If he thinks he is dead either way, then I suspect he will strike first in an attempt to bring as many of us down with him as possible. He would want to revel in the spectacle.
ODDS: All in all, I rate the odds of a major attack against us as very high: Say, 85%.
WHEN: My guess is a first strike. I suspect it will come right after Congress passes a resolution authorizing an attack against Iraq.
Other possibilities exist, such as a public threat first, coupled with a demand that we back off.
Hmm, if I was Saddam what would I do, hmmm. I got it, blackmail. Yep that's the ticket. He may very well already have his pieces in place and now simply waits for the moment of truth to make the ultimatum. I think the probability of this scenario playing out is very high. He seems to placid not to be holding a high card or two.
Interesting times indeed.
You saw what I did to you on 9-11, using a handful of men armed with box cutters. You have the analysis of that powder I sent to Daschle. You understand what a few more such men could do with that powder. So, you have to ask yourself: "Do I feel lucky?"Your predecessor, President Clinton, was smart. He understood: what people don't know won't hurt them. Listen to him now.
I'm happy with 9-11: I got my revenge, and it was a gas. So let's call it Even Stevens, okay? Because, if you point the finger at me, you'll have to kill me. And if you kill me, you'll regret it for the rest of your days. Got the picture? How about it?
Care to venture a guess at what Bush is now saying to Saddam?
I don't think Saddam has too many sleeper agents in the USA willing to commit suicide as a gesture to mark his downfall.
Smallpox is an outside threat.
And 3. What weapon(s) will be used in the attack? Biological (anthrax, small pox, etc.)? A conventional (fission) nuke? A stolen (or bought) thermonulear fusion bomb from the Russians? A "dirty" bomb? VX or sarin gas?
To attempt to answer your two main questions, I'd suspect that an eventual WMD attack on our shores is very high. However, Saddam Hussein doesn't necessarily have to be behind such an attack. There are multitudes of Islamic terrorist orgs (aside from al Qaeda), and a lot of them are well financed. So the attack can originate from almost anywhere in the radical Islamic world.
When is the attack most likely to occur, you ask? If Saddam is behind it, expect it very shortly (within a couple of months). If it's an Al Qaeda operation, the answer is .....when we least expect it.
The time has come to ask:
1. What are the ODDS of a major attack by Saddam Hussein on the American homeland?
2. WHEN is such an attack most likely to occur?
Here's Pat Buchanan's assessment.... for what it's worth
From hard evidence, what may we reasonably conclude? A) Saddam does not have an atom bomb or the critical component to build one, and is not known to be in the market for the uranium he would need. B) While he has chemical and biological weapons, his delivery systems have been degraded. C) He has had these toxins for 15 years and never once used them on U.S. forces, though we smashed his country, tried to kill him half a dozen times and have a CIA contract out on his head.
Why, if Saddam is a madman, has he not used gas or anthrax on us? Osama would – in a heartbeat. Probable answer: Saddam does not want himself, his sons, his legacy, his monuments, his dynasty, his army and his country obliterated and occupied by Americans, and himself entering the history books as the dumbest Arab of them all. Rational fear has deterred this supposedly irrational man. Has it not?
Friends of mine who know a lot more about this stuff than I do seem to think there will be some sort of attack on our soil unleased by Iraq. Maybe not directly carried out by Iraqi agents, but perhaps al Qaeda, backed by Iraqi intelligence.
I don't know whether there will be one or not, but as I tell my sons, in life, it pays to be prepared.
The question in my mind is: Is there anything we as ordinary citizens can do to help defend against/prevent such an attack?
Any ideas?
(2) The anthrax attacks had all the earmarks of a trial run. A number of very thoughtful FReepers have observed that they might indicate a blackmail attempt by Hussein.
(3) As for the possibility that we could lose a city, think about it: If the planners of the 9/11/01 hijackings had concentrated their fire, so to speak, and crashed all four planes either in Manhattan or in DC, they could have taken out the heart of either city. If their tactical planning was better, they could easily have selected flights that left nearly simultaneously, and much closer to mid-day. It doesn't take much imagination to visualize the horror that would have resulted.
(4) The point being that we already came within a whisker of losing much of Manhattan or DC, and we have already been hit with a bio-attack. The President has made it clear that he believes worse will occur if we do not aggressively take the battle to the enemy.
(5) Immediately after the attacks, the President said we would go after both the individual terrorists and regimes which harbor them. We polished off Afghanistant quickly. So it's on to the next object lesson among nations. Think about it: of the other regimes that harbor radical Islamic terrorists, which one is the easiest for us to rally the nation, Congress and the UN for an attack against its leadership?
(6) The President has access to intelligence that we can only speculate about, and clearly what he knows leads him to believe there will never be a better time to go after Saddam than in the very near future. He obviously knows the risks to the U.S. and just as obviously is doing everything possible to minimize those risks. But I also have no doubt that he is haunted by the certain knowledge that last year's attacks could have been orders of magnitude worse.
Conclusion: we don't have any choice, folks.
Saddam is warned: We'd nuke Baghdad
The chilling warning to Iraq was revealed by former Tory Premier John Major, who led Britain in the 1991 Gulf War.
During that conflict, allied forces were armed with “battlefield” nuclear weapons and prepared to use them in a counter attack, he said.
Saddam was privately warned his capital would be obliterated if he used weapons of mass destruction against allied troops or Middle East targets — including Israel.