Monthly Archives: April 2003

I watched one of the most entertaining press conferences I have ever seen this morning.  The Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf had been into the minibar again, got liquored up and held a press conference on the rooftop of a building overlooking Baghdad.  The usual suspects were there, except the American media, who have all been kicked out of town, to listen to a drunk propound on the state of the Battle for Baghdad.

According to al-Sahaf, there are no troops in Baghdad, those who were at the airport were all killed and poisoned by the Iraqi Army and the rest just ran away by the grace of Allah to go and hide behind the skirts of Israeli women denying the Arabic homeland.  Sounds like the usual Iraqi Military press conference:  Two parts generic Islam, a dash of slaughter and cowardice, one part anti-Zionist rant and add a Palestinian homeland garnish.  This is the kind of statement you can just about quote without getting up to change the remote.

Except al-Sahaf was on a split screen on CNN.  The other image being a bunch of guys in camouflage, lugging big guns and radios, pouring out of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, shooting up the Presidential Palace.  In the previous hour, one of the Arab networks, in a show of good camerawork, showed a pair of A-10 attack aircraft, flying over Baghdad, shooting up the joint and providing forward air support to an estimated 105 armoured vehicles rolling around in town. 

I am fairly certain the armoured vehicles were from the US as our sole Canadian tank is in for service and a new air freshener at the Bank Street Canadian Tire.  It will be ready around 4 pm today, maybe tomorrow if they can’t get the new oil filter.  This leaves the UK tanks and they’re all down in Basra, shooting the place up, in Northern Ireland, shooting the place up, or parked in front of a pub in Liverpool.  The Russian tanks are all in Russia, the government not having enough money to fire them up, or, local mafia in Moscow have stolen the treads off them.  It must be US tanks as the rest of the coalition members, Chad, Sierra Leone and Bermuda, don’t have tanks.

Had the US forward air controllers been truly on the ball, they would have waited until Minister al-Sahaf was about two minutes into his rant and run a pair of A-10’s, slow and low, right over his rooftop position.  Shoot the windows out of the high rise building right behind the Minister.  No trick shots, nothing exotic, just a simple, “Hi!  How are you!” flyby during his press conference.

The real point is the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf is so far out of touch that he’s closing in on the special reality occupied by Bobcat Goldthwaite, Steven Wright and Carrot Top.  If he’s the best Iraq can put up, Chemical Ali being dead and Saddam Hussein not wanting to accept the Oscar for Best Performance by a Body Double, then the war is essentially over.

Will someone please tell the Iraqi army, militia, and irregulars, special and not-so-special guards to give it up?  The soldiers want to go home.

Now that it looks like regular troops are in Baghdad proper, here’s the way urban war works, more or less.

This is the imaginary construct.  I want you to go around the whole house tonight, open all the blinds and curtain, turn on all the lights, then strip buck naked in the bathroom. 

Your mission, without putting any clothes on, or just saying ˜so what if they can see Mr. Johnson” is to close all the curtains and drapes and turn off all the lights.  Accomplish this without your neighbours getting a peek at the goodies.  Assume that all your neighbours are perverts and are actively looking in all the windows of your house.  For some of us, this is not much of a leap of faith.

So, how to you do it?  Slowly for one.  You think before you turn a corner in the hallway.  Can they see me from the windows over there, or over there behind me.  Do I turn off the lights first, or am I being lit from behind in that other room where I still haven’t turned off the lights.  Could it take a couple of hours of crawling on your belly and sneaking about the house to finally get things buttoned back up?  Easily.

That is the essential of street fighting war.  Enemy snipers are waiting for anything to pop up in a window a half a kilometer away that they can shoot.  Rocket Propelled Grenades, known as the Beirut Knock-Knock, at close range, can rip the tread off a tank or disable a Bradley.  You are now left with soldiers on foot, dismounted, going room to room, house to house. 

Tanks, like the M1A2 Abrams, are too damn big for the back streets and alleys.  The Abrams has a couple of useful features in street fighting, like machine guns, mortars and the sheer mass of 70 or so tons.  Don’t worry about firing the Big Fun Gun, just drive the whole tank over a house.  That tends to deny the enemy the position.

The only way you can call in air support is to find out where they’re shooting at you from.  Which house or apartment?  You do this by being bait and drawing fire.

A skilled enemy, only fires from highly concealed positions and does not fire until they are certain they can kill someone.  After firing, they get out of where they are.  This is Shoot and Scoot fighting, so by the time the helicopter gunships are targeted at your last position, you are somewhere else.  They blow up where you were, not where you are.  Then you sit quietly and wait for the next target to roll in, ride in, or walk in.

