O'Hanlon on Urban Combat

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Mar 28 09:17:33 PST 2003


[Michael O'Hanlon at the Brookings Institute has previously been the mainstream analyst with the highest projected casualty estimates for the Battle of Baghdad. He argues now that his worst case scenario will not come to pass because it presumed that Iraq would secrete all of its Revolutionary Guard forces inside the city. He now presumes that most RC forces are stationed and will do their battling outside the city. If they are defeated there without retreating back into the city, this would naturally diminish the forces then available for urban combat.]

[We should note however that his original estimates were for 20,000 civilian deaths by combat. Shrink that by a power of 10 and you're still talking a pretty horrific number of violent civilian deaths. Think about what Jenin looked like in the world media and multiply by 20.]

[It also doesn't count the deaths of Iraqi soldiers, who could conceivably die in the 10's of thousands under the scenario he presents below, and who have just as much right to be mourned as ours do. They are, after all, defending their homeland.]

[Lastly, this is only an estimate for Baghdad.]

New York Times March 28, 2003

And Now, the Good News

By MICHAEL O'HANLON

W ASHINGTON Last week's euphoria over a quick start to the invasion of

Iraq has now been almost entirely overtaken by gloom. Pentagon

officials are on the defensive when discussing their war plan; images

of sandstorms and black-masked Iraqi irregulars and American prisoners

of war fill TV screens here and abroad; the looming battle for Baghdad

has made many feel a deep sense of foreboding.

Perhaps the Bush administration deserves it. It did not begin to

emphasize the potential for a difficult war until hostilities began.

Pentagon advisers like Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman have been

promising a cakewalk to Baghdad for 18 months; in the late 1990's,

Paul Wolfowitz, now the deputy defense secretary, argued that a small

American force fighting in conjunction with the Iraqi opposition could

quickly overthrow Saddam Hussein.

But despite this week's proof that war is not always easy, the

invasion is not going badly. As President Bush said at his news

conference yesterday, "Coalition forces are advancing day by day in

steady progress against the enemy." Here's why things are going well

and why they will soon go even better:

The battle of Baghdad will be quick. That's because coalition forces

will probably not enter Baghdad until they have destroyed half the

Republican Guard stationed on the city's outskirts. Mr. Hussein made a

mistake putting several of his divisions outside the capital. That

mistake helps the coalition, giving it more leeway militarily by

reducing the potential for civilian casualties. The guard's Medina

Division and other forces south of Baghdad have resisted Apache

helicopter attacks, but they will not be able to fend off the

combination of ground forces and helicopters and combat jets.

The coalition won't enter Baghdad in a plodding fashion and then take

it block by block. Instead, it will gradually learn where Iraqi forces

have set up provisional headquarters and strong points, and then

destroy or seize them in a nighttime operation akin to an urban

blitzkrieg. There will probably be bloody street fighting, but with

Iraq's command centers fractured, the opposition forces will be

piecemeal and isolated.

Crucial troops are on the way. Perhaps it was a mistake to begin the

war without the Fourth Infantry Division or even the 101st Airborne

Division fully in place, but it is a mistake from which the coalition

will soon recover. The delays imposed by sandstorms and fedayeen

militia resistance in the southeast may be a blessing in disguise,

giving the Fourth, which had been waiting in the vain hope it could

enter Iraq via Turkey, time to arrive in Kuwait.

Saddam Hussein can't cause lasting problems in the south. He can

intimidate populations with his fedayeen, but that group is limited in

size and ability, and it will not be able to convince most Iraqis to

fight with it. Sustained resistance has come only from the elite

forces and fedayeen, not Iraq's conscript army, which constitutes

three-quarters of the country's total military strength. As for Basra,

in a worst case it could pose a challenge similar to Baghdad, but it

would be on a far smaller scale.

There tends to be a period of public impatience in modern wars, with

Kosovo and Afghanistan being recent examples. Now we are going through

our period of impatience, if not downright pessimism, during this

operation. But the main elements of the strategy are sound, and the

enemy is still basically weak. This war will cost a price in lives,

and the administration should have done a better job to prepare the

country for that sober fact. But it will be won, and won decisively.

Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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