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The Devil’s Garden The Challenge and Choice that will decide the War in Iraq By John Schettler April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain… What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? There is shadow under this red rock… I will show you fear in a handful of dust. - From The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot There’s a small garden outside my cottage, surrounded by a rose flagstone courtyard and home to a stately palm, three decorative rocks and a few other hardy plants. Over the years it has seen flowers come and go, planted in the hopes of fulfilling some landscaper’s dream, but they never seemed to last. No matter how much the soil is turned and fertilized, and no matter how much the garden is watered, the simple fact is that there is something else growing there, with a mind and will of its own. Dandelions We have all seen the simplest of weeds, the venerable dandelion, masquerading as a flower in the fullness of its yellow bloom, and then quickly fading to gray. It’s a devious and hardy
plant, this one. Who knows how it came to this little garden, drifting in on the wind, no doubt, and settling unseen into the fertile soil to germinate. Soon it sprouts t Iraq is a bit like my garden. For years it was home to little more than a few ornamental rocks and stately palms watered by the fertile soils of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the rich pools of oil beneath the sands. Then, one day, a weed blew in on the wind and took root there. When Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party began to sprout up some 30 years ago the great gardeners of the world gave him little notice. He had just enough of a smile about him to seem agreeable to their aims, so they did not pluck him out in those early days when he first seized power—and now, in spite of all the might of the US military, the job may prove impossible. He has had thirty-two years to drink in the rich soil of Iraq, and he has built up a devious and far reaching root system. Saddam has gone to gray in the twilight of his regime, and he has already scattered his seedlings throughout that troubled land. As our forces knife across the desert, speeding on their way to Baghdad, they are finding that little weeds spring up to impede their progress in every town and hamlet along the way. Saddam, determined to resist the pressure of the US government to the last, has spread out his host of Fedayeen seedlings and special security police, and they are fighting an
unexpected “asymmetrical” war of harassment and delay that has vexed the advance of The forces sent to do the gardening suddenly seemed woefully inadequate. The US plan called for a brilliant light show in Baghdad to shock and awe the Iraqi leadership while mechanized columns sped unopposed through the historic cradle of civilization to reach the capital and pluck out the weeds. Now it has been seen that the weeds are everywhere, hiding beneath the struggling leaves of ordinary flowers in every quarter of the garden. The troops, sized to complete their road race and lay siege to Baghdad, were soon stretched thin and encountered stiffening resistance with each mile they advanced. The single British Brigade was digging away at Basra, a city of some 1.2 million people. Who knows how many dandelions are hidden there? Elsewhere, at smaller towns like Nasiriyah, Najaf, Hillah and Karbala the enemy had stubbornly forced the US to stop and fight, and then surround these towns to secure exposed supply lines as they proceeded north. Elements of the small three division US force that was thought so capable before the war, were soon being taxed to the limit of their strength. Commentators wondered if it would be enough to do the job. One of the great maxims of war is called “the law of overstretch.” As attacking forces advance, they extend their supply lines and need to position forces along that line of communications for security. This reduces the power in the spearhead of the attack, and slowly forces it to slow and stop, like a rubber band stretched to its limit. The solution to the problem posed by this law is to have sufficient reserves in theater to keep the momentum going. The US brought enough to reach Baghdad, but had little in reserve. The force was supposed to have been four divisions strong. In the South, the main elements launching from Kuwait would have one heavy division, (the 3rd Mech), a medium weight marine division culled together from various regiments, and one highly mobile air assault division of lighter infantry, (the 101st) backed up by helicopters. In the north they wanted a second heavy mechanized division in the 4th Infantry, but this vital element of the plan was foiled by Turkey’s stubborn democratic process—their parliament voted NO, in spite of a $30 billion dollar payoff offer, and it set