The big advantage is you know every street, alley, basement, sewer pipe, rooftop and hidey hole.  Your enemy, the US, does not, so you can dress up like an Iraqi woman and just walk from place to place, with your gun under your robes.

This gives the US some options, however.  As was done in WWII and Viet Nam, assume that all structures hold bad guys.  Churches in WWII were common places for snipers and artillery observers, as they had height as an advantage and could see more ground.  Allies at or near the downtown crosswalk?  Here’s the map reference, drop a half-dozen mortar rounds or artillery shells on that map reference and we’ll slow them down some more. 

This is why so many churches in Europe had their steeples blown off: German observers were probably there, so the Allies denied them the high observation point, by shooting the tops off churches or any other tall structures with their Sherman tanks’ 75 mm Fun Gun.

Urban War is the slowest, most precise and dangerous type of fighting.  Everything in front of you must be assumed to be dangerous.  In the Viet Nam era, the street fighting in Hue taught the US some very bloody lessons.  Even if a building was totally on fire, there was often a crazed opponent, in the basement, blazing away with a machine gun until the upper floors collapsed in on them.  Bullets fired by the crazy still kill, just as effectively as bullets fired by the perfectly sane.

In Somalia, specifically Mogadishu, people with weapons (I will not call them soldiers, as they do not deserve the title) would come running from everywhere, surrounded by family members and civilians, to get in the fight.  The civilians had come to “witness” the battle and the weapons folks had come to use the civilians as cover.  The US took another bloody nose there, as the natural reaction of controlled, trained soldiers is to not fire on women and children.  Of course, this is where the weapon-toting folks hid, right in the crowds.

Can an urban war be won in Baghdad?  Yes, but it takes a very strong willed, disciplined force.  It also takes some very serious decisions to be made higher up.  Namely the use of very intense fire from tanks and conventional artillery.  This will cause the death and injury of hundreds, if not thousands of civilians. 

This will cause extensive devastation of areas of town.  Not just blown out windows and some dust, but whole blocks of apartments, offices, stores, homes, markets, yards and businesses turned into piles of broken bricks.  Think of the photos of Berlin at the end of WWII.  Nothing left intact.

Can the US take that decision?  They should, but will they?  I think they won’t and the price will be paid in lives.  It is always thus.

The Iraqi Information Minister has been drinking the special Kool-Aid again.  Even though Islam frowns upon liquor and drunkenness, the InfoMin has obviously been pounding it back. 

Today’s press conference said that the Iraqi Army has whacked the US Army upside the head and will turn the Saddam Airport into a graveyard for the US forces. If this strikes you as funny, as yesterday there were no US forces within 100 kms of Baghdad, now they’re at the airport, this can only be attributed to the special beverages the Iraqi InfoMin drinks.

Yes, the first victim of war is Truth, but there is that line between “positive”news, “spinned” news and out front “propaganda”.  InfoMin has crossed into the land of “fantasy” news, completely unconnected with reality, on a level with the National Enquirer and The Globe checkout line tabloids.

However, there was chilling moment of medical lucidity from InfoMin.  Paraphrasing: “We have an untraditional surprise tonight.  Not by military”.  This could mean anything. 

I am hoping it means all the ice-cream bicycle peddlers will flock to the Baghdad International Airport and offer Fudgsicles and Rainbow Popsicles to all the US troops, along with unconditional surrender.

I suspect that the massed Popsicle run will not happen.  There are a few horror scenarios that could play out. 

One, is calling for all troops and citizens to advance in line to the airport to overrun the airport with sheer mass:  Give you life for Saddam etc. 

Baghdad has a slightly bigger population than Metro Toronto.  As much as we would love to see all of Metro Toronto march into Lake Ontario line abreast and drown, it does pose some logistical and ethical problems when applied to Baghdad.  The first is how many bullets do the US actually have?  Can/would/should we fire on this type of attack?

Two, is lobbing chemical shells, en masse at the airport:  “We will make the airport your graveyard” etc.   

Three, is lob gas at the neighbourhood around the airport, killing thousands of their own civilians and then point the finger at the US troops, causing the masses to rise up and march on the airport.

Four, is radiological ordinance.  A dirty bomb.  Not a fission bomb, just a big-ass conventional bomb wrapped with nuclear waste products.  It can be done with something as simple as a five-ton truck, rented from Ryder, the Official Rental Truck of Nut Cases Worldwide. 

Take the Unlimited Insurance, fill the rental full of diesel and fertilizer then topped with any nuclear waste you’ve got hanging about, even from nuclear medicine, or research labs.  Get a dedicated loony to drive it into the airport too fast and the 3-7th Cav. will blow it up for you, scattering radioactive nuclear material all over the place. 

