OMEGA MEN:

Will Baghdad Fight to the End? (MARK BOWDEN, 3/27/03, NY Times)

With Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard dug in on the outskirts of Baghdad and thousands of his most loyal defenders no doubt armed and waiting in the city's neighborhoods, he might be on the verge of delivering the "mother of all battles" he promised 12 years ago.

He has ceded the majority of his country to the rapidly moving American and British forces, but has left pockets of determined loyalists in cities large and small. These troops, many dressed in civilian clothing, will shoot at coalition forces from densely populated areas, daring return fire that might kill the very Iraqis whom President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain hope to liberate.

It is a strategy both cunning and cruel, and it may work. The outcome will depend in large part on the people of Baghdad, each of whom has a decision to make. What they decide could mean either a quick defeat of the regime or a protracted mess that would amount at best to a Pyrrhic victory for allied troops.

Saddam Hussein is betting that his people will rally around his crack troops. The allies are betting they will betray the dictator and flush out his enforcers. I'm afraid the odds at this point favor Saddam Hussein. Even those Iraqis eager to turn against the regime are still caught between the guns, and won't dare make a move until they are sure one side has the upper hand. Neighborhood by neighborhood, they will have to decide when it is safe to make their move.

If Saddam Hussein wins his bet, then coalition forces could face fighting reminiscent of the 1993 battle of Mogadishu.

To a certain extend you can understand the entire Ba'athist side of this war so far just by referring to Mr. Bowden's book, Black Hawk Down, which describes the type of battle that (along with Stalingrad) would seem to provide the archetype for what Saddamn is trying to achieve by these tactics, and his profile of Saddam, Tales of the Tyrant, which explains what he's trying to accomplish with his life. The latter is particularly interesting because, in a way that those who think him merely a secular figure have never comprehended, it depends on his delusion of being revered half a millenium from now in an Arabic-Islamic world:

If Saddam has a religion, it is a belief in the superiority of Arab history and culture, a tradition that he is convinced will rise up again and rattle the world. His imperial view of the grandeur that was Arabia is romantic, replete with fanciful visions of great palaces and wise and powerful sultans and caliphs. His notion of history has nothing to do with progress, with the advance of knowledge, with the evolution of individual rights and liberties, with any of the things that matter most to Western civilization. It has to do simply with power. To Saddam, the present global domination by the West, particularly the United States, is just a phase. America is infidel and inferior. It lacks the rich ancient heritage of Iraq and other Arab states. Its place at the summit of the world powers is just a historical quirk, an aberration, a consequence of its having acquired technological advantages. It cannot endure.

In a speech this past January 17, the eleventh anniversary of the start of the Gulf War, Saddam explained, "The Americans have not yet established a civilization, in the deep and comprehensive sense we give to civilization. What they have established is a metropolis of force ... Some people, perhaps including Arabs and plenty of Muslims and more than these in the wide world ... considered the ascent of the U.S. to the summit as the last scene in the world picture, after which there will be no more summits and no one will try to ascend and sit comfortably there. They considered it the end of the world as they hoped for, or as their scared souls suggested it to them."

Arabia, which Saddam sees as the wellspring of civilization, will one day own that summit again. When that day comes, whether in his lifetime or a century or even five centuries hence, his name will rank with those of the great men in history. Saddam sees himself as an established member of the pantheon of great men—conquerors, prophets, kings and presidents, scholars, poets, scientists. It doesn't matter if he understands their contributions and ideas. It matters only that they are the ones history has remembered and honored for their accomplishments.

It is incumbent on us to consider whether men who think this way--as Osama would seem to also and presumably many followers of both--have so convinced themselves of their superiority over the West and are so certain that episodes like the Battle of the Black Sea showed our true colors, that they are incapable of making rational decisions where the clash of our respective civilizations is concerned. What other conclusions can we draw from Saddam's apparent belief that he can win this war and Osama's apparent belief that he and al Qaeda would survive the aftermath of 9-11 but that they are divorced from reality? The length, scope, and lethality of the war on terror must depend on how widely this psychosis is shared in the rest of the Middle East. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 30, 2003 10:55 PM