'Nachman' MSNBC 7:00 PM August 8, 2002
If the U.S. attacks Iraq, how many American soldiers will die?
ANNOUNCER: He’s been everywhere. He knows everybody. And he rips the big stories wide open. And, oh yes, he’s more than just another pretty face.
He’s NACHMAN, Jerry Nachman.
JERRY NACHMAN, HOST: Welcome to volume one. This is number 19.
And on the front page tonight: Saddam Hussein says Iraq is ready to repel any attack. He has also predicted that an aggressor attack against Iraq-that’s us-would, quote, in his words, “fall into the pit of destruction.” Here’s the question: If the U.S. attacks Iraq, how many American soldiers will die? We’re going to explore that.
And a group of judges in San Francisco is forbidding one another to take part in the Boy Scouts because of the organization’s stance on banning gays. I don’t think they can make it stick.
And no more baseball players juiced-up on pills? Well, the players seem to be agreeing to take tests for illegal steroids. Are the muscles about to melt?
My name is NACHMAN. And, ladies and gentlemen of North America and all the ships at sea, let’s go to press.
A defiant Saddam Hussein said today he is not frightened by U.S. threats to overthrow him. He also warned, those who attack Iraq will be digging their own graves.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SADDAM HUSSEIN, IRAQI PRESIDENT (through translator): The evil ones will carry their coffins on their backs to die in disgraceful failure, taking their schemes with them to their countries or to dig their own graves after they bring death to themselves on the Arab or Muslim soil against which they perpetrate aggression.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
NACHMAN: And what if the U.S. does attack Iraq? Various attack plans
we seem to hear about them almost daily-say upwards of 250,000 American land, sea and air forces could be involved.
So what’s the chance that many of them will come home in body bags? It’s an issue that nobody-in the media, anyway-seems to be concentrating on.
Joining me now is Harlan Ullman, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is a former professor at the National War College and a retired Naval officer who served in Vietnam. His latest book is “Unfinished Business: Afghanistan, the Middle East and Beyond: Defusing the Dangers to America’s Security.” Also with us: MSNBC military analyst, retired Colonel Jack Jacobs, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for Valor in Vietnam; and John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, which tracks information about the war on terrorism.
Thank you all for being here.
Jack-home team advantage-thank you for being here.
RET. COL. JACK JACOBS, NBC MILITARY ANALYST: My pleasure.
NACHMAN: My observation-and I want all the gentlemen to respond-is that the young generation of Americans have lived through casualty-free or light wars.
President Clinton was accused of-in Bosnia, of conducting a war like a video game, where everything was done by remote control and lasers and satellites and drones-and even in the Gulf War, a relatively small number of casualties, right?
JACOBS: Well, this is true.
I think if you talk to a lot of American people who followed the Gulf War 10 years ago, they would tell you that no Americans got killed. It was a relatively small number, but it was something like 250 people.
NACHMAN: And you saw a lot of your troops and buddies zipped into body bags.
JACOBS: Well, 250 people in a day. So I don’t think the American public is prepared for the kinds of casualties that might occur in Iraq.
NACHMAN: And what, in your wildest extrapolation, do you fear might happen in an all-out assault in Iraq?
JACOBS: One end of the bell curve is nothing.
NACHMAN: Right.
JACOBS: The other end of the bell curve is many, many thousands, depending upon what kind of war we fight and what kind of weapons are unleashed on our soldiers.
NACHMAN: John Pike, you’re on the right side of the bell curve, are you not? You see a lot of troops dying.
JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: Well, I think it really depends on what the American concept of operations is. That’s still unclear.
It also depends, I think fundamentally, on the Iraqi strategy and essentially whether the Iraqis are going to resist. At one end, you could basically have the 18th Airborne Corps show up on the west suburbs of Baghdad and they surrender.
On the other hand, if indeed the Special Republican Guard, even the Republican Guard, several tens of thousands of troops try to fight it out in Baghdad, as a Defense Intelligence Agency estimate has suggested, then conceivably you’re looking at tens of thousands of Iraqis being killed, and potentially many thousands of American troops, depending on how it plays out.
NACHMAN: John Pike, you’ve written that you think Iraq could be like Somalia was.
PIKE: Well, I think we might be lucky if it was like Somalia, in the sense that Baghdad is one of the largest cities on the planet.
NACHMAN: You mean that in area?
