The Iraq War
Three Years on: Loser’s Perspective
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Danville, California
Three
years ago, on April 9, an armored engineering
vehicle of the US Marine Corps pulled down an
over-sized statue in Firdos Square against the
background of a late afternoon sun. Saddam’s
regime had slipped into history, at a cost of
less than 150 American lives.
The war ended mysteriously, with no surrender
ceremony or victory celebrations. Relatively few
Iraqis were taken as prisoners of war. The 400,000-strong
Iraqi army simply vanished into thin air, its
defeated soldiers preferring to exchange their
uniforms for civilian clothes and to walk back
home. They had fought more than once for their
megalomaniacal ruler and were too worn out to
fight this one to the bitter end.
Saddam himself eluded capture for several months.
He was eventually hunted down on December 13,
when soldiers of the US 4th Infantry Division
flushed him out of a spider hole in a farmhouse
outside his birthplace in Tikrit. Earlier, the
person who had given refuge to his sons betrayed
their presence to the Americans. When they refused
to surrender, they were killed in an intense firefight.
Their patched up bodies were then put on display
for the world to see.
The biggest mystery of the war is why did Saddam
go to war with an enemy that had beaten him squarely
in 1991? There are only two possible answers.
Saddam either thought that the second war would
never take place or he thought he would win by
using his weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
A forthcoming report from the US military, cited
in the New York Times, suggests that the first
answer is more plausible. It is based on interviews
conducted by the Pentagon with 110 of Saddam’s
aides by US officials disguised as military historians.
The interviewees separately gave similar accounts,
corroborating the main themes.
The key message is that Saddam thought the war
would never take place. He knew he was in no position
to fight the US. In the Gulf War — which
he had vaingloriously called the Mother of All
Battles — his forces were forced out of
Kuwait in less than seven weeks. At that time,
he had almost a million men under arms, equipped
with the best Soviet weaponry. When the second
war began in March 2003, his forces were worn
out by a dozen years of sanctions, their equipment
was old and rusty and their air defenses had been
attenuated. Without air cover, his land-locked
forces could not be expected to prevail against
a superior enemy.
He, better than anyone else in Iraq, also knew
that he had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
with which to turn the tide. When he revealed
this “secret” to his senior military
officers three months prior to the war, their
faces were ashen. Gotterdammerung was upon them.
So Saddam did not plan for war with the US. He
was convinced that the Russians would be able
to prevail in the UN and restrain the US from
attacking Iraq. In reality, all they were able
to do was limit the number of allies that joined
the US in invading Iraq. In playing his version
of Russian roulette, Saddam showed that he had
learnt nothing from the Gulf War. He was paranoid
about internal threats and oblivious to external
threats. That is why he ignored the stern ultimatum
delivered to him by President Bush on March 17,
“Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave
Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to go will
result in military conflict commenced at a time
of our choosing.”
Saddam made fatal errors in his military deployments,
preferring to give key commands to trusted friends,
some of whom had no military expertise. If war
broke out, he wanted to micro-manage the war and
gave no real authority to field commanders. Thus,
key bridges were mined but not blown up to prevent
American armor from rolling across the Tigris
into Baghdad. The officers manning the bridges
kept waiting for orders to blow them up, knowing
that if they blew them up without permission,
they would be shot.
The myth that Baghdad would become a Stalingrad-by-the-Tigris
was blown up in two hours by a single reconnaissance
convoy of the US 3rd Infantry Division that had
embarked upon a “thunder run” through
the capital on April 7. Led by Colonel Perkins,
the operation had begun at 6 am simply to gauge
the city’s defenses. By 8 am, Perkins had
taken Saddam’s Republican Palace and was
making plans to spend the night there.
Once large-scale military operations began in
Iraq, no one was in charge of the Iraqi armed
forces. The command and control structure evaporated,
leaving small tactical military formations to
fend for themselves. His army had devolved into
automatic mode.
Perhaps this was not a surprise. In spite of his
soldierly antics — like firing a shotgun
from a palace balcony or dancing in the streets
with a pistol in his holster — Saddam was
not a soldier. He had never served in the Iraqi
army. Early in life, he had had the ambition to
train as an officer but lacked the education to
take the necessary entrance exam. To the very
end, he remained envious of his colleagues who
were admitted into the Iraqi Military Academy,
many from families that had served in the Ottoman
army.
On seizing power in 1978, he would lead the country
down a ruinous path in which it would fight a
series of losing wars. He was a fervent admirer
of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator. Any Iraqi
general who showed signs of becoming popular with
the troops was viewed as a threat. He would be
cleverly removed from office and ultimately killed.
Unfortunately for Saddam, the cunning and ruthlessness
that allowed him to prevail over internal rivals
conferred on him a blind spot when facing external
enemies that proved fatal in the end.
As he stands in the dock in Baghdad, Saddam continues
to be in denial, insisting that he is the president
of Iraq. He extols Iraqis to get their dignity
back by expelling the occupiers, knowing that
he has killed more of them than the Americans.
In his final days, he comes across as a man who
has just walked off the Shakespearean stage. It
would have required all of the Bard’s talent
s to portray his complex character. Maybe he would
have named the play Hubris Personica, in which
the main character would have been a jester and
a wizard, a villain and a hero, all in one.
E-mail: faruqui@pacbell.net
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
