http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-626095,00.html March 28, 2003 Baghdad will be near impossible to conquer Simon Jenkins An astonishing event is about to happen. For the first time in modern history a city with the population of London is preparing to resist assault from a land army. The outcome of such a struggle is wholly imponderable. Cities hate soldiers. Sometimes they throw them kisses. More often they throw them grenades. Defiant cities are near impossible to conquer. It is inconceivable that American and British forces will simply turn from Baghdad and go home. Since the death and destruction involved in an assault could be appalling, any humanitarian must fervently hope that the Iraqi authorities sue for peace or President Saddam Hussein suffers a putsch. At present there is little prospect of either. In the past two weeks I must have seen a hundred maps, diagrams, military handouts and computer graphics. I have watched men in fatigues with whizz-bang videos of soaring missiles and exploding tanks. Each explains how war is won in the open. Not one explained how Baghdad is to be defeated. The assumption is that it will somehow just fold. Yet Baghdad is where Saddam is and apparently means to stay. For victory to be declared, it must be conquered. I have no doubt why Baghdad is never discussed. War in its streets is too awful to contemplate. No soldiers are more skilled at urban fighting than the British. Yet they are finding it hard to pacify even "friendly" Basra. The city appears to have been terrorised into defiance by units of Saddamist irregulars. Students of this strategy need look no further than the Red Army commissars in Antony Beevor's Stalingrad. They murdered an entire division of their own side to make them fight, but they won. British units round Basra have had to resort to long-range bombing and shelling, hoping that this will inspire the oppressed citizens to rise against the irregulars, somehow. In Baghdad the coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Americans in Mogadishu and the Russians at Grozny. Hostile cities have ways of making life ghastly for aggressors. They are not like countryside. They seldom capitulate, least of all when their backs are to the wall. It took two years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall to the Vietcong. Kabul was ceded to the warlords only when the Taleban drove out of town. In the desert, armies fight armies. In cities, armies fight cities. The Iraqis were not stupid. They listened to Western strategists musing about how a desert battle would be a pushover. Things would get "difficult" only if Saddam played the cad and drew the Americans into Baghdad. Why should he do otherwise? Every soldier knows that cities level the logistical playing field. Bombers are useless in house-to-house fighting. Helicopters become targets not weapons. Every building is a fortress, every adult a suspect. The rulebook says it needs "ten-on-one" to fight in cities. Districts are hell to win by day, and more hell to hold by night. Remember Beirut. Ask the Israelis. In cities there is no army to defeat, only an elusive focus of civic authority. A leader must be arrested or killed, key buildings occupied and television controlled. Citizens must be persuaded to deny districts to guerrillas. Baghdad is not Kuwait or the Falklands. The captive Iraqi boy who was asked why he fought so overwhelming a foe merely muttered: "It's my country." The answer was worth a dozen Tomahawks. Coalition strategy is plainly dependent on a political gamble. This holds that Saddam is so hated by his people that his cities will welcome American troops with open arms and his generals will seize the opportunity to kill him. The strategy may have flown in the face of history but was not wholly implausible. There have been Iraqi uprisings before, and attempts on Saddam's life. But the strategy required the most cautious application of force and the most assiduous hearts and minds campaign. Instead it has been wrecked by the Pentagon's latest craze, "shock and awe". This is the most braindead doctrine in the recent history of war. Its exponent, the US defence analyst Harlan Ullman, writes that shock and awe "rests ultimately in the ability to frighten, scare, intimidate and disarm" a foe by delivering "nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction". This stuns the enemy into immediate surrender. Students of Bomber Command in the Second World War may find these words grimly familiar. Ullman points out that shock and awe need not involve great loss of life, but must be vast in its explosive force. The power projection must be graphic enough to shatter the morale of the enemy. As a weapon it is literally "terrorist". The concept, openly avowed by Pentagon spokesmen, clearly lay behind the pulverisation of Baghdad on Day Three of this war. Ullman was quoted in The Guardian as predicting that it would take a week or ten days to know "whether shock and awe has worked". That time is almost up. The thesis needs confronting since we are likely to see a lot more shock and awe in the coming days. Ullman's case is desperately short of evidence. He does not cite the ineffectiveness of the terror bombing of German or British cities in 1941-45. He does not cite Hanoi or Belgrade, where massive bombing produced no collapse in civilian morale, if anything the reverse. He is blind to the most glaring instance of a "near incomprehensible level of massive destruction", al-Qaeda's attack on New York on September 11, 2001. None of these cases produced surrender "over the space of a few hours or days". Most induced the opposite, a fierce desire for retaliation. Ullman's chief support is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which unquestionably precipitated the fall of Japan. Yet that bombing required the Japanese regime to respond rationally to the trauma, which it did. Even then, the weapon was so horrific that nobody has dared use it since. Today's hawks cannot quite bring themselves to cry: "Nuke Baghdad." The purpose of shock and awe is political, not military. The exploding of government offices and empty barracks has no military significance. Yet the proclaimed shock soon evaporates. I recall that Belgrade citizens were delighted to see their police headquarters go up in smoke. Observers of the London Blitz noted that after two days of mild panic Londoners adjusted to the bombing and became defiant. The same applied to New Yorkers after September 11. The thesis that poor cities will react more feebly under attack than rich cities is not one on which I would readily fight a war. Baghdad is not Tokyo, 1945. It has no rational government, just a fierce survival instinct. The past week has yielded no sign of either rebellion or surrender. The citizens are reacting as have all previous cities under bombardment. They get angry. When their families are killed they seek revenge. Every street becomes an arms cache and every brother a Mujahid. Geoff Hoon yesterday called the defenders of Baghdad "dastardly" for involving civilians. Wars in cities always do. They are always dirty wars. Mr Hoon cuts off Basra's water and power and lobs shells into populated areas, knowing full well that this will kill bystanders. With life thus cheapened, it is small wonder defenders fortify schools and hospitals and fail to wear identifying uniforms so Mr Hoon can shoot them. There are no rules of war in cities. Look at Grozny. I am opposed to this war, but am ready to accept that its military achievement so far has been considerable. The coalition has dismembered Iraq and is on the way to confining Saddam to his own capital. But this progress must be consolidated if it is to carry any political message to Baghdad. The coalition must show its citizens that it is capable of bringing peace, prosperity and freedom to the rest of Iraq. Otherwise there is no way the capital will risk turning against Saddam and his private army. To do this with shock and awe is plain dumb. There is no alternative to hearts and minds. The Americans may get lucky. But history says Baghdad will fall from an act of politics or treachery, not an act of war. Bombarding it destroys houses and kills civilians, making enemies of those the invader needs as friends. Iraqis must be induced to see the coalition as the lesser of evils and the safer of guardians. That is a tall enough order. The nightly bombing of Baghdad makes it taller. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-626095,00.html Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
