The fighting, looting and revenge killings reported in the wake of the US troops’ charge toward Baghdad was expected by their commanders — and is seen by some involved in formulating the war plan as necessary in ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Military intelligence analysts long have predicted that the US charge toward the capital would leave a rolling civil war behind it in the south, as an oppressed Shiite population rose up and took revenge on local representatives of Saddam’s heavily Sunni Muslim government. This fighting has the potential of eliminating large parts the Baathist Party structure that rules Iraq and is the target of the US offensive.

From the first, the US assault force was consciously designed to be fast and lean — which means it’s too small to simultaneously carry out both an invasion and an occupation, dropping off forces in each town as it proceeds. And while the outbreak of civil strife is a concern, both for its effect on Iraqi civilians and the image it projects to the rest of the world, officials said they are determined not to allow it to distract the invasion force from its mission.

The top priority of the US offensive, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the US commander in the war, reiterated on Saturday, is to “end the regime of Saddam Hussein.’’

Making his first public appearance since the war began, Franks listed seven additional priorities, such as finding chemical and biological weapons caches and capturing terrorists — but restoring civil order wasn’t among them.

“This is about liberation and not about occupation,’’ Franks said.

There is some quiet concern in the army that fighting in the rear could cut or snarl the supply lines supporting the advancing columns. “I don’t think (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld has got it right,” one retired army general worried Saturday. “He’s got too light a force, and they already are running into trouble in Uum Qasr and Basra,’’ two cities in the south where combat and looting continued Saturday.

While the United States has vowed to stabilize Iraq in its current borders, chaos in the wake of the invasion could encourage both the restive Shiite south and the ethnically divided north to try to split off from the Sunni center of the country. That kind of upheaval would infuriate every US ally in the region, who are counting on Iraq to retain territorial integrity. It also would complicate postwar humanitarian relief efforts.

Still, even as fighting spread Saturday in the south, Franks and others insisted everything was going according to plan. Asked about combat in and around Basra, the biggest city in the south, he said, “our intent is not to move through and create military confrontations in that city.’’

“Follow-on forces will be arriving to deal with security eventually, but we’re just not going to slow down our combat force,’’ a Defense official said. There has been no indication of when those reinforcements might arrive to begin peacekeeping operations.

“You can’t have it both ways,” said another Pentagon insider. “You have to win the war quickly — and you can’t move fast enough if you are infusing authority along the way.’’

He also echoed the possibility that the violence might help the US military if it targets secret police and other elements of the regime who otherwise might be able to fight the invasion.

So, for the moment, the US military aims only to secure a few major highways for its supply lines, leaving the vast majority of southern Iraq essentially without civil authority. That’s a riskier approach than the army is accustomed to taking, but it is in keeping with a plan far more audacious than the army customarily executes.

In a number of important respects, that plan is working better than even those who conceived it expected. Lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division advancing north from Kuwait have traveled with impressive speed, crossing the Euphrates and covering more than half the distance to Baghdad in just two days. They were reported Saturday to be about 150 miles south of the capital.

Special Operations forces in the west have secured a key airfield and, with the help of missile-hunting US warplanes, suppressed the potential for Iraq to fire missiles into Israel. In one previously unreported attack, an Air Force jet patrolling western Iraq Wednesday night located and destroyed a missile launcher, according to air force officials.

Worries that Saddam would set fire to oil fields in both the north and the south have gone largely unrealized. None in the north have gone up in flame, the Pentagon said Saturday, and only nine of about 500 in the south have. Additionally, American and British forces have secured three key oil terminals and found explosives there that had been set to go off.

The air campaign also has produced encouraging results. There are strong indications that since the bombing began Wednesday night, Baghdad hasn’t been able to issue many orders to its field forces, Pentagon officials said Saturday. Also, as of late Saturday, US and British aircraft had flown more than 3,000 sorties without a single plane downed or even damaged.

But for all its gains, the US war effort was still confronting some difficult challenges and showing signs of lagging response — and not just in the south.

In the north, US commanders have yet to insert a significant invasion force to secure oil fields and prevent conflict between Kurdish factions and neighboring Turkish forces. Only a small contingent of Special Operations forces have been sent to the area so far.

Also absent so far has been the kind of major humanitarian relief operation that Pentagon officials had acknowledged before the war would be necessary to care for Iraq’s 23 million people until private and UN relief groups could take over some of the assistance and a new Iraqi government established.

Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, a senior aide to Franks, speaking at a Saturday news conference in Qatar, showed a picture of stocks of supplies massed outside Iraq awaiting distribution. But Pentagon officials acknowledged that little of the aid has begun to flow into Iraq yet.

Arab News Features 24 March 2003