The Kansas City Star October 06, 2002
A lightning strike against Hussein
BY E. THOMAS McCLANAHAN
In any war with Iraq, the outcome won't be in doubt. Saddam Hussein's grip on power will be broken. The only questions are how long the fighting will last and what it will cost in blood and treasure. Will we see a short conflict with low U.S. casualties or will Saddam Hussein unleash chemical or biological weapons and cause a large number of fatalities?
In this war, the most important element is likely to be the morale of the Iraqi army. Will Hussein's troops fight - or will they run, as did many in the Persian Gulf War? If ordered to fight house-to-house in Baghdad, will his troops comply - and force the U.S. offensive to bog down in a bloody, drawn-out urban warfare?
More to the point, if Hussein gives the order to fire chemical weapons, will his commanders obey - knowing they could be tried later as war criminals? To be sure, it isn't clear how the current political and diplomatic maneuvering will play out. But even as negotiations intensified last week on Capitol Hill and at the United Nations, military analysts were spinning scenarios - both optimistic and pessimistic - for how another war against Hussein might unfold.
As in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf War, the campaign would begin with precision strikes by cruise missiles and bombs guided by global-positioning satellites. Many of the initial missions would be flown by B-2 stealth bombers based in Missouri or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.
Some analysts believe that, unlike the Gulf War, ground troops will invade Iraq relatively soon after the bombing begins - a tactic aimed at quickly shocking and overwhelming the Iraqis and perhaps deterring commanders in charge of chemical and biological weapons.
The airwaves will be flooded with broadcast messages urging Iraqi troops and commanders to defect or face the consequences. Leaflets dropped from the air will send similar messages.
Commando units and paratroops will be "inserted" to seize key airfields, attack command posts, search Hussein's extensive "palace" complexes, capture chemical or biological weapons sites or simply spread confusion and mayhem.
Since Iraq's northern provinces are mountainous, the main conventional ground attack will likely surge toward Baghdad from bases in Kuwait, where tanks and other weapons for at least two divisions are already stockpiled.
One of the most pivotal issues is how many ground troops will be needed - with the word "need" defined as a force large enough to convince the Iraqis that resistance is futile.
Some have said that number should be at least 250,000. Retired Marine General Bernard E. Trainor, writing in The Washington Post, said "certainly more than 100,000." Others have suggested the Iraqi military is so demoralized - and Hussein has so little support in the general population - that about 50,000 ground troops would do the job.
"I think the war's going to go quickly," said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org, a defense-policy consulting firm.
Pike also offered a guess on when the fighting might commence.
"It will start," he said, "a week to 10 days after it becomes obvious that American troops are being airlifted into Kuwait. They'll be in Baghdad in a week to 10 days (later). The regime will collapse when they get to Baghdad."
If Bush gives the "go" order soon after the November election, Pike said, that means the war could start around Thanksgiving.
"I think we're going to be surprised at how rapidly the Iraqis collapse," said Dan Goure, a vice president at the Lexington Institute and a former Pentagon official in the first Bush administration. "Iraq is a horror. It's been a horror for years. They may all like to see the man go."
The clear-sailing-to-Baghdad scenario, however, is based on several upbeat suppositions. It assumes the diplomatic preliminaries end satisfactorily for the White House, and quickly; that the election goes well for Republicans, since a big vote for Democrats could cast doubt on support for the war; and that the Pentagon deploys a force on the small end of the scale. A larger buildup would take several weeks longer.
Such optimism is hardly unanimous.
In a CNN interview, Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said U.S. commanders should prepare for high-casualty, house-to-house urban combat. The Iraqis, he said, will screen military targets with civilian populations, ambush Americans from rooftops and use shoulder-launched rockets against our aircraft.
"We will win," he said, "but we could lose a thousand or more people if things go badly."
Similarly, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, writing in The Wall Street Journal, warned that victory would be expensive "and could as well be bloody." Scowcroft's outlook was significant; he served in the first Bush administration during the Gulf War.
Indeed, the list of ways Hussein could complicate U.S. war planning is daunting. He could:
Fire missiles armed with chemical weapons at key U.S. staging areas in Kuwait. U.S. forces are fairly well prepared for chemical weapons, but casualties still might be unexpectedly high. If such an attack occurs before a U.S. ground offensive, it could disrupt preparations by forcing troops to spend considerable time decontaminating their equipment.
"We know he has a chemical inventory and it's weaponized (deliverable via artillery rounds, rockets or missiles)," said Gordon Adams, director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. "With biological agents, it's not so clear it's weaponized." (Hussein's long-time efforts to build or acquire nuclear weapons are not believed to have been successful.)
Attack Israel with chemical or biological weapons, using his arsenal of Scud missiles - believed to number about three dozen. His hope would be to "light the bonfire of the Mideast": provoke an Israeli counterattack, in turn triggering an Arab attack against Israeli and U.S. forces. That hope may seem implausible, but as Adams observed, "Who knows what goes on in the mind of Hussein?"
Instigate retaliatory terrorist strikes in Europe or the United States.
Attack Saudi Arabia, the Shi'ite Muslims in southern Iraq or the Kurds in the north - moves designed to gain the initiative by forcing U.S. troops to redeploy and defend these populations.
Convince the elite Republican Guard units defending Baghdad to stand and fight, miring the U.S. offensive in urban warfare.
Certainly, the Pentagon should prepare for the worst. But in sifting all this, the pessimistic scenarios seem least plausible.
Prior to the Gulf War, many analysts expected U.S. casualties to be significant. The Iraqis, after all, were battle-hardened after an eight-year war against Iran.
Yet after a ground attack of only 100 hours, they collapsed. Many Iraqi units surrendered en masse. Some kissed the hands of the U.S. soldiers who took them prisoner.
Since then, U.S. military power has increased while Iraq's has waned. Hussein's army is about one-third the size of the force that existed in 1990. Its equipment is in poor repair. Its willingness to fight remains suspect. Coup plots have been uncovered even in Republican Guard units.
Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, writing recently in The New Republic, noted an incident in 2000, when Iraqi army units moved into the Kurdish safe haven in the north and attacked the town of Ba'adre. After U.S. planes merely buzzed Iraqi positions - flying low without firing - more than 100 Iraqi soldiers threw down their weapons and surrendered. The remainder retreated.
The most likely scenario is a repeat of this pattern. Still, we shouldn't forget Dwight Eisenhower's warning: "Every war will astonish you."
Copyright 2002 The Kansas City Star
