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COMMENTARY
December 21, 2002
Scorched earth
Surprise is the single most effective tactic in a military operation; so effective that it has oftentimes in history prevailed at least temporarily over much greater force. But of course surprise plus overwhelming force gets the job done very quickly -- always assuming the resources are well-managed. With an enemy like Iraq the United States and its allies are in some need of surprise. The overwhelming force is available and the Americans have through the years of trial and error since Vietnam become remarkably well-organized. No army in the history of the world ever confronted let alone solved such enormous logistic problems: not even Afghanistan was outside their range. While the statement Colin Powell the U.S. secretary of state made Thursday was a necessary part of the diplomatic preparation for war and while increasing candour from the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies about the nature of Iraq's illicit weaponry are also necessary to the drumbeat that wins international support they have a serious disadvantage. For Mr. Powell was effectively telegraphing not only the inevitability of war but even the timetable. All the information is now available for Saddam Hussein to deduce that the U.S. will attack him soon after Jan. 27th and not later than early February. This gives him more freedom for manoeuvre than he ought to have. The task in Iraq is no conventional invasion. It will be the first time the Americans or any other large civilized military force has gone in to disarm and remove a dictator whose defence depends almost entirely on the use of biological and chemical weapons. Nothing else he has in his armoury can even hope to slow the U.S. assault. Moreover Saddam is a dictator who as we know from a fairly certain psychological profile built over a considerable period of time will likely respond as Adolf Hitler did from the last ditch in Berlin. Hitler's final reasoning was if I can't survive why should the Germans? "They have proved themselves unworthy of me." The mind of Saddam is similarly disposed towards the Arabs the racial "nation" he has aspired to rule and especially those Arabs within Iraq over whose lives he still has much power. He still believes and will believe until the eve of invasion that he may have a way of escaping the inevitable. He still calculates that by a game of stalling and dramatic last minute concessions (we can expect to see more) -- that by inducing French Russian and United Nations diplomats to run interference for him -- he can delay the physical assault until the Bush administration is distracted by an even greater emergency elsewhere. Both Iran and North Korea threaten daily to provide just such distractions for unlike Iraq it now appears they both have nuclear weapons. And while he is a very evil man like Hitler or his own personal hero Stalin Saddam has never behaved in a way that is demonstrably irrational or illogical once you grant the rather extraordinary premise that he is an Ubermensch a "superman". He has spent his life dreaming of the Mother of Battles and would not choose to go down except in a reasonable facsimile of Armageddon. In the past week the Pentagon has begun to brief some reporters openly on the difficulties they foresee. These include attempts by Saddam to destroy Iraq's own oilfields and incidentally cause thereby an environmental catastrophe on a scale much larger than what he accomplished while retiring from Kuwait. U.S. intelligence assisted by unnamed defectors some of whom may be recent is also aware of plans to blow up power plants bridges and other infrastructure -- which a section of world opinion will naturally and spontaneously attribute to U.S. air strikes. There may be attempts to poison food supplies and reservoirs. More directly U.S. intelligence is aware that while Saddam probably does not have nuclear capabilities and may not even have the ability to heave a low-tech "dirty radiation bomb" (radioactive materials spread by conventional explosive) he does have sophisticated chemical and biological weaponry. The various kinds of nerve gas are the minor worry their effect is essentially restricted to the theatre of combat in which they are employed though we won't know if U.S. and allied soldiers are effectively shielded against the spread of such toxins until they are used. (There are too many variables in play and it is not humanly possible to anticipate all of them.) Most worrying are his biological weapons. Saddam may well have the means to cause mass outbreaks of quite terrible diseases. Reports from defectors suggest that his most lethal weapons may be the hardest to target: mobile "biology labs" in the backs of trucks with commercial markings that are kept moving around the country; and larger biological weapons facilities that are integrated into civilian hospitals. Some idea of the delivery systems at Saddam's disposal may be had from the list of weapons the former U.N. inspection teams had tagged but could not destroy before they were evicted from Iraq in 1998. (The Iraqis gave no plausible account of these in their recent "true and complete" report to