‘Red Commander’ called up to read Saddam’s mind
The Sunday Times ^ | March 23, 2003 | Sarah Baxter
HE is clean-shaven, on the short side and looks nothing like Saddam Hussein, but Gary Anderson, a retired marine colonel, has played him in Pentagon war games many times.
Anderson has taken on the role of Red Commander, the bad guy, against the true Blue American forces for good.
Until recently, Anderson, 55, was director of war-gaming for the marines at Quantico, Virginia. He has carried on advising the Pentagon, providing insights into Saddam’s thinking to help the military campaign against him.
The colonel has concluded that Saddam has “never been in a position where he has had his back to the wall and felt he had to leave the country. Nothing we know about Saddam suggests he is suicidal or wants to be a martyr, but he is running out of options”.
Anderson believes that when the previous Bush administration threw Saddam out of Kuwait but left him in power in Baghdad, the Iraqi leader interpreted this as a sign of weakness. Saddam has “badly misread the determination of the US because he has got away with half measures for so long”.
So far, the tactics followed by Saddam closely mirror those employed by Anderson’s Red Commander. His forces, like Saddam’s, more or less abandoned the wide open deserts to invaders and hunkered down in the red capital.
Anderson was dismissive of the “stiff resistance” British forces supposedly met at Umm Qasr. He expected Basra to provide a better test of the Iraqis’ will to resist.
It is in Baghdad, though, that Saddam is expected to make his last stand. Will he flee or fight? “I’d say he’ll go for the exile option and play the martyr — just not a dead one,” said Anderson.
In his war games, Anderson has tested a number of frightening scenarios. “Saddam is utterly ruthless and amoral and has no compunction about placing people in buildings he thinks we will bomb and putting munitions in mosques and schools,” he said.
The Iraqi leader, Anderson believes, would rather fight a bloody street-by-street battle than take to the countryside for a guerrilla campaign, as he lacks the popular support that would provide him with shelter. After years of tyranny, he is unable to generate the loyalty of an Osama Bin Laden.
Unlike Al-Qaeda, once Saddam is toppled his Ba’athist apparatus will collapse. That could tempt Saddam to launch suicide missions and unleash weapons of mass destruction in a last bid to cling to power. Yet in Anderson’s war games, such scenarios are rare.
In Millennium Challenge, a red versus blue war game played last summer, the Americans quickly lost their Gulf fleet and many of their sailors when the reds turned a small flotilla of boats into pre-emptive and deadly suicide squads. However, the enemy then was not relatively secular Iraq. “Saddam does not have a fanatical fundamentalist following,” said Anderson.
In one scenario, Anderson has the Iraqis coaxing the Americans to fire artillery or a cruise missile into a compound housing weapons of mass destruction. When the poison gas is released, Saddam can then blame the enemy.
“When I played the Red Commander, I had weapons of mass destruction which stuck to my hands like flypaper,” said Anderson. “You know you are about to be discovered and you just can’t lose them.
“I did decide to use them once, when I knew the regime was going down anyway, and I figured if the Americans didn’t get me the civilians would. I didn’t get nuked, but there was massive retaliation and my regime collapsed.”
Choose exile, Anderson urges Saddam. It is the only option that worked for him. |
