Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=9/3/02

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=BOOT IRAQ

NUMBER=3-326

BYLINE=TOM CROSBY

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=

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HOST: As we have been reporting...Secretary of State Colin Powell has said the world needs to see evidence the threat posed by Iraq and then debate what to do about it. This follows remarks by Vice President Dick Cheney last week that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein needs to be ousted.

If the United States does launch a military invasion of Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, the question then becomes whether the U-S will employ large units as in the first Persian Gulf War or small highly trained special units. President Saddam has vowed that if it becomes necessary...his supporters will wage war in the streets of Baghdad. Max Boot is the editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal newspaper and the author of the new book "The Savage Wars of Peace: The Forgotten History of America's Small Wars." News Now's Tom Crosby asked him...if there is another war against Iraqi forces...what form he thinks it will take:

MR. BOOT: It may well turn out to be they could in a small war, of which the Afghan involvement was a classic example, in that we only had a handful of American soldiers on the ground and we maximized their impact using native allies, using American air power. That is a classic small war prescription, going all the way back to our wars against the Barbary pirates in 1800.

Now, we may choose to fight that way in Iraq, but I at this point would rather bet against it. I would think we are going to have a much bigger American military presence on the ground, in an attempt to decapitate Saddam's regime in the very early stages of the war and to prevent it from deploying chemical or biological weapons.

MR. CROSBY: Will it in some ways, do you think, resemble the war that was waged in the Persian Gulf about a decade ago?

MR. BOOT: Well, I don't think it will resemble that either. I think it will be somewhere in size between the Afghan war and the Persian Gulf war of 1991. I don't think we are going to mobilize half a million men. I don't think we need to do that. By all the accounts that I read and leaks coming out of the Pentagon, it sounds like we are probably going to use 60,000 to 70,000 men and try to use innovative strategies to overcome Saddam's regime in the early stages; for example, by attacking Baghdad early on or doing other things to prevent Saddam's regime from taking countermeasures.

MR. CROSBY: There have been some analysts, though, suggesting that Saddam might engage in street fighting in Baghdad if he cannot mass his forces to counter a large threat.

MR. BOOT: I find that extremely unlikely. He may think that he is going to do that, but are the people of Iraq really going to fight it out block by block against American forces? I very much doubt it. Because the people of Iraq didn't fight for Saddam Hussein very much in 1991. There is no reason for them to like him any more this time.

And I think they are perfectly well aware that American troops come bringing liberty. American troops, when they show up in places like Pristina and Kosovo, or Kabul in Afghanistan, are greeted by local people waving American flags. And I suspect that will be very much the reaction in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. I don't think that Saddam Hussein is going to find very many people outside his immediate clan who are willing to fight block by block to keep his murderous regime in power.

MR. CROSBY: But, conversely, it didn't take too many people in Somalia, when U.S. forces went into Mogadishu in 1993, did it, to combat the U.S. forces that went in there?

MR. BOOT: Well, that was a different situation, because we had lost the high ground as liberators there and also because the operation that we undertook that led to the loss of 19 American lives was a very small-scale operation, involving around 100 special forces troopers. We are going to have a much more substantial operation in place in Iraq and in Baghdad, and I very much doubt that Saddam's forces will put up too much resistance.

MR. CROSBY: Why is he unable to rally his forces, do you think?

MR. BOOT: Because he is an unpopular psychopath. I mean, that's it, to get to the bottom line. This is a guy who is one of the most evil dictators on the face of the planet, who has used poison gas against his own people, who freely kills members of his own inner circle. He is a flat out psycho, who oppresses his people more than just about any other government out there. Under those circumstances, it's not too surprising that he is not going to find very many people who are willing to fight to the death for him.

The only reason anybody would fight for Saddam is because they are more afraid of Saddam than they are of the opposition. But once we go in there and we make clear we are going to defeat him, there is not going to be any reason to be a afraid of Saddam, and I suspect that his forces will then immediately crumble.

MR. CROSBY: In researching "Savage Wars of Peace," you seem to have found that the vast majority of U.S. military operations overseas have indeed been very small ones, haven't they?

MR. BOOT: That's absolutely right. When most of us think about war, we think about the big wars, World War II and the (U-S) Civil War (1861-1865), but the kind of wars that we have been fighting since the end of the Cold War have very little in common with those big wars. I'm thinking of our expeditions in places like Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, and now Afghanistan.

MR. CROSBY: And we can include Grenada in that as well.

MR. BOOT: Right, Grenada, Beirut and others, going back to the eighties. But those kinds of expeditions are very much the norm, not the exception. Those are the kinds of military involvements we've been fighting since the very early days of the Republic, much more common than the big wars that most of us tend to be more familiar with.

HOST: Max Boot, the author of "The Savage Wars of Peace: The Forgotten History of America's Small Wars."

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