In Al-Mussayib, central Iraq - The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armored vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments to defend the capital. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad.
How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truck loads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi Army deployed like this; the Americans may say they are "degrading" the country's defenses but there was little sign of that here
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Was there a lesson in all this? I had perhaps two hours to take it all in, to wonder how the Americans could batter their way up this long, hot highway - you can feel the temperature rising as you drive south - with its dug-in tanks and APCs and its endless waterlogged fields and palm plantations. The black-uniformed men of the Saddam Fedayeen with red and black "kuffiah" scarves rounds their heads, whom I saw a hundred miles south of Baghdad, were kitted out with ammunition pouches and rocket-propelled grenades. And they did not look to me like a "degraded" army on the verge of surrender.
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