This op-ed piece by Gary Anderson (a retired USMC colonel who’s served in Lebanon) makes a case that Saddam’s got a long-term strategy for this war that is a pretty deep game. If so, I wonder if we’re really ready for it.
Anderson thinks Saddam’s ultimate goal is not just to defeat America, but to gain control of the anti-Western wing of the Arab/Muslim world from Osama & Co. He posits a three-step strategy for Saddam.
The first step is to lose the conventional war, but in a way that leaves the Arab world with a measure of pride, by making it as long and bloody as possible, especially in the cities. Saddam would go abroad and into hiding before the end.
The second phase would be a long guerilla war against the occupying forces after the fall of Baghdad.
Then Step 3:
Anderson’s point isn’t to preach gloom and doom, but to be ready for the reality that the enemy may be fighting a different war than we’re aware of.
He makes the point that while it’s hard for us to believe that anyone in Iraq is going to buy the conversion of Saddam and his thugs from cruel tyrants to rebel heroes, it’s happened before (he gave Vlad the Impaler as an example) and (as Collounsbury’s thread makes clear) the elements are in place for it to potentially happen here.
So, what’s to debate? I can see a few things:
Is Saddam really planning along these lines, or has he seen no further than a glorious death in the ruins of Baghdad?
What chance is there that Saddam and his loyalists can create an effective anti-US resistance after the fall of Baghdad?
Are we, as a nation, prepared for this sort of long haul?
Other points of debate will occur to the participants here, I know.
My take:
I have to agree that glorious death isn’t Saddam’s idea of a good time, if he can come up with a viable alternative. And whether or not this is his plan, I believe he’s capable of crafting a plan of which the present open war is just the opening gambit.
I think it’s quite possible, if we don’t kill or capture Saddam. His loyalists are dispersed throughout the country, are armed, and won’t be easy for us to root out of the civilian population after the war. As long as Saddam lives and his loyalists are active, Iraqis will fear them.
I’ve never seen anything to suggest that Saddam Hussein is anything other than your typical Third World Dictator, in business for himself and his family, period, let alone the [air quotes] “Arab World”.
And someone in Collounsbury’s MENA thread said, “Saddam is not skillful at diplomacy.” Diplomacy calls for skills in long range planning, which is not something that I’ve seen Third World Dictators be good at.
Somebody who was good at long range planning would have seen that Bush was obviously spoiling for a fight and would have handled the whole WOMD issue differently, I think–played along more, instead of simply stonewalling, “Missiles? What missiles?”
So I think Gary Anderson is ascribing a bit too much wiliness to this particular coyote.
1)It’s possible, from reports I’ve read he is looking to be some sort or Arab world hero.
I am not so worried about this the farther we are away from the war. Not that everything will be smiles and roses, I think there will be initial anger to the coalition perhaps even culminating in some more terrorist attacks. However, as time goes on, the average Iraqi will come to realise that the Americans aren’t quite as bad as they were lead to believe and it is much better to not have SH around. They will be less likely to support any movement by SH.
Hopefully a large reconstruction plan and progress on the Palestine problem will shorten this period of anger.
America may not be ready for the long-haul peacekeeping, but that is not really their strength anyway. Let the US win the war and other nations with different strengths win the peace. There are a number of them with very good records in this area. The faster they hand-off to the UN, the better.
I also don’t think it won’t be as difficult as you believe to rout out any loyalists. As long as there are enough peacekeepers around…
More than you think. We are not now, but we have a lot more resources, psychological and otherwise, to draw upon.
NO ONE is that good at diplomacy. Even Hitler had a lot of luck.
This whole scenario is highly unrealistic. People outside Iraq generally dislike him. The only places to go are Syria and Palestine, neither of which are safe long-term refuges. Saddam is old and is losing badly, every day. He has no support outside Iraq. Once he had the worlds 4th largest military. Now he can’t even kill 5 Americans a day. He has no chance at all of becoming regional ruler.
