The setbacks the allies have suffered these last couple of days are all due to one thing: some Saddam units acting as terrorists. By pretending to surrender and then opening fire, by relocating in civilian neighborhoods, by shooting prisoners of war in the head, the soldiers apparently still loyal to Saddam are not reversing the allied advance. What they’re doing is trying to inflict sufficient damage to improve their morale and increase the costs of the invasion. They want us to fire into civilian areas; they want us to panic at a few atrocities (as in Somalia); they are counting on an American unwillingness to persevere through serious casualties. And they intend to use the Arab media and their Western sympathizers, i.e. the BBC, NYT, NPR etc., to get this message out. The lesson to learn is that we have cornered the equivalent of a rabid dog. It will fight nastily, brutally and with no compunction. Those units who will go down with this regime will not go down easily. After an initial hope that this thing could be over swiftly, I think it’s obvious by now that we’re in for a nasty fight – and the Saddamite remnants will ally with the anti-war media to fight dirty and spin shamelessly.
THE TACTICS FOR SUCCESS: But at the most important level, these remnants are also surely wrong. It’s still an astonishing fact that in a few days, allied troops are approaching Baghdad, much of the Saddamite government infrastructure in Baghdad has been pulverized, Saddam himself is severely wounded, and the momentum is clear. How seriously should we then take the reports of guerrilla-type rearguard actions? I’m not a military expert. Here’s one from the Washington Post this morning:
Military experts predicted that the resistance in the south was so disorganized and relatively small-scale that it would die out quickly. “Nothing surprising,” said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who has played the role of the Iraqi commander in several U.S. military war games of an invasion. In those games, played to probe U.S. war plans for weaknesses, he said, “We came up with much worse.” He noted that the Iraqi attacks were sporadic and small in nature, temporarily stopping small U.S. units but hardly affecting the broad advance toward Baghdad. Getting to the capital quickly is a key U.S. objective.
The question, to my mind, is who these resisters really are. Senior Saddamites who know they could get killed when power shifts? Islamist terrorists? Opportunists? Regular soldiers? It’s extremely hard to tell; and it certainly helps reveal the difficulties ahead for governing a country where such units can melt away into residential neighborhoods. But if the government itself changes, wouldn’t the incentives for resistance shift as well? I guess we’ll know in a few days, when the battles for Basra and Baghdad get fully under way.
WHOSE WAR? I nominate a few architects: the U.N., Bill Clinton, and a few others.
NO: I didn’t watch the Oscars. I loathe those people for the most part, but I’m glad to hear that some of them actually booed Michael Moore. For relief, I watched “Billy Madison.”
The Dish 