Smart war

This is not so much about new military battle doctrines as it is about the brittleness of tyrannical regimes.

Tyrannical regimes, including Saddam Hussein’s, love to parade their armor and their missiles at every excuse. When the Soviet Union still existed, anniversaries were invariably marked by long military parades, exhibiting every sort of devastating weaponry.

Saddam Hussein’s regime was like that. It loved to rattle sabers, roll tanks and artillery down Baghdad’s avenues at every excuse. It was a regime that picked a bloody war with Iran and vainly attempted to annex Kuwait, provoking an overwhelming international response a decade ago.

The Soviet Union, we know, crumbled from within. A decadent and archaic method of rule, heavily reliant on terrorizing its own citizens, could not be saved by its frightening intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Saddam Hussein’s regime crumbled even more dramatically.

The feared Republican Guard simply melted before the all-volunteer American and British forces. Breaking through token resistance, units of the US Cavalry and the US Marines were at Baghdad before anybody seemed prepared for them.

The quick entry into Baghdad defied the cynics, who indulged in wishful thinking about a humiliated coalition expeditionary force. One local daily, carried more by editorial prejudice than by journalistic fact, headlined a story last week saying that US forces were going to take a weeks-long pause in their offensive to await reinforcement and supplies.

That daily misled their readers’ appreciation of the progress of this war.

This was a lop-sided conflict to begin with. The Americans and the British were unchallenged in the air. Their joint expeditionary forces are the best equipped in the world. They had every option on their side, a wide margin to innovate on strategy and tactics.

Precision bombs allowed daily bombing of Baghdad while civilian life went on as usual. The same is true in Basra where civilian traffic got in the way of firefights between British forces and fanatical Fedayeen loyalists.

The general conduct of the war created a minimum of civilian casualties and negligible damage to key economic infrastructure. This was a war conducted with an eye on rapid reconstruction of a newly-liberated nation. When the lights went off on Baghdad, it was at the instance of the Saddam regime and not a consequence of coalition bombing.

Saddam’s army was fighting with last century’s military doctrines. I have always wondered by this army insisted on digging large holes and burying its tanks. The Arab alliance did that in the 1967 war with Israel. The Israeli air force simply picked off the immobilized tanks from the air and destroyed thousands of them at the Sinai and the Golan Heights.

The principal purpose of putting artillery on wheels and armor is to achieve mobility, engage in hit-and-run maneuvers, and outflank the enemy. By burying their tanks in earthen fortifications, the Iraqis reduce their armored regiments into paralyzed artillery detachments.

I have been an avid student of military strategy, reading everything from Hannibal to Patton, from Sun Tzu to Vo Nguyen Giap. Every victorious army had the advantage of superior mobility. Saddam’s Republican Guards, dug in earth trenches, were fighting on World War I military doctrines. They learned nothing from Marshal Rommel’s panzer tactics.

The battles from the Kuwait border to the suburbs of Baghdad resembled an unequal game between an NBA team, emphasizing individual talent and fluidity in play conducive to individual initiative, and a provincial varsity team relying on passive zone defense. The Republican Guards were doomed to be picked off from the air and by-passed on the ground.

The only way Saddam’s forces could inflict casualties on coalition forces was to send in suicide commando units to take life before they lost their own. That did not seem, from the start, to be a winning option. Many of the commandos had their families held hostage by the Fedayeen. It was a tactic that relied on fanaticism and fear, not on skill and courage under fire.

Iraq’s information minister had the most thankless job the last few days. He had to make hysterical threats against the enemy and claim fictional victories for the rapidly evaporating Republican Guards. While US Cavalry armor rumbled leisurely along Baghdad’s boulevards, the pathetic information minister tried very hard to convince journalists the airport was retaken by pro-Saddam forces, inflicting great casualties on coalition forces.

A beleaguered regime was resorting to lies in order to shore up support from a reluctant population – or at least maintain the threat of reprisal on those who collaborate with the enemy in the event the regime survives.

War is never pretty. Even precision-guided munitions take civilian casualties, especially as Saddam’s remnant units use non-combatants as human shields.

But those casualties ought not to diminish the moral purpose of this war. An aggressive tyranny needs to be extricated with minimum costs to Iraq’s subdued people. A long-oppressed society will be liberated and rehabilitated.

Already, the focus of global concern is humanitarian assistance for the people of Iraq. The damage wrought by war, and the more profound damage to the fabric of society wrought by years of ruthless dictatorship, will need some nurturing.

The US has committed assistance on a scale that it has been compared to the Marshall Plan for Europe after the Second World War. International organizations are even now compiling the funds and the resources for Iraq.

With the volume of assistance now streaming towards Iraq, there is great confidence a humanitarian crisis could be averted in the aftermath of battle. The US is sending enough material to feed the entire Iraqi population for at least a month. More assistance is forthcoming from UN agencies. The French foreign minister has only, to date, contributed much whining about the way things are going.

Germany and France are trying to break into the post-war effort. But inasmuch as they did not invest blood and resources in the war of liberation, they will have very little leverage in determining the strategic future of Iraq.

We have heard nothing from the gregarious but ultimately cowardly triumvirate of Etta Rosales, Walden Bello and Fr. Robert Reyes. They made so much about going over to Baghdad to act as "human shields" for the sake of a mass-murdering regime. Then they slithered back quietly even before hostilities commenced.

If they love the Iraqi people as much as they loved the doomed Saddam Hussein regime, perhaps they should now show us a humanitarian plan for a nation struggling to take its place of dignity in the community of states. Or else, we will continue to suspect they made so much noise only for the most parochial political goals.