Posted on 03/23/2003 9:38:26 PM PST by JohnHuang2
AGHDAD, Iraq, Monday, March 24 — Iraq's defense minister said on Sunday that American forces driving north toward Baghdad had engaged in a pattern of "stops and swerves" around Iraqi defenses in cities and towns along the way, but that they would eventually have to "pay a heavy price in blood" by fighting for Baghdad if they wanted to topple Saddam Hussein.
The warning by Gen. Sultan Hashim, delivered at an evening news conference, came only hours before an intensification of American bombing and missile attacks on the Iraqi capital. After a mostly quiet period in central Baghdad since the ferocious bombardment on Friday night, a volley of cruise missiles began slamming into key government and military buildings on both sides of the Tigris River early today.
The missiles, striking at intervals of a few minutes, sent shock waves for miles, and clouds of dust and smoke could be seen rising from some of the targets.
As the war entered its fifth day, events over the weekend appeared to have moved the war much closer to its climactic phase, the battle for Baghdad. With some American advance units passing the city of Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, tensions in the Iraqi leadership appeared to be rising, along with vows to meet the American troops with fierce resistance.
General Hashim outlined the Iraqi strategy for countering the Americans in what amounted to a lengthy military briefing. With an officer holding a pointer against a large military map at the news conference in Baghdad's Sheraton Hotel, the general said Iraqi forces had held their own in virtually every battle with the Americans so far.
The American advances, he said, were taking place largely because American commanders had chosen not to fight for control of cities and towns like Basra, Nasiriya, and Samawa in the Euphrates River valley on their drive north from Kuwait, but to outflank them and leave battle-worthy Iraqi units behind them.
This strategy, General Hashim implied, was only putting off the moment when American troops would have to fight Iraqi forces for control of the principal population centers, and above all Baghdad.
On a day when American forces suffered their worst casualties so far in fighting in the southern city of Nasiriya, the general asserted that "the enemy, every time he has been surprised by our resistance, stops and swerves."
Then he added a mocking choice for American commanders as they confront the last part of their drive to the capital, beyond Najaf to Baghdad. "Perhaps they can go on to northern Iraq," he said. "They can even go on to Europe. But in the end, to achieve their objective, they will have to come to the city. And the city will fight them. They say a land fights with its own people."
When the battle for the Iraqi capital begins, he said, American advantages in high-technology weaponry, and American commanders' preference for attacking the enemy with long-range weapons to avoid casualties, , would be minimized, and the Iraqis' strengths, of endurance, willpower and a readiness to fight for their own territory, would prevail.
By early today, the United States had asserted that preference yet again, launching cruise missile attacks on Baghdad. They were nowhere near the intensity of the Friday strikes, when hundreds of cruise missiles hit in and near Baghdad, along with heavy bombing, devastating many of the palaces and other buildings that have been symbolic of Mr. Hussein's rule.
One missile hit a building with a gigantic explosion only a few hundred yards from the Palestine Hotel on the east bank of the Tigris, where about 150 foreign journalists are staying. From a hotel balcony, the target appeared to have been in the vicinity of the Iraqi air defense headquarters, which appeared to have been heavily damaged but not destroyed in the Friday attacks.
Since the Friday attacks, the air raid sirens and intense Iraqi antiaircraft fire that met each new wave of American aircraft have been sharply diminished, to the point that there was virtually no ground-to-air fire visible by Sunday night.
Other targets hit over the weekend included the General Security Directorate in eastern Baghdad, a huge complex that is said by Iraqis to have been one of the most feared of all sites in Iraq. The directorate is perhaps the most powerful of the overlapping intelligence and security agencies that have underpinned Mr. Hussein's power.
Its headquarters has long been regarded by Iraqis as a way station, for those prisoners who have survived interrogations there, on the path to notorious prisons like Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, where many dissidents have endured long prison terms or have been executed.
With the government tightly monitoring reporters' movements around Baghdad, few details were available about Saturday's attack on the security directorate. But the pattern since the bombing began in the predawn hours of Thursday has been for most government buildings the Iraqis consider potential targets to be abandoned beforehand.
What was impossible to determine was what arrangements, if any, had been made to move the large number of detainees who were likely to have been held at the complex in the days before the American raids began.
In other recent briefings, Iraqi officials have offered an account of the fighting that has admitted of virtually no setbacks for Iraqi forces. Accounts of Iraqi triumphs in battling allied troops at the port of Umm Qasr, the first Iraqi town north of Kuwait, at the Fao region southeast of Basra, and outside Basra, have been hagiographic, with Iraqis driving back the attacking forces, or at least holding them, everywhere.
Coalitions claims that some Iraqi soldiers surrendered in the early fighting without resisting, for example in Umm Qasr, have been mocked. The Americans and the British, the Iraqis have said, simply rounded up civilians at Umm Qasr and presented them as prisoners of war.
But General Hashim's briefing, even if it, too, appeared to gloss over Iraqi losses, seemed closer to some of the battlefield realities. The general refused to give any numbers for Iraqi casualties, or for losses of tanks and other equipment, saying it would take time to amass such details. But he offered a detailed account of the fighting in the south, naming some of the Iraqi units, and he sketched out some of the battles.
The picture that emerged from the general's briefing was one of Iraqi units putting up a far stiffer resistance than American commanders had expected, and denying the American troops' victories at strategic centers like Basra and Nasiriya.
At Fao, General Hashim said, the Americans used airborne troops to take control of strategic oil fields, but then took another two days, through Sunday, to advance "one or two kilometers," about a mile, against Iraqi troops holding other parts of the peninsula. Another advance at Basra, he said, had given American troops "a foothold" at Basra airport on Sunday, but other troops trying to approach a crucial bridge guarding the approaches to the city had been driven back. Similarly, he said, three American assaults on the approaches to Nasiriya had been beaten back. American officials said the city was eventually captured.
By a reporter's tally, the general's account of American losses included at least 12 tanks, 14 armored personnel carriers, and three helicopters, as well as the downing of "large numbers" of cruise missiles.
Although he left other officers to give details on the Americans killed and captured during operations at Nasiriya, he answered a question about the treatment of prisoners by saying that they would have the protection of the Geneva Convention, as well as the guarantees that sprang from what he called "Islamic and Arab traditions," and that they would be shown to foreign reporters once they were brought to Baghdad.
General Hashim said Iraqi commanders had the advantage of knowing the principal American objective in the war, the overthrow of Mr. Hussein. "The enemy's big objective is well known," he said. "But any land they occupy will not bring them any closer to accomplishing this aim, which is to remove our leader and replace him with another leader of their choice. For that, they must not only occupy our land, they must come to our cities, and we will stand and fight them. The Americans should know that all the people are united behind our great leader, President Saddam Hussein."
Duh. They were "downed" right into the target . . .
Sorry General, we forgot to tell you, this delivery will be COD.
BTW, where is your "great leader" anyway?
I'm no military strategist, but guess is that we are going to position our troops around Baghdad, then hit them with a relatively brief - but very intense - bombing campaign just before we move into the city. A long campaign cannot sustain the level of intensity that we will probably see with the heavy, precisely targeted Shock and Awe attack. With good timing, we can attack and penetrate the city before the enemy can regroup.
President Bush and the Pentagon are giving major hints of a short, sharp attack with statements like "the worst is yet to come" and "you ain't seen nothing yet".
..and went on to say "because we have him propped up pretty good, his feet are encased in concrete, and we've had the rest of him bronzed."
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