Is This Hussein's Counterattack?

[pritchke]

An interesting article saying it may be Saddam who is responsible.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer

The recent string of high-profile attacks on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq has appeared to be so methodical and well crafted that some top U.S. commanders now fear this may be the war Saddam Hussein and his generals planned all along.

Knowing from the 1991 Persian Gulf War that they could not take on the U.S. military with conventional forces, these officers believe, the Baath Party government cached weapons before the Americans invaded this spring and planned to employ guerrilla tactics.

"I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall," said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division and the man responsible for combat operations in the lower Sunni Triangle, the most unstable part of Iraq. "That's why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country. They were planning to go ahead and fight an insurgency, should Iraq fall."

In an interview Wednesday at his headquarters northwest of the capital, Swannack said the speed of the fall of Baghdad in April probably caught Hussein and his followers by surprise and prevented them from launching the insurgence for a few months. That would explain why anti-U.S. violence dropped off noticeably in July and early August but then began to trend upward.


Makes sense that it could have been the plan of Saddam all along. If so when will it all end? If this is what has happened, than Coalition forces will need to catch Saddam before we can even hope to end the attacks.

[ 11-13-2003, 11:24 AM: Message edited by: pritchke ]

[johnny]

If this was all planned, then where do his two sons fit in ?

[pritchke]

Originally posted by johnny: If this was all planned, then where do his two sons fit in ?

Are you saying that Saddam may have used his sons as a decoy so he could escape?

[ 11-13-2003, 12:01 PM: Message edited by: pritchke ]

[johnny]

No, i'm not saying anything. I just don't think this is going according to Saddam's plans. He's just seizing the momentum now that it's Ramadan, and things don't go as smooth as the Pentagon thought it would. It should have been all over by now, but it looks like it's gonna be a long winter.

And who says saddam didn't get killed already ?

[B_part]

I guess Saddam and his army planned to fight a guerrilla war from the start... just leave a bit of cannon fodder here and there to allow reorganizing, and then sting the enemy. After all, this tactics is the only one that makes sense: frontal battle against US hardware would have been a suicide.
Also, anti-war movements in the west are the best weapon saddam has: just hold on until the invaders get scared by the casualties and leave under the pressure of their public opinion.

Oh, and don't forget that anti-US & islamistic movements all around the world are organizing to fight in Iraq - the escalation in the attacks is also due to the big flow of kamikazes, terrorists and terrorist masterminds that has flown to Iraq. Their final aim is not the same as SAddam's, but the means are identical: create chaos and block reconstruction, to fuel hate against the Americans.

[Skunk]

Very few of these attacks have anything to do with Saddam - that's just wishful thinking on behalf of the administration. In reality, there is a groundswell of popular support for a resistance movement, and the latter is split into many factions.

Bush and Co need a 'devil incarnate' to point the finger at. Saddam is responsible for the anti-american feelings and the attacks, right?


It has nothing to do with re-employing his henchman into the same role as they had before the war, re-opening the same prisons that Saddam had and detaining people there without trial or without any access to the outside world. It has nothing to do with midnight raids on residential districts, hand-cuffing kids in their homes and accidently shooting people at road-blocksand and democracy is a distant dream. Of course the Iraqi's won't be angry at these tactics - afterall, they lived with it under Saddam, so they won't complain now, will they?

And so what if unemployment has shot up, security is down the pan, water and food supplies are erratic and people are afraid to travel without armed escort (and too afraid to leave their homes at night) prompting many to complain that life was better under Saddam than under their new political masters. A worse situation doesn't always lead to people to be dissatisfied, right?

So it must be Saddam behind all these attacks - yeah, right...I stopped believing that the bogey-man under the bed existed when I was 5 years old - I'm not going to believe in him now.

[Night Stalker]

Now I was all for the action to smack Saddam. I felt, and still do feel, that the UN failed to enforce it's own numerous postions against Iraq.

But I do happen to agree with Skunk abit. (Do wonders never cease?! [img]tongue.gif[/img] ) Let's face it. Our troops over there right now are not a Force of Liberation. We are a Force of Occupation. We were not asked to come overthere like in Kuwait. That we have not truely liberated the population by now shows that the post combat missions are not as well executed as they should be. I am not familiar with the way things are being run over there, but if even part of what you say is true Skunk, then our military really hasn't learnted much from Vietnam.

A force of occupation really only has two options to hold it's objective. Dominate, subjugate, and demoralize it's enemy and the people that would support them. Or, subvert the population so that the enemy has no support. If it is not willing to do one, it absolutely has to do the other. Unfortuneatly, we are doing neither.

