Sticking To His Guns

By Romesh Ratnesar

One week into the war, the Commander in Chief was on edge. Appearing before reporters with British Prime Minister Tony Blair last Thursday, George W. Bush let loose a double dose of presidential petulance. He fidgeted, he frowned, and he scowled at questioners. At one point Bush spoke over Blair as the Prime Minister tried to answer a question. Bush's temper had grown short, aides said, because doubts about the war's progress were growing just when Bush was trying to get out a message of resolve. Reports of Iraqi irregular forces harassing U.S. troops up and down the road to Baghdad--faking surrenders, springing ambushes, firing from commuter buses--had not made him rethink his war. What the President wondered about instead was his message. Why wasn't it getting through? He asked his aides what had become of all the leaflets being dropped on the Iraqi people and the radio messages beamed their way urging them not to fight for a dying regime. Did the Iraqis understand that Bush, unlike his father, would not relent until Saddam Hussein was dead or captured? Said an aide, "There is this concern that [the Iraqis] think we won't finish the job."

With each new report of an atrocity by the Iraqi regime--a woman hanged for waving at a coalition soldier, a nine-year-old boy shot because his family refused to cooperate with Saddam's forces--the President grew more anxious to repeat his message. "Resolve," said a senior Bush aide. "That's what people who have loved ones who are POWs want to hear. That's what the guys in the field who are fighting this thing want to hear. And he is going to hammer it home and hammer it home and hammer it home." So when Bush was finally asked at the press conference whether the war would "last months, not weeks," he could barely wait for the question to be completed. "However long it takes to win," he shot back. Moments later he repeated the pledge, slowing his words for emphasis. "However. Long. It takes."

It was a revealing moment. Clearly Bush meant to remind the world of his determination to finish off Saddam's regime, but his impatient tone simultaneously underscored that the task was proving more difficult than many had anticipated. The allied wave of steel pushing into Iraq had been slowed by sandstorms and guerrilla attacks. Civilian casualties were adding up. Having apparently survived the U.S.'s first-day attempt to kill him, Saddam seemed to be in command.

Expectations aside, just how badly or well the war was objectively going was a matter of debate last week even among the Pentagon brass. Some U.S. officers in the field, who had to personally cope with the allied travails so far, were more anxious than certain commanders in the rear, who were focused on the campaign's overall progress. The latter group could point to a number of achievements, including the allies' near total command of the skies over Iraq, the securing of Iraq's southern oil fields and the advance of thousands of troops to within 50 miles of Baghdad. There was also the prospect that a major allied score in coming days would change the atmosphere. On the other hand, both the worried and the sanguine understood well that the lesson of the war's first act was that however long the campaign lasts, coalition soldiers would probably be bedeviled by pockets of resistance that would continue to complicate their missions and imperil their lives. After 10 days of combat, 38 Americans and 23 Britons were confirmed dead, as were hundreds if not thousands of Iraqi fighters.

The threat to allied forces by fighters--even single fighters--loyal to Saddam was illustrated last Saturday morning when an Iraqi suicide bomber killed four G.I.s at a checkpoint north of the central Iraqi city of Najaf. A senior intelligence official told TIME that the U.S. believes its forces are also under threat from Mujahidin-e Khalq, a militant Iranian group that operates in southern Iraq opposed to the government in Tehran. "That will be an important thing to watch," says the official. "They've been generously supplied and supported by the [Iraqi] regime."

U.S. forces continued to charge forward through the arid plains of central Iraq, but they were forced to defend their positions every step of the way. A fierce and somewhat unexpected enemy was the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary group headed by Saddam's brutal son Uday that was dispatched by the regime to hide in cities and pick off invading forces. The militants stunned the allies with their will to fight, inflicting dozens of casualties on coalition troops. Allied commanders said late last week the coalition had killed hundreds of Fedayeen and had begun rooting them out of the cities. Early Saturday, U.S. Marines backed by Cobra helicopter gunships launched a daybreak attack on Iraqi forces holed up in Nasiriyah, the contested city in southeastern Iraq that is vital to U.S. efforts to secure a passage for forces traveling north. U.S. forces say they destroyed several tanks. Some Fedayeen were still believed to be inside Nasiriyah, allegedly forcing civilians to send their sons to fight. But by late Saturday the Marines believed they were close to securing control of the city.