DDG - I’m certainly not claiming Saddam cares about anyone but himself, nor do I think Anderson is. But he cares about his influence, and what he can use as a power base if he should have to go into exile and hiding. And standing up to the US is good PR in that part of the world.
I see no need to ponder a deep strategy there. All you need is to posit is Saddam’s power hunger and the desire of the Iraqi people to defeat and expel an imperialist invader, and the predicted results occur.
There’s a couple of major problems with Col. Anderson’s thesis:
-Escaping Baghdad and going into exile is a lot easier said than done. How’s he going to get out? Who will take him in?
-The idea that Sadamm would give up control of his entire power base, his country, his money, his armed forces etc deliberately is also kind of hard to imagine.
Defeated and in exile, fighting a guerrilla conflict and hoping for some good will from fellow arabs is hardly as advantageous a position as owning an entire country. Having arab good will isn’t always such a wonderful thing, and it’s hardly a guarrantee of success as the Palestinians will note. It’s so obviously a dunce move that I can’t see it being a serious possibility.
Why would he want to be a Yassir Arafat type figure in exile? It’s not such a great niche to fill.
-Guerrilla warfare is a young man’s game. Saddam’s 65. The risk to reward of such a strategy is disproportionally disadvantageous. He gives up everything to hope for support from forces outside of his control. I don’t see him or anybody doing that.
-Why does Saddam have to have a deep strategy? He’s been as stupid and transparent as Saran Wrap as far I can see. The Kuwait invasion sure as hell wasn’t a subtle move from a masterful chess player.
I think it’s a good idea to be suspicious when your enemy makes moves and does things that seem incredibly stupid. Survival instinct quite rightly gives us a natural tendency to look for subtle motivations and deep strategys so you don’t get caught in a trap.
However, sometimes stupid moves are just stupid moves.
You think our 100,000 troops have Iraq blanketed? I don’t. And he’s got money stashed abroad; somebody will take him in.
What do you mean, deliberately? You think we’re winning because Saddam’s throwing the war? I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to day.
Again, his choices are?
OK, suppose Israel was hundreds of miles away from Palestine. How long do you think Israel would stay then? The Palestinian problem is that the Israelis aren’t going anywhere, and the Palestinians have nowhere else to go.
Being overpowered militarily is admittedly not the best possible move, but you don’t always get to choose that one.
Except it might’ve worked, if Maggie Thatcher hadn’t put a bit of backbone into Daddy Bush at just the right moment. And even then, James Baker had to toss out reason after reason that didn’t persuade the American people that this was our fight, until he finally hit on “Saddam might have nukes,” which just barely won the day.
If you could rewind the world to 1990 and play it over and over again, I bet Saddam would successfully annex Kuwait more times than not, doubling his oil reserves.
I think it was a pretty good gamble on his part. And he thought it looked better than it was, since April Glaspie told him we didn’t have a dog in that fight.
I am quite skeptical of the idea that SH would go to ground and live in caves like Osama. He seems to me to be too used to living in luxury. How many palaces does he have again?
I could maybe see him doing this as a last ditch thing to avoid death or capture, but I can’t see it ever having been his long term plan.
Of course all this is moot if the man is dead or critically injured, as I strongly suspect he is.
(nitpick) I think it’s more than that, and they don’t have to blanket Iraq, just Baghdad. Yes. I think they can close it up pretty tight.
We own the air, so he can’t get out that way, and I would take a Wag, and guess that with radar, satellite surveilance, drones, and all the other stuff we have that a goat couldn’t walk out of Baghdad without being observed, much less Saddam himself.
I admittedly don’t know what the chances are, but I don’t think I’d give him good odds.
I was under the impression that this was a kind of master plan wherein Saddam has started this war on purpose in order to follow the “deep strategy,” and that’s why he didn’t capitulate or do what was necessary to avoid war.