PIKE: In population, in area. It’s one of the largest cities on the planet.
A quarter of Iraq’s population lives there, five million people. When you compare it to Mogadishu, a couple of hundred thousand people. When you compare it to Grozny in Chechnya, a few hundred thousand people, several hundred thousand people in Stalingrad. Basically, if you take all of the big military operations on urban terrain, all of the hard city fighting that we’ve seen since over the last-since World War II, pile it all into one place, and you’re looking at basically an area the size of Baghdad.
NACHMAN: Harlan Ullman, to go back to old the Vietnam language, you’re a hawk. Is that correct? Is that fair?
HARLAN ULLMAN, FORMER PROFESSOR, NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE: I wouldn’t say that. I think that I’m very, very objective. And I think both Jack Jacobs and John Pike are certainly correct in their estimates.
There are a couple of other points that have to be raised, Jerry. At this stage, nobody has a clue what our casualties would be. If things went well, they would be very low. But things could go badly.
(CROSSTALK)
ULLMAN: Let me just finish. There are a couple points.
NACHMAN: Let me object mildly.
Doesn’t the Pentagon, as a routine exercise, do casualty estimates as a tactical...
ULLMAN: Sure.
But nobody on Colin Powell’s staff in 1991 would have guessed that we had 148 Americans who would be killed. Let me make...
NACHMAN: What did they guess?
ULLMAN: The best estimates was down in the low numbers of thousands. We had a number of body bags that were shipped to the Gulf. And thank goodness the casualties were relatively light.
But let me make two points here. First, what we don’t know is the size of Iraqi casualties. If the civilians become targets-Saddam Hussein could very easily turn on the Shia and we have a humanitarian nightmare. These are not Americans. These are Iraqis. And what do you do under the glare of MSNBC and CNN?
NACHMAN: Explain that. You mean killing his own people?
ULLMAN: Absolutely. You have got to realize that Sunni majority have oppressed the Shia majority for years and years and years. What would stop Saddam from turning on the Shia population and giving us the biggest humanitarian nightmare since the Yugoslavia bombing?
NACHMAN: I’m a little unclear. He would blame us for that?
ULLMAN: No, no. What he would do would stick us with a problem of the care and feeding of these people, who would be under some sort of terrible attack. That is one thing that has been discounted here.
Then, if we did get into city fighting, as John Pike pointed out, we don’t do very well in that. I recall very well Hue in January of 1968 that fell to Vietcong and North Vietnamese. The Marines had a very bitter time taking that back. Somalia has already been mentioned. And Baghdad, street-to-street fighting, if that got to be a situation, would be very difficult.
Then there is the issue of weapons of mass destruction. My guess is that, fortunately, Saddam does not have nuclear weapons, because, if he did, I think that is the one weapon he might be inclined to consider. I don’t regard chemical and biological weapons against American forces as a principal area of concern, though it is a concern.
NACHMAN: Jack, you were around in Tet season, ’68?
JACOBS: Yes, it was very bad news.
Harlan is absolutely right. We don’t fight very well in the cities. Nobody fights very well in the cities. It’s an extremely difficult environment to fight well.
NACHMAN: It’s not what armies are trained to do, generally, is it?
JACOBS: You’re right. And it’s also difficult to train people to fight in the cities. It’s a very, very tough environment.
Now, if we have to fight in Baghdad, we are liable to wind up losing a very large number of people.
NACHMAN: John Pike, would you be offended if I called you the dove in the crowd tonight?
(LAUGHTER)
NACHMAN: That’s what you do for a living, right?
PIKE: I wouldn’t be surprised if you did.
The United States understands very clearly the difficulties of military operations in urban terrain. And that’s why basically every major Army training facility has the so-called village where they train to fight here.
I think, as the Defense Intelligence Agency pointed out, a fundamental dilemma the United States is going to have is: How many Iraqi civilian casualties are we prepared to inflict vs. how many American soldiers are we prepared to have killed in action?
NACHMAN: Hold it right there, John, because we’re going to take a break.
We’ll be right back with all of these gentlemen, speculating on the human price we’re likely to pay in a war to liberate Iraq.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
NACHMAN: It’s been a full generation, 30 years, since Americans turned on their television sets every night and saw G.I.s coming home in body bags, often to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
We don’t lose people like that anymore, so I want to talk to our guests, starting with Harlan Ullman, about whether Americans have the stomach to sustain any kind of serious casualties.
