I JUST KNOW THERE'S A QUAGMIRE IN THERE SOMEWHERE:

Saddam under siege: The deadly choice now facing Badhdad (Peter Beaumont in Amman and Patrick Graham in Baghdad, April 6, 2003, The Observer)

Yesterday it was reported that a suicide bomber had attacked American soldiers at the airport, but there was no immediate word on any casualties. All of which leaves the biggest problem confronting the US military planners until last: having encircled Baghdad, what do you do with a city of five million people? The scale of the problem was underlined on Friday by the usually hawkish American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said that although Saddam and his entourage were doomed, his forces could survive if they changed sides at the last minute.

If they did capitulate, their surrender would certainly save America from a potential mess. So do the men of the 3rd Infantry Division and the US Marines blast their way through a Baghdad that it is now theirs to take, confounding the much-vaunted 'humanitarian ideals' of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?

If they wait, as the British forces have done outside Basra - and UK officers have been called in by US military planners - then they may have trouble.The Basra stalemate and humanitarian concerns for the city's residents are already close to becoming an international scandal.

So which will be the fate of Baghdad: death by attrition or all-out attack? It is a question that may well determine the future success of the allies' subsequent occupation and administration of Iraq.

Leaving Baghdad's civilians inside a city with no electricity and rapidly diminishing supplies of fresh water and food threatens many of them with a lingering death. The Red Cross said yesterday that several hundred wounded Iraqis have already been admitted to hospitals since the American troops reached the city. 'The situation is getting increasingly difficult,' said spokesman Florian Westphal.

Yet a bitter, brutal onslaught on the capital city will trigger even more misery and fill the world's TV screens with scenes of dead women and mutilated children - inflaming more local opposition and provoking further suicide attacks.

It is this latter scenario that the US military machine is now contemplating. 'We're not going to tiptoe into the city, it will be a forceful knock-out punch every time we go in,' said US Marine Captain Matt Watt, commander of Lima Company, a unit of mechanised infantry trained in urban warfare.

'We'll make sure there's no capability for the enemy to resist us, we'll go in shooting up every time,' he told Reuters. 'And if we are to take the enemy out, it may unfortunately be at the cost of a lot of civilian lives, unintentionally. If we start taking a lot of fire, we will simply level the building area, destroying it with indirect fire and air and tanks. Then we'll go in with ground forces. That's when you get civilians who choose not to leave, and they're going to die in the process.'

It is a chilling prospect, principally for the Iraqis, but also for the soldiers storming their capital. 'Marines are trained in the urban fight but despite better training, you're still going to take a lot of casualties. There's just no way round it, it's an extremely difficult fight in the urban area,' Watt said.

The fight for Baghdad is unlikely, of course, to end up like the battle of Stalingrad, which ultimately claimed a million lives. Nevertheless, the very nature of the conflict that lies ahead looks uncomfortable and unforgiving.

The suffering of the people of Iraq, bottled up inside the cauldron that is their country's capital city, is certainly not going to be over soon.

The quagmire is apparently always around the next corner. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2003 10:07 PM