Battle For Iraq May Not Be Pushover It Appears
By John Chalmers
3-21-3
Rense.com
"AS SAYLIYA" CAMP, Qatar (Reuters) - Television images of U.S. tanks
tearing across desert sands make the invasion of Iraq look as easy as punching
through a soggy paper bag, but the toughest battles of this war are yet to come.
"We have not yet seen a major engagement between large groups of troops,"
said Tim Ripley of the Defense Studies Center at Britain's Lancaster University.
"Until you see that you just can't judge the willingness of the Iraqis
to fight."
A top U.S. military commander in the Gulf on Friday predicted a swift victory
in the war against Iraq, and a British military spokesman said the allied forces
would "hopefully" be in Baghdad in three to four days. But U.S. Central
Command headquarters in Qatar has imposed a news blackout on operations.
By combining public optimism, a dearth of operational detail and carefully controlled
news images of rapidly advancing troops, the allies aim to intimidate and befuddle
the Iraqis.
But while the world watches American armored columns race deep into the country,
other, messier operations are likely to be unfolding out of the public eye.
POCKETS OF RESISTANCE ALREADY
No one ever predicted much resistance to U.S. and British forces in Iraq's western
desert, where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's troops were sitting ducks in
the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraq had made it clear before the shooting started that its elite Republican
Guards would be pulled back into towns and cities to draw their opponents into
more unpredictable and dangerous urban fighting.
"It doesn't surprise me they are meeting little resistance so far. This
is consistent with the Iraqis' assertion they would not fight in the desert
but in Baghdad," said Jacques Beltran at the IFRI French Institute for
International Relations.
But there have been pockets of resistance already in the south, where Saddam's
most ill-prepared troops are ranged with defenses pulverized by months of U.S.
and British attacks in the no-fly zone.
While the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division advanced from Kuwait at least 150 km (90
miles) into Iraq on Friday and British commandos took the Faw peninsula on Iraq's
southern tip, U.S. Marines met tougher resistance at the port of Umm Qasr.
Reuters correspondent Adrian Croft said the Marine unit to which he is attached
was pinned down for two hours just inside Iraq by anti-tank missiles and small
arms fire, and only advanced again after calling in British artillery support.
"They have experienced more resistance in the south than they expected,"
John Rothrock, a retired U.S. airforce colonel who fought in Vietnam, told ARD
television's Washington studio. "It has not run as easily as expected."
WATERSHED AHEAD
Rothrock said the allies wanted if possible to avoid the "shock and awe"
strategy -- a blitz of some 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles that had
been expected at the opening of the campaign but did not initially come -- to
avoid extensive civilian casualties, something that would go down badly back
home where support for war remains low.
"They will wait through today to tomorrow to see if more Iraqi units surrender,"
Rothrock said.
Ripley said the narrow-focus cruise missile strikes at dawn Baghdad time on
Thursday, aimed at Saddam and his inner circle, showed the allies were looking
for a clean victory by decapitating the state and seeing its troops crumble.
"If you kill all Saddam's henchmen then the bulk of the army or the Republican
Guard will be leaderless and open to persuasion to give up," he said.
A U.S. defense official said that while the Pentagon was pleased with the rapid
ground progress so far, massive air and missile strikes were still in the battle
plan.
"I don't think anyone is surprised about the progress down south, but it
could change when we get closer to Baghdad," the official told Reuters.
Beltran said there could be a watershed in the conflict in as little as two
to three days.
"Either the regime will have fallen by then, or it is still intact and
we have to prepare for a battle in Baghdad against Saddam's elite troops that
would have much more serious risks."
He pinpointed three areas of risk: a "Stalingrad" siege scenario in
Baghdad, an Iraqi resort to biological or chemical weapons, or an escalation
elsewhere with fighting either between Turks and Kurds in the north or an Iraqi
attack on Israel.
At the allied forces headquarters in Qatar, British Group Captain Al Lockwood
talked plenty on Friday but gave little away: "Deception is always part
of a military plan," he said.
But the message on a photograph hung up outside the British media office in
Qatar said it all: "If you find yourself in a fair fight you didn't plan
your mission properly." (Additional reporting by Emma Thomasson in Berlin
and Mark John in Paris)