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Saddam's battle plans no secret
01/04/2003 18:27 - (SA)
Baghdad - When Iraqi President Saddam Hussein offered his on-camera advice on military strategy and tactics to senior army officers, Pentagon planners may not have taken him too seriously.
On the 13th day of a vicious war, they may regret not having listened more closely.
In between remarks on the troops' personal hygiene or endurance capacity, the Iraqi leader said on more than one occasion that he planned to let US and British forces have their way in desert regions before dragging them into urban warfare, chiefly in Baghdad.
"The enemy will land in remote regions and film it," Saddam said in late January during one of his daily meetings with military aides.
The "enemy media will then start saying that they are at some distance from Ramadi (west of Baghdad) or somewhere else and now on their way to invade this or that city.
"This is how they are going to put on their show," he said.
"The enemy will not enter Baghdad's suburbs because he will die. Even if they send a million soldiers, our boys will kill them," Saddam added at the time.
US President George W Bush says US and British forces closing in on Baghdad every day. But the allied troops appear to be marching in place in the desert without taking any of Iraq's major cities. Criticism of the military campaign
Criticism of the military campaign has begun to surface in the US media, targeting in particular Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who is being accused of rejecting advice from military commanders to use substantially more troops and armor.
The need to deploy more troops on the ground is being felt especially because of the allied forces' apparent inability to break the regime's hold on major cities despite intensive air bombardment, particularly of the Iraqi capital.
An additional 120 000 US troops are due to pour into Iraq within weeks, joining the 90 000 who began the ground war.
It is a scenario Saddam forecast publicly in the course of a "chat" with the military top brass.
"Anyone seeking to occupy a land must deploy soldiers on this land. Without deploying ground troops, the enemy will be able to destroy and inflict damage, but not to occupy the land," he said.
"I say this on television knowing the Americans are listening," Saddam added. "We warn them against any illusion that Iraq will be an easy prey. They can hurt us, but do they realize the scale of the damage they will suffer?" he warned.
Echoing his boss, Iraq's number two Ezzat Ibrahim on Sunday downplayed the allied forces' advances on the ground, vowing that Iraqi fighters would surround them and force them to "flee to the empty desert."
"What will determine the outcome of the battle is the price the enemies pay in losses of men and equipment, not the fact that they control an inch here or there in Iraq," he told a meeting of high-ranking officials from the ruling Baath Party.
"Therefore our fighters must minimise losses in their ranks and inflict as heavy casualties as possible on the American and British forces of aggression," Ibrahim said.
US miscalculations
The Baath Party mouthpiece Ath-Thawra on Tuesday scoffed at US miscalculations.
"The Pentagon is blaming the CIA for feeding it wrong information that hastened the launching of the war while the stupid CIA is denouncing the lack of preparation and equipment," the paper wrote.
"As for the generals, they are denouncing Rumsfeld's dictatorial behaviour and his refusal to heed their advice to put off military action," it said.
The CIA "fiasco" must be attributed to its reliance on information provided by "a small group of traitors and agents," Ath-Thawra said in a reference to the US-backed exiled Iraqi opposition.
Al-Iraq, another official daily, also offered Rumsfeld advice. It said he could extricate himself in only one of two ways - by "committing suicide or resigning."
- AFX
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