Gwynne Dyer: Spectre of Stalin walks in Baghdad

Historical analogies are often misleading, but have you noticed that Saddam Hussein, in recent TV broadcasts, looks more and more like Josef Stalin?

That's how he is positioning himself politically, too. Like Stalin during World War II, he is effectively telling Iraqis to forget about the socialist ideology, the purges and all the rest, and unite against the foreign invader.

As in the old Soviet Union, many citizens seem to be listening.

Stalin's finest hour was in 1941, when Hitler invaded with the confident expectation of victory in a matter of weeks.

He had this brilliant military technique, blitzkrieg, which allowed relatively small numbers of German troops to spread shock and awe among the defenders (the phrase was first used in the Nazi magazine Signal) and achieve a rapid victory at low cost.

The blitzkrieg technique had beaten France in six weeks. Hitler calculated that it ought to work better against the Soviet Union because the vast majority of citizens hated Stalin and the Communist Party.

Stalin's secret police had murdered millions, and all the non-Russian citizens of the Soviet Union hated Russian rule. So masses of Soviet troops would defect at the first opportunity, and the non-Russian half of the population would greet the Germans as liberators.

Sound familiar?

In July 1941, the German Army launched its armoured columns into the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, and within weeks its tanks were many hundreds of kilometres inside the country.

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were cut off and left behind as the tank spearheads raced for Moscow; points of resistance were bypassed in the interest of speed; shock and awe were the essence of the strategy.

But the cut-off Soviet troops did not surrender, the garrisons of bypassed towns attacked the German supply lines, and the people did not strew roses before the invaders.

The German spearheads ultimately got quite close to Moscow, but winter closed their offensive down and the Soviet capital was never captured.

The war turned into a nightmare battle of attrition that eventually destroyed the German Army.

This history offers some precedents that must be keeping the commanders of the American forces in Iraq awake at night.

This is not to imply that George W. Bush is like Adolf Hitler, or that the US Government's goals in Iraq resemble Nazi Germany's in the Soviet Union.

But American military strategy now does resemble German military strategy then, and there are close parallels between Stalin's Soviet Union and Saddam's Iraq.

Look at the US strategy in Iraq. It depends on shock and awe, mostly in the form of air power delivered right on target to bewilder and demoralise the defenders.

Above all, it depends on the assumption that the ruling party is so rotten, the ruler so universally hated, that the edifice will collapse at the first hard push.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein's rule has always been essentially a Soviet-style state. Indeed, during the 1970s, before war and sanctions ruined Iraq's economy, the ruling Arab Renaissance (Baath) Socialist Party used Iraq's oil revenue to built an impressive welfare state. The wars were Saddam's fault - but the reason he survived them is because he is a mini-Stalin.

The secret police, the party militia, the commissars, the personality cult - it's all there, and combined with natural Iraqi patriotism, it makes the country much more resistant to an unprovoked foreign invasion than the Pentagon thought it would be.

So is the US Army in the same predicament before Baghdad that the German Army was outside Moscow in 1941?

Technically, yes: it is 500km from its base of supply with unbroken enemy forces all along its lines of communications. But that's as far as the analogy goes, because the US Army is so overwhelmingly strong that it can make any number of mistakes and still win.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, it was attacking a country with a bigger industrial base and twice as many people: there was no margin for error if the blitzkrieg did not produce a quick win.

By contrast, Americans outnumber Iraqis 12-to-one, and the US defence budget is 250 times bigger than Iraq's.

Defeating the Iraqis will take longer and cost more than US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expected, but it would take a genius to lose this war.

He has the arrogance, but he is no genius.

Herald Feature: Iraq war