The city had no remaining air defenses and Allied bombers streaked across the night sky, dropping their payloads unimpeded. Inside the capital, teen-agers, some as young as 12, donned helmets several sizes too large for them and took up weapons they could barely lift. Suicide squads, armed with explosives, prepared to meet Allied tanks on the city outskirts. And death squads roamed the city perimeter with official orders to shoot any citizen attempting to flee.
Baghdad 2003? It could have well been. But it is, in fact, Berlin in 1945. While Russian and American troops closed in on Adolf Hitler – presaging the end of the Third Reich – Berlin became a fiery battleground as the command structure of Nazi Germany precipitously collapsed. It was in these final days of the Third Reich that a delusional Adolf Hitler, so strongly convinced that the German people should share his own fate, conceived the idea of suicide in common as the mark of national glory.
Defiant to the end, Hitler brought destruction on his capital without thinking twice about the suffering of his people.
The Battle for Baghdad seems to have borne many hallmarks of the earlier Fuhrerdammerung. Here another recalcitrant dictator – delusional and convinced that there is victory in the most abject defeat – seemed willing to sacrifice thousands of his own people in a fatal attempt to achieve posthumous glory. Once again, a leader called for his people to martyr themselves for a cause that has nothing to do with their own welfare but everything to do with the hubris of the man who leads them.
Yet, unlike Hitler, Saddam Hussein’s seemingly futile resistance was based on a plan. He had believed that widespread hatred of the United States and the memory of colonialism would inspire Arab intervention. But it is rare for one Arab nation to rise in support of another, no matter how many riots swarm through the streets of their cities.
The regimes in these countries are led by calculating men who usually weigh the balance of risk before surrendering to the emotion of the street. They see the world changing and share a keen sense of how the United States will take account of newly perceived friends and foes. In the end, no Arab leader was willing to risk the ire of the future victor for the sake of a pointless Arab liaison.
Hussein’s fallback position was reliance on world opinion, a strategy of isolating the United States through withering condemnation by its Western allies. That strategy worked well to isolate the United States in the U.N. Security Council, but did little else. There was never evidence that those countries, which fought so vigorously to stave a U.S. attack on Iraq, would lift a finger to defend Iraq or save Saddam Hussein’s regime from certain destruction.
The only result of the winter fiasco at the United Nations was the irremediable weakening of that international body – its eclipse as an organization capable of anything other than partisan quibbling. The United States has wisely rejected any suggestion that a discredited and compromised United Nations should play any meaningful role in administering a defeated Iraq.
Finally, Hussein was looking for a means to destroy American will and morale through mounting casualties. Hussein and the Iraqi leadership believed that the specter of Vietnam would descend on the battlefield and issue a windstorm of domestic revulsion in the United States.
But, once again, he gravely miscalculated. Iraq is no Vietnam, and the American public is now far more deeply sensitized to the risks of a domestic attack than at any time during the Cold War. If opinion polls are right, the American public’s willingness to accept combat losses against an enemy nation has markedly changed since the Vietnam War – and most particularly since the events of Sept. 11, 2001. This is unlikely to alter until the rest of the Middle East is swept clean of Saddam-like dictatorships.
That all leaves Saddam Hussein secreted in an Iraqi bunker, nervously awaiting the end. Much like Hitler, he may be determined to twin his own suicide with the destruction of his country. ” Losses can never be too high,” Adolf Hitler once told his generals. “They sow the seeds of future glory.”
By his willingness to expose his people to such needless destruction, Saddam Hussein has proven himself a fitting successor to the German dictator and eminently worthy of receiving that man’s fate.
Avi Davis is the senior fellow of the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies and the senior editorial columnist for the online magazine Jewsweek.
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