I had to go for a long drive this afternoon and I turned on Rush Limbaugh to get the war news on the radio.
Detractors will disagree but it is my opinion that Rush is trying to be a stand-up guy in his war reporting and is editorializing to a much lesser degree.
The question came up as to what was Saddam’s strategy. What was he hoping for, what was he trying to do.
Rush said that he thought Saddam was trying to execute a Mogadishu(sp?) strategy. He said that Osama Bin Laden had opined that Somalia and Mogadishu showed that the American’s were a paper tiger, that we could not tolerate casualties or a bloody conflict and would give up when we were hurt.
Rush conceded that Osama was probably right as regards those conflicts. We did give up and run when we got hurt.
Therefore he thinks that Saddam knows he cannot win militarily and is therefore not trying to win militarily. According to Rush, Saddam thinks he can get us to just go away if he can make the war bloody and hard enough for us, inflict enough casualties, that we no longer have the heart for it.
His strategy has therefore been one of guerrilla fighting, letting us infiltrate into the country but setting his major defensive for Baghdad. His goal is to make us fight street to street and inch for bloody inch, and make sure that a lot of casualties civilian and otherwise are inflicted.
If he makes it hard enough and costly enough in terms of lives Saddam beleives the history of Mogadishu will repeat itself and we will give up.
I’m not qualified to remark on the efficacies of this strategy or how we counteract it, but I thought it was interesting enough to open up for debate.
Huh. I agree with Rush Limbaugh. I would add, though, that I also think that Saddam has some sort of backup plan involving escaping in the chaos if things go sufficiently badly. For this to work, he needs a fair bit of chaos. Then he can kick back on a villa somewhere with Osama, Hoffa, and Elvis.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go grab my skates to see if I can’t scare up some pick-up hockey in hell.
Whats really interesting is that the failure of the Mogadishu incident lies with the president who opted to pull out of somalia playing right along with the Osama propaganda.
Now, here we have a new president willing to show the world that the USA will never back away from any battle and we have diehard peaceniks trying to impliment the same mistake the previous president did.
Mogadishu was the impetus for a bolder Al Qaeda. It gave Osama the status of American Slayer. The myth and charisma that is Osama Bin Ladin came from this moral victory. Think of the consequences in terrorism, world opinion, and world stability if we allow Saddam Hussien to survive this war.
I’m inclined to agree with Limbaugh, not that his analysis is increadibly original. Saddam is not stupid, he knows he can’t fight the coalition in the open, his only hope is to make it as bloody as possible in the streets. What else can he possibly do?
Here is a somewhat different take on what Somalia has to teach us about the present conflict (written by the author of Black Hawk Down).
As to Rush’s beliefs: it makes sense for Saddam to fight an urban guerilla war whether or not he believes it will lead to American withdrawal. It’s simply the most effective way to use what he’s got.
Well, I guess the world might explode when I say this…but I pretty much agree with Rush on the basic idea of Hussein’s strategy. But, as Mandelstam points out, it is sort of the obvious strategy. I mean, isn’t Rush pretty much stating the obvious here? I am a little confused about where this differs from the obvious.
Well, it’s not merely that urban guerrilla strategy is the best of a poor set of military options for Saddam.
In his foxy/insane way, he’s probably hoping to create enough hell so that he can in some way survive in power. This means causing lots of Allied casualties, so that public opinion in Britain and the U.S. will turn so heavily against the war that some negotiated peace is made (the theme that casualties are being microdissected and overreported has been broached by Administration supporters). If he can cause enough Iraqi casualties through suicidal assaults, use of human shields, forcing civilian deaths via infiltrating his military units into populated areas and threatening to execute those who won’t fight for him, he figures to provoke an Arab uprising that will force the Allies to stop short of victory. And if that doesn’t work, he might take as much of the country down with him as possible in his own version of a Gotterdammerung, so that a tidal wave of hatred is spawned against his enemies, making their victory hollow.
And one of those options might “work”. There are already expatriate Iraqis professing outrage at casualties inflicted by coalition forces, who are returning to their country to join what seems logically to be Saddam’s doomed fight. The man might have killed 50,000 of their Shiite countrymen in '91, murdered Kurds galore and run an extended reign of terror countrywide, but hey - he’s their psychopath.
So on the one hand there’s Rush, William Safire and the like with their “On To Baghdad - Unconditional Surrender” motif, and the opposition who are stressing short-term coalition failures (such as Gwynne Dyer, British pundit who was suggesting even before the onset of hostilities that the coalition needed to win the war in a week).
Well, if Saddam can inflict more casualties when we fight him then when we “appease” him then he has something going for him.
Once enough people start dying, Saddam’s danger down the road pales in comparison to the harm he’s causing now. Then it comes down to a matter of “principle” and how much Americans want to die for a “principle” in some far off land.
I don’t buy on principle however, that showing a callous disregard for human life will somehow save lives. It doesn’t make sense.
130,000 more troops are going in. Wow.
Let’s hope they come back soon.
I am not aware that Iraq has nuclear weapons. Biological and chemical weapons are by no means “weapons of mass destruction,” they are merely area denial weapons.
Even so, there is no solid evidence that Saddam still has CB weapons. Not even the chemical plant the coalition captured offered anything conclusive.
Just curious, has Rush ever claimed that Reagan’s pulling out of Lebanon after 220 Marines were killed by a suicide bomber in 1983 made us look like ‘paper tigers’?
I agree with the interpretation of Saddam’s strategy. He cannot hope to beat allied units in a stand-up fight, and I’m sure is aware that any local successes will only bring reinforcements and possibly a loosening of the restrictions on allied targeting.
He’s fighting the war the only way he realistically can. Hit-and-run raids on rear areas, bloody urban combat, holding back major forces to hit war-weary allied units. Even the much-reported column that was being constantly bombed by the allies wasn’t an entirely stupid tactic: if the weather had remained in his favour, the plan according to some analysts was to bypass heavy allied armour and attack tired, less heavily-armed Marine units.
His tactics don’t sound hugely different to how NATO would have fought a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. Use towns and villages as chokepoints to slow the enemy’s advance and expose their armour to close-range AT weapons; launch special forces raids at the enemy’s supply lines to disrupt their plans and sow fear, tying up combat units that must be diverted to protect rear areas. Saddam does not appear to me to be an idiot in his handling of this war.
A “dirty bomb” that worked through the release, dissemination, or impact of radiation or radioactivity would easily fit the definition of WMD.
However, it doesn’t explicitly recognise that a nuclear warhead that levelled an entire city through the effect of the explosion, would actually be a WMD.
