The Denver Post April 03, 2003
Into the 'red zone'
By Kevin Simpson and Michael Riley
U.S. Army and Marine units have punched holes into the 'red zone' of the Iraqi defense and decimated elite enemy troops to mark the beginning of the battle of Baghdad - and perhaps the beginning of the end for Saddam Hussein.
'Our guys are able to see the skyline' of Baghdad, said a senior military official in Washington. 'That's how close we've gotten.'
But allied commanders and military analysts alike warn that these early battles on the outskirts of the capital will evolve - slowly - into a two-phase assault.
With advances at Karbala Gap to the southwest and Kut to the southeast of Baghdad, U.S. forces struck hard for the first time at two units of Hussein's most elite defenders, the Republican Guard.
'In order to get the regime to collapse, we have to crush the Republican Guard,' said Dale Davis, a former counterintelligence officer who now teaches at the Virginia Military Institute. 'That's the first battle.'
A second phase - the struggle for control of Baghdad itself - looms. But its form and tactics depend both on the outcome of the first battle and how Baghdad's inhabitants, both civilian and military, respond.
Decisive defeat of the Republican Guard outside the city could break the remaining resistance and bring a quick end to the conflict. But a slogging, prolonged campaign could encourage Hussein's loyalists and create the allies' worst-case scenario: the meat grinder of urban warfare.
'Cities have buildings, they have power lines, they have places people can hide,' said Linwood Todd, a retired Army major and military planner. 'In the open, you have to worry about people taking a hill and shooting down at you. In cities every time you turn a corner there is potentially a sniper in every window.'
And Iraq's chemical weapons, described by U.S. military leaders as a real threat at this stage of the war, remain both a military and political wild card.
Soldiers barreling through the Karbala Gap 45 miles south of Baghdad pulled on their protective suits Wednesday as they continued north, well into the so-called 'red zone,' where Hussein is believed to have authorized use of chemical weapons.
And elements of at least three more Republican Guard units - the Al Nida, Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi divisions - reportedly wait closer to the capital.
Did Wednesday's developments mean a stunning initial success or - as Iraqi government officials insist - an illusion?
Some analysts say that even the Iraqi units already hit hard could be pulling back to take up positions closer to the city itself. And they question U.S. claims that persistent airstrikes have reduced some Republican Guard units by half.
'Let us hope they're truly smashed and Baghdad is defenseless,' said Tim Lomperis, chairman of the political-science department at St. Louis University and a nationally recognized expert on military strategy. 'When we say we've degraded units to less than 50 percent from the air, I'm hesitant to buy these assertions on the face of it. These ranks may have been pulled into the city, with the idea to suck us into a big trap in Baghdad.'
Marine and Army units are expected to join forces outside the capital before any battle begins, and some analysts warn that the massing of troops could trigger an Iraqi chemical attack designed to inflict maximum casualties.
'If you want to have an effect with limited stockpiles of chemical weapons, you wait until your enemy is concentrated and that may be what (the Iraqis) are doing,' says VMI's Davis. 'Using chemical weapons is a political decision for Saddam Hussein. The second he uses chemical weapons, he immediately loses all the international support and the support he has built in the Arab world. He won't use them until it is abundantly evident to him that his demise is certain.'
While ground commanders say the closer they get to Baghdad the greater the worry over chemical weapons, analysts allow that intensive bombing and artillery poundings may have knocked out Iraqi delivery systems. And while the fate of Hussein himself remains unclear, the possibility exists that early attacks might have knocked out the will to use such weapons.
'There is still an untold story on how significant American strikes were on the command and control locations,' said Patrick Garrett, a military analyst at GlobalSecurity.org. 'And it is just possible that somebody in the Iraqi military has decided they don't want to use chemical or biological weapons.'
Baghdad, a city of 5 million people roughly equivalent in area to Los Angeles, not only holds the military and political seat of power, but also the symbolic heart of Iraqi resistance. Secure its airfields, occupy its palaces, control access to food, water and medicine, drive up and down its boulevards - and the battle is won, some experts say.
'You need to get to the point where the emperor has no clothes,' says Lomperis. 'The battle for Baghdad is a forceful stripping him of the armories of power, which he has in multiple layers.'
The first layer of that defense - initially believed to include about 30,000 soldiers and 600 tanks - appears to be folding, according to American ground commanders. They expected much more resistance near Karbala Gap and at key river crossings.
'It's a bit surprising that up to now we haven't run into more significant resistance from the Republican Guard, just based on the history of the 1991 war, when these divisions stood and fought and did not withdraw from the field until ordered to do so,' said VMI's Davis.
