Posted on 04/05/2003 5:01:00 PM PST by Dog Gone
The conventional war for Iraq is virtually over. If Saddam Hussein's regime has been unable to mount significant resistance to the Americans this far, it is impossible to imagine that it will do so at all.
The only remaining military uncertainties are whether the Iraqis will contrive a last-ditch release of chemical weapons, and the clearance of Baghdad and Basra.
Whatever policy the Americans pursue for Saddam's capital, his supporters are obviously incapable of mounting a coherent defence through the streets, on 1945 Berlin lines. To achieve that, one needs fanatics with the military skills of the Waffen SS, and there are none in Saddam's forces.
They have shown themselves fantasists of a kind familiar in the service of tyrants: masters of bombast, more comfortable in the torture chamber than on the battlefield.
The Allies take seriously the guerrilla threat that could be posed by some hundreds of would-be fighters who have been filtering into the country from Syria and to a lesser extent from Iran. But this is a problem for the security of Allied-occupied Iraq, rather than a danger to victory.
This war has provided yet another lesson on the chasm between a Western culture that means what it says, and a culture extravagant in the use of words, such as that which pervades most of the Arab world.
The Americans and British are literal-minded people. We encounter difficulties in diplomacy with the Irish or the Spanish or the Chinese, never mind the Iraqis, because other societies possess a different attitude to verbiage.
Before the war, many Western pundits found it difficult to believe that Saddam's people could deliver so many blood-curdling threats, without having some practical notion about how to implement them. Yet this week, few Iraqi units have stayed around to fight the Americans, and those that did so have been easily eliminated.
There have been isolated incidents of terrorism. There will be more after the war is over, perhaps bloody and protracted. But the Iraqis have done nothing to suggest that their forces are under effective central command.
It has been the same since March 19, when Baghdad ordered the destruction of the oil fields around Basra, and most of its local Ba'ath loyalists simply took to their heels without heeding instructions.
I suggested a week ago that, while nothing much had gone wrong with the military campaign, the political horizon could become stormy unless the Allies got the war over quickly. In the past four days, the Americans have dramatically regained momentum. Even among Saddam's minions in Baghdad, it is plain that the message has sunk in.
Everybody in Washington and London has always recognised that the end-game will be messy. Everything in Iraq, even the technology of the oilfields, has been run by the Ba'ath Party. Its members are now fleeing and going to ground.
This leaves only Allied personnel to secure a big country, maintain law and order, restore vital services and finish a war. There are not nearly enough people on the ground to handle this.
In the weeks ahead, there will be horror stories of hospitals without water, looters stripping palaces, civilians accidentally killed at checkpoints. It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the administrative task.
Yet we should only pray for one deliverance at a time, and first must come the fall of Baghdad and of Saddam.It would be a huge embarrassment to Washington if the tyrant escaped.
It is hard to ensure his extinction, however, in a large country amid millions of people. There is no political comparison with Hitler. Saddam is a mere regional monster, rather than a global one.
But allied intelligence faces the same problems as the Russians in 1945, in locating the tyrant. Soviet intelligence sent a special Smersh team to Berlin, to find Hitler dead or alive.
The Russians confidently expected him to flee the city. The first evidence that he had not done so came from the capture of a civilian engineer, who had been summoned to the fuhrerbunker to adjust its ventilation system.
"There was a wedding there yesterday," the terrified man told Smersh. "The Fuhrer married Eva Braun."
The Russians did not believe a word of it. It seemed to them inconceivable that anything so banal could have taken place, while catastrophe engulfed Berlin and its doomed ruler.
In Baghdad today, the population has the consolation of knowing that a battle through the streets is unlikely.
The best guess must be that the Americans will progressively tighten the noose around the city centre of Baghdad, only pausing if they meet significant resistance.
There may be some fighting, but no climactic showdown. The war will peter out, rather than reach a tidy conclusion with a formal surrender.
The British Army's handling of Basra has been a textbook demonstration of how to match ruthless military action against armed opposition with benign peacekeeping in occupied areas. If the Americans can achieve half as much with the bigger problems of Baghdad, they will do very well indeed.
The world faces some more days of apprehension and tension about the end of this horrid business, for all war is a horrid business. But the doom-mongers still look set for disappointment.
A tolerable end beckons for the fighting, if not for the problems of Iraq.
This describes the KU - Marqette game today also!
Probably that's because this writer is a historian, not an average reporter.
".......never mind the Iraqis? Shouldn't that be ......Never mind the French?!!!
They defined "immediate" in resolution 1441 as "all eternity!" And they did it with straight faces!!
SS. Didn't they lose?
Waiting for the 4th Infantry Div. would be my guess.
Those Arab fundies are only "tough" when it comes to torturing and murdering innocents. When a determined, heavily armed and professionally-trained foe has them in his sights, they crumble like a bunch of scared little girls.
Sorry to burst your bubble. You will have to explain the behavior of the French some other way. There is no country on earth that works harder to maintain purity of the meaning of words and clarity of expression. Well-written French is a joy to read. A well-written French article that I read explained that the problem is that French men only separate from their mothers at age 49 or something.
*cough* *cough* Clinton *cough* Gore *cough* *cough* etc.
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