- DOHA (Reuters) - The U.S.-led
attack on Iraq is now longer than the land war in the 1991 Gulf conflict.
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- It passed the 100-hour mark at 9:30 on Monday morning
Baghdad time.
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- President George H. W. Bush chose 100 hours as the time
to end a crushing ground offensive in 1991 with the liberation of Kuwait
and the surrender of Iraqi forces, a prospect still very much in the uncertain
future for his son.
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- "This is just the beginning of a tough fight,"
Bush warned Americans as Iraqi hit-and-run attacks, guerrilla tactics and
determined stay-behind forces dealt setbacks to the two-pronged U.S.-led
advance on Baghdad.
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- The war began just after 5:30 a.m. Baghdad time last
Thursday (9:30 p.m. EST Wednesday) with a cruise missile and stealth bomber
strike aimed at killing President Saddam Hussein, with U.S. and British
forces poised to invade across Iraq's southern borders.
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- Unlike the Gulf War, which relied on the "overwhelming
force" strategy favored by Colin Powell, then chairman of the U.S.
Joint Chiefs of Staff, the invasion to topple Saddam is gambling on a much
lighter but speedier thrust to Baghdad.
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- The spearhead of the invasion on Sunday was just 100
miles from the Iraqi capital, U.S. field officers said.
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- But Iraqi attacks on the long lines of the U.S. advance,
stretching fully 200 miles up from Kuwait, cost the lives of several U.S.
soldiers -- U.S. commanders confirmed up to nine dead -- and spelled captivity
for at least five others, apparently from a maintenance unit chasing along
in the rear.
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- U.S. military officials said force commanders would now
be exercising greater caution. Bush's new warning not to expect a rapid
victory struck a grim chord.
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- THE COMING DAYS
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- Military analysts said the entire operation was now entering
a crucial phase which could show whether Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's
gamble on lighter but sharper armies would pay off or prove to be too great
a risk.
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- "The next 72 hours could show whether we've overplayed
our hand," said MSNBC television analyst Dan Goure, noting that the
northern front Washington had originally hoped to open from Turkey did
not exist, due to Ankara's refusal to allow it.
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- The advance on Baghdad will bring some 170,000 U.S.-led
ground attackers face to face with the four brigades of Saddam's toughest
troops, the 30,000-member Special Republic Guard (SRG).
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- Along with the Special Security Organization (SSO) headed
by Saddam's son Qusay, Iraqi officials say their strongest units are ready
to fight in the outlying suburbs and in the city itself if necessary to
defend the regime.
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- "We will fight to the last drop of blood,"
Defense Minister Sultan Hassan Ahmed said on Sunday.
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- Whatever the Pentagon might say about the fairness of
such a guerrilla strategy, "this is warfare and it is a tactic as
old as warfare itself," said analyst Dan Plesch of Britain's Royal
United Services Institute in a BBC comment.
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- Together SRG and SSO number over 35,000 well-trained
and heavily armed troops and Baghdad is their garrison city. They would
likely be joined in battle by the Saddam Fedayeen under the control of
Saddam's son Uday. It was units of this militia that counterattacked and
stopped the U.S. Marines charging north across the Euphrates river at Nassiriya
on Sunday.
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- Iraq military expert and former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack,
says the Fedayeen may now number as many as 100,000.
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- This force was "once a strange cross between a goon
squad and a kamikaze brigade" but has received better equipment and
training in recent years and is now a force to be reckoned with, says Pollack
in his recent book "The Threatening Storm."
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- SWORN TO DIE
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- Saddam is also protected by about 2,000 Presidential
Guards, who number about 2,000 and are all from the Iraqi leader's al-Bu
Nasir tribe from around Tikrit.
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- The broad coalition army of nearly 700,000 led by U.S.
Army General "Stormin"' Norman Schwarzkopf in 1991 never had
to deal with any of these hardcore units on their home turf -- their objective
was far more limited, to oust Iraq's army from Kuwait.
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- After taking a 38-day aerial pounding in their inadequate
trenches, Iraq's ill-equipped conscript divisions crumpled at the very
approach of the U.S.-led force. Saddam ordered a retreat from Kuwait after
just 49 hours of ground fighting.
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- His Republican Guard divisions put up a fight in places
but most generals concentrated on saving their force by withdrawing, which
the coalition, to its subsequent chagrin, let them do.
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- President George Bush senior ordered his troops to cease
fire at 100 hours, rather less than Schwarzkopf's suggested five days which
the general noted would be one shorter than the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and
"had a nice ring to it."
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- The label that Bush's son's war in Iraq will eventually
inherit is still anyone's guess.
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