The Edmonton Sun October 09, 2002
Iraq war has frightening possibilities
By DOUG BEAZLEY
It's time to get down to brass tacks with the brass hats. With his most recent speech, President George W. Bush made it clear he's going after Iraq sooner rather than later, with every lightning bolt the planet's sole superpower can muster.
This should matter to all Canadians, since conquering Iraq will require years of military occupation (or "peacekeeping," if you prefer), and there's a pretty good chance Canadians will take part in that phase of the campaign.
How much danger they'll be in depends on how bloody this invasion becomes. Will this be a quick, relatively clean war? Or will it involve massive civilian casualties, a fresh eruption in anti-American sentiment in the Arab world - perhaps even a wider Middle East war?
Brace yourself.
"I can guarantee you, this war will kill thousands of innocent Iraqis," said Ramzi Kysia, 34, of Washington, D.C. He's in Baghdad as part of a group of mostly American anti-war observers, putting together press reports on the pending U.S. invasion for "alternative" media outlets in North America.
"The economic sanctions against Iraq have already created vast human suffering, unemployment and hunger. If the American invasion destroys what's left of the civil infrastructure, there'll be tens of thousands of civilian casualties."
The Iraqi campaign is walking a knife's edge. The Bush administration's planning for the invasion makes many assumptions: that Hussein's Republican Guard is too fragile to fight, that Baghdad will fall within days, that Hussein isn't ready to launch chemical or biological attacks against American targets in the Gulf region or back in the States and that the threat of war crimes prosecution will keep Iraqi generals from using weapons of mass destruction on civilians.
None of these assumptions look like sure things to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a D.C. military think-tank.
"First of all, this invasion will happen," he said. "I think it's been assured since Bush was inaugurated. It fits his vision of how the world should be run."
Second, said Pike, given the feeble state of Hussein's ground forces, the dictator's only available strategy is to somehow provoke the United States or its primary regional ally, Israel, into doing something truly stupid. Like turning Baghdad into a crater.
"Once an American ground campaign begins, I see Hussein launching chemical missile attacks from Basra into Kuwait," he said. "Hussein will be hoping to provoke the Americans into carpet-bombing Baghdad in retaliation. I don't think the U.S. will be lured into doing that."
Why would Hussein want the U.S. to kill civilians? According to Pike, it's Hussein's only hope to force the U.S. to pull back before it achieves its objective: his head on a platter.
Hussein can do that in one of two ways. He can provoke a massacre of Iraqi civilians by American bombers, and use the resulting international outrage to stop the invasion. Or, he can force Israel to get involved.
"There is a scenario that sees Iraq launching a chemical or biological missile attack on an Israeli city," said Pike. "Hussein lobbed missiles into Israel during the Gulf War, but managed only marginal damage.
"If he can do extensive damage in a mass-destruction weapons attack on Israel, he might provoke an extreme reaction from Israel."
For "extreme," read "nuclear." If Israel used nukes on Iraqi civilians, the pressure from ordinary Arabs in Syria and Egypt to retaliate militarily against their ancient enemy would be overwhelming.
The governments of Egypt and Syria live in fear of popular Islamist revolts. They would have little choice but to send in the tanks.
"At that point you've got a whole different kind of war," said Pike. "And no one could predict how it might come out."
Where would Canadians be in this mess? Maybe nowhere, maybe in the middle.
Given the large number of warring Iraqi ethnic groups likely to be at each other's throats after Hussein's fall, said Pike, the postwar occupation could last five to 10 years.
At least initially, those occupation troops would be the target of every vengeance-crazed Islamist in the region. It would be an extremely dangerous place to be a soldier - even a Canadian soldier.
"I haven't gotten the impression that the Bush administration has given any thought at all to the aftermath."
Copyright © 2002, CANOE
