Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 3, 1991 TAG: 9102030316
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By R.W. APPLE Jr./ THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: DHAHRAN, SAUDI ARABIA LENGTH: Long
To begin with, the United States is trying, as ever, to substitute firepower for manpower. Outnumbered by an enemy who sees himself battling for his life, and who is therefore willing to fight to the last 16-year-old, the United States is not even considering national mobilization. Nor are its allies. So warplanes and ships and bombs and missiles will have to even out the equation here, as Lyndon B. Johnson meant them to do in Vietnam.
"We shall cut the limbs and the branches from the Iraqi war machine so that it no longer casts its shadow over Kuwait," said Air Marshal Sir David Craig, chief of the British defense staff, promising there would be no ground assault by the allies "until a successful land battle is assured."
But assuring that is not easy, which is why Bush, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and others in Washington talked of the struggle that lies ahead in such sober terms as they review the battle so far.
History is littered with the bones of the overconfident, not least in this region. No less a strategist than Winston Churchill was very nearly ruined by the British defeat at Gallipoli in 1915, when a supposedly backward power, the Ottoman Empire, overcame a dominant (if reluctant) one, the British Empire, on the beaches of the Dardanelles.
Put in its simplest terms, the allied strategy is to bomb Baghdad and the rest of Iraq into military impotence, or something approaching it. As in Southeast Asia, the notion is to so thoroughly disrupt the enemy's capacity to communicate, to resupply, to maneuver and to fight that he either gives up or comes unglued in battle.
But as in Vietnam, the enemy is not without resources to combat this strategy. If Iraqi President Saddam Hussein lacks the protective cover of the jungle, the active support of a patron nation like the Soviet Union and the ability to bring in supplies through neighboring countries - things that helped to sustain Ho Chi Minh through the long years of battle - he has some others. Examples:
What he himself called "the superior will power and patience" of a country that sees itself menaced by a huge, alien force.
Years of preparation for the kind of pounding Iraq is now taking, in the form of backup communications networks, subterranean command posts and steel-and-concrete bunkers for its planes.
The ability to patch up, adapt, make do.
American intelligence officers say the Iraqis are managing to repair roads and railroads and runways and even some radars, just as the Vietnamese repaired the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi again and again. Their facilities are being "degraded" - Pentagonese for worn down - but not eliminated, but then facilities matter less to Baghdad than manpower.
Vietnam taught the lesson that if there are no shoes, bits of old tires will do, and Iraq could manage better than expected by husbanding its resources and maintaining its morale in the face of adversity. There is something about living under persistent, prolonged air attack, as the people of London and Hanoi demonstrated, that brings out human grit.
Not enough, say the allies, and they are surely right, although measuring these things is difficult, especially given the paucity of information from Iraq or from the Pentagon.
The American-led coalition, with sophisticated weapons and a more sophisticated approach to this war than the last, scored significant early victories by knocking out nuclear-weapons plants, blasting power stations and battering the elite Republican Guard on whom Saddam counts heavily.
Then, too, Saddam is fighting a conventional war, not a guerrilla war, and he is fighting it on a desert plain, not in jungles, rice paddies and mountains. All the better for the foreigners, always at a disadvantage in rough and unfamiliar terrain.
But he is fighting a conventional war with unconventional means. As the bombs rained down on Iraq and allied commanders searched in the aerial photographs for evidence of how badly they had bloodied Saddam, he sought to hurt them and to demonstrate his own capacity to strike back by indirect means.
If the allies would not oblige by charging directly into his dug-in defense, if he could not bomb them as they bombed him, he could try to weaken their coalition, sow perplexity and savage their emotions.
Hence the Scud surface-to-surface missile barrages on Israel and Saudi Arabia, barrages purposely directed at civilian targets, to try to bring the Israelis into the war and to drive at least some Arabs out of the anti-Iraq coalition.
Hence the propaganda interviews with allied prisoners of war, designed to weaken resolve in the West. Hence the appalling oil discharge into the Persian Gulf, designed to complicate any amphibious assault, to disrupt military and civil water supplies and to discombobulate allied thinking.
President Bush, a Marquess of Queensbury man all the way, said Saddam had a sick mind. American generals huffed and puffed and said none of his actions had military significance.
But each of the things that Westerners considered dirty tricks or low blows make life harder, in one way or another, for Bush and his commanders, and they all make Saddam look like a dukes-up guy, unafraid of the American bully. That's what he looks like to many ordinary hero-starved Arabs, if not to their governments.
"By God, tell me whether you are not pleased to have brothers who enjoy such strength and such determination," Baghdad Radio said in a broadcast. "Do you not feel proud to see us stand up against all the Arabs' enemies, not scared or frightened? Then why do you not join us? We now represent the Arabs' awakening from the ocean to the gulf."
An overstatement, at best.
But what is evident is that Saddam is not going to go quietly, and that almost certainly means a much longer war than many in Washington had been hoping for, punctuated by more unpleasant surprises like the spreading oil slick.
If, as Cheney said, the Iraqis are powerless to change the ultimate outcome of the war, they seem to retain ample scope for altering its shape and timetable and, most of all, its aftermath.
by CNB