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By Mike Cuenca | March 21, 2003
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Even a superficial review of the history of modern combat in cities
should prompt a great deal of skepticism about any promise of a "short"
war in Iraq.
Baghdad is not the Arabian Desert. This will not be another Gulf War.
Our armed forces will not be sweeping across a vast open expanse that
provides little or no cover for defensive fortifications or for hiding
troops and heavy weapons. Baghdad is a city of 5.7 million people, in
thousands of homes and buildings.
Each of those houses and
buildings will have to be cleared, one by one. There are only two
possibilities: annihilation or surrender. Even if the Iraqis surrender,
will that surrender come within a few days or months or years? Will it
be all forces at once, or will it be units and cadres one at a time?
Once Iraq surrenders officially, urban guerilla "resistance" will
surely claim casualties among occupation troops for perhaps as long as
they're ordered to stay. The other possibility, annihilation, shocks
the conscience when you consider that Iraq's army is less than 500,000
troops, which means that annihilating a city of nearly 6 million will
kill thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of civilians. Consider
Stalingrad and Manila in World War II.
Consider Beirut or
Mogadishu. Go rent a copy of "Black Hawk Down." War in the streets of
Baghdad will likely continue much longer than promised, and there will
be many casualties, including many of our own fighting men and women.
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Originally published by the Lawrence Journal-World.
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