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CNN SHOWDOWN: IRAQ
Interview with Ken Pollack
Aired March 28, 2003 - 12:17 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks, gentleman. As Renay and the general were just talking about, a U.S. Army source is now telling our Walt Rodgers that coalition air power has badly hurt the Medina Division of Iraq's Republican Guard. The Guard, as you may know, represents Iraq's best trained, best equipped, most trusted military fighters.
Now besides the Medina Division, the Hammurabi and the al Nayda (ph) divisions are guarding Baghdad from the north, south and east. And former CIA analyst, now CNN analyst, Ken Pollack, joins me now with more on that. Welcome back. Good to see you, Ken.
KEN POLLACK, FMR. CIA ANALYST: Good to see you, Paula.
ZAHN: I wanted to start off this afternoon with a tacit admission that the deputy defense secretary just made in Washington, admitting that military officials may have underestimated the scope of deceptive tactics the Iraqis use. I want to use an exact quote here Ken, when he said, "I don't think we anticipated so many people who would pretend to surrender and then shoot. I don't think we anticipated the number of execution squads within Basra." Should that have been a surprise?
POLLACK: Well, it's always hard to predict how Saddam Hussein is going to do things, and it's always hard to know exactly what Saddam has learned. That said, I think that we have seen tactics like this from the Iraqis before in some situations. And I certainly think that it's the case that there were voices out there who were suggesting that don't count anything out from the Iraqis, that they are willing to do anything. Certainly, there were any number of people who were saying things like the Iraqis will use their own citizens as human shields.
That said, what I think that the military was expecting when they went into Iraq was a much more conventional fight. That even from those militias that did fight back, the Fedayeen Saddam, the Ba'ath Party militia, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), their special security organization, and these other groups, that it would be a much more conventional fight. That they would man the barricades in the cities and fight back at U.S. forces, rather than wearing citizen clothes, hiding behind civilians, and just conducting hit-and-run attacks the way they have.
ZAHN: I wanted to share with our audience something that got a lot of attention today, and it's something the Army's senior commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General William Wallace told "The Washington Post" and "The New York Times" when he talked about the stalled drive towards Baghdad. And he mentioned these bizarre attacks by pick-up trucks, by lightly armed Iraqis. And I guess he was implying how stunning it is that they would attempt that kind of attack against tanks and Bradley armored vehicles.
POLLACK: Right. Well, this is -- this gets to the kind of lessons that Saddam learns. I think it's pretty clear that Saddam learned a lot from the U.S. experience in Somalia, from the battles in Mogadishu, where the United States was forced to withdraw its troops after suffering 18 dead at the hands of Somalia irregulars. And he seems to have learned some good lessons from it and some bad lessons from it.
The good lessons was, keep your troops dressed as civilians, fire from behind civilians. These are all things that the Somalia militia, led by Mohammed Fara Adid (ph), did to U.S. forces and gave U.S. forces a great deal of trouble.
On the other hand, as General Wallace pointed out, the use of these -- what we're calling technicals -- the use of these pick-up trucks and SUVs mounted with (UNINTELLIGIBLE) weapons, like machine guns and grenade launchers, that's probably not a good lesson to be learned. Because when the U.S. and British forces have tanks, have Bradley fighting vehicles, those technicals just become deathtraps.
They're easily destroyed at long distances where they can't really do a lot of damage to U.S. forces. And I think that's why a lot of these fights have been very frightening for the U.S. and British forces, but haven't actually done a whole lot of damage to them.
ZAHN: The lieutenant general also saying that's something they didn't war game. He said he knew these kind of folks were out there, whether you want to call them paramilitary death squads, irregulars, or whatever you want to call them. But he wasn't sure -- he said he wasn't convinced how they were going to fight up until now.
POLLACK: Right. Well, again, I don't think that any of us really knows exactly how U.S. Central Command was expecting it to fight. That stuff is all classified. But I do think that it's quite clear now that they were expecting a much more conventional fight from these different groups inside of Iraq. That while they recognized that there would be Republican Guards and Saddam Fedayeen and others who would be willing to put up a fight, they were expecting a much more conventional kind of battle, as opposed to the kind of hit-and- run attacks that they've been getting.
ZAHN: Based on what you've seen so far with these irregulars, what is your chief concern if and when these troops move towards Baghdad and encounter the Republican Guard?
POLLACK: Well, I think that what we've seen from the irregulars simply bolsters what should have been expected from the Republican Guard, which is these troops are going to stand and fight. We saw that from 1991. I think most people's image from the first Gulf War is that the whole Iraqi armed forces collapsed. And certainly there were a lot of divisions that did. But it's important to remember that the Republican Guard didn't. They stood and they fought to the death. And I think that we have to expect that they'll do that this time. And another lesson that Saddam has learned is don't stick your army out in the middle of a desert, because that's where the United States has all of its advantages.
And, in particular, the first Gulf War really highlighted the limitations of the Republican Guard. They're not very good at combined arms warfare, they're not very good at maneuver warfare, and they're very vulnerable to the long-range weapons of the United States.
And so this time around, Saddam has done something much cleverer, which is he's kept his best Republican Guard divisions around Baghdad in the built-up terrain, which hopefully will allow them to play to some of the few strengths that they have, which is, set in defensive positions, they will fight extremely hard. And Iraq's hope is that, in this worst terrain, with trees and buildings around, it will be much harder for the U.S. to use its advantages in maneuver warfare and long-range attack weaponry to be able to destroy these divisions as easily as the U.S. did in 1991.
ZAHN: Ken Pollack, our analyst, also of the Brookings Institution, thanks so much for your perspective.
And one little other note to add. Another concern of the administration at this hour the number of expatriates that are coming in from Jordan and Yemen and Egypt, that some were hoping would fight against Saddam. Now apparently are willing to fight for him.
We have been showing you these pictures of aid arriving in Umm Qasr this morning, Coming up, we're going to talk live with the CEO of America's largest humanitarian aid alliance and see what some of the alliance's biggest hurdles will be
Also, we're expecting a White House briefing that starts live in just about five minutes or so. Plus more of our powerful pictures of the day. We'll be back in one moment.
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