Iraqi Strategy Centers on Cities

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has told regional government officials that he aims to thwart any U.S. invasion by avoiding open desert fighting and massing his military in major cities where civilian and American casualties would be highest, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.

In meetings in recent weeks, the U.S. officials say, Hussein has outlined a strategy that appears to center on drawing U.S. forces into Baghdad and other urban settings where his equipment and troops would not be as exposed to America’s warplanes and high-tech weaponry.

Hussein’s statements have been relayed to U.S. intelligence operatives through Iraqi defectors and opposition groups in contact with officials in Hussein’s ruling Baath party.

Hussein did not discuss detailed strategy in the sessions, intelligence sources said, but directed the officials to be prepared for urban fighting.

His planning appears to be driven partly by lessons from the 1991 Persian Gulf War--in which Iraqi tanks and other equipment were easily destroyed in the open desert by American aircraft--and by the significant erosion of Iraq’s military capability since then.

Urban fighting is one of the most daunting scenarios U.S. military planners face. Baghdad in particular is a sprawling setting, where Hussein’s forces would have significant advantages.

Military targets in Baghdad are sprinkled among a population approaching 5 million. Hussein has constructed an elaborate warren of underground bunkers and escape routes. U.S. soldiers would probably have to slog through Baghdad’s streets wearing chemical-weapons suits and carrying extra equipment.

The signals from Hussein come as the White House appears to be moving forward with plans for war. President Bush and his national security team were briefed on several options Monday by Gen. Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command. Reportedly among them was a so-called inside-out plan in which the United States would strike Baghdad first in an attempt to decapitate Iraq’s military capability and cause a collapse of the regime.

Given Hussein’s signals and the evolving direction of U.S. plans, military analysts said it appears increasingly likely that any U.S. invasion would involve significant urban fighting.

“It’s almost a foregone conclusion,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. Hussein “won’t fight out in the desert.”

But if the strategic outlines are starting to emerge, experts and intelligence officials said it is extremely difficult to calculate how urban fighting in Iraq would play out.

U.S. defense and intelligence officials acknowledge that they don’t know where Hussein is hiding many of his chemical and biological weapons, let alone how he might use them in a pitched battle for Baghdad.

Experts also say it is difficult to assess how long it would take for U.S. forces to seize Baghdad, partly because it’s hard to know how long Hussein’s elite troops and intelligence agencies would remain loyal in the face of an American siege.

Bush on Wednesday promised to be “patient and deliberate” in considering options concerning Iraq but signaled that the United States remains committed to toppling a dictator accused of developing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism.

“These are real threats, and we owe it to our children to deal with these threats,” Bush said in a speech at Madison Central High School in Madison, Miss.

White House Debate

The question of how the U.S. deals with those threats has prompted a fierce debate within the administration.

A number of Pentagon planning documents have been leaked in recent months outlining options ranging from an Afghanistan-style mix of air attacks and Special Forces maneuvers to an all-out invasion by as many as 250,000 U.S. troops.

Amid this saber-rattling, members of the Iraqi parliament vowed Wednesday to resist a U.S. invasion, and Hussein is scheduled to deliver a nationally televised address today to anxious citizens.

Hussein’s comments on a defensive strategy represent the first indication of how he intends to respond to any U.S. attack. A former U.S. intelligence official said he was told of Hussein’s comments during recent meetings with Iraqi dissidents and opposition groups in London. A U.S. defense intelligence official said American intelligence has collected similar information and considers it reliable.

Another U.S. intelligence official said he could not confirm accounts of Hussein’s meetings and was skeptical that such information would find its way out of the country. But he said an attempt to force the United States into urban fighting “is the best of a bunch of bad options” for the Iraqi dictator if the U.S. invades.

The current and former intelligence officials spoke on condition they not be identified.

Hussein’s apparent aim is to “force the Americans to come in and create a lot of collateral damage, which will get the international community to get in and stop the fighting,” the former intelligence official said.

Many European and Arab leaders, including U.S. allies, are urging the United States not to invade Iraq.

The Domestic Factor

Hussein also apparently believes that urban fighting “will inflict heavy casualties on the Americans,” eroding U.S. support at home, the former official said.

America pulled out of Somalia after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in fierce street fighting in Mogadishu in 1993. The fighting was dramatized in the 2001 movie “Black Hawk Down.”

Pentagon officials said it might not be necessary for U.S. troops to enter Baghdad and engage in street fighting. Rather, advances in precision-guided weapons could enable the United States to hit almost any important target by air. And if Hussein holes up in one of his many bunkers, they said, U.S. forces could choke off the city and wait him out.

One complication for military planners is assessing the allegiance of Iraqi troops, particularly the elite Republican Guard.

“I don’t think Hussein would survive long,” said a former CIA official with extensive experience in the region. “But that’s the problem: We don’t know what the breaking point is for his supporters. Does a solid month of B-52 strikes do it, or do we need people on the ground?”

Some former Iraqi military officials insist that Hussein’s regime would crumble quickly.

Former Gen. Najib Salhi, who defected in 1995, said in a recent interview that Hussein’s forces would turn on him the moment U.S. troops started to roll toward Baghdad.

“Only a few hundred will stay loyal to Saddam until the last minute,” Salhi said. “Everybody in Iraq will be against him.... It’s going to be a big collapse, like a building demolished with dynamite.”

But military experts said the United States can’t afford to count on that and that airstrikes may not be adequate to seize the city. Hussein survived bombing of his hiding spots during the Gulf War, and the U.S. may not be willing to wait out a desperate dictator with chemical weapons.

“I don’t have a sense that [Hussein’s] various praetorian guard formations are guerrillas or house-to-house fighters,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent defense policy group. “But if the thing does not spontaneously fly apart, and if it does turn out there are substantial numbers of armed people prepared to resist, it could be real nasty.”

It’s possible, Pike said, “that it takes a week for U.S. forces to get from Kuwait to the west side of Baghdad, then three months to get to the east side of Baghdad.”

A Postwar Decline

Iraq’s capabilities have eroded significantly since the end of the Gulf War.

Hussein has been unable to maintain much of the machinery used to fight the war because Iraq relied on foreign technical experts to service its French and Russian aircraft and other equipment.

Morale is so low that regular army troops would probably defect in large numbers, leaving only a corps of 100,000 Republican Guards defending Hussein, defector Salhi said.

Yet Iraq retains the most formidable military in the Persian Gulf, with 424,000 men, 2,200 tanks, 3,700 other armored vehicles and 2,400 artillery pieces, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Perhaps half its 316 combat aircraft remain capable of carrying out missions.

Military analysts consider it likely that U.S. soldiers would face chemical or biological weapons if they fought an urban battle in Baghdad, because Hussein would have little to lose.

In the 1980s, he killed thousands of Kurds and Iranians with chemical weapons. His forces dispersed chemical weapons during the Gulf War but did not deliver them, according to a CIA report.

“He will not hesitate to use these weapons,” said Salhi, adding that Hussein’s storage and delivery of such weapons left them unreliable.

Iraq has planes equipped with chemical “sprayer” tanks and has experimented with unmanned planes that CIA officials believe have been modified to disperse chemical or biological agents.

A United Nations report has concluded that Iraq may have hidden as many as 6,000 chemical weapons from U.N. weapons inspectors.

“The end result is likely to be that Iraq would succeed in launching some [weapons of mass destruction] strikes against U.S. coalition forces, targets in neighboring states, and/or Israel,” Anthony H. Cordesman, a military strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, concluded in a recent study of military options against Iraq.