There may be new surprises ahead, apart from the expected challenges of taking Baghdad. Washington has pointed to the capture of two airfields in western Iraq as a blow to Saddam's ability to menace Israel with Scud missiles, as he did in the 1991 war. But the U.S. has what it considers credible intelligence that some Scuds have eluded detection in western Iraq, within striking distance of Israel. "We're not out of the woods yet," a senior U.S. intelligence official tells TIME. Saddam may have "a Scud or two that he's saving for the right moment," the official adds, noting that coalition forces are hunting the western desert for missile launchers.

When Saddam showed up on state television early last week, the supposed proof of his survival was trumpeted as a victory for the regime. "The enemy wanted to make the war short," he said. "But we hope, God willing, to make it long and heavy." The Iraqi dictator showed signs of having calculated how to do that. Knowing his forces are no match for the power of the allies, Saddam employed maneuvers that suggest he has learned lessons from the first Gulf War. His military has abandoned the wide open deserts that made its tanks easy targets for U.S. attacks in 1991. Instead the Iraqis have burrowed into the cities and the verdant Euphrates river valley, where U.S. forces have more difficulty spotting them.

What's more, the Iraqi leader has relied heavily on the Fedayeen to launch hit-and-run strikes. The Fedayeen and other Iraqi irregulars have employed deceptive tactics like shooting at allied forces while waving white flags. "The enemy has gone asymmetric on us," complains Lieut. Colonel Bryan McCoy, commander of the 3rd Brigade, 7th Marines. "There's treachery. There are ambushes. It's not straight-up conventional fighting." On Saturday, U.S. Marines recovered the bodies of seven missing U.S. troops who appeared to have been executed and then dumped in shallow graves outside Nasiriyah.

The U.S. commanders' hopes to quickly open the climactic battle for Baghdad were delayed by the intensity of Iraqi resistance and a blinding sandstorm that stalled the advance of U.S. forces. The coalition's thinly defended nearly 300-mile supply line became the target of strikes by Iraqi irregulars.

The U.S.'s aversion to suffering losses and inflicting civilian casualties has helped Saddam's small bands of loyalists cling to control of the cities, from which they hope to drag the U.S. into a frustrating, Vietnam-style guerrilla conflict. "People say to me, 'You are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps to hide in,'" Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told one interviewer last year. "I reply, 'Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings be our jungles.'"

With live footage of fire fights streaming into the world's living rooms, the White House distanced itself from the predictions of a rapid, relatively painless victory that Administration hawks had peddled to build support for the war. The hopeful mood on display at the White House on the war's opening night has vanished. A presidential adviser said aides were trying to concentrate on their work while glued to their televisions. "They're very, very somber," the adviser said. Before Bush's speech at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., last Wednesday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters aboard Air Force One that Bush would declare the war was progressing "ahead of schedule." But Bush decided to scratch that sentence from his speech, eliciting private criticism from an Administration official, a rarity in Bush's Washington. "It made it sound like we were less optimistic than we had been," the official said. "It looks like we're succumbing to the doom and gloom, which we're not."

Allied leaders attributed the perception that U.S. and British forces have suffered battlefield setbacks to the constant reports of combat from journalists embedded with the troops; those snapshots of the war, military commanders say, have failed to convey the larger picture of the allies' progress. "We're one week into this," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last Friday, "and it seems to me a little early for history to be written."

If history were written now, it would record that despite enemy resistance and crippling weather, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division's push into Iraq in just a week is an advance of men and armor unmatched in speed in the annals of warfare. In addition, more than 7,000 smart bombs and missiles battered the Iraqi leadership's command and control outposts and pounded the tanks and artillery of Saddam's Republican Guard. After prolonged delay, 1,000 members of the U.S.'s 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted into northern Iraq to open a second front. A senior U.S. official told TIME that U.S. military special operations and CIA paramilitary teams are roaming all over Iraq looking to pick off key Iraqi military and civilian leadership figures.

