Army leaders have shown tactical brilliance to win the war, and will againhave to think unconventionally to win the peace, writes Tom Clonan
With Saddam's forces retreating from Baghdad for a possible final battle in Tikrit, the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk have fallen to Kurdish and American forces. The situation within Baghdad, however, remains fluid. US troops continue to engage Muslim extremists and Saddam loyalists at the Adhamiya mosque and in the Mansur and Dawrah districts of the capital.
Efforts to enforce a semblance of law and order within Baghdad have been frustrated by shooting incidents and attacks on US troops throughout the city. A suicide bomb, the third such attack on US forces in the region since the war started, killed a number of marines at a US checkpoint in Saddam City on Thursday night.
Allied to these factors, with Centcom issuing a list containing the names of up to 55 Iraqi leaders it wants "killed or captured", the propensity for further violence within the country continues to grow.
Ironically, the chaotic descent into looting and mob violence that has marked the current phase of the US campaign in Iraq is a partial consequence of the recent dramatic American advance on Baghdad.
Centcom, aware of the potential for riotous public disorder within Iraq following the sudden "decapitation" of Saddam's regime will have had plans for such a prospect. They would have included the saturation of Iraqi population centres with high-profile patrols, checkpoints and cordons.
In a textbook military scenario, the civilian population in such circumstances would be subject to martial law and a strictly enforced curfew. Even in ideal conditions, however, such a stabilisation phase would be troop-intensive and would require major reinforcement and reorganisation.
At present the US and British have not yet completely neutralised enemy opposition. Nor do they have sufficient numbers of troops to mount an effective policing-style operation within Iraq's major cities.
As sporadic fighting continues, US troops on the ground will remain on a combat footing. This aggressive posture will probably lead to further military and civilian casualties in the coming days.
In order to remedy this situation, Centcom will be anxious to ensure that troops of the US 4th Mechanised Division begin to reinforce their beleaguered comrades in Baghdad as soon as possible. In order to avoid tarnishing President Bush's stunning victory over Saddam, it will be imperative for Gen Franks to restore order within Baghdad and render humanitarian aid in a timely fashion.
In the coming days, domestic and international public opinion will be critical of any further degradation of Iraq's civil infrastructure and will be especially hostile to images of further bloodletting or humanitarian crisis emanating from the country.
For career officers in the military, campaigns such as Operation Iraqi Freedom bring with them mixed fortunes. Maj Gen Buford Blount, commander of the US 3rd Infantry Division, has performed exceptionally well in this conflict. Analyses of his armoured assault on Baghdad will no doubt become compulsory reading on the syllabuses of military academies for years to come.
Commanding a force of over 10,000 vehicles, accompanied by over 350 5,000-gallon fuel trucks, Gen Blount's 200-mile advance on Baghdad was a triumph of logistics and speed over difficult terrain and a static Iraqi defence.
His seizure of Baghdad's Saddam International Airport and subsequent dash to the city centre ran contrary to established military doctrine. Until now, received wisdom within the military would hold that tanks and armour are vulnerable to attack in cities requiring large numbers of dismounted infantry in support. Gen Blount ignored battlefield precedent this week and pressed home his advantage, steam-rolling his tanks from the airport to the city centre.
His success in Iraq will be welcomed among army officers in the Pentagon jealous of their peers in the Navy and Air Force who, because of strategic air and naval power, have won most of the US military's kudos in recent conflicts.
The digitisation of the US army, with the proliferation of "ruggedised" laptops and the computerisation of tactical operations centres (TOCs) in the field, has revolutionised the command-and-control and manoeuvre capability of ground forces.
This has been accompanied by bold and decisive leadership on the part of US ground commanders.
Moving away from the conservative military culture associated with the European tradition, the Pentagon has encouraged a liberal education programme for the forces, which has facilitated the professionalisation of their officer corps.
In such a meritocracy, officers such as Gen Tommy Franks have risen from the enlisted ranks to positions of high command. Such a scenario would be impossible in a surprisingly large number of European armies that remain encumbered with an artificially imposed class system.
Now that Basra, Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk have fallen, challenging days lie ahead for US officers in Iraq. Difficult command decisions will face Centcom as the ground campaign moves away from a conventional war to a low-intensity stabilisation operation.
With troops unfamiliar with and untrained in the aid-to-the-civil-power type operations (ATCP Ops) now required to restore order in Iraq, the military will be seeking to shift the onus on to the Iraqis to police themselves. This will require the US to identify Iraqi organisations possessed of a functioning system of command-and-control and the communications and equipment necessary to police the civilian population.
These requirements alone suggest that the US will appoint pre-existing Iraqi security agencies to fulfil this role. Such agencies could include the Iraqi police force or even the Iraqi 5th Army Corps reported to have signed a ceasefire with the US military. Whatever instruments are chosen, it will inevitably mean that Baath Party members may be given positions of responsibility in the interim authority to be overseen by the US military.
Despite the controversy this might engender, it will be far preferable to the prospect of US troops engaged in daily confrontation with a population culturally alien to them. A high degree of lateral thinking will be required of the US military in the coming days to effect a speedy conclusion to the current conflict.
For Bush and Blair, in terms of public opinion, a spiralling civilian body count at this stage of the war would represent the snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory.
Dr Tom Clonan is a retired Army officer with experience in the Middle East and former Yugoslavia. He is a fellow of the US-based Inter University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. He currently lectures in the School of Media at DIT