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COMMENTARY
July 13, 2002
Secret war?
I wrote here Tuesday about the debate that has been going on within the Bush administration not about whether to invade Iraq nor really about when either but only about how to pull it off -- with the least "collateral damage" to U.S. interests in the region and the world. I said this debate came down in the end to essentially two schools or sides: 1. The "big-endians" let us call them. Gen. Tommy Franks the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the vast majority of Pentagon brass George Tenet and the CIA leadership the White House national security council and every "expert" but one (I think) in the State Department agreed that the safest course was a massive probably three-pronged invasion (from Turkey Jordan Kuwait?) after the usual devastating air campaign and special forces nip-and-tuck on some ground targets needing particular attention. The bureaucracy feels in its bones that bigger is better and has huge logistic and co-ordinating capacities that need periodic justification. Gen. Franks is widely believed to have settled upon the clinching estimate of 250 000-plus troops most of which will be standing by in places like Turkey and Oman in case they happen to be needed. Given a (meaningless) best estimate that Saddam Hussein would not be ready to greet these invaders with say a deployable nuclear weapon for at least two years their assumption has been that the mission could wait until as early as December or as late as March next year giving plenty of time to get the incredibly elaborate logistical and diplomatic ducks in order. 2. In response to which there was a strong minority of "little-endians" arguing for a smaller smarter quicker operation one that could have been performed with forces that were already in place a month ago or at more leisure in August. I named only Gen. Wayne Downing who recently quit the administration apparently in frustration (a man as legendary for his impatience as for his genius as a special forces officer); but it appears to me that these "hawks" or "hotheads" consisted largely of the brass with battlefield experience -- the people who instead feel in their bones the danger of hestitation or delay once you have decided on a course of action. I know what they say about "armchair generals" about how amateurs like to discuss strategy but professionals only talk about the three "L"s (logistics logistics logistics). I also know that the U.S. is walking into a battle it can't practically lose -- that there are hard and massive facts buttressing anything that resembles U.S. arrogance. Notwithstanding the reader will sense my regret that no military imagination would be employed in the "mother of all walkovers" for I feel reasonably certain the "big-endians" have won the debate with the people who count: George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. They won it by cheating however: not merely a stacked gallery but the President has his hands too full of everything from Worldcom to Europe to be in a position to resist the bureaucracy on this one. I do believe however that he and Mr. Rumsfeld are end-running that bureaucracy in another way. For while it outwardly appears from leaks to the media that the "big-endian" plan is moving remorselessly forward the real decision was a "both/and" rather than an "either/or". The only public hint of this was the publication some weeks ago of a Presidential "finding" authorizing CIA and other covert forces to conduct the equivalent of a secret war: to see if they can't bring down Saddam's regime before the regular troops even get there. The evidence that this secret war is actually underway comes from many small clues one has to put together. Alas the clues themselves are frequently hearsay but they add up. For example a steady stream of air traffic westward from the quickly-expanding U.S. air base at al-Udeid in Qatar. Very rapid rotations of ground troops in Kuwait. More frequent acknowledgements of incidents over the no-fly zones in Iraq itself. Rumours of special forces movements coming not only from the Kurds in northern Iraq but more interestingly from the Turkomans who are distributed across a diagonal slice of the country from north-west to south-east. The informally-acknowledged loss of a Predator reconnaissance flight in the north. An Iraqi claim to have shot down or damaged two U.S. aircraft north of Baghdad. (Helicopters participating in a mission near Saddam's "home town" of Tikrit?) Complaints within the Jordanian government about U.S. special forces activity in the eastern desert of that country. Unconfirmable reports of accidents within Iraq which might instead have been hits. It is quite impossible to get accurate information out of Iraq. The Saddam regime holds most of the country in a Stalinist clamp. And the student of current events in Iraq must be aware that opposition forces complicate the issue by telling the most extraordinary self-serving lies. (I am thinking especially of the two principal Kurdish factions.) Indeed information overload and the paralysis it can lead to would appear to be an increasing problem for the Bush administration -- and another reason why it must feel compelled to put special forces on the ground in Iraq even at substantial risk simply to confirm or eliminate factual speculations. But the size of the budget the administration seems to have appropriated for covert activities in the region argues further for the prosecution of a fairly ambitious secret war. Another indication is what we can see of the state of combat readiness. It is as if the "little-endian" plan had been going forward simultaneously with the big one. For since early June the U.S. has had forces in place for a reasonably large sudden strike as a necessary back-up. There are presently about 15 000 U.S. troops in Kuwait on normal rotation with enough mobile equipment on hand to surround Basra. A further 40 000 are on standby in the Gulf area ready for rapid deployment. As well the U.S. Navy could deliver a large inventory of tanks and other battlefield equipment to Kuwait's harbour with only about a day's warning (from the time the fleet in the Arabian Sea converged on the Strait of Hormuz). And with the Fifth Fleet fully deployed from Bahrain and a spare aircraft carrier group the U.S. can respond to any major development in Iraq almost instantaneously. I think we have three stages here. The first is the probing point of a secret war already underway. The second is the quick-strike force that provides a chisel shaft behind it. And the third is the great hammer that will come down on top of this chisel if and only if there is a need. The invasion may be waiting but I don't think "regime change" is. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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