One reason for the quick deterioration of some Iraqi units could be a phase of the war that lurks beneath the surface of conventional tactics, Lomperis said, citing possible 'back-channel dialogue' between U.S. forces and guard commanders.
'The fact that (U.S. forces) are keeping their momentum going, not waiting, suggests that there's another dimension to this war that is pulling the operational tempo - the outlines of which we'll see afterward, not before,' he said.
But the pace could slow again if substantial portions of the Republican Guard can flee the battles on the outskirts and retreat into Baghdad.
'The last thing we want is to be lured into urban fighting,' Lomperis said.
Firepower disparity
The tangle of street-to-street fighting, complicated by urban landscape and potential civilian shields, would offer the best-case scenario for Iraqi leadership.
On open ground, American forces have huge advantages in air power and weaponry. In their last meeting, during the first Gulf War, American M1A1 Abrams tanks, firing armor-piercing uranium-depleted rounds, destroyed nearly 600 tanks and armored vehicles of the Republican Guard's Hammurabi Division without suffering a single casualty.
Iraqi commanders tried to limit those disadvantages this time, hiding tanks and artillery among the region's thick vegetation and moving it as little as possible to avoid detection.
While guerilla attacks have been troublesome to the south, the Iraqis' conventional-warfare tactics haven't fared much better than a decade ago.
A wave of 34 Apache Longbow helicopters sent to ferret out enemy tanks in the area last week took such heavy fire from rooftops that one was shot down and all but seven were grounded for repairs.
But coalition strategists adjusted quickly, and have since relied on aircraft such as the A-10 Thunderbolt, more heavily armored than the Apaches and able to fire 4,000 rounds a minute at infantry and tanks.
If the Republican Guard can be largely destroyed or induced to surrender while most of the units are outside the capital, the war will be shorter, military analysts predict. American commanders may even decide to move on the capital without waiting the several weeks it would take for the arrival of reinforcements from the 4th Infantry and other units.
'If this goes well and we destroy the Republican Guard divisions one after another and they just fall away without any significant impact on our own combat capability, then that has a severe psychological impact on the regime,' said Davis. 'But you still have to deal with the political problem, which is that you haven't liberated a single city yet,' he added. 'We really need to present images of a liberated Iraq, of people being fed and being provided for. Not people being blown up, which is what we are seeing now.'
The urban quagmire
Even if American forces manage a decisive defeat of the Republican Guard outside Baghdad, Hussein and his ministers have made it plain their last stand will be the country's massive capital.
Inside Baghdad stand 15,000 members of the well-equipped Special Republican Guard and a significant part of the country's 100,000-man security services, all of whom have little motivation to surrender.
That makes taking the city a daunting prospect for coalition troops.
In 1968, 400 American Marines and more than 5,000 North and South Vietnamese fighters died in the three-week battle of Hue. In Chechnya, a technically superior Russian force suffered thousands of casualties and lost hundreds of tanks in a two-month pitched battle for Grozny in 1994.
Still, American military strategists have refined urban-warfare techniques substantially since World War II, when forces fought block by block. Modern forces focus on taking key centers of power, cutting street fighters off from their commanders and hostile neighborhoods off from supplies.
The coalition will be aided by the fact that, though an ancient city, Baghdad has been modernized since the 1970s to include wide boulevards that allow tanks to maneuver easily.
Even if coalition troops can take Baghdad, the force they may have to apply will make America's longer-term objectives - stabilizing the country and establishing a transitional government - much harder to achieve.
Jewad M. al-Maliki, an exiled member of the Al-Dawa Islamic Party opposition group, has a vested interest in seeing the war end quickly.
But he doubts that will happen.
'Saddam Hussein is responsible for this war,' he said from exile in Syria. 'But the price of the victory against him will be the destruction of Baghdad and the killing of Iraqis.'
Al-Maliki has been away from Iraq for a quarter-century. But he drew himself up straight, imagining how a Baghdad resident might face coalition troops.
'This is my country,' he said, 'my people, my history, my integrity, that you would crush beneath the treads of your tanks.'
Denver Post staff writer Gwen Florio contributed to this report.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Reuters/Oleg Popov U.S. Marines from Lima Company, a part of the 7th Regiment, secure a bridge over the Tigris River on Wednesday, providing a crossing point in the advance on Baghdad. The New York Times Closing in on Baghdad (map) The Denver Post A key battleground (map)
Copyright © 2003, The Denver Post Corporation
