Which Side Will Give Up First?

by Alexander Cockburn

But wait! Surely the ferocious B-52 bombardments of the Al Medina and other Iraqi divisions on the southern perimeter of Baghdad are already degrading them seriously, and a few more days of softening up will render them mere skeleton forces, shell-shocked and ready to surrender.

This seems unlikely. Remember first what happened in 1991. The Republican Guard was battered by six weeks of bombardment, after which time these divisions emerged from their foxholes and efficiently suppressed the Shi'a rebellion in the South while George Bush Sr. ordered U.S. forces to stand aside.

Already in 1991 the Iraqis were showing great skill in camouflaging their equipment and in deploying dummy targets. Reports from various military sources suggest that they didn't waste the following 12 years, either, in preparing for guerrilla operations or in readying their defenses around Baghdad by a vast system of trenches and dugout decoys, plus more robust communications networks.

At the start of this week the U.S.-based Stratfor website, reasonably well informed from military and intelligence sources, abruptly changed its somewhat complacent "sure and steady advance" theme, and directly challenged the U.S. command's claims that bombing has degraded the Republican Guard divisions' combat capabilities by 35 to 85 percent. Stratfor cited "foreign intelligence services" as estimating that air attacks have degraded the combat capabilities of the Republican Guard Al Medina Division by 5 percent, the Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar divisions by 5 percent to 10 percent, and the Baghdad Division by 10 to 15 percent.

Most targets in Baghdad available to precision-guided missiles have already been hit more than once in the enormously costly barrages that have now seriously depleted the U.S. missile arsenal. Furthermore the smoke from oil fires is making it harder for U.S. satellites to assess damage and assign targets to the GPS satellites governing the missiles' trajectories.

So the target sets are being steadily widened, with increased civilian casualties as a consequence, which of course means a hardening in Iraqi civilian resentment. But bombs alone, even if the U.S. had enough, can't do the job. As German military strategists, looking back at the siege of Leningrad and at Stalingrad, are reminding the world, the only way to take a large city with determined defenders is to fight through it block by block, inflicting and incurring tremendous casualties in the process. Saturation bombing in advance only makes the task more difficult, with every pile of rubble offering obstructions and foxholes.

The other way is simply to hunker down outside the city, destroy the water supplies, try to prevent food getting in and install a medieval siege, while being harassed by guerrillas along that extended supply line.

The furious finger-pointing between the uniformed military and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides misses one fundamental point. Rumsfeld, a vain and foolish man, may have made a huge blunder in forcing his concept of a lighter force on Gen. Tommy Franks, despite the latter's pleas for a far larger force. But even if Franks had prevailed, it would have been next to impossible to have massed the numbers that General Schwartzkopf was able to command in 1991.

The whole pattern of U.S. military procurement for many years, increasingly so since 1991, has been to degrade basic fighting capacity in favor of the costly hi-tech systems promoted by the "iron triangle" of defense contractors, congressional boosters and their accomplices in the services. Precision-guided missiles and kindred emblems of U.S. technological supremacy were supposed to render old-style battles and sieges more or less obsolete. So has the United States got the manpower?

Ultimately, yes. But there are political constraints, starting with the casualty rate. By March 26, the official coalition losses in Iraq were running at 57 dead, but there's a time lag of three days, and often more, between a death and its recognition in official statistics. Some estimates, including one well-informed Russian site, suggest that the coalition losses include no less than 100 killed U.S. servicemen and at least 35 dead British soldiers, plus a larger number listed as missing. The normal multiplier for wounded is 10, which give us a possible 1,000 casualties for the second half of March, which means a monthly rate of maybe 2,000 casualties. (These figures are, it should emphasized, somewhat speculative.)

Some comparisons. In WWII, average casualties ran at 28,000 a month killed and wounded. In the Korean War, the average was 3,000 casualties a month. In Vietnam, between 1966 and 1971, casualties averaged 8,000 a month. At the peak of that war, out of a vast force, there were actually 40,000 U.S. soldiers with rifles in their hands, meaning that the risk for these fighters of getting wounded or killed was extremely high, as would be any attempt to attack Baghdad by the 3rd U.S. Army infantry division, with about 3,500 combat troops.

So the present, inferential casualty U.S. rate in Iraq, at a moment when, according to generals on both sides, the "real fighting" is just beginning, is not out of sight of the Korean rate, which allowed General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run as a candidate who would extricate the United States from a costly war.

So even if the Bush administration is ready for a long war, will political opinion around the world and at home allow him to wage it?