Rumsfeld still hopes for Shiite rebellion

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld held out hope Thursday that the Shiite population in Baghdad opposed to President Saddam Hussein would stage an uprising against the regime, without the need for U.S. ground forces to invade the city of 5 million people.\nAt a Senate hearing, Rumsfeld was asked what would happen once the tens of thousands of U.S. Army and Marine troops now on the southern approaches to Baghdad got to the capital.\nRumsfeld suggested that they would follow the example in southern Iraq of the British handling of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. British forces have surrounded Basra for several days and are fighting loyalist Iraqi forces on the outskirts while encouraging a Shiite rebel uprising.\nRumsfeld noted that, like in Basra, there are many Shiites in the capital. "And they are not terribly favorable to the regime," Rumsfeld said. "They've been repressed, and they are in the present time in Basra assisting us." He said roughly half of Baghdad's population are Shiites.\n"The regime has tended to be fearful of them and repress them," he said, adding that he expected Saddam's loyalists to shoot any Iraqi troops in Baghdad who try to surrender and those who might try to assist U.S. forces.\n"We will go through a period where we'll have to deal with that problem. We'll put in (air) strikes as necessary, we'll undoubtedly get assistance from people inside the city, and we will attack them and subdue them," he said.\nUnder questioning, Rumsfeld acknowledged that it could take an extended period to secure Baghdad, and that a first step would be to destroy or gain the surrender of the Republican Guard divisions ringing Baghdad.\nOther defense officials said U.S.-led invading forces flew more than 600 bombing missions over Iraq on Thursday, stepping up the air campaign that had slowed because of bad weather.\nThey were hitting Republican Guard formations around Baghdad.\nPowerful sandstorms had forced the cancellations of a couple hundred planned bombing missions Wednesday. That weather -- along with unexpectedly strong resistance spurred by Iraqi paramilitary forces in central and southern Iraq in recent days -- had created a drag on coalition troops and forced them to focus on those pockets of resistance.\nBrig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told a press conference Thursday morning at command headquarters in Qatar that the invasion force remains "on plan."\nA week into the war, he declined to estimate how much longer it might take to overthrow Saddam Hussein.\nOn Capitol Hill, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Appropriations Committee: "This will not delay the execution of the plan laid out by (commanding) General (Tommy) Franks. It's tough to characterize because of the way they act. A better definition is regime death squads. They are putting guns to the heads of Iraqi citizens and forcing them to fight, and they'd much rather give up."\nOther U.S. military leaders had warned Wednesday against expecting a quick end to the war as U.S. Army paratroopers opened a northern front and thousands of other troops assembled for an eventual assault on Baghdad.\n"It may go fast, it may go slow, and we're going to apply any power we need to get the job done," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the overall campaign Wednesday night.\nThe speed of the initial U.S. ground attack into Iraq from Kuwait last week led many to assume Baghdad would be assaulted soon, but now that appears to be many days away.\nSevere sandstorms also had grounded Apache helicopters that made an initial round of strikes Monday against armor of the Medina division of the Republican Guard.\nCoalition planes put attacks on the Republican Guard's Medina and Hammurabi divisions at the top of their target lists Wednesday.\nThe military continued to insist that the war was on track and not being significantly affected by the Iraqi shock troops accused of multiple atrocities and ambushes against American forces.\n"They have executed prisoners of war ... They have used women and children as human shields and they have pretended to surrender and then opened fire," Pace said on CNN's "Larry King Live."\n"I've never seen anything like this. It's disgusting," he said.\nThe general apparently was referring to some of the U.S. Army troops captured Sunday by Iraqi forces in the city of An Nasiriyah.\nIntelligence officials have received one uncorroborated report indicating that at least some of the dead soldiers had been captured alive and executed in public, a senior Pentagon official said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.\nThe United States also opened a northern front Wednesday by dropping 1,000 paratroopers of the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade onto an airfield in Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Iraq.