In each case though, the result is mass casualties and a dirty battlefield. That denies both sides the actual ground.  The US can’t stay there and the Iraqi Army can’t go there:  No one can go there, for days, weeks, or years depending on the bomb. 

There is also an ethical dilemma for the US.  Faced with a couple of million of people marching towards you, waving everything from AK-47’s to kitchen knives, do you just keep pulling the trigger until the crowd all falls down or the barrel of your gun melts? 

Can we, as a group, live with the guilt of CNN covering a mass attack, live?  I’ll vote yes, but very, very reluctantly.  It is too hideous to ponder at any length.  At least as hideous as seeing the airburst of a cloud of stuff that drops a bunch of our troops, gagging and clawing at their skin, puking in their gas masks and then lying very still.

Will any of these ghastly potentialities play out in the next 24 to 48 hours?  According to the InfoMin, yes it will.  How we react is now the question.  We know the US cannot and will not go nuclear, even if Iraq does. 

Will George W grit his teeth and invite Tommy Franks to “do what needs to be done”?  Will Tommy Franks unleash an old fashioned carpet bombing of anything that moves and fuck’em all but six for pall bearers?

Please no, but if that’s the call, then do it hard, fast and nasty.

The Grand Experiment of embedding journalists is now two weeks old.  Journalists are jammed in military units up to their eyebrows.  The journos have to supply their own vehicles and/or travel with the soldiers.  They eat MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat, also know as Shit In A Bag) or chow at the military lines.  The journos usually wear blue police-style body armour, but some are in camouflage with Kevlar helmets and Go-fast goggles.  Odds are a few are carrying a sidearm, but are being discreet about it on camera. 

Part of the deal is you grab sleep when you can, meaning when the troops laager for the night.  Another part is you can only file and transmit when the military says go ahead and you are kindly instructed to keep your big mouth shut regarding where you are or what the boys and girls are going to do tomorrow.  Some of the embedded journos are looking rough, away from the makeup, lighting and grooming so important to modern television image.  Martin Savage and Ryan Chillcote from CNN both look like they’ve come through a two-week whiskey drunk, touring biker bars.

To my mind, embedding has worked reasonably well.  The footage from Walter Rogers and John Roberts, from CNN and CBS respectively, of Mechanized units racing across the desert live and in living dark green and light green, was spectacular.  Live war is astounding television, giving us a real-ish picture of what war kinda is.  Keep in mind that there are reality filters in place, but it is awfully close to unfiltered.

When (hopefully, only If) we see live blood and guts, then it is completely unfiltered and real.  With any luck most of the viewers will puke up their dinner, as the viewing of something like that is beyond the experience of almost all of us.  That is how we should react if we ever see something that.  Scream, puke, stare, pray.  Television with Visceral Impact.  Think along the lines of the feelings you felt when you saw the World Trade Center towers fall down.

Is the quality of the reporting suffering or being hindered by embedded journalists?  No more than it was with pool reporting, in the Gulf War Version 1.0.  In that show, the daily McNews Nugget was dutifully regurgitated back to the viewer, except for the first few nights when Shaw, Holliman and Arnett had the camera out the window of the hotel.  Today, we get the real goods.  If there is not much to see, there isn’t much to report.  If there is lots to see, there is lots to report. 

Spin doctoring, reality styling and information grooming is left to the analysts.  Please remember that “anal” is the first part of ”analysts”.  Not to suggest that they all speak out their assholes, but many do.  The retired military men who analyze this stuff are quite informed and almost all of the good ones have pointed out that any battle plan is merely a sketch of what might come down and that goes out the window as soon as the gunfire starts.  Now it is up to the feet on the street to figure out the rest. 

So far, the feet on the street are doing a good job:  Bad guys are being captured and killed.  Baghdad is taking an infrastructure ass-walloping without killing a whole lot of civilians.  Saddam Hussein is nowhere to be seen and his two sons Qusay and Bidet (or is that spelled Biday?) are staying low.  The Republican Guards are running towards the front lines to fight, probably chased by the Fedayeen Saddam who are being chased by the Special Republican Guard, who are being pursued by the Special Iraqi Secret Service.  Eventually they’ll all wind up at the front and pile into each other like the Marx Brothers chasing a car full of circus clowns, each group demanding the other fight first to demonstrate their loyalty.

Will there be another “Shock and Awe”?  Yes there will and very soon all the pieces will be in place.  Did General Tommy Franks have the exact date written down in the first draft of The Plan?  Who cares? 

Walter Cronkite had the best thought about it all:  Preserve as much information as you can for the historical record and worry about the analysis after it is all over.