Bai hoc

Providing that it holds, the cease-fire between Iran and Iraq ends a war that cost up to a million lives, and it concludes a long laboratory session in modern warfare. ''What the Spanish Civil War was to World War II, the Iran-Iraq war could be to wars of the future,'' said Phillip Karber, a Washington-based military expert. The Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936-39, was widely seen as a testing ground for weapons and tactics used in World War II. The Persian Gulf war is one of the few conflicts since the end of World War II in which weapons from industrial nations have been pitted against one another in high-intensity battles. Such a conflict is of interest to military experts in Western Europe and the United States because these experts foresee less of an emphasis on nuclear weapons and a shift toward conventional defenses as a result of the Soviet-American treaty on land-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Experts said the secrecy in which both sides shrouded the war makes it difficult to assess the many battles fought since the conflict broke out in 1980. However, there is enough evidence to draw preliminary conclusions. Lessons Reconfirmed The consensus among American experts is that the ground war between Iran and Iraq offers little new in the way of tactics or military trends. But the war did reconfirm these lessons, drawn from earlier wars, some of which were forgotten as military attention has focused on new technology: * The value of tactical defensive operations and fortifications, even those built in haste. This should be a valuable lesson to the United States Army, which shuns entrenched forces in favor of mobile defenses and offensive operations with tanks and mechanized infantry. * The importance of combining artillery, armored infantry and air power, both in defense and offense. That was also illustrated in the Arab-Israeli wars of the last 30 years. * The significance of the intangible factor of morale. When morale was high at the outset of the war, Iran was able to fend off the superior Iraqi forces. When its morale declined, so did Iran's ability to resist Iraq. * The need for good logistics, to allow supplies and reinforcements to be rushed to critical points along the front. The Iraqis became masters of logistics during the war, while Iran lost opportunities to break Iraqi defenses because Iranian supplies could not keep up with Teheran's attacking troops. Poison Gas a Factor

The routine use of poison gas by the Iraqis, which was widely reported and eventually confirmed by a United Nations investigation, was seen by American military officers as a dangerous precedent for future wars in the third world. Chemical weapons weakened the Iranians, but the arms proved no more decisive than when they were introduced in World War I. The Iraqis, possibly with outside help, modified ground-to-ground missiles, extending the range of the weapons to hit targets deep in Iran. But on the whole there was little innovative use of military equipment in the war. There were no breakthroughs on the order of the German biltzkrieg in the early days of World War II. Despite the range,

accuracy and deadliness of the weapons used by Iran and Iraq, neither side achieved a decisive advantage. On the strategic side, the war showed the importance of air superiority and the cumulative effect that bombings and missile attacks have on the will of a nation to fight a prolonged war. This provides valuable support to advocates of air power, who were discredited after the failure of the American air war over North Vietnam in the 1960's. But Edward N. Luttwak, a military expert and the author of several books on military affairs, cautioned against drawing major conclusions from the Iraqi bombing campaign. He said Iraq was uncontested in the air and Iranian economic sites were easy marks. Breakdown in Morale The break in the Iran-Iraq war came not as the result of Iraqi battlefield victories but because of a breakdown in Iranian morale. Teheran suffered heavy losses, economic strangulation and bomb and missile attacks on industrial, oil and civilian targets. The Iranian population was also experiencing a sense of hopelessness and isolation as a result of the American naval action in the gulf and because of a worldwide backlash against the excesses of its fundamentalist regime. Since World War II, only the Iran-Iraq war and the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967, 1973 and 1982 can be regarded as high-intensity wars. Western specialists have studied the Arab-Israeli wars, looking for keys to quick battlefield victories in the event of war in Europe between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The studies seem to show that heavy use of anti-tank weapons and deep air attacks, in the World War II tradition of Rommel and Patton, hold the key to countering Soviet-style warfare. United States and other officers in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization stress the quality of Western soldiers and equipment against those of the numerically superior Warsaw Pact, whose forces are viewed as less unified than those of NATO. But some military experts say the Eastern bloc and Western armies are roughly comparable. If rough equivalency of forces is a critical factor in conventional warfare, the Iran-Iraq war and World War I may in the long run hold the vital lessons for NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Dien bien:

