Study ties Hussein, guerrilla strategy
US may have played into plans, report says
By Bryan Bender
WASHINGTON -- The ''shock and awe" attack that toppled Saddam Hussein in three weeks is often touted as a brilliant strategy that defeated Iraq with relatively few US casualties. But new information suggests that the United States may have played into Hussein's plans for a quick war followed by a long guerrilla insurgency.
The report last week of the Iraq Survey Group, based partly on interviews with captured leaders of the secretive Iraqi regime, said Hussein planned to have his troops and loyalists pull back after an initial US thrust and engage the Americans under terms more favorable to the Iraqis.
The quick fall of Baghdad was once seen as vindication of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's belief in the power of smaller numbers of fast-moving troops. But recently, even President Bush has conceded that the early victory of the US-led coalition helped lay the groundwork for an insurgency that has claimed the lives of 929 US troops since the end of major combat on May 1, 2003.
Bush portrayed the insurgency as an accidental consequence of a war plan that worked too well. Last week, however, the Iraqi survey report declared a guerrilla insurgency is exactly what Hussein envisioned. The Iraq Survey Group, a 1,500-member team created by the director of the CIA to search for weapons of mass destruction, has been on the ground in Iraq since the toppling of Hussein's regime.
''Saddam believed that the Iraqi people would not stand to be occupied or conquered by the United States and would resist -- leading to an insurgency," said the 1,000-page report by chief weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer. ''Saddam said he expected the war to evolve from traditional warfare to insurgency."
The dictator told his advisers and military commanders before the invasion to stand their ground for about eight days, when Hussein would ''take over," according to the report.
The Duelfer report, the first detailed accounting of Hussein's strategy in the face of a likely US military assault, concludes that Hussein's instructions -- repeated on at least three occasions -- were a sign of his overall strategy to wear down the American and coalition forces over time, even if he did not directly coordinate the resistance in the eight months before he was captured in December 2003.
The report said that from August 2002 to January 2003 Iraqi commanders across the country were ordered to hide weapons in the countryside. An index to the report says that a branch of Iraqi intelligence trained fighters from Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, Lebanese, and Sudan in explosives and marksmanship at Salman Pak, near Baghdad.
Indeed, intelligence officials said that instead of reading up on tank warfare, Hussein and some of his top generals are believed to have been boning up on books penned by Vietnamese communists on guerrilla warfare tactics.
The United States should not have been surprised, according to officials and outside analysts. Signs that a guerrilla war might be in the offing were apparent before the United States invaded. Nonetheless, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the intelligence branches of the Army, Navy, and Air Force do not appear to have given them much credibility or passed concerns up the chain of command, they said.
For example, the CIA warned in several secret reports before the war that the invasion would likely be followed by a guerrilla campaign. Meanwhile, as the US invasion force was moving north, Fedayeen Saddam, the irregular forces under the command of Qusay Hussein, one of Saddam Hussein's sons, launched hit-and-run attacks at US supply lines. That, too, should have been a sign of what might be coming if Iraqi troops and irregulars were able to slip away, officials and analysts said.
''They were conducting another kind of warfare," said retired Army General George Joulwan, the former NATO commander who led the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. ''The US was meeting organized resistance of a different kind, not Republican Guards but this different sort of fighting. It was an early warning."
Even by telegraphing that the US-led onslaught would be a ''shock and awe" campaign, the United States unnecessarily played into the Iraqis' hands, according to Joulwan, because from an enemy standpoint it provided additional reason not to confront the United States directly. ''There were strong indications this was part of their strategy," Joulwan said.
The report of the Iraq Survey Group has led to renewed complaints about the Pentagon's prewar planning, which anticipated a conventional war plan aimed at defeating Hussein's elite Republican Guard divisions.
''The basic idea of trying to decapitate the regime was still the right approach," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. ''But not having a serious plan to deal with insurgency was unconscionable to the point of being incompetent. Not having a backup plan if it failed was foolish."
The main military lesson of the war, other specialists said, is that military power is no guarantee of victory.
''All the after-action reports are pointing to the fact that we were postured for the wrong type of adversary," said Loren Thompson, a defense expert at the conservative Lexington Institution in Arlington, Va. ''We were looking for nuclear weapons and conventional formations, and the enemy was planning for elusive and unconventional operations."
He added: ''What looked initially like a big conventional victory looks like a military challenge for which we have no good response. This is really a serious problem because the whole world can see the pattern of Vietnam and Somalia in Iraq now."
According to retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Krepinevich, an expert in counterinsurgency, ''good strategic planners look at not only the rosy scenario but some of the darker ones that we are now being confronted with in Iraq."
But in the end, he said, the full-blown insurgency is probably less a result of Iraqi planning and ''more our missteps."
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