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Failure to fight
Why did Saddam Hussein do almost nothing to try to stop the invasion of his country?
What is not in question is that Saddam did almost nothing to slow, hurt, or stop the invading American forces. I saw this for myself as I traveled with the Marines from Satwan at the Kuwaiti border all the way to Baghdad. Along the way, when my unit stopped near them, often for whole days and nights, I studied battlefields still smoldering from the heat of warfare. These were among the obvious defensive measures that Saddam failed to take:
The battlefields I walked over revealed signs of panicky flight: Iraqi gas masks and uniforms abandoned; armored vehicles left in revetments where they could not see advancing U.S. armor, much less shoot at it; blanket rolls left out in the open. I searched for bodies and bloodstains but saw neither on battlefields where Iraqi vehicles hit by marines were still smoking. Defenders must have run before Marine fire reached them. Iraqi officers deserted their men, as happened in the first Gulf War, and this abandonment almost certainly triggered full flight by all ranks.
"It's obvious the state of the Iraqi army was hyped," said a battle-wise officer here who also studied the sad state of Iraqi defenses. Did the U.S. intelligence community know that the Iraqi military was broken and would be a pushover? If so, when did it know it, and was the information solid enough for U.S. military leaders to shape their war plans accordingly? These and other questions should be part of the post-conflict audit of this second Gulf War.
BAGHDAD-A burning question as this strange, monthlong war comes to a close is why Saddam Hussein failed to set up even the most rudimentary defenses against the American invasion he had to know was coming.
Since the start of the war when I embedded with a Marine unit, I have posed the question over and over to everyone from battle-wise gunny sergeants to Maj. Gen. Jim Mattis, 1st Marine Division commander. Nobody knows for sure. Educated guesses include these:
- In his heart, Saddam did not believe that President Bush, despite all his talk about regime change, would invade Iraq, so the dictator didn't bother building defenses.
- The Iraqi leader knew he could not win a war against the United States and decided to go down as an Arab martyr by letting the world see just how big and bad the United States was during the pummeling of his country.
- When the shooting started, Saddam was either killed or incapacitated; yet he had made no arrangements for someone else to run the Iraqi military.
- The fractured Iraqi military was virtually on strike before the invasion. The regular Iraqi army and the supposed elite Republican Guard had lost heart and did not want to die for Saddam, no matter how many screaming orders they received from Baghdad. This is Mattis's view.
- He made no serious attempt to cut U.S. supply lines. Before the invasion began, American commanders worried that Saddam's forces would attack U.S. convoys making their way north from Kuwaiti ports. Blowing up bridges behind and in front of an American supply column, and then chopping it up with attacks from both sides, is an easy tactic that would have caused invading U.S. forces tremendous difficulty and perhaps inflicted high casualties. And high casualties would have cost Bush support for the war in its crucial early days.
- He placed mines in only a few places. Sowing mines on the obvious invasion routes to stop enemy tanks and kill soldiers would have been easy for Saddam to do. Marine artillery units learned that they could put their big guns almost anywhere they wanted without worrying about mines.
- He did not deploy an arrayed defense in an organized, deadly way. Artillery, mortars, anti-tank weapons, and crew-served guns could have been trained on main roads over which the mechanized U.S. forces traveled. I saw, for example, Iraqi tanks that never got off the truck trailers that transported them to the battle area, and shallow rifle pits that would have been death traps if Iraqi defenders had stayed in them.
- He did not construct anti-tank ditches and berms. It would have been easy to slow the advance of American armor with these. Iraqi commanders could then have aimed their artillery at U.S. tanks stopping for such obstructions, and perhaps have turned the areas into death zones for the invaders. But Iraqi artillery turned out to be a nonplayer in the war.
- He never resorted to chemical and biological warfare. Saddam did not use these weapons for reasons that make more sense than his failure to put up the simpler defensive measures. He could have feared that Bush would retaliate with nuclear weapons. Commanders may have told Saddam that they had not weaponized chemical or biological agents to the point they would be sure that these weapons would hurt the invaders rather than the defenders. Command-and-control may have been so decimated by American shelling and bombing that field commanders could not obtain the necessary approval from Baghdad to use them. Or maybe commanders did get such authority but did not want to risk spending the rest of their lives in prison as war criminals. Finally, Saddam may have wanted to show the world he did not have such weapons, just as he had been saying all along.