1980 Sept. 7: President Saddam Hussein of Iraq cancels 1975 treaty with Iran and claims sovereignty over the Shatt al Arab, the waterway that forms part of the southern border between the countries. Iran rejects the claim. Minor border clashes follow. Sept. 22: Iraqi forces invade Iran. By the end of October the Iraqis occupy a strip of Iranian territory 6 to 25 miles wide. 1981 May: Iran begins a counteroffensive, forcing Iraqi forces back on the central and northern fronts. October: Iran starts drive on the Iraqi-held port of Khorramshahr. 1982 March 29: President Hussein proposes an Iraqi withdrawal to international borders. Iran ignores his offer and sets its conditions for negotiations: Iraqi withdrawal from Iranian territory, the overthrow of Mr. Hussein and payment of reparations. May 24: Iranians take Khorramshahr. 1984 Feb. 22: Iran mounts an offensive, entering Iraq by the end of the month and taking part of the Majnoon oilfields, north of Basra. An attempted advance on Basra is thwarted by Iraq. March 27: Iraq begins air attacks on oil tankers serving Iran. May: Iran retaliates by attacking Kuwaiti and Saudi tankers. 1985 March 11: Iran starts new offensive against Basra and crosses the Tigris River, but is driven back. Iran fires missiles at Baghdad in retaliation for Iraqi air raids on Iranian civilian targets. September: Iran seizes more territory around Majnoon. 1986 Feb. 9: Iranian forces cross the Shatt al Arab south of Basra. By Feb. 16, they occupy 300 square miles of the Fao peninsula. Dec. 24: Iran mounts offensive in southern Iraq. 1987 Jan. 6: President Hussein calls for peace. Jan. 9: Iran mounts drive against Basra, reaching outskirts. April 23: Iran increases attacks on neutral shipping. Kuwait appeals to big powers to protect free navigation in the gulf. May 17: Iraqi missile attack on the Navy frigate Stark kills 37 Americans. July 20: U.N. Security Council adopts resolution calling for end to war. July 24: Mine damages supertanker Bridgeton in first U.S. Navy convoy for Kuwaiti ships. Oct. 16: Iranian missile hits the Kuwaiti tanker Sea Isle City. Oct. 19: U.S. forces attack two Iranian oil platforms. 1988 March 16: Iran takes Halabja, in northern mountains; Iran says Iraq used chemical weapons. March 21: Up to 54 die in Iraqi air strike on Iranian supertankers. April 18: In retaliation for mining of the Samuel B. Roberts, a Navy ship, U.S. forces destroy two Iranian oil platforms and sink or damage six Iranian naval vessels. Iraqi forces recapture Fao peninsula. June 26: Iraqis retake Majnoon oilfields. July 3: Navy cruiser Vincennes downs Iranian jet, killing 290. July 11: Iraqis recapture Halabja. July 18: Iran says it will accept a U.N. resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. July 20: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini personally endorses a cease-fire. Source: Associated Press

WAR IN THE GULF: Iraqi Leader; Hussein's Errors: Complex Impulses

Behind President Saddam Hussein's humiliating defeat in Kuwait is a simple question with a complicated answer: How could the Iraqi leader have so badly miscalculated(nhm) the political will and the military power of his enemy? The coalition members, in their public and private diplomacy since the invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, had warned Mr. Hussein over and over that if he chose to stay and fight he risked the destruction of his military, his political future and his country. But the message had somehow not gotten through to him. And once the war started, even the devastation of his country's military, political and industrial infrastructure did not move Mr. Hussein to give in. In choosing to fight, Mr. Hussein was motivated by five overlapping(chong cheo), sometimes contradictory impulses, some suggesting that he knew he would lose, others indicating that he believed he could win

