Gen Tommy R Franks, the overall commander of US forces in Iraq, boasted in a briefing in Doha, Qatar that the military campaign in Iraq would be "unlike any other in history." ( First soldier killed in base incident in Kuwait, 12 others wounded )

As the Iraqi war progresses, it is apparent that this "unlikeness" is not o­nly quite true but it is also not necessarily reflective that all is well and smooth in respect of the coalition's prosecution of the war so far, as Commander Franks claimed.

For example:

First, this is a divisive and controversial war launched by US-led coalition without the United Nations Security Council's sanction and notwithstanding widespread domestic and worldwide anti-war protests occurring at the outset of war. There was even an abnormal incident of US' own soldier identified as Sgt Asan Akbar of the 326th Engineer Battalion, who most likely due to resentment or protest against the war, attacked by grenade and small arm fire his own command centre of the 101st Division's 1st Brigade at Camp Pennsylvania, Kuwait.

Second, it is also an anomaly that for the Butcher of Baghdad with a record of aggression against Kuwait in 1991 and repression against his own people, he is presently getting not o­nly more than his share of world sympathy that he hardly deserves, but also wrestling rather successfully the moral cause of the conflict away from the US-led coalition.

True, adversaries have every right to use every weapon in their arsenal. Yet where Baghdad is continually and helplessly strafed every night by precision-guided bombs launched by cruise ships and planes that Iraqi defenders could hardly see, much less respond, the glaring disparity and o­ne-sidedness of the conflict is stark.

Even sympathisers of the American-led campaign will, given time, be "awed and shocked" into outrage at this unfairness and lack of a level playing field in a match. And there is something in the American soul that abhors a bully. Americans have always been a people that have pride in according everyone a level field in educational and economic opportunities, in love, as in war too! As this unequal war progresses, it is difficult to reconcile how this war of liberation is increasingly becoming more like a battle between "David Hussein" who uses his wits and the "American Goliath", in size and strength.

Because of the rampant domestic and international opposition and the controversies underlying its moral cause, the US-led coalition is presently conducting the war based o­n seemingly conflicting imperatives that are difficult to implement at battlefield level i.e. overwhelming blitz-erg with minimal civilian casualties and collateral damage and maximum humanitarian aid.

How these conflicting imperatives can be satisfactorily achieved simultaneously is a matter of doubt when dealing with an uncanny and ruthless adversary like Saddam Hussein.

He neutralises the superior firepower of coalition forces by the simple expedience of bringing in women and children to military positions as human shields.

Unlike in the last Gulf War in which Saddam's military forces were lined up in open desert to be annihilated by aerial bombing, today they are hunkered in urban centres amongst local populace that precision bombs cannot be used without inflicting massive civilian casualties.

Coalition forces may have barreled quickly through the desert in a short span of four days to advance within 150km of Baghdad and 'captured' important strategic ports like Umm Qsar and towns like Basra and Nasiriyah, but in the absence of a house-to-house search, it is doubtful that they have ferreted out Iraqi forces holed up in these places. Even if coalition forces reach the outer perimeters of Saddam's capital and centre of command and control in Baghdad, their flanks are not necessarily protected from sporadic guerilla attacks.

The decisive battle of "Operation Iraqi freedom" will be the "Battle for Baghdad". If won, the rest of the country will be pacified.

So far amongst the "carefully" selected targets pounded and blitzed in Baghdad were the presidential compound at the Old Palace and other palaces, the cabinet bunker, Baath party and military headquarters, government offices and other ministries. These are but mere symbols of what were o­nce the Iraqi command structures.

No o­ne would reasonably expect Saddam and his top military commanders to still strategise and confer within any of these obvious targets to be decimated.

Massive precision bombing will kill Iraqi forces but it would also subvert the other imperative of minimising civilian casualties and collateral damage to infrastructure.

The gauntlet thown down here is whether in the final analysis coalition forces dare to enter Baghdad and engage in hand-to-hand, street-to-street combat under the range of ubiquitous sniper fire. This urban warfare is the nightmare that US marines have seen in films like Black Hawk down and Enemy at the gate . Will Caucasians be willing to spill their precious blood ostensibly for the reinstatement of Iraqi people's freedom from Saddam's tyrannical regime? Are American forces trained or experienced in fighting successfully in large-scale urban warfare in which the other side has advantage of terrain and conditions?

If starving the city is inconsistent with humanitarian mantle of the coalition's campaign, waiting in concentrations outside the perimeters of Baghdad is no solution either. It demoralises the coalition's troops, exposes them to guerilla attacks from the flanks, if not a direct chemical or biological warhead lobbed from within the city.

Undoubtedly it would be the intent of "A-Day" to avert this scenario of urban engagement. It is intended to impress upon the people and the defenders of Baghdad that the coalition's victory is a certainty, Saddam Hussein is finished and his rule, history, and it would be wiser for them to dessert, if not rebel against and assassinate him within Baghdad.

The question then becomes whether the people and ordinary soldiers defending Baghdad would be so impressed, shocked and awed by the sound and fury of precision bombing as to turn against Saddam Hussein and loyalists, and by proxy shed their blood to dislodge them alongside the American-led forces entering the city.

This bears o­n the other ultimate question whether the people of Baghdad really hate Saddam and whether they view American intervention as liberation or aggression. The Pentagon says it is liberation but there is so much of disinformation in this psy-war from both sides that o­ne scarcely knows which is the truth. How reliable however is CIA intelligence that the people of Baghdad will cooperate with the invaders, when it failed in first instance to pinpoint Saddam Hussein's exact location for Operation Decapitation to take him out?

It is true that Saddam won the first round by merely surviving ( By merely staying alive, Saddam won round o­ne ). According to a New York Times report, President Bush had now conceded that the war in Iraq "could be longer and more difficult than some have predicted".

To Saddam, it means more time for:

  • Anti-war protests in US, UK and worldwide to spread and gather momentum;
  • Moderate Muslim regimes or Muslim governments like Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey or Egypt to be destabilised by their outraged Muslim constituencies;
  • Radical groups, terrorist cells and networks worldwide to be galvanised to take his "jihad" direct to selected targets in Washington London and Sydney; and
  • More captured marines and more body bags to be sent back to America to undermine the collective morale and will to wage this war of attrition.

The US now complains that the Iraqi regime violates the Geneva Convention to film and thrust in front of Iraqi TV images of at least four dead coalition soldiers and five prisoners of war captured.

But has the US adhered to Geneva Convention, in targeting the assassination of Saddam Hussein, his family and Iraqi top officials by Operation Decapitation?

This is the kind of moral contradiction that the US gets itself increasingly tied to when it seeks incompatible imperatives of using overwhelming force to win the war first round without spillage of its own Caucasian blood and with minimum civilian casualties to assuage international outrage which was brought about in the first place by the US' inconsistent position of playing policeman for the United Nations (to enforce Security Council's resolution 1441 against Iraq) and subsequently, where expedient, conveniently ignore the Security Council's veto (by launching the Iraqi War without the UN's endorsement).

In summary, to the US, it is becoming a war that, having started o­n wrong footing, has now to be prosecuted o­n seemingly conflicting imperatives between swift victory and humanitarian concerns, that in turn necessitates double standard and double faced responses o­n the US' part in relation to the standards of Geneva Conventions, and undermine in that process the entire moral cause upon which it is, according to Sun Tzu, supposed to be underpinned.