The military outcome of the 2003, Iraq War was never in doubt. How could a country that had been under 12 years of sanctions take on the world’s mightiest country?
And yet Saddam Hussein decided to fight the US, promising to turn Iraq into the graveyard of invaders.
How does one reconcile Saddam’s grandiosity with his achievements? The answer lies in Saddam’s miasmic ambition. He fancied himself to be a gifted military commander like Nebuchadnezzar and Salahuddin. Both had conquered Jerusalem.
The 1991, Gulf War provided ample evidence of his irrationality. He entrapped himself by invading Kuwait, and then compounded it by refusing to take an offer that would have left him better off than he was prior to the invasion.
The Arab League had offered Saddam three major concessions in return for withdrawing from Kuwait. First, he would maintain possession of Bubiyan Island in the Gulf that blocks most of Iraq’s short shoreline. Second, he would get Kuwait’s Ramaila oil fields, a site he contended Kuwait had appropriated when it inched its oil wells on the Iraqi side of the unmarked border. Third, Iraq would have been forgiven the better part of the $14 billion war debt to Kuwait that it had rung up during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam rejected all three conditions, and annexed Kuwait as its nineteenth province.
Ultimately, under UN’s auspice, the US issued an ultimatum: withdraw from Kuwait or face war. Saddam refused because he misjudged the resolve of the Americans to face casualties. Massive disaster ensued in the war that came, and even more disaster followed when UN sanctions were imposed on Iraq.
Had he not lost his goodwill with Kuwait in August of 1990, the US would not have been able to use Kuwaiti soil for launching an invasion on Iraq. But Saddam once again erred in strategy.
First, when the UN Security Council (UNSC) passed Resolution 1441 with a unanimous vote, he should have cooperated fully with the UN inspectors and prevented the eventual move to war. When Hans Blix reported mixed results about Iraq’s cooperation to the UNSC, the US and Britain were able to threaten military action on January 28, 2003, by saying that Iraq was showing ‘contempt’ for the UN, and that it stood in material breach of the Resolution 1441.
He misread the global opposition to a US-led invasion by thinking that global public opinion had the muscle to stave off such an invasion. He felt emboldened that even in San Francisco alone the rally to oppose the invasion of Iraq drew a crowd of several hundred thousand. But that did not mean that the US administration was going to change its mind
Second, he misread the global opposition to a US-led invasion by thinking that global public opinion had the muscle to stave off such an invasion. He felt emboldened that even in San Francisco alone the rally to oppose the invasion of Iraq drew a crowd of several hundred thousand. But that did not mean that the US administration was going to change its mind.
Finally, when President Bush gave him the option of going into exile, he declined and chose instead to fight a war that he knew he would lose.
Even then all was not lost, if he had but chosen the right strategy. Given the vast disparity in conventional forces, he should have planned to fight a protracted war of defense using guerilla tactics. He had 12 years to study the Gulf War and to study American military tactics in Somalia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. He should have known that the coalition forces would most likely conduct round-the-clock aerial bombardment of his fixed army dispositions, so it was critical that he not rely on these forces to fight the war. His land forces should have been dispersed throughout the land, and converted into bands of guerilla fighters.
These bands would have harassed and demoralized the invading armies, who would already be disoriented by fighting in unfamiliar terrain with people who spoke another language under difficult weather conditions. As Corporal Alan Thompson of the US Marines noted during his first firefight in and around Nasiriyah, “You don’t know where you are, and they do. It’s like being in someone else’s backyard.”
The war began on March 20, with a surgical air strike that was designed to decapitate the Iraqi leadership. Saddam survived. Then the British commandos made an incursion toward Umm Qasr, Iraq’s only major port. It was poorly defended and fell within three days. Subsequently, the first Armored Division of the British surrounded Iraq’s second largest city, Basra.
During the next several days, the third infantry division of the US army, and the first Marine Expeditionary Force began to fan out toward Baghdad in a pincer-like movement. The US forces encountered sporadic resistance by the Fedayeen Saddam fighters but almost none from the regular Iraqi army. The Iraqis did not fight any large-scale or even small-scale battles, even though their territory was lost day by day.
Two weeks of unrelenting precision bombing destroyed several divisions of the Republican guard, including the Medina and Baghdad divisions. Many soldiers decided not to fight, and dispersed in civilian clothes. Those that chose to fight were either outmaneuvered or out gunned by the highly equipped and mobile US forces, backed by close air support from A-10 Thunderbolt tank busters, Tornado GR4 and F-15 strike aircraft. These jets were flown close to the ground in order to create panic in tank crews. Many simply ran away into the desert.
Frank Thorp, a senior spokesman at the US Central Command, said that US forces found piles of weapons big enough to equip entire divisions in many places, but no soldiers around these weapon stores. “These are not soldiers who are going to fight another day. They’ve just gone.”
Morale was terrible if you wore an Iraqi uniform. A long-time veteran of the Iraqi 12th Mechanical Division observed, “We had no motivation for this war.” Borhan Abdul Karim, a soldier of the Republican Guard, told the New York Times, “We’re not cowards. But there’s no point in fighting when the Americans have this aviation, and there is no way we can win.” Saddam invoked Islamic duty but the invocation did not move the soldiers.
Iraqi forces put up little resistance as US forces made ‘thunder runs’ into Baghdad. Iraqi guns had been destroyed from the air. Iraqi tanks were found with their crews inside, killed by shots to the head by Iraqi security forces who did not want them fleeing or surrendering.
Baghdad fell on April 9, the Marines pulled down Saddam’s statue from Firdous Square. He went underground, hoping to fight another day.
The writer is a defence analyst and economist. He has authored ‘Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan’ (Ashgate Publishing, 2003). He can be reached at [email protected]
Published in Daily Times, October 23rd 2018.