The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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Dirty Little Secrets
Saddam Succeeds with the Secret of Stalingrad
by James Dunnigan
March 28, 2003
Saddam Hussein has learned a lot from the major tyrants of the 20th century. In particular, he admired Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and the bureaucracies of terror both men built. The current Iraqi government is an odd combination of Nazism and Stalinism, using organized terror in administering the country, and for encouraging Iraqis to fight coalition forces. The tactic of threatening reluctant Iraqi troops with death, and worse, if they don't fight, is a method used with brutal effectiveness by Stalin's secret police during World War II. In 1942, for example, one reason Russian troops fought so valiantly against the Germans at Stalingrad was because 19,000 Russian soldiers (according to recently released Soviet documents) were shot by their own officers for insufficient enthusiasm. Stalin's police would also jail and torture the families of soldiers who did not "do their duty for the motherland." At the time it was said that it took a very courageous man not be brave in the Red Army.
Iraq's use of Stalinist terror tactics to force Iraqis to make suicide attacks on American troops was unexpected. Saddam's secret police, Baath Party and Fedayeen have long used terror to compel compliance from the population. Refugees have told of this sort of brutality for decades. Saddam's thugs typically tortured and killed relatives of anyone who betrayed Saddam. This group punishment is an ancient practice, and still widely used in the Middle East. But the brutality of Saddam's henchmen is off the scale, including rape and mutilation that was, at first, not believed by Western officials. Then they saw the scars from wounds on defectors who had survived this treatment, and kept encountering more and more victims. Oddly enough, there was never much of an uproar against this in the West or in the Moslem world. Saddam was seen as "bad" but "someone we could do business with." Now Saddam's way of doing business is forcing Iraqi men to make suicidal attacks on coalition troops or see their families tortured and killed. This is being heard from Iraqi attackers who survive their encounters with coalition troops. Saddam's people supervise these attacks, standing behind the attackers, ready to shoot any that hesitate. Coalition troops have found many attackers who were shot in the back while advancing on coalition troops.
Not all of the Iraqis attacking coalition troops are compelled to. Indeed, the fact that everyone knows what Saddam's supporters will do if you don't go fight has a tendency to encourage the faint hearted. The attacking groups are not very professional and tend to be quite brittle (breaking and running if you promptly shoot back at them.) The attackers also tend to get confused and easily outmaneuvered by better trained and disciplined coalition troops. Some coalition troops dismissively call the Iraqi attackers "target practice" after several encounters. But the attacks are a chore, with extra troops needed for guard duty at night. But the attackers find that the night attacks are more suicidal than the day ones because all coalition troops are equipped with night vision devices. The Iraqis don't have this and think they are sneaking up on coalition troops in the dark, until they are shot down by coalition troops who were watching the Iraqis for some time.
These brutal tactics by Saddam's supporters was apparently not planned for. British Royal Marine Commands are advocating changing the plan of attack and going into Iraqi cities and killing the Saddam loyalists and thus putting an end to the reign of terror. But it takes commando class troops to do this, as a lot of careful scouting and small unit raids are needed to carry out this sort of thing. The Royal Marine Commandos, and some US Marine units train for this. But the U.S. Army depends on it's Special Forces and Rangers for these operations. The current strategy calls for going after Saddam, after which his supporters would largely fall apart. This is probably true, although after Saddam is gone, the coalition would have no choice but to go after all the Saddam supporters.
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