The War in Iraq is Definitely not WWIII - 26 March, 2003

It looks like Saddam is not intended to harms Americans

The strange war has been going on for a week already. Numerous messages about battles and bombings are mixed up with news messages about killed British and American soldiers. News programs keep broadcasting the footage of illuminated Baghdad at night.

Saddam Hussein is a long-standing fan of Stalin during the period of the Great Patriotic War. However, the current situation in Iraq is like a parody of the year 1941. It would be ridiculous to compare George W. Bush to Hitler. The only thing that Saddam has in common with Joseph Stalin is the moustache.

In the beginning of the war, everyone was surprised with the instruction regarding the careful attitude to Iraqi captives. American soldiers have that instruction, although there are nearly no Iraqi captives. It seems that the Iraqi army stands very firm and is not going to give up to the enemy. However, the enemy is 110 kilometers far from Baghdad. No settlement has been seized. There is an impression that the allied army avoids any battle. However, the results of those battles show that the Iraqi army avoids direct battles too. This reminds the way Russian troops entered the plain Chechen territory: a gunshot could hardly be heard.

The USA already has a reason to celebrate something from the economic point of view: indexes go up, oil prices go down. No one doubts that the USA and Great Britain are a lot stronger than Iraq from the military point of view. It seems that the haggling process has been going on for the whole week. The fact that this war is very unpopular in the West is also a relevant issue in the haggling process. The USA has recently reproached Russia of illegal deliveries of arms to Iraq. By the way, the Russian interest in Iraq is evaluated in the sum eight billion dollars of the Iraqi debt.

The storm of the town of Umm Qasr, which is located 700 meters off the border on Kuwait is a good example to give. The US forces can not seize it, no matter how hard they might try. A small Soviet military unit managed to defend a railway station in the city of Brest during WWII. Brest was like a gateway to the East. Umm Qasr is a port. One can not level the city with artillery shells, for there will be no point of seizing the town then.

However, the intensity of Iraqi battles does not remind the battles of WWII. Stalin’s soldiers did the utmost to defend Soviet ports of Murmansk, Sevastopol, Novorossiysk, Odessa, Leningrad. It is possible to suppose that Saddam Hussein’s army allows the USA and Great Britain to speared communications deliberately in order to conduct the guerrilla warfare afterwards. However, communications have been already spread. Allied troops have lost very few pieces of their ordnance, although it seems that certain armoured vehicles were made in order to be hit by grenade launchers. Shahids, suicidal bombers, have vanished somewhere, although they have been so widely advertised recently. Bridges across the Euphrates river have not been blown up for some reason. There is an impression that Saddam Hussein is not interested in causing damage to the living force of his enemy.

The war is on. Two Apache choppers have been downed strictly in accordance with WWII rules – from any kinds of weapons, including double-barrel guns. Three planes have been downed, one of them was shot with an own missile: a very small result for the ABM of the country. Looks like Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. The war is on, and it is absolutely real for those people, who take a direct part in it. There is bloodshed and death. Pieces of information that “leak” from the Russian radio reconnaissance service testify to the battle tension: “The US command was forced to suspend the offensive on an-Najaf after yesterdays’ tank counter-attack of the Iraqi army. Iraqi troops took their positions on the eastern part of an-Nasiriya, across the Euphrates river. Iraq lost up to 20 tanks, two artillery batteries, and about 100 soldiers during one day of battles in the area. The US forces had ten tanks and armoured vehicles destroyed and 15 soldiers killed.”

There are no doubts that it is a war, although it can not be compared either to WWII, or to the Korean, or to the Chechen war. It does not look like WWIII at all.

Anatoly Baranov
PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov