Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Coalition forces can win the battle of Baghdad, but grisly images of death and destruction could cost them the war for Arab hearts and minds.
Mar 28, 2003 | Want to know where the war with Iraq will end? Perhaps inside a Baghdad phone booth.
With the United States' much-hyped air bombardment failing to shock and awe enough members of Saddam Hussein's military or high command into surrender, many observers remain convinced that U.S.-led coalition forces will have to win their military victory in downtown Baghdad. And they'll have to do it by waging dangerous, restricted urban warfare, often compared to a knife fight inside a phone booth.
Analysts agree the U.S. and its allies would likely prevail in such a fight. But in the days and weeks ahead, military commanders will be pressed to find a difficult balance: While they must use enough force to win the battle, they must limit casualties among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians or risk losing the crucial war of public opinion. Images of grief and destruction have already inflamed war opponents at home and throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and that's come even as the allies have pulled their punches, militarily.
"It's an extraordinary balancing act," says Ronald Bee, a senior analyst at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation in San Diego. "We'll win. But if we have to fight in the city, it will be a mess in terms of casualties and public opinion ... Form is as important as substance. How this plays out will send all sorts of messages to our friends and political enemies."
Although the timing for a potentially epic city battle has slipped in recent days due to the fighting in the south of Iraq, all eyes remain on the Iraqi capital -- "Fortress Baghdad," as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dubbed it. It's a fortress Saddam and his generals may be busy prepping for a guerrilla showdown.
Before the war, a brutal urban battle was described as the Pentagon's least favorite option. But in a campaign that has been short on momentum-changing victories, and with the planned surrender of Saddam's high command failing to materialize, that worst-case scenario is looking more and more like an inevitability.
"Increasingly there's no way around it," says Patrick Garrett, senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org. "Is it possible Saddam and his army will capitulate? Sure. Is it likely? No. If I were in his position, that's what I would do -- draw U.S. forces into the city."
Adding to the odds that troops will have to enter the capital is the fact President Bush stated an unusually precise goal for the war: physically removing Saddam Hussein from power. That means coalition forces may have no choice but to descend upon the city of 5 million and weed out Saddam's supporters neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, until they finally get their hands on the dictator.
"I don't mean to compare this to Vietnam," says Garrett. "But similar to that conflict, the United States has staked its international credibility on achieving those military goals, which are unconditional surrender. There is no Plan B."
For that reason, "the best-case scenario for Baghdad is that we don't have to fight there," says Timothy Hoyt, associate professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. "The campaign was designed so that there would be many possibilities along the way for things to go right which would preclude us from having to go street-to-street in Baghdad. That's the last option."
The fear for the Pentagon is that street fighting -- the underdog's oasis -- could turn into a public relations debacle if pictures of dead Iraqi civilians slumped over on curbsides are beamed around the world to an international audience already uneasy with the U.S.-led war. The Pentagon got a taste of that possible blowback on Wednesday when news broke that two errant bombs had landed in a commercial Baghdad marketplace, killing 17 civilians and wounding dozens. Whether the missile was fired by coalition or Iraqi forces was unclear, but most of the world was instantly ready to blame the United States. And if it was a wayward coalition strike, the stark images of an enormous crater in the Baghdad street surrounded by demolished cars, smoldering buildings, dead bodies and wailing women will do little to bolster the U.S. claims of a war to free Iraq, or to win the hearts and minds of angry locals, who reportedly chanted: "Oh, Saddam, we sacrifice our souls and blood to you." They're the same Baghdad citizens the U.S. hopes will soon rise up against Saddam.
"I worry about Baghdad," says Judith Kipper, a Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "I'm afraid Saddam has many things planned for us, that he'll revert to his early days as a guerrilla leader. He's homicidal, not suicidal. He'll try to kill as many American as possible." There's already speculation Saddam may have laid down a red line in the sand outside Baghdad, and once coalition forces cross it Iraq will launch a chemical or biological attack. Recent reports suggest he's following the lead of the rebels in Mogadishu who used small pickup trucks manned with machine guns to fight American soldiers, and those low-tech gunners may soon be seen racing around Baghdad. Saddam is also said to have deployed his militia throughout the city, commandeering schools, apartment buildings and shops, suggesting that he wants to place Baghdad citizens in the thick of the fight.
His goal? Creating bloody scenes that spark a worldwide uproar. "He wants to drag U.S. forces through populated sections of the city in hopes of getting the international community to step in and make it stop," says Garrett.
Compared to the wide-open desert, the city setting would certainly give Saddam's estimated 20,000 loyal troops embedded inside Baghdad more killing options by using buildings, rooftops and cellars as ambush platforms. Streets would turn into shooting galleries, homes and parks into battlegrounds, and intelligence would be harder to gather. The casualty rate for soldiers involved in urban battles is 30 percent, according to today's military calculus.
"The history of urban warfare in the 20th century indicates it's casualty-intensive," notes Stephen Cimbala, professor of political science at Penn State University and author of "The Politics of Warfare." "It's grunt-and-groan warfare."
The most famous and bloody urban battle in history was at Stalingrad, the epic, six-month World War II fight that claimed 1.5 million lives. Today, modern-day urban warfare scenarios vary from police-type actions, like skirmishes in Northern Ireland, to Israel's more aggressive military action in the West Bank, to bombing-only campaigns such as in Kosovo, or all-out military sieges such as the Russian's 1999 bloody bombardment of Grozny, which virtually leveled the Chechnya city.
U.S.-led forces have already gotten a taste of Iraq's brand of urban guerrilla warfare in southern cities such as Nasariyah and Basra, where soldiers have dressed as civilians, faked surrenders, and stashed guns and ammo inside hospitals, all clear violations of international law. That kind of deadly deception would likely be rampant inside the winding streets of Baghdad, where the U.S.'s extraordinary military advantage would be at least partially offset.
That's just one reason the Pentagon prefers to avoid city clashes. And that's why it may be hard for most Americans to conjure up modern-day images of winning urban battles. Perhaps Panama City, Panama, 1989. But even then, Gen. Manuel Noriega was able to elude tens of thousands of U.S. troops as he drove around Panama City for three days before finally surrendering in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen.
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