Posted on 07/20/2002 4:27:21 PM PDT by Pokey78
No one in Washington seems in any doubt now that an attack on Saddam Hussein's Iraq is only a matter of time.
And slowly, between the angry determination of the White House and the caution of the country's military leadership, it's becoming possible to see what kind of war it might be.
Things change, of course, and what looks likely today won't necessarily be what happens in the end; but for now the model for the campaign won't be the huge build-up of international force and the slow burn that constituted the Gulf war of 1990-91.
Instead, it seems, the campaign will be a variant of what happened last October and November in Afghanistan.
Only up to a point, however. There is no convenient army on the ground to do the hard slog, like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Instead, we are told, British and American agents are being infiltrated into Iraq, and particularly Shia southern Iraq, in order to raise a rebellion against Saddam.
Then, it seems, the Americans and British will start bombing Iraq heavily, as they did in January 1991, and at some stage in the resulting confusion the locals will rise and do the job for the Americans.
There is no real alternative. Mr Bush doesn't have the appetite for a long war, and the Pentagon doesn't feel that the United States army should be used nowadays to take on a determined enemy in the field.
Air power, yet again, will have to do the main part of the job: with all the ugly loss of life for Iraqis which that will involve. There are, of course, one or two small problems. One is that the very people whom President Bush II will be relying on to rise up against Saddam are those whom President Bush I called on to rebel 11 years ago; only to desert them directly they had taken this dangerous, irretrievable step.
I shall not quickly forget the tears of the Iraqi Shia general who told me in July 1991 how he went to his own base, now occupied by the Americans, to beg them for the Iraqi weapons stored there. They refused; and he and his men had to face Saddam's avenging forces unarmed. The general was one of the very few survivors.
George W Bush won't let them down as his father did; he will need them too much, and he won't be fooled by that fuzzy, wrong-headed geopolitical reasoning that persuaded Bush I that Iraq without Saddam would break up and destabilise the entire region.
Still, things have moved on since 1991. The unthinking trust which Iraqis once had in the West, and the United States in particular, has long since evaporated.
Eleven years of fierce United Nations sanctions have turned the anger of most Iraqis against the outside world.
They may not love Saddam more as a result, but they are now firmly convinced that there is unlikely to be any serious alternative to him for a long time; and that it would be better for everyone if nature, rather than external intervention, were allowed to take its course.
None of this means that the American strategy won't work, just that it will be harder than it ought to be. Faced with a bankable assurance that Saddam will indeed be overthrown, there probably will be some sort of uprising against him, both in the Shia region and in the Kurdish north; Iraqis, when aroused, can show an extraordinary degree of courage and self-sacrifice.
But the job of overthrowing him can't be left entirely to the rebels, as the overthrow of the Taliban was left to the Northern Alliance after the American bombing of the front lines had done its work. American and British ground troops will have to be used.
Yet in some ways the biggest problem for President Bush will be how he starts his war with Saddam. Even if you are the world's only superpower, with a very healthy assessment of your abilities and your right to do as you think fit, you cannot simply drop your smart bombs on someone you don't like without some kind of justification.
The CIA has tried to persuade the world that Saddam was a supporter and paymaster of al-Qaeda, but it didn't seem convincing. Maybe some casus belli can be engineered by pushing Saddam into a corner over UN weapons inspections; yet he's had such experience with this kind of thing that it's hard to believe that he'll let himself be trapped in such a convenient fashion.
Something else will have to be tried - something which, ideally, might persuade even the Turks, even the French, even the Russians, that an attack on Iraq is justified. The trouble is, it's hard to think what that might be.
I thought we were talking about Iraq. You know, the guys who tried to surrender to unmanned drones and TV crews. What does that have to do with a 'determined enemy'?
Disinformation. We won't need a lot of troops to beat the Iraqis, but we will need enough to hold the country.
No, he's the BBC's World Class Clymer.
We'll meet them in the field. We just don't want to go house-to-house, because that really sucks.
Only up to a point, however. There is no convenient army on the ground to do the hard slog, like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Instead, we are told, British and American agents are being infiltrated into Iraq, and particularly Shia southern Iraq, in order to raise a rebellion against Saddam.
I'm sure that's one element....why not make trouble for him in this regard.
Then, it seems, the Americans and British will start bombing Iraq heavily, as they did in January 1991
Wow, he's a tactical genius, isn't he? I would have guessed that we weren't going to use any aircraft this time. /sarcasm
There is no real alternative. Mr Bush doesn't have the appetite for a long war, and the Pentagon doesn't feel that the United States army should be used nowadays to take on a determined enemy in the field.
Not that it matters, because it won't be a long war. It's going to be short. Real short.
Air power, yet again, will have to do the main part of the job
Well no kidding, it would be foolish to keep the mightiest air power in the world on the ground and not utilize them. Dummy.
There are, of course, one or two small problems. One is that the very people whom President Bush II will be relying on to rise up against Saddam are those whom President Bush I called on to rebel 11 years ago
We didn't 'rely' on them then, and we won't be relying on them this time either.
I won't even bother with the rest.....the more I read, the more I see more Euro-envy. Europe seems to hate us because we put them to shame, despite all of their pontificating about how great and advanced they are.
To Europe:
We'll handle Saddam, we'll do it quickly, and most of all, we don't need you to do it.
....and when we did it was downright humiliating for them.
We aren't Europe, we aren't Russia, and we aren't (take notice, Mao Tse-Tung) China.
We are the United States of America, attack us and be destroyed.
I think they have already been persuaded.
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