Friday, March 28, 2003 --- THE WAR ON IRAQ
The lessons learned by Saddam 12 years ago.
Since the first Gulf conflict, the Iraqi leader has improvised and taken advantage of fighting a battle at home
AGENCIES
The war is just a week old, but it is clear that Saddam Hussein has learned a lot since his forces were routed in the first Gulf conflict. Like other leaders facing larger, technologically superior forces, he has found ways to improvise and to take advantage of the fact that the fighting is taking place on his home ground. He is waging a campaign of harassment and delay. It is not likely to change the outcome of the war, but it will prolong the fighting, make it more costly for his adversaries and profoundly affect the way it is seen in other Arab countries and around the world.
Already, the Iraqis have forced coalition forces to delay their main-force attack on Baghdad until Basra, which they had hoped to bypass, can be subdued and until the road north can be made considerably more secure.
"We underestimated the capacity of his paramilitary forces," said a senior uniformed officer at the Pentagon. "They have turned up where we did not expect them to, and they have fought with more resourcefulness than we expected them to demonstrate."
Another Pentagon official conceded: "It's clear that Saddam went to school on Desert Storm. It is clear Saddam went to school on Kosovo. He has learned how America attacks."
The North Vietnamese, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland and the Serbs in Kosovo have all shown how an outmanned, outgunned force can fight back.
Mr Hussein has obviously concluded that he cannot win a land battle against an adversary who controls the air, so this time his tanks are not arrayed in the desert, waiting to be plastered by coalition missiles, although he appears to be willing to use armoured divisions south of Baghdad.
Nor can he be confident a centralised command will work. It, too, would be vulnerable to air attack.
So the Iraqi leader is leading a kind of guerilla defence, conducted by the fedayeen, who number perhaps 60,000 fighters, plus hard-core members of Mr Hussein's Ba'ath Party and other irregular forces. US intelligence officials say that command has been devolved to provincial level.
The desert does not afford the kind of cover that the jungles, caves and mountains of Vietnam did - although periodic sandstorms can enable the Iraqis to mount ambushes.
But the streets and alleys of Iraqi cities are ideal places for urban guerillas who can blend into the crowds to operate, just like those of Belfast and Tel Aviv. "Urban warfare usually benefits the defender," said Clifford Beal, the editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, a leading publication on military matters. Not only that, urban warfare "will negate the technological advantage of the coalition".
He added: "The Iraqis will be jumping in and out of alleyways. It tends to become a low-tech, house-to-house situation and that kind of combat can become very costly for combatants and others."
A war depending on low technology and high numbers of combatants and casualties is precisely the opposite of what the modern American army is trained to do. And even the British army, with three decades of experience fighting the IRA, would not be familiar either with the Iraqi terrain in cities such as Basra or Baghdad or with the much greater firepower that Iraqi troops could use in urban areas.
Who is a fedayeen fighter and who is a civilian? Marines tell stories of Iraqis changing in and out of uniform. A civilian bus turns out to be a troop transport. Guerillas cluster near schools and hospitals. In several cases, troops carrying white flags have opened fire.
Iraqis do not play by the rules of West Point and Sandhurst.
If the frustrated coalition forces call in urban artillery and air strikes, civilian casualties are almost inevitable. If they do not, stability is difficult to establish.
British armoured units are confronted with that conundrum near Basra at the moment. A decision has apparently been made to fight for the city, but the tactics and the timing are not yet clear. In any event, the British and the American marines fighting with them are surely going to become involved in some kind of street-by-street, if not house-by-house, urban warfare.
"They want to draw us in, bleed us, wear us down," said a veteran of Democratic administrations.
US officials had thought the Shi'ite Muslims of southern Iraq would prove reluctant to shelter the fedayeen. So far, that judgment has been proved incorrect.
