"The snake is now back in the desert sands, swerving around certain desert towns."
Posted on 03/31/2003 10:36:14 PM PST by HAL9000
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 31 - With American advance units pushing ever closer to Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's presidential compound once again under remorseless aerial attack with what seemed like American bunker-busting bombs, the Iraqi leadership put on a show of redoubled defiance today and promised American troops nothing but "death in the desert."
When government ministers emerged in their military-style uniforms and berets to spread their message of doom for the American war effort, they were insistently upbeat about events on the battlefield. But there was something different in their their demeanor - something more strident, more polemical, more pugnacious, and more edgy.
As the ministers told it, this reflected new successes for Iraqi fighters amid the palm trees and grain fields of the Euphrates River valley, the center of fighting for American troops advancing from the south. But it was not difficult for a listener familiar with the changing shape of the war outside Baghdad to think that this might not be the full story.
"The Americans are telling a lot of lies; lying is the golden rule of the American administration," said Naji Sabri, the foreign minister. He added, "We shall turn the desert into a big graveyard for American and British troops."
The British, he said, already had graveyards here from Iraqi uprisings against their colonial rule. "Now they will have other graveyards, where they will be joined by their friends, the Americans," he said. "Those Americans who will not surrender to us will face nothing but death in the desert, or else they will have to flee back to their puppet regime in Kuwait."
The sharp boom of a new bomb striking a mile, or perhaps 10 miles away, shook the building at times during the news conference at the Palestine Hotel. The ministers, undeterred, or at least determined not to be seen being deterred, affected not to notice.
To Iraqi loyalists, this no doubt seemed like defiance of the invader at its best. To others, there was the thought that the insistent indifference to the bombs might be a metaphor for something else - perhaps an unwillingness to look at matters in any way that could presage an outcome other than victory for Mr. Hussein and those around him, like the ministers, whose prospects, and perhaps lives, depend on his somehow confounding the onslaught.
One difference was that Mr. Sabri and the information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, made virtually no reference to Mr. Hussein, although they stood beside a large, flatteringly youthful portrait of him. Another was that their remarks took place against the intrusive, off-stage percussions of the American bombing and the sporadic Iraqi antiaircraft fire that, so far, appears not to have downed a single American warplane over Baghdad.
Instead, Mr. Sahhaf, wearing a holstered pistol at his hip and two magazines of bullets on his belt, spoke of a new Iraqi offensive that had, he said, brought disaster to American advance parties that set up camouflaged hideouts in the desert. From those hideouts, he said, the Americans had harassed Iraqi units and sought to create the impression that the Americans were further forward and in greater strength than they were.
Having discovered this tactic, Mr. Sahhaf said, the Saddam fedayeen forces destroyed one desert hideout, killing all of the American troops there. He gave a tally for the previous 24 hours, from all sectors of the war, of 43 coalition soldiers killed in action, as well as 13 tanks, 8 armored personnel carriers, 6 other armored vehicles, 4 Apache helicopters and 2 unmanned Predator drones destroyed.
"The snake is in a quagmire now," he said.
Mr. Sahhaf said Iraqi fighters had pushed the Americans back into the desert. "The snake is now back in the desert sands, swerving around certain desert towns," he said. "The Saddam fedayeen and certain smaller units of our armed forces are conducting the fight against the lackeys of the mercenaries night and day. We have decided we will not let them sleep, and we are chasing them all over the place."
It was impossible to verify any of those claims from the restricted vantage point of Baghdad, where the 150 foreign journalists face tight controls on their movements, limiting them mainly to visiting bombing sites selected by the Information Ministry, and attending news conferences at the hotel. The Palestine became the war press center after the third in a series of pinpoint Tomahawk cruise missile strikes on the Information Ministry on Sunday night.
But the one front of the war that is visible here, the bombing of Baghdad, seemed not to be going at all well from the Iraqi point of view. In fact, the capital, the strategic heart of Mr. Hussein's apparatus of power, seemed open to whatever punishment American air commanders chose to inflict.
Through the day and deep into the night, bombs and missiles pounded targets all across the city, none more so than a huge colonnaded building amid the palm fronds of Mr. Hussein's most prized piece of real estate, the hundreds of acres of riverside palaces and retreats, bunkers and guardhouses, gardens and fountains, that cluster around the Republican Palace.
It was here that the American bombing began, with heavy attacks that turned much of the compound into an inferno on the first night of heavy bombing a week ago on Friday, and it was to here that the attacks returned, with renewed fury.
Something about the huge granite building at the center of the compound appeared to have persuaded the Pentagon that it deserved sortie after sortie of heavy bombs or missiles - exactly which was not clear even from the vantage point of a high balcony at the Palestine, perhaps 1,500 yards across the Tigris River.
Some Iraqis whispered that the building was the palace given by his father to Qusay Saddam Hussein, 36, who, under his father's direction, controls the Republican Guards and Iraq's most feared intelligence and security agencies, and who was appointed to command the Baghdad military district.
For more than a week since the initial strikes, little that has been visible to the eye has stirred in the sprawling presidential compound. So today, when the building known colloquially as Qusay's palace came under round after round of what sounded like bunker-busting bombs, the word among Iraqis who dared talk of it was that it was the tunnels and bunkers beneath the building that the Pentagon was after, not the shell of the palace above. Perhaps, those Iraqis said, the Americans believed that high-ranking Iraqi leaders, possibly even Mr. Hussein himself and his two sons, Qusay and his brother, Uday, 38, were somewhere in a complex designed by German engineers in the 1980's to withstand even a nuclear strike.
