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Sammy was just plain nuts prior to the war
This casts even more doubt on the whole idea of him being responsible for that Lebanese peace envoy. My guess is that Habbush was acting on his own accord (or maybe with the Russians), trying to salvage as much of the regime was possible.A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers. Mr. Hussein believed that a "casualty averse" White House would order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand, according to the secret report, prepared for the Pentagonâs most senior leadership and dated Jan. 26. And the Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation, believed that any ground offensive would come across the Jordanian border.
Even so, both campaigns scored unexpected successes, the Iraqis revealed during their interrogations. When a wave of calls went out to the private telephone numbers of selected officials inside Iraq, asking them to turn against Mr. Hussein and avoid war, the Arabic speakers making the calls were so fluent that the recipients did not believe the calls were from Americans. Instead, the Iraqis believed the calls were part of a "loyalty test" mounted by Mr. Husseinâs secret services, the officials said during questioning. Afraid of arrest, incarceration, torture and even death, they refused to cooperate. But as a result, the officers limited their calls or stopped using those telephones altogether, hampering their ability to communicate in the critical days before war. The militaryâs collection and analysis of interrogations was compiled by the Joint Forces Command in a report, "Iraqi Perspectives on O.I.F. Major Combat Operations," using the initials for "Operation Iraqi Freedom," the Bush administrationâs name for the war effort. Late Wednesday, the officer in charge of the Joint Forces Command, Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., said in a telephone interview that the report was written as part of a "very broad gauge" effort "to study what types of lessons we can gather when we go into combat." Admiral Giambastiani refused to discuss the contents of the report, citing its classification. But he did say the study was unusual for the American military in that it comprehensively compiled the views of an adversary to produce "a dynamic, interactive, real-time diagnosis, versus the usual static post-mortem." He added, "We like finding ground truth." The study details problems with another information operation, and quotes Iraqis saying that the millions of leaflets â carrying statements like "Beware! Do not track or fire on coalition aircraft!" â did not incite desertions. But the leaflets intimidated Iraqi soldiers who realized that American bombers could just as easily drop their payloads on their locations, despite Iraqâs vaunted air defenses, according to the detained officials. Officials said that the Iraqi television broadcast system, and the telephone system linked by wires and fiber-optic cables, were unexpectedly resistant to attack. The leadership in Baghdad believed the United States would mount a long-distance air war, mostly focused in the south because Turkey, north of Iraq, had denied access rights. A bombing campaign could "be absorbed," leaving the government in control, Iraqi officials said during their interrogations. The interrogations were viewed by military officers who received the briefing as validating both the decision to send ground forces from the south to drive swiftly toward Baghdad â what Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the wartime commander, described as a strategy of "speed kills" â and the decision to use small numbers of Special Operations forces in western Iraq instead of large infantry forces in that section of the nation. Despite the broad news media coverage of the American and British buildup in Kuwait, the Iraqi Defense Ministry insisted that Jordan would be the launching pad for the invasion, according to the detainees. That assessment was a wild misinterpretation of a series of Special Operations raids by relatively small numbers of the elite troops in the western desert, which began before the major land force crossed out of Kuwait. The goal of the Special Operations missions was to destroy border posts and blind the Iraqi military in those zones as American and allied commandos hunted for unconventional weapons and missiles and controlled that vast, desolate terrain. Pentagon officials said that the politically charged question of whether Iraq possessed unconventional weapons just before the invasion came up during the many closed-door discussions about the study, but that the report carried a disclaimer that that question was not under review in the study. That job, officials said, was assigned to the Iraq Survey Group, which combined officers from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the intelligence branches of the armed services, and until recently was under the direction of David A. Kay. Dr. Kay, the former chief C.I.A. weapons inspector, has said that his team learned that no Special Republican Guard units had chemical or biological weapons â but that all of the officers believed that some other Special Republican Guard unit had them. He said it appeared that the Iraqi officers were the victims of a disinformation campaign by Mr. Hussein. Pentagon officials and military officers said their scrutiny of the interrogations had found nothing to contradict Dr. Kayâs statements. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-02-12 |
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