- DOHA, Qatar (Reuters) - There
were no chemical weapon attacks, there was no "war within a war"
between Turkey and the Kurds, no refugee crisis, no mass destruction of
oil wells, bridges or dams and there was no "Stalingrad" urban
bloodbath.
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- Was Iraq the dog that didn't bark?
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- With U.S. Marine chemical warfare experts in Baghdad
now turning decontamination kits into hot showers for the troops, the worst-case
scenarios predicted before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq less than a month
ago look ridiculously overblown.
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- And yet U.S. military planners say that were it not for
the lightning speed of their push forward and the potent combination of
arms -- from devastating air power and disruptive special forces to intelligence
and psychological operations -- those scenarios might well have come to
pass.
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- War commander General Tommy Franks applied many of the
lessons learned in the Afghanistan conflict of 2001 to Iraq. Among these
was the extensive use of special operations forces, teams of 10 or 12 people
who -- according to one source -- waged "a guerrilla war of their
own."
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- "The special operations raids early on destroyed
command and control centers, they seized oil infrastructure, they took
airfields, they began to establish a presence inside of Baghdad and get
the targeting information we've used..." said Michael O'Hanlon, a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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- He told a briefing on the war in Washington that the
juxtaposition of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's ideas for "innovation
and special operations" with the military's preference to go in big
and strong and conventional had worked.
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- COMMAND AND CONTROL KEY
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- The command structure of now-deposed President Saddam
Hussein's giant military machine was modeled along Soviet lines: it was
one where divisional commanders waited for orders and were not expected,
perhaps not trusted, to take initiatives.
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- And so by quickly ripping Iraq's command and control
capability to shreds, the U.S.-led forces reduced the chances that orders
to use weapons of mass destruction or blow up bridges, dams and oil wells
would ever reach its front lines.
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- Planners believe their leafleting campaign may also have
made Iraqis decide against torching oil heads or destroying bridges, many
of which they say were rigged with explosives.
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- Some Iraqis captured in the southern oil fields were
reported to have told U.S. forces they had been persuaded by air-dropped
exhortations not to squander their country's wealth.
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- The disintegration of Iraq's command and control meant
that the U.S.-led forces were always 48-72 hours ahead of their enemy,
which never had a real-time picture of the battlefield.
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- And so Saddam, if he was still alive, was probably astonished
to find U.S. troops at the gates of Baghdad so quickly.
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- Brookings Senior Fellow Kenneth Pollack says the Iraqis
made the same miscalculation in the 1991 Gulf War.
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- "The Iraqis plan for a certain kind of war and they
always expected to have more time to make decisions and shift forces than
was actually the case," he told the Washington briefing.
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- PRESSING ADVANTAGE
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- Lacking direction and battered from the air and ground,
the formidable line of Republican Guards with which Saddam had hoped to
defend the southern outskirts of Baghdad collapsed and pulled back in disarray
to set up hasty defenses within the city.
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- Pollack said U.S. forces saw that Saddam's elite troops
were on a back foot and, instead of digging in for a siege, they dashed
into the capital before the Iraqis could prepare an urban battlefield.
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- Military officials boast that Franks's readiness to look
for opportunities like this to press forward rather than stick to rigid
timelines -- another lesson from Afghanistan -- paid off.
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- In the north, the Kurdish militia's grab of Kirkuk stoked
concerns that Turkey would send its forces across the border to put down
a possible push for independence.
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- But a combination of strong diplomatic pressure on Ankara
to hold off and a tight rein on the Kurdish militia meant the "war
within a war" scenario was never a serious threat.
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- As for predictions that the war would unleash huge flows
of refugees from Iraq, they too turned out to be wrong.
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- "It seems that the early allied military strategy
of bypassing major cities, selective bombing of military targets and warnings
to civilians to stay at home and off the main roads have limited the number
of civilians on the move," the International Institute for Strategic
Studies said in a paper.
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- U.S. Central Command said Tuesday that its forces had
found 80 surface-to-air missiles as well as extensive caches of modern
weaponry since the fighting died down.
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- Analyst Paul Beaver told BBC World the finds were chilling.
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- "If they had had their command and control in place,
if they had had the will, they could have actually delayed this conflict
and made it a very long and drawn-out affair," he said.
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