I’m no military-woman, I am not a tactical coordinator, I have never been to war. But the following tactic (which was NOT taken by Saddam and his army) seems obvious to me: Here’s a hypothetical:
I am the leader of a threatened regime. I know that a massive enemy army is shrieking towards the capital city of “my” country, the capital city where I am now in hiding. I have been pumping out propaganda throughout the struggle saying things like: “Don’t you dare enter the city. If you enter the city there will be hell to pay. If you enter the city, the armies of the righteous will rise up and chase you out. All bets are off if you dare to enter my sacred city.” So what would be a good move then? Perhaps … bombing all the bridges leading into the city? Would that perhaps be a smart thing to do?
Saddam Hussein is a not a warrior. He is not a leader. He is not a smart man, with a smart army, trying his best to defend his territory. Otherwise, he would have bombed all of his own bridges, Baghdad, the city of a million bridges. Saddam Hussein could not (or would not) even organize his own people, to put up even a pretense of defense. Did it even cross his mind that that would be a good idea? Did he have any interest in an ACTUAL fight? Or …
He has been so cut off from the real world for so many years, an international pariah, (self-inflicted), that he is unable to grasp the simplest of realities. We in the US are told over and over again that we must try to understand our enemies. One of the major lessons of Vietnam. Our soldiers went over to Vietnam with no understanding of what that fight was all about, who the Vietnamese really were, what their real beliefs were, if there was any support on the ground at all for our war over there … So we learned that lesson well. We had intelligence from Iraq (helped, of course, by the Iraqi National Congress.) We went in there with a good feeling that once the people knew Saddam was gone they would be happy to see us. We had a pretty good sense about that, because we had invested time and energy in understanding the “enemy.”
Saddam Hussein (and other Arab leaders) clearly have no interest in “understanding” us.
The real point of this post is that Saddam Hussein is either stupid or dead. Otherwise, he would have dismantled all of those bridges, throwing roadblocks in the way of our advance.
No wonder many Arabs are embarrassed. “Where was the big fight? Where was all the resistance? Where is Saddam?”