the whole plan on its head. Now, instead of a two pronged envelopment, the US would be forced to advance along a single main access of approach. Almost immediately, it was learned that Saddam had ordered certain Republican Guard Divisions stationed in the north to head south toward the heart of his regime’s power centers in Baghdad and Tikrit. He knew, then and there, that the US would not produce a credible “northern front” for many weeks or months into the campaign. The US left the heavy equipment for this snubbed division floating around in the Med for weeks while planners courted favor with the newly elected Turkish Prime Minister—yet all for naught. Why? Because the entire deployment was late. The 101st Air Assault Division only received deployment orders on March 3rd and, as the date of Bush’s ultimatum drew near, its equipment was still clogging the ports in Kuwait, with troops off-loading helos, and assembling them for action. The backup in the ports meant that there was no place to put the 4th Mech, so they left it in the Med and worked for a political opening through Turkey. In the first Gulf War the US brought an army to fight a battle. There were 750,000 coalition forces, (half a million of them US). The Order of battle included 1st Armored, 24th Mech, 1st Cav, the 101st, 82nd, and a host of Marines. There was also a full UK division and troops from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other gulf states comprising another division. The military “shaped the battlefield” with a 45 day bombing campaign and then executed their lightening swift battle plan with thunderous precision. The battle, an engagement on the scale of Kursk in the Second World War, was won in just 100 hours. The hapless Iraqi forces, pounded for weeks by coalition air strikes, folded in mass surrenders. There were some 80,000 prisoners taken in record time, a number comprising a full eight to ten Iraqi divisions! This was not the case in the second war, which netted about 6,000 prisoners —not even enough to account for a single one of the fifteen divisions in the regular Iraqi Army. In this latest engagement the US has brought a single corps sized formation, not to fight a set piece battle over a small territorial region like Kuwait, but to fight a war of occupation in a nation five times that size! Relying on the “force multipliers” of precision munitions from the air, and upon notions tested in Afghanistan where two light battalions brought down the Taliban easily enough, the US was confident it could do the job. It is now clear, however, that Iraq was not preparing to fight a battle, but a war of determined resistance. The force committed, in my humble opinion, was at least two divisions light. (Indeed, in addition to the 4th Mech, the entire 1st Cav Division and elements of the 1st Armored Division were initially flagged to deploy, but shipping difficulties and overconfidence at the highest civilian levels of the defense department, kept them in limbo. The Battle Von Moltke said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. It is always necessary to adapt and improvise in war, and in this the US forces have shown remarkable flexibility and skill. The highly trained and motivated forces sent to the gulf. were able to seize Iraq’s only port, Umm Qasr—a move as significant as the British seizure of Antwerp’s locks and dock equipment in a startling drive by the British 11th Armored division in 1944. The port was vital for bringing in relief supplies and helping to “win the hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. The “other reason” for the campaign, the vast oil fields of light sweet crude, were captured intact, with minimal damage. That alone might be considered a victory on one level, but the US intention of weeding out the dastardly regime then sent the troops hurtling north through the desert. Their first test came at Nasiriyah, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Lead elements scouted out across the bridges and, as heavier units came up, they pressed north. Then came the “mother of all sandstorms” that grounded US close air support and helos, and offered the Iraqi paramilitary forces an opportunity to do the only thing that offered them any hope in this struggle—closing with the US forces and engaging them at the shortest possible ranges. US doctrine relies heavily on the lethality and accuracy of its ranged firepower. We fight, as rock musician Roger Waters sings, “with the bravery of being out of range.” When the sands blew in, however, the Fedayeen seedlings blew in with them, and marines tasked with holding the Nasiriyah bridges soon found a growing insurgency around them, sniping from hamlets, and gutters at very close quarters. The enemy fought with the deception of a dandelion. They shed their uniforms, donned civilian dress, used human shields, pressed locals into the fight at gunpoint, and generally