Still, the coalition's battle plan is adapting to the new reality on the ground. Officials at the Pentagon and at Central Command field headquarters in Qatar, were considering slowing the pace of the ground war. The initial U.S. strategy was to bypass most cities in southern Iraq and rush ground forces to Baghdad within days of the war's start; military officials believe that once U.S. forces crush the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard forces protecting the city, Saddam's hold on power will crumble. But the decision to leave the southern cities unsecured has proved costly, as Fedayeen and Republican Guard troops dispatched to the south waited for U.S. armor to roll by before ambushing lightly armed supply teams in the rear. The battles have left the 50,000 troops at the coalition's spearhead--members of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force--anxious, exhausted and short on water, food and fuel. In one instance, a Marine commander told his men they would be limited to one ready-made meal a day. The U.S. has set up airfields across Iraq--ever closer to Baghdad--to speed supplies to the front.

Military officials say the Pentagon may put off an all-out ground assault on Baghdad until the Army can deploy 20,000 more troops from the 4th Infantry Division--who left Fort Hood, Texas, for Kuwait this week--to the front lines to reinforce the two forces already in place. As it regroups on the ground, the U.S. plans to ratchet up the pressure from the air. Apache helicopters from the Army's 101st Airborne Division have begun attacking the Republican Guard's Medina division southwest of Baghdad. Warplanes and gunships will try to smash the three Republican Guard divisions arrayed south of Baghdad as U.S. and Kurdish forces pouring in from northern Iraq attack Iraqi troops on the northern edge of the city. As ground forces moved closer to Baghdad, the Army's AH64 and Marine AH-1 helicopter gunships that accompanied them north began pulverizing Iraqi armor and the troops around them.

Judging by the clashes between the allies and Saddam's forces in the south, at least some of the Iraqi forces guarding Baghdad are likely to fight to the death. The struggle for the city could draw U.S. troops into highly dangerous close-quarter urban combat and bring untold misery to Iraqi civilians subjected both to collateral damage caused by the allies and to the terror of Saddam's men. In the besieged cities of Basra, Nasiriyah and Samawah, Iraqi refugees and defectors said Fedayeen were slaughtering men and boys who refused to fight against the invading forces.

Saddam loyalists went even further just outside Basra, Iraq's second largest city, which was surrounded by British troops. British military officers said that members of the Black Watch Regiment saw more than 1,000 civilians--including babes in arms--crossing a bridge on foot, presumably to escape the besieged city. Witnesses said Iraqi troops, led by some of the 1,000 members of the Fedayeen who were holding out in the city, opened fire with machine guns, apparently fearful that the residents' departure would set off a civilian exodus from the city, inviting a British invasion. The Black Watch Regiment fired on the Iraqi positions in a bid to halt the attacks; while some civilians made it to safety, others were forced back into the city. In Basra and in al Zubayr to the south, British troops staged surgical raids to arrest and kill Iraqi paramilitary commanders and called in air strikes to destroy buildings where Baath Party leaders were meeting. A British army official says the operations "were specifically designed to show locals that Saddam's men are no longer in charge." But British forces hesitated to make a move into the city for fear of putting civilians at greater risk.

The standoff in Basra underscored a central dilemma facing the war planners as they plot their final assault on Saddam's regime: the longer the allies remain handcuffed by their desire to limit collateral damage, the longer the conflict will be--and perhaps the deadlier for coalition troops. "The war ultimately will boil down to how many of our soldiers we are willing to sacrifice to keep dead Iraqi civilians off al-Jazeera," says a Navy officer at the Pentagon. Defense officials say that as the battle for Baghdad is joined in coming weeks, the U.S.'s unusually tight restrictions on target selection may be relaxed. Notes a Pentagon official: "We won't announce it." In the chaos of the battlefield, the old rules of engagement have already been tossed out. Lieut. Colonel Wes Gillman, commander of Task Force 130 of the 3rd Infantry Division, told his men, "If you see an Iraqi in civilian clothes coming toward you--even with a stick--shoot it."

But a high civilian death toll would play into the hands of Saddam. He presumably calculates that the U.S. could be made to quit fighting by international condemnation of the further loss of innocent life. In Baghdad, Iraqi officials claimed last week that U.S. bombs hit a marketplace and a hospital, killing 30 civilians; U.S. commanders said the damage may have been caused by falling Iraqi antiaircraft missiles.