First, in the months before the war, Mr. Hussein saw war as inevitable. Instead of listening to the signals as they grew more ominous, he ignored them. He told a number of visitors that when faced with either a political or a military defeat, he chose to lose militarily. Tonight, after six weeks of fighting, President Bush declared that the Iraqi military had indeed been defeated. 3-Tier Iraqi Defense "I know I am going to lose," Mr. Hussein told a French envoy, Pierre Vauzelle, in a four-and-a-half hour meeting in early January, echoing statements made in October to Yevgeny M. Primakov, a top Soviet official on the Middle East. "At least I will have the death of a hero." According to a French diplomat familiar with the meeting, "Saddam said it with some resgination, as if he couldn't change the course of history -- the Arab ability to self-delude." Second, Mr. Hussein held the rank of field marshal, but he has never been a military man. When asked at the military briefing in Saudi Arabia today about what he thought of Mr. Hussein as a strategist, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf summed it up in the first word of his answer. "Hah!" he said. Mr. Hussein was not a soldier, not a general, not a strategist, not a tactician, he said. The Iraqi President believed that the war against the coalition would replicate the Iran-Iraq war, and that he could fight it and win it with the same strategy and defenses. He used a three-tier defense of fortified defenses along the Kuwaiti border, mechanized forces in reserve and Republican Guards, as he had done in the later, successful stages of the eight-year border war. America had the technology, he said in a speech to an Islamic conference in Baghdad on Jan. 11 that revealed his strategy, but he had the experience. Congressional Debate "Under all circumstances, one who wants to evict a fighter from the land will eventually depend on a soldier who walks on the ground and comes with a hand grenade, rifle and bayonet to fight the soldier in the battle trench," he said. "All this technological superiority, which is on paper, will eventually be tested in the theater of operations. We are not people who speak on the basis of books; we are people with experience in fighting." Mr. Hussein also had the men. After the Iran-Iraq war, he had demobilized only about 25 percent of his million-man army. Even if he lost three-fourths of it in a war against the allies, he would still be left with about the same size military he controlled on the eve of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980. Third, Mr. Hussein viewed the debate inherent in Western democracies as evidence of weakness and believed that he could outlast American will in any war. An avid viewer of CNN, according to President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Mr. Hussein misinterpreted the network's coverage of the Congressional debate over American policy on the gulf as evidence that such a divided country would not go to war. "He didn't realize that there could be democratic debate, but when a decision was taken, it would be over," Mr. Mubarak told Egypt's Parliament in an address last month. "He didn't believe that there could be a war." The Language of Force Fourth, Mr. Hussein gambled that in losing militarily, he might win politically. Even though the analogy did not fit, aides in Baghdad on the eve of the war compared his plight to that of Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt in 1967, who was defeated militarily in the Arab-Israeli War but held on politically -- albeit bloodied and beaten. There was a fifth reason for Mr. Hussein's miscalculations, related more to his character than his political outlook. Mr. Hussein was a leader who rose through the ranks of the Baath Party not as a political strategist but

as an underground guerrilla. As his speeches and actions over the years made clear, the language he best understood was the use of force. If the Iran-Iraq war was a guide, Mr. Hussein was not particularly skilled in the art of negotiating. In August, less than two weeks after the invasion of Kuwait, Mr. Hussein suddenly abandoned his war demands in order to free Iraqi troops from the Iranian border and curry favor with Teheran. The Iranians readily accepted the deal. When Mr. Hussein tried to negotiate his way out of the gulf crisis, he did not know how to do it. And by the time he agreed to withdraw from Kuwait, he was incapable of finding a negotiating starting point acceptable to Washington. For General Schwarzkopf, there was another explanation for Mr. Hussein's miscalculations. In an interview this month with U.S. News & World Report, the allied commander said that the Americans "have several reports that Saddam is a very distraught man, that he has three doctors treating him with tranquilizers, which may say something about his mental state."