March 25, 2003
THE COSTS OF WAR:
Republican Guard Scatters, Moving Into Civilian Areas (Wall Street Journal, 3/25/2003)
Pentagon planners once dreamed Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard might lay down arms rather than fight superior U.S. forces. But now two divisions of his army's elite -- roughly 20,000 Iraqi troops -- await the Americans on the approaches to Baghdad from the south.To make the confrontation more complicated, those troops are dispersing. The U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq pledging to spare its citizenry of hardship and death as much as possible -- a pledge the Republican Guard is taking to heart.
"They're not in their final fighting position," one senior U.S. military official in the region says. "They're either mixed into civilian areas or they're dispersed to areas where there's religious shrines or antiquities or things like that."...
Amatzia Baram, a professor and former Israeli army battalion commander who has studied Iraq's military for years, says the Guard will take advantage of U.S. pledges to limit civilian deaths and is prepared to fight a war in populated areas. "Their tanks are not as good as American tanks but they'll hide their tanks behind houses," he predicts. "The soldiers will be inside houses. They know this is America's weak point." He added U.S. forces should expect them to use chemical weapons....
The Special Republican Guards and the Special Security Service are based in the capital of Baghdad itself.... Analysts say Special Republican Guard troops have the closest ties to Saddam Hussein, and the best pay and perks. Gen. Kamal Mustafa, believed to be the head of the Special Republican Guard, is related by marriage to Mr. Hussein. These troops are living with their families in Baghdad, which may give them more of an incentive to defend it.
One defect of visibly promising to avoid civilian casualties is that it tempts the enemy to use human shields and makes civilian casualties more likely. We should absolutely strive to minimize civilian casualties, but we should avoid advertising this commitment. Best, in most negotiations, to leave the other side in uncertainty.
Saddam is working hard to assure that we cannot win the war without taking many civilian lives. He hopes we will decide that victory is not worth it. His hope is vain.
Posted by Paul Jaminet at March 25, 2003 10:04 AMCould be messy but an army dispersed among civilians is no longer any army, it will have no cohesion, could not act in coordianted fashion and could not possibly win even limited tactical objectives.
It would not take very smart officers to figure out they've been given terminal latrine duty, but I am not persuaded Iraqi officers are smart.
How smart does one have to be?
Because the problem is, what if the goal is not to win but to cause as much death and carnage as possible, to your enemy as well as to your own?
And what if causing such death and carnage is what Saddam and his ilk define as "victory" (similar to his victory at having survived the first Gulf War)?
And I wish I were just talking about semantics....