If the U.S. cannot be made to halt the war through shame, Saddam hopes to try pain. U.S. military-intelligence officials believe the Iraqi command circulated copies of the movie Black Hawk Down before the war, as a manual for defeating the Americans. The film tells the story of the 18 U.S. Army Rangers who were killed by Somalis while attempting to rescue comrades from two helicopters downed in Mogadishu in 1993. The casualties prompted the U.S. to wind up its military operation in Somalia. The Iraqis may hope that similar scenes of Americans being bloodied in the streets of Baghdad would bring the same result.

The U.S. military has no desire to fight inside Baghdad. Rather, the U.S. plans to bomb the Republican Guard forces near Baghdad into submission before Saddam tries to sneak them back into the capital. If Iraqi forces attempt to leave their trenches and head toward Baghdad, they could suffer crippling losses from coalition air strikes. Allied commanders believe that units that survive the U.S. assault will lack sufficient numbers or time to establish effective defenses. Having kept most of his military out of Baghdad presumably to guard against a coup, Saddam has entrusted the city's defense mostly to the 15,000-man Special Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization. Those groups are badly outmuscled by the 325 Abrams tanks, 200 Bradley fighting vehicles and 100 attack helicopters soon to bear down on them. The survivors among the defenders, however, along with the Fedayeen, would probably mount persistent ambushes on coalition troops. At a Pentagon press briefing last week, Rumsfeld said that "this terrorist-type threat ... will very likely continue" throughout the war. Noted an Air Force officer: "It's going to lead to some of our guys getting killed, but it also means they're going to start running out of suicidal maniacs, sooner or later."

The military has long prepared to lay siege to Baghdad instead of plunging directly into the city and engaging in brutal door-to-door urban warfare. Allied commanders say they may cordon off the capital with a loose chain of troops, tanks and armored vehicles. U.S. troops may cut off the supply of water, food, electricity and communications--encouraging civilians to flee the city center and leaving Saddam's soldiers and perhaps even the Iraqi leader holed up. U.S. forces would then attack targets inside the city with air strikes, long-range weapons and surgical commando raids with the aim of destroying the remnants of Saddam's power structure.

Military officials still believe that Saddam will attempt to use weapons of mass destruction against coalition forces once his resistance becomes futile; one clue may have been the thousands of chemical-weapons-protection suits coalition forces found in abandoned Iraqi bunkers. Another harrowing scenario is that if an extended siege of Baghdad failed to break Saddam's hold on power, the U.S. would be forced to send its forces downtown to get him. Since Mogadishu, the U.S. has significantly improved its urban-combat readiness, training soldiers how to fight in claustrophobic environments in which 90% of the targets are less than 50 yards away. But nothing can prepare young soldiers for the relentless hell of the real thing. Urban engagements historically result in 30% casualty rates on both sides; while the U.S. believes it can cut its losses to 10% of its total urban fighting force, that would send U.S. casualty figures into the thousands.

Is America ready? The White House brushed aside criticisms of the allied strategy by pointing to rising public support for the war effort. "People are seeing firsthand that there are some fierce battles going on," says a senior Administration official. "It's steeling the public." While Iraqi officials gloated that the invaders did not have the stomach to bear the casualties inflicted on their forces, a different phenomenon unfolded in the war rooms in Washington, London and Qatar and in the coalition foxholes and camps scattered across the Iraqi desert; the grit of battle and the prospect of losses to come seemed to produce even more clear-eyed determination among the military leaders to finish the job. After a ceremony for fallen servicemen at his headquarters in Doha, Qatar, last Friday, Central Command Chief General Tommy Franks gathered his staff and tersely told them, "There will be more." Says a senior Administration official: "We're seeing a hardening and steeling of the troops." That's good. Because for the Americans on the road to Baghdad as much as for the President commanding them to battle, there's no turning back now. --Reported by Scott MacLeod/Cairo; Terry McCarthy/Basra; Paul Quinn-Judge and Michael Ware/Northern Iraq; Alex Perry and Simon Robinson/Southern Iraq; Sally Donnelly/Qatar; and Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, John Dickerson and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Scott MacLeod/Cairo; Terry McCarthy/Basra; Paul Quinn-Judge and Michael Ware/Northern Iraq; Alex Perry and Simon Robinson/Southern Iraq; Sally Donnelly/Qatar; and Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, John Dickerson and Mark Thompson/Washin