made Nasiriyah into a logistical nightmare. One of the three marine regiments deployed here to take the bridges and clear the town. The remaining two bulled their way through in flying columns and headed north toward their rendezvous at Baghdad. Elsewhere, the US would encounter similar resistance at Najaf, where Iraqi forces holed up in the holy shrines of Islam, knowing the public relations shield this would give them. 3rd Mech dueled with them by night as it formed up in the region, and then turned the area over to one of the brigades of the 101st. Now this crucial air mobile element, as well as the reserve 82nd Airborne Brigade, were doing duty as security and area denial forces in the rear. These battles to secure the vital lines of communications (LOCs), soon reduced the striking power of the Coalition Corps by a full third as it sped north. Only two of the three brigades in each division would be available for the next phase of the operation, the battle for the approaches to Baghdad. The holes in the US force structure, which badly needed units like the 3rd Armored Cav and 2nd Light Cav for this “area denial” security work in the rear, were now apparent. Orders were quickly cut to end the floating holiday of the 4th Mech Division in the Med and send the equipment through the Suez toward Kuwait. It was always intended to flow in, say the planners, but the reality is that it was intended to relieve the victorious US forces after the battle was won. The sand storm, and the Fedayeen weeds on the road to Baghdad may have been godsends, however. They imposed a brief interval of pause on the US advance, and forced them to adapt and correct problems that were born of false expectations and hopes. Where were the Iraqi people? Why were they not rising up to greet their liberators? They were hiding in their towns, where young thugs were going door to door to force men and boys into the fight. This tactic, using the long steeped fear and terror that have held Saddam in power, forced the Coalition to fight for four days in the tiny hamlet port of Umm Qasr, for 8 days in Nasiriyah, and now in a host of other towns and villages. The quick battle the US hoped for had escaped them. Now they realized they were fighting a war. When the weather cleared the US relied again on its undisputed trump card, the terrible power of the Air Force. While US forces consolidated 60 miles south of Baghdad, and probed forward for bridges and highway lines of advance, the air units pounded the Republican Guard divisions with unrelenting fury. Tank by tank, bunker by bunker, they began reducing the fighting strength of these formations with precision violence. Indeed, the Republican Guard became, in the end, little more than an outer wall around a medieval city. The attacking force would roll up siege engines and catapults and slowly hurl rocks at the walls until they crumbled and a breach could be forced. Today we carry our rocks on the bellies and wings of high performance fighters and bombers. The Republican Guard was doomed the moment it took up positions south of the city—a move that was predicated upon Saddam’s own fear of the units, which were never allowed to enter Baghdad. Like the Fedayeen, their mission was to delay and buy time—a hard outer fence before the US troops got the pleasure of digging into the heart of the Devil’s Garden. Baghdad A city of 5 million people some 30 kilometers wide, the city of Baghdad was the last stand of the dying regime, and an enormous challenge to the US forces tasked with conquering it . The US had been bombing it nightly, with precision strikes aimed at targets like the Information Ministry, Presidential Palaces, Secret Police Headquarters, TV and telephone stations along with other regime targets. I would venture a guess, however, that all these attacks, intended to “shock and awe” the enemy, only hit and gutted abandoned buildings. The Special Republican Guard, a force of 4 Brigades of some 5,000 men each, found other places to make their stand, including residential districts, hospitals, hotels and schools. If the action in Basra and other towns in the south was a preamble, the fight for Baghdad loomed as a long drawn out affair. The enemy could use mines, roadblocks, booby traps, subterranean tunnels and bunkers and who knows what else. They knew every nook and corner of their city, and if they chose to fight for it, it could be a bloody fight indeed. Large urbanized environments are the death of mechanized armies and the bane of infantry. Historians have warned that no great city has ever been conquered in the history of modern warfare. They point to battles like Stalingrad and Leningrad in the Second World War, where the choice was to either reduce the city to rubble (as at Stalingrad), or to starve it (as at Leningrad, a city that endured a 900 day siege.) Rome and Paris were declared “open cities” and never fought for. If