What’s your guess?
ULLMAN: Well, Jerry, 38 years ago this month, there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when a single North Vietnamese PT boat attacked an American destroyer and gave Lyndon Johnson cause to really start the war there.
If somebody had told Johnson 58,000 Americans would be killed, he would have been in disbelief. So I think the administration, if it’s really going to make the case to get involved in Iraq, it better prepare the United States and its public that casualties could be massive. They’re not likely to be, but we better be prepared for the long haul.
NACHMAN: May I remind you that, in 1964, candidate Lyndon Johnson said, “Under no circumstances, will I send American boys to fight in a land war in Asia,” which is why he vanquished Barry Goldwater by then the biggest landslide in presidential history.
ULLMAN: Of course. And that tells you some of the cynicism that’s always present.
NACHMAN: So, what I’m really asking you all to comment on is, President Bush has said we’re in this for the long haul. But have Americans been steeled to the possibility of large numbers of our young men and women dying?
(CROSSTALK)
ULLMAN: Jerry, could I finish up? Could I finish up the comment?
Because, the first point, the administration has not.
But the second point I would make is that we occupied Germany and Japan in 1945 and we still have troops there. We went into Korea in 1950. We’re still there.
(CROSSTALK)
NACHMAN: We had surrenders there.
ULLMAN: I understand. But the other part of the argument is, if we go in, we better be expecting a very, very long-haul presence in Iraq in which there may be casualties.
NACHMAN: John Pike, I hear you shouting in my ear.
PIKE: No, I think that that’s precisely the thing that is concerning me about this: that, if you listen to some of the most vocal proponents of an attack on Iraq, they basically make it sound like a victory parade, that we are going to drop a few bombs, line up a few tanks, and that the entire Iraqi people are going to come out and greet us with flowers.
NACHMAN: And nobody talks about casualties.
PIKE: No one talks about-I think, frankly, until the last couple of days, no one has really focused on the possibility that we’re going to have to fight our way from one side of Baghdad to the other. I think that that’s unlikely.
But I think that anybody who gets into this war under the theory that it’s either going to be a no-casualty or a low-casualty war may wake up one morning and be quite surprised by what they are seeing on television.
NACHMAN: I agree with you.
Colonel?
JACOBS: Three things.
First of all, the administration has not started to prepare the American public for this sort of thing. Secondly, even if it did, the American public wouldn’t believe it until it saw it. We didn’t believe it until we saw it in Vietnam. And, thirdly, my experience in the field is, if you want to-the harder you work to prevent, reduce the number of casualties, ironically, the larger number of casualties you’re going to have, because you’re going to follow bankrupt tactics and strategies, which will guarantee that you’ll have a high number of casualties.
NACHMAN: But the Colin Powell doctrine, when he was chief of staff, was to have massive forces.
JACOBS: Massive forces go a long way to reducing the number of casualties in the long run, I believe.
PIKE: I think, in this case, we are seeing a move towards a concept of operations that involves a much smaller force, one that’s attacking the actual center of gravity, which is Saddam’s regime, basically bypassing the Iraqi army, which is not the target, something that can be put into place quickly, something that can get to Baghdad quickly.
The gamble on that strategy, though, is that, when the 18th Airborne Corps shows up on the west side of Baghdad, the regime collapses and they don’t have to fight their way to the east side of Baghdad.
NACHMAN: Harlan Ullman, you may get the last word here, but I am going to ask you, in return for that, to be brief.
(LAUGHTER)
NACHMAN: Remember what happened? It looked like, even though we didn’t get a surrender or get Saddam, it looked like we made pretty quick work of Iraq in the Gulf War.
ULLMAN: We did, but let’s not let that go to our heads.
That was an open territory in which we had enormous advantages. Iraq was more than decimated. It was destroyed. The problem here is, if Iraq decides to resist, if it gets to the cities, if gets to be prolonged, I don’t believe the American public at this stage has a stomach for casualties. Our allies certainly don’t. And this applies as much to Iraq as well as to ourselves.
And so, if the administration really has a case, it better damn well make it now, and it better think through the consequences, which, in many ways, are going to be far more severe than the actual military operation.
NACHMAN: Thank you, Harlan Ullman, Colonel Jack Jacobs and John Pike.
Excellent job.
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