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The ruling Baath Party had purged almost all non-Baathist officers from the army during the 1970s. As a result, the officer corps stopped seeing itself as the defender of a national entity known as Iraq and began to see its mission as the preservation of the party and its leader, Saddam Hussein. By 1980, a fifth of Iraq's work force was in the army, police or militia. The effect of Saddam's policies was to turn the country into an ideologically motivated military machine. Rumors of coups and plots within the military had no significant result on the conduct of the eight-year conflict with Iran, says Anthony Cordesman, author of The Lessons of Modern War, an authoritative study of the Iraq-Iran war.
Western experts consider the Iraqi army to be three forces in one:
-- The regular army, which consists of 50 infantry divisions of 12,000 men each, backed by substantial numbers of tanks and other armored vehicles.
-- The People's Army, a relatively weak, poorly trained and badly organized militia.
-- The vaunted Republican Guards, a tough combat force of 125,000 selected for their bravery and loyalty.
Saddam's strategy is clear -- making a virtue of necessity. He cannot reach out and strike the allied forces because his air force is in hiding or in exile, his insignificant navy is bottled up, and his Scud missiles are too inaccurate to pose much threat to military targets. He can only hope that the allied troops will come to him in a frontal assault on his fixed positions.
If that occurs, his troops would almost certainly let fly with shells loaded with chemical weapons -- mustard gas that sears and blisters, nerve agents that cause death in minutes, or even biological killers like anthrax and botulism. Experts still argue whether Iraq has biological warheads for its bombs or shells, but thousands of chemical weapons have been stored along the front in Iraq and Kuwait.
Chemical weapons are horrifying and unreliable, and some military specialists have questioned whether Saddam would resort to them. Poisons might not be highly effective because modern armored vehicles have filters to keep them out and infantrymen wear protective gear. But Saddam is determined to kill as many allied troops as possible, and his chemical shells caused an estimated 25,000 Iranian deaths.
Saddam's keen desire to lure allied forces into ground combat, the sooner the better, is obvious to General Norman Schwarzkopf and his colleagues. As the allied commander pointed out last week, his air campaign is now blasting the supply lines to Kuwait, especially bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
It would suit Schwarzkopf fine if cutting supply lines from the air would drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but that is not likely to happen. Since they use up a lot of supplies during combat -- Iraqi gunners fire as many shells in one day as Americans do in a week -- the Iraqis have stockpiled immense quantities of munitions.