FOGGING IT UP:

Battling for Hearts and Minds: Capital's Mood, Defenses Guide Closing Moves (Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks, April 4, 2003, Washington Post)

Over the first two weeks of the war, U.S. forces attacking northward across Iraq have been greeted with violent hostility in some cities, flat indifference in others and, lately, in some places, with open arms.

How the war ends is likely to depend on how they are received by the 5 million residents of Baghdad, whose mood will go a long way toward determining whether fighters loyal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein can mount a successful resistance.

As U.S. forces closed in on the west and east of the capital yesterday, defense officials discussed following an "opportunistic" strategy of probing and testing the capital's defenses to gauge the mood of the population and the likely intensity of resistance.

Under that approach, armored reconnaissance missions, Special Operations actions and precision bombing would be used across the city as ground force commanders consider their options. Those range from pushing aggressively into the city along key roads to establishing a cordon along its perimeter and waiting for reinforcements to arrive, defense officials and analysts said.

U.S. officials seemed to think yesterday that the warm welcome they had counted on from Iraqis, especially in the heavily Shiite Muslim south, finally was emerging. In the southern city of Najaf, regarded by Shiites as the third-holiest city in Islam, U.S. commanders staged a ceremony in which a statue of Hussein was blown up, and they said a Shiite leader had issued a religious edict telling followers not to interfere with U.S. forces.

There were indications that the U.S. strategy in Baghdad would be to seek to capitalize on that trend, beginning by having Marine Corps units approaching from the southeast move into the heavily Shiite eastern part of the capital. There, said Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the residents of a Muslim sect widely seen as opposed to the Sunni-dominated government "probably will not be friendly to the regime." [...]

Even a large-scale attack would not aim to take over the entire city, but would instead try to capture or destroy certain key targets vital to the government's control over the capital, defense experts said.

"They might . . . hop in and occupy some strategic points, make these guys feel surrounded," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Terry Scott, a former commander of Army Special Operations Command. "Mostly it's occupying places that retard their ability to move around from place to place -- it may be road intersections, it may be particular buildings, it may be sets of buildings."

On the other hand, if the population broadly opposes the U.S. presence, some experts said, the probable alternative would be to loosely cordon off Baghdad until more troops arrive. "We need a lot, a lot, a lot of light infantry," a Pentagon official said.

To do that, said retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., the military would establish a perimeter that stops well short of a siege. The U.S. line, he said, would be "porous enough to allow the enemy who are willing to escape an opportunity to do that."

Then, he said, the hope would be "that the city will collapse upon itself."

Baghdad, he explained, "contains all the elements of insurrection -- rich and the poor, Sunni and Shiites, the regime and the families of those the regime has murdered. It's like a tinderbox inside the city, and what you need to do is supply the spark that would enable this internal collapse to occur."

In the meantime, said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which has spearheaded the drive to Baghdad from Kuwait, could swing to the northwest around Baghdad to Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, with an eye on seizing control of the northern oil fields and the important oil hub of Kirkuk north of Tikrit.

Come off it--they're going in with what they've got. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 4, 2003 3:39 PM