The Times (London) July 28, 2002
U.S. Fears "Basra Breakout"
A surprise Iraqi attack on Kuwait would seriously hurt the bid to topple Saddam Hussein.
By Tony Allen-Mills
WASHINGTON - In a heavily populated district of the southern Iraqi city of Basra, a garage roof slides open to reveal a mobile missile launcher. Minutes later, a modified Scud missile carrying a warhead packed with VX nerve gas streaks into the night sky, heading for a U.S. military base in Kuwait.
Simultaneously, three Iraqi army divisions pour out of Basra towards the Kuwaiti border only 64 kilometres away. After months of threats and bluster, the battle for control of Baghdad begins, not with an orderly U.S. build-up, but with a sudden Iraqi attack. Pentagon planners have dubbed it the "Basra breakout," a nightmare scenario that might seriously complicate the American drive to topple President Saddam Hussein.
Senior officers at U.S. Central Command have warned their superiors in Washington that U.S. forces, as currently deployed in the region, have only a 50-50 chance of preventing Iraqi troops from mounting an attack on Kuwait City and effectively taking its civilian population hostage.
While any such attack would instantly unite most of the world against Saddam Hussein, some U.S. military planners believe the Iraqi dictator may conclude he has nothing to lose once he decides the Americans are coming to kill him.
A defiant thrust on Kuwait would disrupt U.S. plans for a ground war and delay an advance on Baghdad.
"Preventing an Iraqi occupation of Kuwait City could be a difficult task if Iraq is willing to absorb very high levels of damage done by U.S. and allied air and missile power," warned Anthony Cordesman, a former director of intelligence assessment at the Pentagon. He and most other military experts in Washington are convinced U.S. forces would eventually prevail. But concerns are spreading at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill that the cost could be far higher than President George W. Bush's administration has acknowledged.
No official casualty estimates have been published, but the Senate foreign relations committee is expected to hear this week that U.S. troops may face far greater dangers than during the campaign in Afghanistan. Chemical or biological weapons could be deployed and the Republican Guards could resort to guerrilla warfare.
"Fighting delaying actions inside urban areas offers Iraq a way of using human shields, limiting U.S. airstrike capability and forcing U.S.-led coalition forces to fight on the most restricted terms," said Mr. Cordesman, who published a 92-page study of Iraq's fighting capabilities last week.
"American military casualties could be in the thousands," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defence specialist at the Brookings Institution, the independent policy analyst. "Iraqi forces would probably take a lesson from their defeat in 1991 and fight from the cities, where civilian casualties would greatly raise the cost of airstrikes and buildings would provide disguise for weaponry and military personnel."
Behind the casualty concerns lie basic differences among Mr. Bush's advisers over the magnitude of the military's task in Iraq. The Pentagon's civilian hawks, led by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, are convinced Saddam Hussein will put up no better fight than he managed during the Gulf war.
Ken Adelman, a former Pentagon official close to the administration, insists that a war in Iraq will prove a "cakewalk," saying: "One, it was a cakewalk last time; two, they've become much weaker; three, we've become much stronger; and four, now we're playing for keeps."
Military chiefs appear far more cautious. Their main concern is that once Saddam Hussein feels a U.S. invasion is inevitable he will be fighting for his life. While he might yet accept the return of UN weapons inspectors, thereby denying Washington one of its pretexts for an offensive, U.S. planners believe his ultimate option for defence may be reckless attack.
Scattered across the northern Kuwaiti desert, at least 7,000 U.S. troops are already prepared for action. Many are in tent camps close to the Iraqi border. They have been inoculated against anthrax and are training in chemical/biological suits that all U.S. forces are to wear once an invasion is launched. Reports say the suits are "murder" to wear in temperatures above 49 C, which is one reason why officers rule out a ground attack before the cooler weather of November.
The U.S. troops are also equipped with M1A1 Abrams tanks, Bradley infantry vehicles, self-propelled artillery and Apache attack helicopters. At a nearby airbase, RAF Tornados and American F15s and F16s enforce the southern no-fly zone that includes Basra.
Yet, military sources admit that even these defences would be hard-pressed to resist an overnight thrust on Kuwait by up to 30,000 Iraqi troops, particularly if preceded by a volley of poisoned warheads. Pentagon officials believe Saddam Hussein has between 15 and 80 Scud missiles capable of reaching Kuwait from Basra.
He may also have modified 155mm artillery and 122mm multiple rocket rounds to deliver chemical weapons, and there have been reports of experiments with pilotless drone aircraft filled with nerve gas.
Iraq's ability to manufacture anthrax for use in a weapon remains a crucial unknown. Despite repeated allegations by U.S. and British officials that Saddam Hussein is attempting to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, Pentagon planners do not yet appear concerned that any such weapon is likely to be deployed against them.
The most important question about the "Basra breakout" is whether Iraqi forces could move far enough, fast enough before U.S. air power destroyed them. "Can those convoys get to Kuwait before the U.S. air force can shoot them up? I'd bet on the U.S. air force," said John Pike, a military analyst with GlobalSecurity.org .
Memories of the "highway of death," where U.S. forces trapped retreating Iraqi troops, may incite mutiny among Basra-based forces ordered back to Kuwait. But a snap advance could be completed in hours, and once inside Kuwait City the Iraqis would be hard to dislodge.
Whatever Saddam Hussein's strategy, there are signs in Washington of growing frustration at the difficulty of preserving an element of U.S. surprise. The leak to The New York Times earlier this month of a detailed planning document outlining a "concept of operations" involving up to 250,000 U.S. troops underlined the difficulties in preserving secrecy.
Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, has threatened to jail whoever was responsible for the leak. Other Washington figures speculated the episode was an exercise in strategic deception: that the disclosure was staged to mislead Saddam Hussein. Instead of a massive invasion next year, as the document indicated, the Pentagon may be planning a strike much sooner, one political source suggested.
Missing from the Pentagon document was an analysis of how Saddam Hussein would react once an invasion force was massing on his border. The New York Times quoted one military analyst as saying: "The Iraqis aren't just going to sit on their butts while we put in 250,000 people."
The summer may yet get hotter in Kuwait.
Copyright © 2002 CanWest Interactive