We may be confused, or I may be confused. I’m reading the deep strategy as a master plan Saddam has set in place before hostilities became inevitable. If I’m correct you’re reading it as a “I’m screwed, so what do I do now?” kind of strategy. If I’ve guessed correctly and this is indeed your stance, I have little problem with it, and my objections are withdrawn. As an optimistic and hopeful strategy of last resort it makes a lot more sense than as something designed from the outset. Still, I’d think that his strategy is simply that he hopes to inflict enough casualties and make things difficult enough that we just go away without toppling the regime.
Yup yup yup and yup.
I disagree. I don’t think the Saudis would tolerate it under any circumstances.
Still, it would be fun to model, and make a hell of an interesting wargame, wouldn’t it?
Didn’t Iraq get a lot of support from the Russians at one time? Maybe he’s using the Russian military strategy that worked against the Germans–draw them deep into your own territory and wait for the winter snows…
No, no. You misread. He said “with the bets of them.” In other words, we can pacify guerrilla uprisings by building casinos.
This assumes that Saddam is still in Baghdad. Could be in Tikrit or elsewhere nearby. Hell, we don’t really know for certain that he’s still alive. It’s a bit unrealistic to think Saddam can’t possibly escape when Bin Laden is still “at large”. Granted, he’ll probably wind up dead quickly in most potential futures, and he’s definitely less likely to escape than Bin Laden–Saddam has more local enemies and is not as experienced in keeping himself protected on the run.
I would certainly agree that the scenario of Saddam as returning hero is quite unlikely.
Addressing the issue of “how would he get out of Baghdad anyway”: If he really were a strategist, the smart thing to do would be to accept the Saudi offer to broker a ceasefire.
So actually the smart, sensible thing to do, for himself personally, and for the good of his country, would be to step down. And Bahrain has offered him sanctuary. Granted, it was technically before the war started, but I can’t visualize the King of Bahrain going back on his word.
And then from his vantage point in Bahrain, he could continue to be a player in the Arab world. He’s banished Al Jazeera from Iraq, so it would be his word against the Coalition’s as to just how badly his troops had been outnumbered, and he could put all kinds of spin on his surrender.
Scylla - I read this as “What might Saddam’s plan be, in the event that there was no good option for him other than war?” I think he’s not so suicidal as to invite war with the US, but dictators who rule by force and fear prefer a lot of things to being rendered impotent, and a genuine capitulation to open inspections would likely qualify as a demonstration of impotence, from his POV. I think his first choice would have been to continue to rule Iraq in the normal sense and at least partially defy the inspectors, but given the potential unavailability of that option, he might have had a Plan B long prepared.
It’s less a war game than a diplomacy game, really. War defined the boundary conditions (e.g. we were capable of retaking Kuwait but the Saudis weren’t), but diplomacy was the game.
What the Saudis would tolerate - other than the presence of our military - didn’t really matter then. How many divisions did the Saudis have? Not enough to root Saddam from Iraq. Heck, they needed us to ensure that he didn’t take their oilfields next; their forces were insufficient for self-defense.
I remember the whole thing as having just barely happened at all. Without Maggie’s giving George H.W. a backbone transplant, we might not have had troops over there at all. Without Bush’s waiting until after the 1990 midterm elections to bring up the possibility of converting Desert Shield into Desert Storm, ditto. And of course, if James Baker & Co. hadn’t finally hit on a public rationale for the war that mildly resonated with the public.
That’s my recollection, anyway, and I’m sticking with it.
I think it may be moot, because Saddam’s continuing to speak through proxies suggests that he may be seriously wounded, at the least. But supposing he were healthy, I don’t think getting Saddam out of Baghdad would be that difficult, even now with our troops fighting to gain the Baghdad airport.
Other than a handful of paratroopers in the far north, we still don’t have troops to the north of Baghdad, and we can’t bomb every vehicle that flees in that direction and still claim to be the ‘good guys’, which is really important right now.
All he’d have to do is get to an underground bolt-hole far enough out of town that he’d be outside the ring around Baghdad when that ring got pulled tight. I can’t see how that would be all that tricky.
alternative. And whether or not this is his plan, I believe he’s capable of crafting a plan of which the present open war is just the opening gambit.
