April 12, 2003

THE AMAZING VANISHING IRAQI ARMY
by Srdja Trifkovic

A week is a long time in politics but now we know that it can be even longer in war. It was only a week ago that we, among others, warned of the dangers of storming Baghdad, "with three divisions of the Republican Guard and unknown thousands of irregulars embedded into the sprawling city's residential quarters." While pockets of disjointed resistance still remain to be mopped up in some parts of the capital and the north of the country is yet to be secured, it is now clear that the Iraqi military has collapsed without a real fight.

The outcome of this war had never been in doubt, but the magnitude and speed of that collapse are nevertheless puzzling and deserve closer scrutiny. In terms of numbers and equipment available to it the Iraqi military was theoretically a foe worthy of respect. Its past performance was mixed but by no means abysmal. It suffered serious reverses in the early stages of the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran War, but it did not disintegrate even when casualties started running into hundreds of thousands. In the closing stages of that war, when the Iranians turned the tables on the attackers and entered southern Iraq, it fought reasonably well and held its ground in the face of relentless attacks by human waves of Khomeini's Pazdarans. In 1991 the Iraqi army was comprehensively beaten by the U.S.-led coalition in Kuwait, losing almost a half of its inventory, but the crushing magnitude of that defeat—in addition to the enormous superiority of the Coalition—was due to Saddam's military ineptitude. Placing tight columns of slow-moving armor on open roads and trying to hold thinly spread, fixed defensive positions was exactly what General Norman Schwarzkopf wanted him to do. With the Coalition completely dominating the air the Iraqis were doomed, no less than Rommel in Tunisia in 1943, or Rundstedt at the Falaise Gap in 1944.

The ensuing demoralization and meltdown of regular troops did not spread to the Republican Guard units, as the rebelling Shias of southern Iraq learned to their peril. Even after the fiasco in Kuwait the Iraqi army remained the largest in the Middle East and nominally the strongest in the Gulf, numbering 430,000 regular troops and close to half-million reservists and militiamen. The UN sanctions had prevented refurbishment of its military, but of its 2,000 tanks about 800 were T-72s or better and it also had 2,000 armored vehicles of other types, up to 2,000 artillery pieces, as well as countless mortars, mines, RPGs, and small arms. The Iraqi army certainly lacked offensive capabilities, its air defenses were practically gone, and its ability to halt US-UK advance in open field non-existent. Nevertheless, its scope for fluid defense—passive deceit, dispersal into urban areas, and guerrilla tactics—was considerable. Skillfully deployed, boldly handled and aptly commanded, even with its limited resources it could have created difficulties of the kind encountered by the U.S. troops in the first week of the war. Hit-and-run tactics, surprise raids on supply columns, and resistance from fortified urban strongholds offered the regime its only even remotely viable strategy for survival: to gain time, to cause civilian suffering, to inflict casualties on the "Coalition," to prompt third-party political pressure, and to hope for eventual rise of domestic opposition to the war in the U.S.

That none of this happened was primarily due to the interdependent issues of morale and the nature of Saddam Hussein's regime. To put it somewhat crudely, that regime combined the lethal brutality of other Oriental despots (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim) with the operatic inefficiency of Mussolini. Saddam's claim from 1980, that "Iraq is as great as China, as the Soviet Union, as the United States," was almost as ridiculous as the Duce's pretense to parity with the great powers of his time. The boast of a "million-men army" of the former was as hollow as the latter's myth of the otto milioni di baionette. In both cases the ambition of the leader was at odds with the capacity of his power base. Saddam could deal with the Kurds, and Mussolini with the Ethiopians, but against first-class powers they were out of their league. In both cases bluster was the substitute for strategy, and defeat preordained by the unwillingness of the leader to test his assumptions against reality, and the understandable reluctance of his entourage to question those assumptions. One immediate consequence of Saddam's autocratic rule was an officer corps unable and unwilling to take risks and display initiative. Iraqi commanders of tactical units in previous two wars, lieutenants and captains of 12-15 years ago, could have provided Saddam with a pool of battle-tested, experienced candidates for top brass positions today. This did not happen: political loyalty—defined as blind obedience to the leader and tribal kinship—was the ticket to promotion, while even the suspicion of the slightest disagreement with Saddam was tantamount to a death warrant. The climate of fear and insecurity reigned supreme in the Iraqi military ever since Saddam summarily executed over three hundred senior officers in the aftermath of a failed major offensive against Iran in 1982. The result in the field was predictable: the bridges over the Euphrates, to take a small but significant example, were not blown up because retreating commanders lacked specific order to do so. The paralysis was comparable to what happened in the Red Army in the aftermath of Stalin's purges of 1936-38, leading to the near-complete immobility of its command and control structure in the first months of the Barbarossa.

This brings us to another parallel with 1941, the importance of political warfare. Had Hitler called his attack "Operation Russian Freedom," had he presented it from the outset as the war against a cruel, dictatorial regime and not against the Russian people, the Wehrmacht could have staged a victory parade in the Red Square within months. Stalin was saved by the self-proclaimed goal of the Reich to conquer the Lebensraum in the East and clear it of the Slavic Untermaensch. He hastily reopened the churches, invoked the ghosts of Suvorov and Kutuzov, and went on to fight the "Great Fatherland War." Saddam tried to do something similar, invoking Allah, pan-Arabism, and even Nabuchodonosor, but—unlike the Russians—his long-suffering subjects knew that the option of surrendering was available and that it offered some interesting possibilities. We should not be misled by the scenes of joy in Baghdad into believing that most Iraqis actually like having American troops in their streets, but very few were prepared to risk their lives to prevent it from happening.

Support for Saddam did not "collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder," as Richard Perle had predicted. Nevertheless, the character of his personal regime precluded the creation of necessary conditions for a sustained, patriotically motivated defense of Iraq. It is almost finished; once the job is done let us hope that Mr. Bush will have the wisdom and prudence to leave Iraq to the Iraqis.

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