the U.N.) These included 50 conventional Scud missiles that were convertible to deliver chemical or biological agents; 16 Scuds already outfitted with botulin; five Scuds with anthrax warheads; 157 biological bombs with anthrax gas gangrene and botulin; more than 6 000 miscellaneous chemical and biological munitions; and 550 mustard-gas shells. It can only be assumed first that this inventory was incompletely surveyed in 1998 and second that it has grown since then. The Scuds were mostly al-Husseins with an effective range of 650 kilometres but Saddam is believed to have at least a handful of 900-kilometre al-Habas Scuds which could theoretically reach Israel from a launch site near Baghdad. It is believed these are stored fairly deep under schools apartments and other "human shields" on the assumption the U.S. will be unwilling to mark such targets or that there will be a huge outpouring of anti-American rage on the "Arab street" if they do. But returning from delivery systems to what is to be delivered one lucky break came with the documents the Iraqis handed over on Dec. 7th. In the first sign of a scorched earth policy Saddam actually named various Western companies that had contributed to Iraq's illicit weapons programs before 1998 many of which would still have been doing so more recently through the open supply of "dual use" goods and a less open provision of technical assistance. Inclusion of this list was an obvious attempt to set the cat among the pigeons in the West -- revelations that in particular 80 German companies and several dozen from other Western countries (including 23 American companies working mostly through European affiliates) had knowingly supplied him with the means to develop formidable chemical and biological capabilities. I understand that the information has provided something of an intelligence bonanza to the Bush administration which is now quietly shaking down the named companies for information from the supply side. The very fact Saddam disclosed the names of the companies and gave sufficient details for intelligence to shake them down suggests he thinks the end is near -- that he has no further use for their services. Likewise Iraq is now absconding on several major oil patch developments and other foreign investment contracts -- washing its hands of entanglements that are no longer any use to them. There may be room left for Saddam to make one or two fresh "dramatic confessions" to sow confusion through the Security Council and among U.S. allies and thus further delay the U.S. attack; but in the main and especially after listening to Colin Powell's remarks on Thursday Saddam will now be preparing for war. The limitation upon Hitler near the end was that his surviving officers became less and less willing to obey his orders. It became clear enough even to the most evil among them that Hitler wasn't going to be around tomorrow whereas Germany with a bit of luck might still survive the war. There were also their own necks to consider. It is interesting that for the last week (and possibly longer) the U.S. has been showering Iraq from the sky with pamphlets addressed to just such people. But here is a further practical complication. In the Gulf War of 1991 Saddam had to use an exposed copperwire control and command system both to distribute orders and to link radars for advance warnings against air attacks. The U.S. had no difficulty breaking it up in the first hours of the war leaving Baghdad headquarters mostly in the dark and Saddam's officers often couldn't hear his orders even when he barked them. Since then the Chinese and others have helped Saddam install a fairly advanced nationwide buried fibre-optical system with layered back-ups that will not this time be so easy to uproot. So long as Saddam remains alive in his bunker he should be able to communicate with his officers and receive some advance warnings that might enable him to use concealed weaponry before it can be hit. Which returns us to the question of surprise. Bound up in string by the United Nations and by his commitment to proceed towards war in Iraq through consultation with allies President Bush has effectively surrendered the possibility of tactical surprise. It may still exist in the form of choice of weapons in the first moments of conflict -- for instance in the use of a low-yield nuclear device to take out a command complex buried more than 100 metres underground (and therefore unreachable by conventional weapons). But this is unlikely. Because it is unlikely it remains to be seen given the means at Saddam's disposal to spread havoc and his willingness to use them whether this will not prove the key lesson of "Gulf War '03". The lesson may be that in order to prevent massive civilian casualties the U.S. must in future act unilaterally destroying such other enemies as Iran and North Korea entirely without consultation and totally by surprise. As the shape of the future battlefield emerges it becomes easier to imagine a situation in which humanity demands the end of all diplomacy except what can be done to patch things over "after the fact". David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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