A rchive Date
[ 06-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_apr6.html
Is this Saddam's last stand?
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
March 30, 2003
The military situation in southern and central Iraq remains fluid. Three powerful U.S. divisions, the 3rd Mechanized, 1st Marine, and 101st Air Assault are on the outskirts of Baghdad. These U.S. units have seized Baghdad's almost undefended international airport and are launching armoured probes along four-lane highways leading to the city center.
As of now, the hugely outgunned Iraqis are still fighting back, but just barley.
Unless a military coup against the embattled regime of President Saddam Hussein occurs within the next few days - the heartfelt hope of Pentagon planners - U.S. forces will be compelled to begin urban warfare in Baghdad, a metropolis of five million.
Baghdad is a low, sprawling city, one of the Arab world's more modern, with few high-rise buildings and wide boulevards and streets. The capital's open urban architecture and broad thoroughfares make defence more difficult, allow for movement of tanks and armoured vehicles, and will permit invading U.S. forces to chop the city up in sections for easier assault.
Extensive aerial mapping of Baghdad and suburbs will lessen the chances that attacking U.S. units will become lost.
Many residences are walled villas, which are far from ideal as defensive positions. The best urban defensive positions are large, ruined residential and industrial buildings with extensive cellars, and old areas with narrow warrens of streets.
Over the past three days, U.S. forces have advanced 140 km to Baghdad, encountering little resistance around Kut, a choke point where in 1916 the Turks defeated an earlier invading British army; or in the strategic gap between Kerbala and Baghdad's outskirts. The holy Shia city of Kerbala has been masked by U.S. troops and bypassed. The decisive battle U.S. commanders expected with three or four Iraqi Republican Guard divisions before Baghdad did not occur - only a series of sharp skirmishes in which Iraq lost a few hundred troops and about 40 tanks.
Sheltered in Baghdad
It appears regular Iraq units swiftly pulled back into the shelter of Baghdad rather than stay forward of the city and face annihilation in the open by the omnipotent U.S. Air Force. No troops on earth could withstand days of pounding by heavy B-52 and B-1 bombers, and strike aircraft using precision munitions, fuel air explosive, wide-area anti-armour weapons, lethal ATCAMS tactical missiles, MRLS rocket batteries, and a deluge of 155-mm artillery shells, some with "bus" rounds packed with anti-vehicle/anti-personnel submunitions.
In spite of the crushing superiority of U.S. forces, the Iraqi Army managed to mount a number of sharp local counter-attacks. Many were delivered without proper coordination with neighbouring units or supporting artillery, and all were mauled by U.S. warplanes and helicopter gunships.
But these bravely delivered attacks were evidence that Iraqi forces still retained elan and some combat capability. How long they can continue fighting under 24/7 air attack, cut off from their bases, low on supplies, and without medical aid, remains uncertain. Demoralization must by now be setting in and could quickly cascade.
Iraq's only hope of halting the U.S.-British invasion is to turn beleaguered Baghdad and Basra into Stalingrad, as Saddam, who appeared quite live and hearty on TV on Friday, vowed. But this alone will not save Iraq from eventual surrender: as in all sieges, ammunition, food and water must eventually run out, and some Iraqi units will lay down their arms. The best way to resist a siege is to attack or harass the besieging enemy's lines of communications (LOCs).
The vanguard of the U.S. invasion force before Baghdad - the three divisions and other brigade-sized units - has left something of a vacuum in its rear. The delayed 4th Mechanized Division is disembarking at Kuwait Port and will head north, possibly piecemeal, beginning this week, followed by a U.S. armoured cavalry regiment. Their immediate mission is to protect the invasion force's 350-km supply lines back to Kuwait and to mask unconquered Iraqi cities and towns. U.S. Special Forces and British SAS commandos have also been rushed in to guard LOCs.
The U.S.-British deployment in Iraq resembles a mushroom with a very long stalk, with its broad head at Baghdad, and long stem running back to Kuwait. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell used an address to the U.S. Israel lobby, a primary supporter of the U.S.-Iraq war, to threaten war against Iran and Syria, the lobby's next targets.
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld echoed Powell's undiplomatic threats. Interestingly, if such a war came, a mere 140-km westward thrust by an Iranian army corps along the Khorramshahr-Basra-Kuwait axis could cut off and isolate the entire U.S.-British invasion force in southern Iraq.
Next few days crucial
The next few days will tell if Iraqi defences are indeed crumbling, as the Pentagon claims, or if the Iraqis have dispersed their main force units into 200-man companies and will attempt to implement Fabian tactics designed to slow down, delay and bleed the invaders.
There are at least 50,000 Iraqi regulars and many thousand irregulars clustered in towns bypassed by the U.S. rush to Baghdad: Najaf, Nasiriyah, Hillah, Kut, Hindyah and Falluja.
Repeated attempts by U.S. forces to storm these towns have been repulsed, with loss. Iraqi mechanized units in Divania actually counter-attacked U.S. units and pushed them back.
Large numbers of combat worthy Iraqi regulars and irregulars are still fighting British invaders around Basra, even launching counter-attacks towards Faw and Umm-Qasr.
British troops have penetrated no more than 1.5 km into Basra City.
There remains a risk the garrisons of these besieged or bypassed strongholds could sally and assault U.S. supply lines and follow-on forces in the rear, though Iraqi command is believed unable to mount a co-ordinated offensive given its total lack of air cover and badly degraded communications.
Iraq has not yet fired most of its tactical ballistic missiles, including over 100 al-Samouds. Its 100-plane air force has simply vanished, and its once-vaunted artillery arm has performed poorly.
Nevertheless, it is inevitable that growing U.S. forces will eventually crush such scattered resistance and occupy Baghdad, though there will remain the risk of a long, low-to-medium intensity guerrilla war against the U.S.-British colonization and exploitation of Iraq.
Fierce resistance
Given the fierce resistance mounted by Iraqi soldiers and civilians to the Anglo-Saxon invasion, chances are a guerrilla war will flare up once the conventional war ends. Up in the north, the problem of Kurdistan remains unresolved. The two main Kurdish groups want at least de facto independence from any new regime in Baghdad, just as in Afghanistan's northern Panjshiris, Uzbeks and Tajiks simply ignore the decrees of the U.S.-installed "mayor of Kabul", Hamid Karzai.
If Kurds get too independent-minded, and crave the oil of Mosul and Kirkuk, the Turkish Army, which already has 10,000 soldiers in northern Iraq, is poised to invade. So the U.S. is trying to bribe the Turks to stay out, while bribing the Kurds to stay quiet - no easy task in a land of volatile tempers and ardent nationalist passions.
The end game approaches. Iraq, a demolished nation of 17 million Arabs, has put up a far more robust and honourable fight against the U.S.-British invaders than anyone expected.
But how much longer will it last? Days or weeks? People trapped in corners fight hard. The Iraqis may still make a fierce last stand in the ruins of Baghdad. Or Saddam Hussein may be killed, and the war quickly ended. The Bush administration's worst fear is that Saddam may dematerialize, slip away, like its other elusive nemesis, Osama bin Laden. However, escape from nearly-surrounded Baghdad seems unlikely. As it was for an earlier Mesopotamian monarch, Balthazzar, fiery writing is once again emblazoned on the wall of Saddam Hussein's palace.
Eric can be reached by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com or visit his home page.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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