Report on urban warfare points to US plans to destroy Iraqi cities

Patrick Martin of the WSWS reports,

A new report on urban warfare by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff is a blueprint for the use of America’s overwhelming military and technological supremacy to brutalize and terrorize a far weaker opponent into submission. It suggests that in any invasion of Iraq, American military planners are prepared to use massive firepower to destroy Iraq’s major cities.

At the same time, the military brass would prefer to treat cities like Baghdad and Basra as targets to be devastated from afar, rather than as prospective combat zones. The document emphasizes the obstacles which urban combat places before an attacking force, raising as cautionary examples such bloody urban battles as Stalingrad, Hue (Vietnam) and Grozny (Chechnya).

The report, dated September 16, 2002, was made available on the web site of the New York Times, which described the document in an article October 21. The study...is entitled “Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations.” (In Pentagon terminology, “joint” designates an operation combining air, naval, ground and special operations forces under a single command).

The Times article is fundamentally dishonest, portraying the new strategy as aimed at bypassing cities, avoiding combat losses and minimizing civilian deaths. A careful reading of the report suggests the opposite conclusion: despite occasional lip service to such humanitarian concerns, it makes a case for using advanced weaponry on a massive scale—with an inevitably catastrophic impact on the civilian population—as a substitute for the perils and difficulties of house-to-house ground combat...