Saddam fights, the historians claimed that Baghdad could never be taken. The situation at Baghdad, however, was nothing like Stalingrad. That city had its back to a river where the far bank was always under the control of Russian forces. This allowed the Russians to ferry in unit after unit, along with supply barges laden with food and ammunition. The citizenry of Stalingrad were all allied with their soldiers, and they worked at their factories throughout the battle, turning out new tanks and vehicles right on the edge of the fighting! This was not the case at Baghdad. Once the US forces were able to surround the city, no more major units could get through to bolster the defense. Saddam had only one source of reinforcements—the Iraqi people—and, returning to the metaphor of my garden, this is why the US could not choose either of the two traditional methods of reducing a city. They could not starve or burn out the dandelions without harming all the other plants. Troweling through a city of five million to find and extract the weeds would take enormous amounts of time and manpower. So how could it be done? Some rumors were circulated that the US had a plan for Baghdad that did not involve its destruction or starvation. Clearly the bombing campaign was intended to prevent as much collateral damage as possible. The power stations were still running and, until very near the end, so was the TV station. The plan was whispered in dark corners, off the record of course: the city would not be reduced or starved, it would fall from the inside out! But how could that be accomplished? Some analysts conjectured that the US had inserted numerous small CIA and Special Ops teams who were covertly organizing a resistance built on Iraqi dissidents. While that may be hard to posit considering the twelve Iraqi secret service police forces in the city, it may be the kernel of a seed the US hoped to plant in the city—little cadres of weed killing cells that would fight their own devious form of insurgency. If Saddam planned an “asymmetrical” guerilla fight for the city—so did we! The main point here to consider is this: Saddam’s defense presumed the people of Baghdad would love and support the efforts of his secret police and Fedayeen. This was the single greatest question to be answered in the battle for Baghdad. This is why Saddam had been using Iraqi TV to broadcast appeals to Iraqi nationalism, tribal loyalty, bruised Muslim pride and Islamic fervor. Saddam knew that only the population of five million inhabitants could hold on to his city for him. They were the great third army in the equation and, their decision decided the battle. US forces formed up, conducted raids and recon “thunder runs” to identify Iraqi strong points. They seized a segment of the city out near the International Airport, and expanded out from there. The citizens of Baghdad had to make their choice, and it was the first step toward democracy and freedom for them, a step they had to take on their own. In many ways it was a kind of “Sophie’s Choice,” for Saddam tried to make it very painful for any who would dare to choose the US side. The Fedayeen were literally executing children to force older fathers and young men into fighting. But the choice between freedom and fear can have only one outcome. Another election was held in Baghdad, only this time there were two names on the ballot. The outcome was quite interesting to see. The vast majority of the civilian population was too intimidated to brazenly side with the US—but it was clear that they were not rising to the defense of Baghdad either. They abstained, waiting to see if the US could break the resistance of Saddam’s Special Republican Guard units in the city--and break it they did. The US strategy was soon played out for all to see. After taking the airport and reducing the main Iraqi resistance there, they simply used the protective shield of their heavy armor to bull their way to the center of Baghdad. There they sat, challenging Saddam’s loyalists to come and remove them. Many tried, but the lightly armed resistance fighters broke like a wave on the hard rocks of US tanks and APCs. Soon the first returns began to come in—the Iraqi people began to make their choice. Every vote to support US forces was a vote for their freedom, and even those who abstained by simply staying home served to undermine Saddam’s power. His only hope was to gain the support of the 5 million residents, and he lost. Fear is not a kind persuasion. The instant the Iraqis realized they had a champion, a protector from the brutality of the Baath regime, the battle was won. There were several instances reported in the news before Baghdad that spoke to how this election might go. In some incidents, US Marines dashed into a crossfire gun battle to rescue children under fire in Nasiriyah—under fire by the Fedayeen, I might add. In another incident at Al Kut a US