From: John Grigg (starman2100@lycos.com)
Date: Wed Mar 26 2003 - 20:58:41 MST
I found this Australian news article gave a good overview of the daunting challenges ahead if the U.S. and British troops are required to engage in extensive urban combat to occupy the Iraqi cities, especially Baghdad (pop. 4.5 million).
A city and regime steel for reckoning to come
By Paul McGeough, Herald Correspondent in Baghdad
March 26 2003
an excerpt:
The US policy of avoiding towns and cities leaves each one it passes as a virtual time bomb. Already at Basra, Iraq's second city, the Iraqi defences are trying to lure the invasion force into urban combat - and British units on the northern outskirts of the city are falling for it.
On Monday they returned fire with artillery into a city in which the Iraqi defences are spread through the civilian quarters. And it did not take long for the Iraqis' strategic trap to be sprung - the British units yesterday declared Basra a "military objective" and now they are planning to take the city with "minimal civilian casualties".
The analysts' view that the war is bogging down is premature - the US-led advance to Baghdad has been remarkable. But is has been at the expense of leaving carefully planted units of Iraqi fighters in cities that might erupt at any time and which will always be nipping from the rear at the American, British and Australian troops.
Iraq's Defence Minister, Sultan Hashim, calls the US advance the swerve and stop campaign. He says the Americans are staying in the desert, always heading north. He said: They can keep going north for as long as they like, all the way to Europe if they want to. But if they want us, they will have to come into the cities; they will have to come into Baghdad.
Cautious analysts have observed for months that the Iraqi forces are better than the US makes them out to be, and they are proving that point. The Republican Guard is well armed and equipped - it has rifles, machine-guns, hand grenades, anti-tank weapons and, most important, familiarity with the battlefield - and if it comes to street-fight in Baghdad, the US's technological superiority will be blunted.
The Iraqis see death in battle as honorable; the Americans see it as a political crisis at home.
More importantly, the US has never captured a heavily defended city as big as Baghdad, which has a population of 4.5 million. And US successes in smaller cities like Hue in Vietnam in 1968 came at a cost of more than 1000 Americans dead or wounded and 9000 Vietnamese casualties.
The direst warnings are in the Pentagon's own Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations, which notes: "Cities reduce the advantages of the technologically superior force. The physical terrain of cities tends to reduce line of sight, inhibits command, control and communications capability [and] makes aviation operations more difficult ... It also degrades logistics, and often reduces ground operations to the level of small-unit combat."
Mr. Aziz argued that the US-led troops entered Iraq at the peak of their psychological preparation in the belief that the regime would collapse in hours or days. Remember, they said shock and awe?
But if they cannot take Umm Qasr and the heavy casualties we are inflicting, you can imagine what the next seven days will be like.
Asked if, at this stage, a diplomatic solution might avoid more bloodshed, he added: I don't have candies to offer them, only bullets.
(end of my excerpt)
If we have the usual 15-1 casualties as in WWII or Viet Nam we could wind up with about 17,000 dead or maimed. With our superior technology and firepower I don't think our casualties will be anywhere that bad, but I could see the Gulf War's supposed 157 combat deaths being dwarfed by the number fallen in this war. If the deaths on our side are not in the thousands after the dust settles I will be happily shocked.
To find the full article go to:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/25/1048354604384.html
John Grigg
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