It was military Micawberism: Saddam simply hoped that something would turn up
(Filed: 13/04/2003)
telegraph.co.uk
By any standards, the war on Iraq was a fast, devastatingly effective campaign - with one enduring conundrum: what was Saddam's battle plan? Max Hastings, the military historian, looks back on the conflict
It was the war that wasn't, in the traditional sense of a contest between rival armies. Coalition forces have destroyed Saddam's army with the ease that every sensible pundit predicted. We have got the sort of messy endgame we expected. We should now expect the struggle to peter out over weeks, rather than to end with a comprehensive surrender or indeed any clear punctuation mark.
The most abused media cliche of the Iraq conflict has been 'heavy resistance'. There has been no heavy resistance. There has sometimes been heavy firing. But the bodies of those Iraqis rash enough to attempt it lie broken and blackened in the sand from the Kuwaiti border to Baghdad.
The effectiveness of resistance can only be measured by the casualties it inflicts. The Allies have gained possession of most of Iraq at a cost of smaller losses than a single American or British infantry battalion suffered in a few day's fighting in the Second World War.
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When military historians pick over the bones of this struggle, the issue that will puzzle them most is why Saddam Hussein accepted war with the United States, when he possessed no plan for how to fight it. 'It was military micawberism,' suggested someone in British intelligence this week. 'He simply hoped something would turn up.'
The 1991 Gulf war showed how vulnerable are conventional forces to precision-guided munitions. America has raised its military game immensely since Desert Storm, while the Iraqis have become ever weaker.
The only explanation for Saddam's behaviour is that he is - or was - a fantasist in a long Arab tradition. He believed that defiant words would somehow prove a substitute for modern munitions. Some individual Iraqis showed courage and determination, resisting to the death. But nowhere have Saddam's troops fought convincing, organised battles of a kind any Western officer would acknowledge. They have simply been eliminated piecemeal by air and artillery bombardment.
Most historians find the European wars of the 14th century distasteful. The so-called flower of chivalry hacked down the peasantry on the battlefield, secure in the knowledge that they were themselves impregnable in plate armour, unless they were unfortunate enough to be unhorsed, and killed by a dagger beneath their visors.
Few people today will expend the sympathy upon Saddam's men that medieval English and French foot soldiers merited, but the military comparison is not inappropriate. It was absurd for Fedayeen fighters to hope to destroy Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles with RPG7 rocket-launchers, unless they were lucky enough to break a track. The Iraqi T55 tanks that were destroyed outside Basra by British Challengers should have been in a museum, not on a battlefield.
The Allies' military difficulties have been caused by the lowest of low-tech opposition: suicide-bombers, fighters in civilian clothes, Iraqi soldiers who have exploited Western scruples about civilian casualties to fight with small arms from built-up areas. There was a significant wobble in the Allied advance a fortnight ago when a few Fedayeen attacks on American lines of communication caused a spasm of alarm in General Tommy Franks's command about 'force protection'.
This, together with the need for re-supply, caused some days' delay. If the Iraqis had shown themselves able to maintain pressure on supply lines through guerrilla attacks, the campaign could have taken significantly longer, because more troops would have had to be diverted for rear-area security.
Four days into the war, I believed that the Allies would get to Baghdad by about Day 11. On Day 11, however, Allied commanders worried about Fedayeen attacks, thought that victory could take several more weeks. They were amazed by the speed with which resistance collapsed thereafter.
By any standards, this has been a fast, devastatingly effective campaign, fought as humanely as the Allies could contrive. The world continues to puzzle about why the Iraqis did not use chemical weapons. These would not have altered the outcome, because Allied troops are well protected. But Saddam's chemical arsenal seemed to offer the only means by which he might delude himself that he possessed a chance of victory.
The British and American tactic of probing day by day into Basra and Baghdad until the opposition crumbled was brilliantly successful. The Iraqis were given time to realise the hopelessness of their own position and run away, rather than being forced into a corner and obliged to fight.
Although there has been some street fighting, and there will be more during the mopping up period ahead, there has been no coherent, centrally- directed defence of Iraq's cities. Fragments of Iraq's forces survive in the north, but it seems unlikely that big set-piece attacks will be needed to deal with them.
Armour and vehicles can be destroyed from the air with little difficulty. The hard part will be to secure this huge country, in which at least some hundreds of Saddam loyalists survive, armed with AK47s, able to fire a few bursts and vanish around street corners.
The Allies have begun the very difficult transition from war-fighting to peace-keeping. On the one hand, soldiers need to engage with the local population on the ground, to gain their confidence. On the other, Allied units will be deeply reluctant to drop their guard, as long as they are at risk from sudden small arms fire.
There have already been incidents in Baghdad in which American forces have shot up civilian vehicles, killing their innocent occupants, amid the considerable tensions after suicide bombers have struck, or Americans have been fired upon.
It is difficult to blame US soldiers and marines for being trigger-happy, when the threat they face from isolated gunmen remains all too real. But the political cost of killing civilians will rise every day. Amid the Iraqis' jubilation about Saddam's fall, it is already plain that there is little enthusiasm for the American and British armed presence in their country.
Allied forces will be mopping up for weeks, if not months. But it will require exceptional sensitivity to dispose of armed resistance on the streets, while convincing the mass of the population of Allied goodwill. The Americans and British face a risk of significant casualties during this concluding phase of the campaign, when they will be more vulnerable to terrorist attack than they were behind armour plate on the battlefield.
The big disappointment thus far, of course, is the failure to kill or capture Saddam Hussein. However much American and British government spokesmen try to discount his importance, it will be impossible to draw a line under this war until he is accounted for. His escape would be a political disaster.
Saddam's elusiveness reflects the weakness of Allied knowledge about the Iraqi leadership. Military intelligence about Iraqi deployments, dominated by electronic surveillance, has been superb. No significant Iraqi force could move without being pinpointed for destruction. The British take pride in the contribution made by their agents on the streets of Basra, whose reports enabled Major-General Robin Brims to judge when to move into the city almost bloodlessly. But information about Saddam and those around him has proved hard to come by.
We have always known that the rules governing a war of policy, of a kind that this one is, are quite different from those in a struggle for national survival, such as the Second World War. The military campaign represents only one strand. The political and media dimensions are almost equally important. In particular, public opinion is much more sensitive to civilian casualties than to those among combatants.
The Allies have done everything possible to minimise civilian losses. Indeed, the Americans would probably have been in Baghdad some days sooner had they not waged such a careful campaign. But public perception of the war is bound to be greatly influenced by how quickly humanitarian aid now reaches the Iraqi people, and order is restored in their cities.
Today, US and British forces have every reason to congratulate themselves on a coolly efficient military achievement. But no lasting judgement on this war will be possible until the world can read the last chapter of a labyrinthine political saga. |