The Pentagon's desire to go after the ruling family was also suggested by another cruise missile strike that some Iraqis reported having seen today, this one on the headquarters of the Iraqi Olympic committee. It is headed by Uday, who, according to Western human rights reports, turned the headquarters into an interrogation and detention center with a reputation that makes those who have been there as captives tremble.
Mr. Hussein and his sons, of course, have been the center of the war from the start, for Iraqis as much as Americans, since it was their departure from Iraq that President Bush set as the condition of the ultimatum that triggered the war. But the Iraqi leader remains an enigma. He appears almost nightly on Iraqi television, sometimes with his sons, ostensibly leading conferences on the war. Iraqis say the films could be fresh, or just as easily old, prewar loops revived. His name is chanted by the Greek choruses of ordinary Iraqis that Baath Party zealots organize atop the rubble at every bombing site reporters visit, but television has shown no film of him viewing the sites himself, or visiting survivors in Baghdad's hospitals.
He could be almost anywhere, but the hunch among the few Iraqis who talk about it is that he would be unlikely to isolate himself from the capital now, especially with American troops only 50 miles away to the south, and about 100 miles away to the west.
There, travelers have reported being stopped and searched by American tank squadrons that have straddled the highways leading to Jordan and Syria just west of the Euphrates River town of Ramadi. From Ramadi, it is only about 85 miles as helicopters fly to Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's home base northwest of Baghdad, which has also come under heavy American bombing.
A puzzling aspect of many of the news conferences given by top Iraqi officials since the war began has been how rarely they have mentioned Mr. Hussein, compared with the standard before the conflict, when his name and leadership were invoked as often as Mao's in the China of the 1970's, or Stalin's in the Russia of the 1930's and 1940's. At some appearances by ministers, he has been mentioned once or twice, but just as often, he has not been mentioned at all.
This may have been partly why, today, one reporter asked Mr. Sabri, the foreign minister, whether the leadership could operate normally under the bombing in Baghdad, which has destroyed most of the capital's telephone system and left many of Mr. Hussein's palaces and other command centers in rubble.
Mr. Sabri, on this as all else, was defiantly upbeat. Among the leadership, he said, "the mood is excellent, as usual, as normal, and we are even more determined to beat the enemy and drive him out of the country." He made no mention of Mr. Hussein. But if this suggested that the Iraqi leader is somehow diminished in the reckoning of his inner circle, much else suggests the reverse.
A striking feature about life in Baghdad under the American air attacks has been just how passive most Iraqis have remained. If there has been any temptation to use the situation to stage local uprisings, there has been no sign of it. Indeed, the instinct to show loyalty and obedience has only intensified.
Even among ministers, perhaps especially among them, this concern to show fealty is obtrusive. Mr. Hussein may be rarely mentioned, but top officials who brief reporters on the war accomplish something similar by emphasizing, again and again, the leading role in Iraqi resistance, the "spearhead role," as Mr. Sahhaf put it at least five times today, of the fedayeen.
Given the Iraqi strategy of guerrilla tactics, the prominence given the fedayeen could, some Iraqis say, be a recognition of their role in slowing the American advance. Just as easily, those Iraqis say, it could be a way of signaling that loyalties remain with Mr. Hussein. The fedayeen, recognizable by their black uniforms and black facemasks, are led by Usay.
There's a bunch of shiny, new JDAMs with his name on them awaiting delivery.
There, travelers have reported being stopped and searched by American tank squadrons that have straddled the highways leading to Jordan and Syria just west of the Euphrates River town of Ramadi. From Ramadi, it is only about 85 miles as helicopters fly to Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's home base northwest of Baghdad, which has also come under heavy American bombing.
FYI.
Yeah, tell another "golden rule" why dontcha.
I think that you are exactly right.
It sounds like neither Uday nor Qusay are running the country. As the article says, it's being led by someone named "Usay". :-)
Yeah, I was wondering about that too.
Probably by his speech writer Al-Arnett.
There, travelers have reported being stopped and searched by American tank squadrons that have straddled the highways leading to Jordan and Syria just west of the Euphrates River town of Ramadi. From Ramadi, it is only about 85 miles as helicopters fly to Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's home base northwest of Baghdad, which has also come under heavy American bombing.
This report shows that US mech infantry is north of Lake Razazah, almost at 33 degrees 30 min latitude. John Burn's filed this story on April 1.The main highway to Jordan runs straight west across the Syrian desert to Al Rutbah. The travelers would have noticed large troop columns crossing the highway if the US has deployed in strength above Ramadi. One would have to conclude that the bulk of the US force is still south of Ramadi.
But this still raises the possibility that the US can send a force across the Euphrates past Razazah and descend on Baghdad from the north. If, as reports suggest, the IRG has stripped its northern marches to reinforce the crumbling Medina IRG Division, then the defense of Baghdad is in great peril.
"The snake is now back in the desert sands, swerving around certain desert towns."
Everytime I see these Iraqis give a "press conference", it reminds me of a Saturday Night Live sketch.
I loved the one where they said the Americans were on their way to blow up Muhammad's grave.
I couldn’t agree more.
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