Republican Guard

And they were a period of four to six hours apiece.

And you're thinking, we've seen combat, but we have not seen Saddam's Republican guards, his special Republican guards, his elite forces.

We have only seen his conventional regular army and what we call Fadeen forces, which are pro-Sunni, pro-Saddam rebel fighters.

And that's when morale got kind of tough.

We did see some, but mainly from Team Assassin and Team ROP, which was in our lead.

That was my company that I got sliced away from.

We finally, within five kilometers of the bridge, start taking heavy artillery from the Republican guards.

And we're on a hardball road, not a hardball road, it's an improved like gravel road.

If successful, it was hoped it would speed up the fall of his regime, but ultimately Saddam survived this attack.

Guarding the city were regular Iraqi army units that had survived coalition air power thus far, and up to four divisions of the much vaunted Republican Guard.

By the end of March, the defenders' numbers swelled with the incorporation of paramilitary groups and volunteers who took up arms against what was increasingly being seen by Muslims the world over as a war against Islam by the West.

However, by this time, Saddam Hussein feared a coup perhaps even more than he feared the invading US-led forces.

US and coalition forces completely outmatched their Iraqi opponents on the battlefield, and they blazed a path towards the Iraqi city.

In the build-up to the battle, coalition air power carried out targeted strikes in and around the city.

Many of these targets concerned air defense sites, or were aimed directly at the Republican Guard's infrastructure.

While careful efforts were made to avoid civilian casualties, the strikes had a profound psychological effect on the population, who often saw their night sky glow orange and the ground tremble from the detonations, which combined with a leaflet-dropping campaign aimed to make any would-be defender of the city feel the situation was hopeless.

And we were thinking about how we were going to do what we really needed to do a lot quicker and with a lot less force, because there were some of us who thought Saddam Hussein was a hollow shell.

And as it turned out, he was, for all intents and purposes, pretty hollow, even the Republican Guard.

That said, we didn't, and we took our time, and you can thank Colin Powell for that and H.W. Bush being convinced by Colin Powell that that was the case.

Dick Cheney was not necessarily convinced until he saw the president was convinced.

Ground zero.

Even Republican Guard will go there.

Ground

zero.

Everything in us wanted to go help them, but that was beyond our mandate.

We weren't allowed to do that, uh, you know, to help the Shia, because they were being pummeled by the, the, uh, Sunni Republican Guard people.

And yet that was the rules of engagement, so we had to abide by that, and that brought that war to an end.

And of course, then we know what happened after that.

I did not know that.

My experience with Yemen started, I guess, about 2010 when there was a disorder and the people of Yemen were divided between The Republican Guard, I think they called themselves, headquartered in the north, in the capital Sana'a, and they were chiefly a military dictatorship that had been in power for decades.

And the rising against them was indistinct, but at the time it was interpreted as al-Qaeda or jihadist rising.

That wasn't accurate.

...

there goes another Republican Guard.

Thank you very much, Bob.

All right, you have a good night.