[A-List] Consolation for troubled liberals

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The rottenness of the Iraqi regime will hasten its end

Iraq's soldiers are voting with their feet and Baghdad will fall quickly

Martin Woollacott
Friday April 4, 2003
The Guardian

Sarajevo is the exception to the rule that in modern war capital cities do
not long survive the occupation of their hinterland by the enemy. They fall
in a rush, as Dhaka did in 1971, for instance, or Pnomh Penh and Saigon in
1975. The advance of American units on Baghdad could prefigure such a
toppling. The spectre of intense street fighting to come recedes somewhat as
reports come in of Iraqi units scattering miserably from the battlefield
after doing nothing, in most cases, except suffer under air attack. Blow for
blow this is not, which is precisely why it is so destructive of morale.

Journalists who stayed in Saigon in 1975 discussed which of two worrying
scenarios was most likely. One was a heavy artillery bombardment of the city
followed by a full-scale attack against competent defenders. The other was
that the North Vietnamese would just wait outside for days, and, as the
southern regime disintegrated, lawlessness would reign in a city without a
master. Neither happened as, instead, the NVA armour simply sped into town,
pushing aside the morning traffic, and not pausing until their lead tanks
bashed through the gates of the presidential palace. Fighting was minimal,
once the defenders on the main axis of advance into the city gave way.

In Bangladesh, Dhaka was surrendered without a fight in the city itself, and
the Bihari militia who had supplemented the Pakistani forces disappeared
into hiding or were captured. True, in Bangladesh, the Bengali majority of
the population were on the side of the Indian invaders, while in Vietnam the
essential political change had already taken place with the creation of a
government which, although it vainly imagined it could negotiate with the
other side, had accepted that the war was lost. There is no parallel to that
in Baghdad. Indeed, the regime's strategy is precisely to hold out in the
cities, with the hazy idea that, if they put up a tough enough fight, there
might be a diplomatic way out. But the rank and file in any country usually
have a nose for a political leadership which is terminally weakening,
slipping into fantasy, and threatening to take them down with it. Commissars
or no commissars, they vote with their feet.

One report from Iraq, of a road littered with army boots, is reminiscent of
similar scenes in Saigon, as men sat down, company by company, and exchanged
the boots which would identify them as soldiers for the peasant sandals
which would let them pass as civilians. The boots remained on the road, in
the Vietnamese case, almost in military formation.

The discarded boots connect to another image, which many Iraqi exiles of a
certain age recall vividly, that of the Ba'ath party uniforms left on street
corners or in the garbage after an earlier reverse, before the advent of
Saddam, when the party for a time lost control of government. The relatively
puny organisation of those days has since been elaborated into an intricate
structure of control and coercion. But the value in a fight against the
Americans and British of the many military, paramilitary and security
organisations is open to question. They were not designed to work together
but to spy on one another, operate against each other, and if necessary for
Saddam's security in the case of an internal threat, to fight each other.

It may be said that these agencies have been quite effective in maintaining
control of Basra and other southern cities and towns, deterring entry by
threatening street battle. But their capacity for it has not really been
tested, and in any case they were operating with a still intact and
functioning Baghdad in their minds. Those defending Baghdad have no such
mental or physical fallback position. As the military analyst Anthony
Cordesman, of Washington's Centre for Strategic and International Studies,
puts it, "A force 10 miles from the city centre is far more intimidating and
far more likely to lead to some form of catalytic collapse," although that
is "a possibility, not a probability".

As Cordesman also says, the past two weeks have been an object lesson in the
unwisdom of jumping to conclusions during a war. Another commentator, in a
version of Otto von Bismarck's remark about politics, suggested that war is
like sausage making, best judged in the outcome rather than the process.
Still, the angry debate about the "pause" cannot have arisen entirely
without cause. Worry about Donald Rumsfeld's whimsical interference in
deployment was evident before the war began, and, after it did, there was
obviously concern among field commanders which journalists were picking up.
But the war, in the shape of intense aerial attacks, did not actually pause,
even if some ground troops did.

Most of the critics of the US military who emerged in the past week have
been from the school that counselled more forces, better preparation, and a
more deliberate approach. But some, less publicly prominent, have taken the
opposite point of view, arguing that America and Britain, far from having
too few forces, had more than enough. "We suffered a colossal loss of
nerve," according to one. "We did 300 miles in 96 hours, with only 40 dead,
and then we balked."

On this argument the coalition forces might have bounced into Baghdad a week
ago, with less chance of fighting or the use of chemical weapons, and could
still do so if they acted quickly, a course he doubted they would take.
Douglas MacArthur, he recalled, went against the advice of cautious
colleagues and landed 60,000 troops in Luzon, where they faced 200,000
Japanese and had "a complete walkover".

But if victories like those in Luzon or during Patton's drive to the Rhine
have their place in American military memory, so does the experience of 1968
when, particularly in Hue, American soldiers had to drive out North
Vietnamese and Vietcong forces from cities in costly fighting.

This time, in spite of the danger to them and to Iraqi civilians of chemical
warfare, they have advantages they did not have then. They have much more
precise weapons, the effects of which are only partially negated by the
suburban or urban environment. And then there is the nature of the enemy.
The Vietnamese communist forces were brave, motivated and skilled. They were
also brutally used and wasted, and coercion was not absent. But they had a
vision of ultimate victory and of their nation's future. Their steadiness,
indeed, turned their physical defeat in the Tet campaign into a political
victory which led on over the years to that triumphal entry into Saigon.
There is no sense that the last-ditch forces in Iraq have such qualities,
and it remains the case that the rottenness of the Iraqi regime is the best
single weapon in the American and British armoury.