Peter Tatchell warns that western forces could get bogged down in a long, bloody urban guerrilla war.
The war in Iraq won’t last more than a few days, said the generals and media pundits just four weeks ago. The hi-tech, professional US and UK forces will overwhelm Saddam Hussein’s underpaid, poorly armed and disaffected troops. They will not put up a fight. There will be mass defections from day one and total collapse within a week.
That is what Downing Street and the White House wanted the world to believe. Gulf War 2 will, they said, be a quick, precision-targeted, virtually bloodless war, with few military or civilian casualties.
Perhaps the war will be over soon, with relatively little loss of life. I hope so. But already the predictions that Baghdad will fall within seven days look absurdly rash and naïve.
Last September, I cautioned that US and UK battle planners were under-estimating potential Iraqi resistance. They failed to take into account the strength of nationalist feeling among ordinary Iraqis and the large number of people who have a stake in Saddam’s regime through jobs and other forms of patronage. Many of these people will lose everything – possibly even their lives – if Saddam is deposed. They will fight to the death to defend him.
So far, my warnings have been closer to the reality of the battlefield than the earlier wild optimism of the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence. I make no claim to be a military expert, but I wrote a book on military theory and history, Democratic Defence, which was commended by officers at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
My military knowledge, and a bit of common sense, lead me to conclude that while victory may yet be assured in a couple of weeks, it could also be delayed for months or longer.
The French discovered this lesson the hard way in Algeria in the 1950s and 60s. Given their vast technological superiority, they believed it would be easy to pacify the numerically small and rudimentarily armed FLN freedom fighters. But people, not weapons, are decisive in war. The French did not take into account the power of nationalist sentiment, and soon found themselves bogged down in a protracted urban guerrilla war in the alleys and casbahs of Algiers. The brutal, bloody battle dragged on for eight years. In the end, the French occupying army lost what little goodwill it had among the Algerian people, largely because of its savage counter-terrorist measures against the FLN. France finally withdrew in 1962, defeated and humiliated. Is there a possibility that the same fate could befall US and UK forces in Iraq?
Unless Saddam Hussein is very stupid, he has presumably learned lessons from Gulf War 1. So far, he has avoided battles in the open desert, where his army is vulnerable to superior allied fire-power, especially air strikes. There will be no repeat of the 1991 debacle on the Basra road, where his soldiers were swatted like flies by US fighter planes.
Instead, the Iraqi leader appears to be concentrating his troops in densely populated cities, especially Baghdad, using the civilian population as human shields. Iraqi military deployments and tactics in the south around Basra already indicate this could be Saddam’s secret strategy. He seems intent on fighting a dirty war with small, mobile, covert units of his militia and Republican Guard. Organised into terrorist-like cells, their aim is to lure western troops into the cities where they can be picked off by sniping, mines, booby-traps and car-bombs. It could be like Belfast in 1972, only 10,000 times worse.
Many of Saddam’s troops will probably go underground. Discarding their uniforms and passing off themselves as civilians – as has happened in Umm Qasr and other Iraqi towns – they will fight a guerrilla war with no big hardware and no set piece battles. Defeating this shadowy, invisible enemy in unfamiliar terrain may be difficult for US and UK troops.
It is highly probable that allied soldiers will have seek out Saddam’s forces in house-to-house street fighting. The price could be high. Are we ready for the prospect of our servicemen and women coming home in body bags for weeks, months and perhaps years?
Even if British and American troops take Baghdad relatively easily, they may not kill or capture all of Saddam’s forces. The Iraqi leader’s strategy may be to avoid a last ditch stand and switch instead to a rearguard terrorist campaign against the armies of occupation. In this scenario, our forces will have to remain in Iraq for at least three years to maintain control and prevent counter-attacks by Saddam loyalists. Keeping the peace might not be easy. Republican Guard guerrilla units could wage prolonged hit-and-run terror attacks on allied patrols, melting back into the civilian population after lightening strikes. If a couple of hundred determined IRA volunteers can wreck havoc in Northern Ireland for 30 years, imagine what 50,000 Republican Guards and 30,000 Ba’ath party militiamen can do in Iraq.
To combat this terror campaign, the occupying US and UK forces would probably adopt tough counter-insurgency measures, including checkpoints, house searches, curfews, press censorship, military courts and internment without trial. As usual, innocent people will get caught up in the clamp down on genuine pro-Saddamites.
This is the point where allied tactics might start to seriously backfire. To sustain a change of regime in Iraq, we need the Iraqi people on-side. Right now, only a minority favour a western invasion. Although they hate Saddam, most are also against a US and UK attack. They fear civilians will suffer greatly and dislike the neo-imperial connotations of an allied’liberation’ where they are treated like pawns, with no say or control over their own destiny.
Saddam is successfully exploiting this nationalist sentiment. Playing the patriotic card against America and Britain, he is deflecting and diffusing opposition to his regime. So far, there have been none of the huge crowds that western analysts said would greet the advancing allied armies. High civilian casualties as the war progresses, followed by heavy repression in the name of peace-keeping, would inflame nationalist passions and provoke increasing public hostility towards allied forces. A US and UK occupation could become a Vietnam-style fiasco, where we lose the hearts and minds of the civilian population, resulting in growing popular resentment and eventual outright rebellion.
If we are not very careful, Gulf War 2 will eventually get rid of Saddam but might sow the seeds of Gulf War 3: a national liberation war by the Iraqi people against the occupying armies of Britain and America.
* Peter Tatchell is the author of Democratic Defence (Heretic Books/GMP, 1985).