"Small Arms"

"Will Saddam's Troops Fight?"

Michael Rubin has an unusual article at TNR; contrary to most of the pundits one sees/hears/reads these days, he explains why he thinks defeating Saddam Hussein will not be much trouble at all:

Today, Ba'adre is once again a sleepy, backwater town in northern Iraq, 25 miles south of Dohuk and miles from the nearest paved road. Few Iraqis have ever heard of Ba'adre, and fewer still visit. But, for 72 hours in December 2000, Ba'adre captured attention in crisis rooms in Washington, London, and Ankara after Iraqi troops invaded the Kurdish safe haven and laid siege to the town. The last time Saddam Hussein had been so bold — in August 1996, when his Republican Guard invaded the Kurdish capital of Erbil — the Bill Clinton administration had responded by lamely firing cruise missiles at lightly manned Iraqi military facilities hundreds of miles south of the invasion zone. But in Ba'adre the United States went right at the invading force. And when American warplanes flew low over the Iraqi lines, 138 Iraqi soldiers threw down their weapons and surrendered without a shot being fired; the rest quickly withdrew. The lesson wasn't complicated: Not many Iraqis want to die for Saddam. Soon after the surrender at Ba'adre, I met a Baghdad Arab in a restaurant in the northeastern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah and asked him about Iraqi military morale. "Do you really think my son wants to be in uniform?" he asked. "Or anyone in his unit? He hears about life outside of Iraq. That's what he wants to live, not what he wants to fight." ....

(Thanks Moe.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 09/02/02 08:40:19 PM
Categorized as Classic.