together with Secretary of State Colin Powell, himself a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were said to have wanted a much bigger and heavier force to punch its way to Baghdad.
Rumsfeld was said to have rejected the blunderbuss approach of strength through numbers as old-fashioned, in order to vindicate his belief in a "Baghdad Lite" strategy. This involved making maximum use of America's advanced hi-tech weaponry an combining it with a smaller, lighter, more mobile forces on the ground.
During "wobbly weekend" the indestructible Rumsfeld did the rounds of American Sunday morning TV talk shows denying the story and insisting that the military plan had not been his alone; but that if it had been, he would have been proud of it. Not many were inclined to believe him. The few voices who insisted that all was going according to plan were ridiculed. When the US announced that it was to send another 120,000 troops to boost its forces, it was taken as proof that Rumsfeld had been made to scrap his plan and go along with the generals and with Powell.
Worse would follow, some analysts predicted. In front of Baghdad the world would witness one of the biggest tank battles since World War II as the Republican Guard revealed their true mettle. "The real war starts now," was how Patrick Garrett, a military analyst with the American website, GlobalSecurity.org, put it.
The critics' field day did not last long. On March 29 Bush convened a teleconference from Camp David with his senior national security advisers; it was decided to keep the military!/s sights fixed on Baghdad on the grounds that the Iraqi capital remained the primary objective of the war. Suddenly the world awoke to the news that US troops had leapfrogged the remaining miles and were virtually at the gates of the capital. The Republican Guard, supposedly Saddam!/s military creme de la creme, made a stand of sorts at the approaches to Baghdad, but crumbled under American air and artillery firepower. For the most part, just like the much derided conscripts in the Iraqi army, the professionals of the Republican Guard threw away their uniforms and melted away into the civilian population.
The Allies were now on the brink of an extraordinary success; some of the TV studio naysayers looked positively grim at the prospect. Their apocalyptic warnings about regime loyalists fighting to the death in Baghdad were proving false. Around Basra, too, the British 1st Armoured Division was painstakingly gaining control through a skilful mix of patient encirclement and dashing raids into the city to destroy specific leadership targets.
When the Ba'ath party structure finally collapsed, looting broke out, until the British were able to restore some order by doing a deal with a local sheikh to run the city. On Friday, the British decided enough was enough and that drastic measures were required to restore order. They shot dead five men who were robbing a bank.
On April 4, the US 3rd Division took Baghdad airport, only 12 miles from the centre of Baghdad, while the marines' advance advance reached the outskirts of the city from the east as part of a pincer movement. Iraqi TV was still on the air, with its usual mixture of martial music and propaganda, despite attempts to bomb it into silence. Saddam, or one or more of his doubles, continued to pop up on television from time to time. In one appearance, after the first bout of bombing, he was wearing uncharacteristic horn-rimmed spectacles.
Later he appeared out in the open against the backdrop of a destroyed building and was shown being mobbed by a small crowd. There were rumours that his family and henchmen, if not Saddam himself, had fled to Syria, the only neighbour willing to offer a safe haven. But what was by now clear was that the only bits of Iraq in which the Iraqi leader was now free to move were networks of underground tunnels and bunkers in Baghdad, and possibly his home town of Tikrit, 90 miles to the north.
Copyright © 2003, The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