[Chewbacca]

LINK

Defining the resistance in Iraq - it's not foreign and it's well prepared UN weapons inspector saw 'blueprints' for insurgency By Scott Ritter DELMAR, N.Y. – In the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib is a compound on an abandoned airstrip that once belonged to a state organization known as M-21, or the Special Operations Directorate of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. As a UN weapons inspector, I inspected this facility in June of 1996. We were looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). While I found no evidence of WMD, I did find an organization that specialized in the construction and employment of "improvised explosive devices" - the same IEDs that are now killing Americans daily in Iraq. When we entered the compound, three Iraqis tried to escape over a wall with documents, but they were caught and surrendered the papers. Like reams of other documents stacked inside the buildings, these papers dealt with IEDs. I held in my hands a photocopied primer on how to conduct a roadside ambush using IEDs, and others on how to construct IEDs from conventional high explosives and military munitions. The sophisticated plans - albeit with crude drawings - showed how to take out a convoy by disguising an IED and when and where to detonate it for maximum damage. Because WMD was what we were charged with looking for, we weren't allowed to take notes on this kind of activity. But, when we returned to our cars, we carefully reconstructed everything we saw. What I saw - and passed on to US intelligence agencies - were what might be called the blueprints of the postwar insurgency that the US now faces in Iraq. And they implied two important facts that US authorities must understand: • The tools and tactics killing Americans today in Iraq are those of the former regime, not imported from abroad. • The anti-US resistance in Iraq today is Iraqi in nature, and more broadly based and deeply rooted than acknowledged. * * * IEDs are a terrifying phenomenon to the American soldiers patrolling Iraq. The IED has transformed combat into an anonymous ambush, a nerve-racking game of highway roulette that has every American who enters a vehicle in Iraq today (whether it be the venerable, and increasingly vulnerable, Humvee, or an armored behemoth like the M-1 Abrams tank) wondering if this ride will be their last. Far from representing the tactics of desperate foreign terrorists, IED attacks in Iraq can be traced to the very organizations most loyal to Saddam Hussein. M-21 wasn't the only unit trained in IEDs. During an inspection of the Iraqi Intelligence Service's training academy in Baghdad in April 1997, I saw classrooms for training all Iraqi covert agents in the black art of making and using IEDs. My notes recall tables piled with mockups of mines and grenades disguised in dolls, stuffed animals, and food containers - and classrooms for training in making car bombs and recruiting proxy agents for using explosives. That same month, I inspected another facility, located near the wealthy Al Mansur district of Baghdad, that housed a combined unit of Hussein's personal security force and the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The mission of this unit was to track the movement and activities of every Iraqi residing in that neighborhood straddling the highway that links the presidential palace with Saddam International Airport. A chilling realization overcame us when we entered a gymnasium-sized room and saw that the floors were painted in a giant map of the neighborhood. The streets were lined with stacked metallic "in-box" trays - each stack represented a house or apartment building. A three-story building, for example, contained three levels of trays; each tray contained dossiers on each citizen living on that floor. Similar units existed in other neighborhoods, including those deemed "anti-regime." Hussein's government was - and its remnants are - intimately familiar with every square inch of Baghdad: who was loyal, where they live, and who they associated with. (The same can be said about all of Iraq, for that matter, even the Kurdish and Shiite regions.) This information allows officials from the remnants of Hussein's intelligence and security services to hide undetected among a sympathetic population. Indeed, a standard quotient among counterinsurgency experts is that for every 100 active insurgents fielded, there must be 1,000 to 10,000 active supporters in the local population. Though the Bush administration consistently characterizes the nature of the enemy in Iraq as "terrorist," and identifies the leading culprits as "foreign fighters," the notion of Al Qaeda or Al Ansar al Islam using Baghdad (or any urban area in Iraq) as an independent base of operations is far-fetched. To the extent that foreigners appear at all in Baghdad, it is likely only under the careful control of the pro-Hussein resistance, and even then, only to be used as an expendable weapon in the same way one would use a rocket-propelled grenade or IED. The growing number, sophistication, and diversity of attacks on US forces suggests that the resistance is growing and becoming more organized - clear evidence that the US may be losing the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. To properly assess the nature of the anti-American resistance in Iraq today, one must remember that the majority of pro-regime forces, especially those military units most loyal to Hussein, as well as the entirety of the Iraqi intelligence and security forces, never surrendered. They simply melted away. Despite upbeat statements from the Bush administration to the contrary, the reality is that the Hussein regime was not defeated in the traditional sense, and today shows signs of reforming to continue the struggle against the US-led occupiers in a way that plays to its own strengths, and exploits US weakness. For political reasons, the Bush administration and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) haven't honestly confronted this reality for fear of admitting that they totally bungled their prewar assessments about what conditions they would face in postwar occupied Iraq. The failure to realistically assess the anti-American resistance in Iraq means that "solutions" the US and CPA develop have minimal chance of success because they're derived from an inaccurate identification of the problem. The firestorm of anti-US resistance in Iraq continues to expand - and risks growing out of control - because of the void of viable solutions. Unless measures are taken that recognize that the tattered Hussein regime remains a viable force, and unless actions are formulated accordingly, the conflict in Iraq risks consuming the US in a struggle in which there may be no prospect of a clear-cut victory and an increasing possibility of defeat. • Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-1998), is author of 'Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America.'