Lessons on how to oust Hussein

One alternative would be for the US to adopt a "northern alliance" strategy in Iraq, using the Kurds in the same way as it did Afghan fighters opposed to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

US Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Peter Osman has arrived in northern Iraq Sunday to head up the Military Coordination and Liaison Command, and Kurdish officials are pressing him to allow a wider role for the Kurds in any northern front. But this is a sensitive subject, since a Kurdish military role might well provoke a Turkish intervention.

The Turks do not want to see the Kurds gain any more power and autonomy in northern Iraq than they already have because they worry that such a development would inspire Turkey's Kurdish minority to demand a similar arrangement.

"We are capable of taking Kirkuk again, but for political reasons we cannot," Mustafa says. "But if the coalition orders us to have a role in liberating Kirkuk or Mosul or Tikrit or Baghdad, we are ready."

Another feature of the Kurdish strategy in 1991 was a propaganda campaign, in advance of the rebellion, to inform people collaborating with the regime that they would not be punished. "We alerted them that there will be no revenge, no looting, no killing and we will forget the past to build a new era," Mustafa says. The idea was to give lower-echelon members of the regime some incentive to go along with an uprising, rather than to defend the status quo.

Mustafa sees little evidence that there is any coordinated effort by the US to bring about popular rebellions in Iraqi cities. The US does not seem determined, in cities apart from Baghdad, to crush the institutions that the Kurds targeted in 1991. As a result, he argues, "the population ... cannot move."

What is clear is a near-total focus on the capital. "I think the grand strategy of Gen. [Tommy] Franks is to surround Baghdad and oblige the Iraqi Army to surrender as a whole and not division by division," Mustafa says, referring to the leader of the US Central Command. Even so, some US actions puzzle Mustafa: Iraq's internal communications systems, mass media, and electrical infrastructure seem to be largely intact after a week of war.

Allowing the regime to communicate within its ranks and with the Iraqi people helps maintain the perception that it is still in control, Mustafa argues. One way to counter this perception would be to put Iraqis in "liberated" parts of the country or exiled Iraqi opposition figures on the radio, in order to promote the notion that regime change is a certainty.

Instead, the propaganda effort, through leaflets and radio, seems focused on telling Iraqis to stay in their homes. "You can feel the lack of any Iraqi opposition element in this war against Saddam Hussein and his party," Mustafa says.

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