marine drove his vehicle out onto a bridge, at great risk, to retrieve a wounded Iraqi woman and drive her safely out of harm’s way. She was forced there by the Fedayeen, and was bleeding in her Chador under their heedless wrath. With each rescue, with each helping hand, we gained votes in those crucial primaries, and Saddam lost them. Yet the inverse was also true. The “unconventional” tactics of the enemy have forced the US troops to loosen their fire discipline and rules of engagement. A bus recently refused to stop at a Marine checkpoint and was fired upon—killing seven Iraqi women and children inside—seven families who’s vote is now in doubt. The election in Baghdad, however, decided it all, but now we must live up to our ideals. We told them that we came to set them free, but the choice was always theirs. Sadly, many Iraqis choose to exercise their first moments of freedom with chaotic looting, while organized gangs of professional thieves pilfered the priceless treasures of the Baghdad Museum. It was here that the lack of at least one more full division was keenly felt on the US part. American troops secured “key” buildings like the Oil Ministry and Intelligence Operations Center, but they left another 150 odd government buildings and palaces to burn. They wanted those oil transaction records and all the Intel they could get their hands on about Saddam's evil weapons and terror plans...and the treasures of Mesopotamia, of Ur and Babylon, be damned. (And they said this was all about freedom? I think it was about fear and greed, and I said as much in “The Road To War.”) The real work ahead now is in the difficult reunification of Iraq. There’s a lot of digging left in this garden, but if we do it right we can achieve something great and precious from the ashes of this war. If we do it wrong? Well, remember those dandelions. If we do it wrong the weeds will spread far and wide, through the whole of the Middle East and perhaps beyond. Let us hope we do it right. (Note: In spite of the quick military victory in Iraq, the struggle has really just begun in the Devil’s Garden. The dandelions have spread, particularly in the “Sunni Triangle” and a lot of weeding needs to be done before we can leave. Once again, the Iraqi people are the key to our success. If they join us in taking back their country, then we can help protect them and support their new road into the future. For more on the consequences and challenge of the post-war environment in Iraq read “Uplift.”) |
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iny green leaflets, that grow and extend themselves upward in a grand charade.
Deception, you see, is a central part of its strategy for survival. Its golden bloom is like a sinister smile, posing as a carefree flower complete with a subtle aroma to delight the nose as well as the eye.
Who would want to pluck such a brightly colored thing from the ground? In its full flush it seems to exude the energy of spring and summer, tempting the pollinating bees as ably as any rose I have ever seen. Its
slender stalks, so frail and milky when snapped away by the casual gardener, are in fact designed to give way easily, so as to leave the vital
root of the plant intact. And its hour and day in the sun is fleeting and brief, a mere wink and a nod before the plant gets about its real business—the making of more dandelions. In
a matter of days the golden crown can wither and whiten to an afro of puffy white and gray seedlings. If your hand was in the slightest stayed, and you have not troweled up the
deepest tendrils of its roots by then, you have lost your battle with this hardy weed. Try to pluck it away when it has gone to gray, and you ensure the next generation will colonize
your world. The slightest touch sets the feather light seedlings to flight, and they drift and scatter on the barest whisper of a breeze. One dandelion can become a hundred in the
space of a few short weeks, and any gardener arriving too late on the scene will have a great challenge before him. Just when you think you have plucked out the last of the feisty
little demons, you find ten more have rooted somewhere else. 
US
forces on the heart of the Devil’s Garden. US attempts at quickly “decapitating” the regime with the flashing spades of their stealthy night
attacks appear to have failed. The weeds are still there, dug in deep, and rallying their troops through obvious propaganda. They have choked the flowers and plants of that garden for so long that the Iraqi people cannot
yet believe this latest gardener is determined to root them out. Instead of wild greetings of welcome and jubilant parades through the heavily Shia populated south, the marines and soldiers encountered deceptive
ambushes, false surrenders, RPG and small arms attacks in the thick of blinding dust storms, renegade youths careening at them in pick-up trucks, and suicide bombers—a Devil’s garden indeed! 
