Six Deadly Fears: What could go wrong in Iraq!
Mark Mazzetti & Kevin Whitelaw
US News and World Report
Donald Rumsfeld likes making lists. This is a man, after all, who lives by a collection of maxims known as “Rumsfeld’s Rules.” Yet few lists the defense secretary has ever compiled are more ominous than the one that now sits on his desk at the Pentagon. It is a collection of things that could go wrong if the United States goes to war with Iraq, and for months he has been steadily adding to it. He has yet to cross anything off.
With Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations ratcheting up pressure on Saddam Hussein (related story) and a military conflict drawing ever closer, there is remarkable consensus among war planners about one thing–that the United States would win a second Gulf War, and in short order. “On the military side, the outcome is not in doubt,” says one top officer. Iraq’s ramshackle and ill-trained Army, they argue, would be little match against overwhelming U.S. military superiority. With 125,000 troops already in the region and the northern half of Kuwait converted into a vast marshaling yard, the Pentagon last week launched another round of deployments, sending the 101st Airborne Division and the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk toward the Persian Gulf. More than 42,000 British troops are poised for an attack, and cargo ships continue to bring a stream of tanks and armored vehicles into Kuwaiti ports. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, whose 24th Mechanized Infantry Division helped execute the famous “left hook” attack against an Iraqi Army stronger than today’s in Operation Desert Storm, puts it this way: “The Iraqis have no good military options. There is no technique, no tool that they can now adopt that will have any military significance on the outcome of the conflict.”
Yet beneath the confidence among U.S. officials about the outcome, a general unease exists about the unintended consequences of trying to take down Saddam Hussein’s regime. It could go smoothly: Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution estimates that as few as 100 U.S. soldiers may be killed. If things go badly, he predicts, that figure could hit 5,000. Saddam, many fear, like the biblical Samson, will bring the walls of the temple down around himself. “Based on a fair amount of trying to figure Saddam and his cronies out, I wouldn’t try to predict how they will behave,” remarks one senior Pentagon planner. “That’s what makes them so dangerous.” The following are scenarios that war planners tell U.S. News keep them up at night. Some of their worst-case scenarios they refuse to divulge, for fear of giving Saddam any more ideas.
1. Iraqi forces unleash their chemical or biological weapons arsenal.
After the 1991 Gulf War, the CIA reported that Saddam Hussein had ordered his troops to use chemical weapons if American troops crossed a certain line in Iraq. They didn’t, and a fusillade of deadly gases was never launched. This time around, any war would go all the way to Baghdad, and U.S. intelligence is reporting that Saddam recently authorized his field commanders to use chemical weapons to combat a U.S. invasion. Most likely, Saddam would use artillery-delivered mustard gas and nerve agents against U.S. ground elements advancing on Baghdad. If so, says McCaffrey, “it’s going to create conditions of abject misery, but it will have no impact on the pace of the operation.”
U. S. military planners are working to confound Iraq’s ability to use these weapons. The invasion plan is designed to move swiftly, sow confusion, and cut off Saddam’s command and control. Already, U.S. forces are conducting psychological operations to persuade local commanders to ignore orders to use weapons of mass destruction or face war-crimes charges in the aftermath. But the orders could still be carried out by the Special Security Organization, a powerful agency headed by one of Saddam’s sons.
Iraq is most experienced at loading chemical weapons into artillery shells that could be used on the battlefield. Unprotected Iraqi civilians could be killed, and U.S. forces might still take casualties despite their protective gear, but U.S. forces could take out artillery batteries relatively quickly. Biological weapons could be scarier still, particularly if Saddam employed a nonconventional delivery system, such as aerosol sprayers hidden along major roads. “We might not even realize we’ve been slimed,” says Michael Eisenstadt, a military expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Defenses against exotic agents like botulinum toxins are limited.
According to Powell, Iraq retains several dozen long-range Scud missiles it could use to hit nearby U.S. military command posts or against Israel in order to draw a response that could provoke the Arab world. But U.S. Scud-hunting techniques have improved since the last war, and special operations troops may already be scouring the western Iraqi desert to neutralize any remaining launchers.
In his presentation to the United Nations last week, Powell revealed a newer, more serious threat: Iraq has been testing unmanned aerial vehicles with a range of more than 300 miles. Combined with spraying technology that Iraq has previously developed, these could deliver deadly biological agents to a number of neighboring countries and nearby U.S. military bases.
2. Saddam Hussein makes a bloody last stand in Baghdad.
Baghdad is the one true prize in the fight for Iraq, but it could prove a costly one for U.S. troops. Many analysts think most Iraqis would simply hunker down in their homes and wait out the war. But the streets of the capital could provide a last-ditch defense for Saddam’s most loyal troops: the Special Republican Guard and his fiercely disciplined security forces. “If you have 100,000 people willing to defend Saddam, that can cause a lot of casualties,” says Kenneth Pollack, an Iraq analyst at the CIA during the Gulf War. Troops and tanks that make easy targets in the open desert are harder to attack in an urban setting, and war planners worry that civilian casualties and so-called collateral damage could weaken support for the U.S. war effort.
The Army’s 1993 experience in Mogadishu, Somalia, where 18 Rangers were killed by Somali militiamen, is still fresh in the minds of officials at the Pentagon. In recent months, U.S. soldiers and marines have been assaulting mock cities in Louisiana, California, and Guam to prepare for what they might encounter in Baghdad. Marine Corps officials have also traveled to Israel to study how the Israeli Defense Forces quelled the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank town of Jenin. Yet military officials are still hopeful that after a massive bombardment of Saddam’s power centers and wholesale defections of Iraqi troops, they might never have to apply what they’ve learned.
3. Iraq’s oil wells are turned into fields of fire.
As they retreated from Kuwait in 1991, Iraqi troops committed one final indiginity: They torched the country’s oil wells. It took oil-field workers nine months to put the fires out, and Central Command is expecting Sadadam would use the same tactic if the U.S. invades. According to intelligence officials, there are signs that Saddam has already wired some of Iraq’s 1,500 oil wells to explode on his orders.
This time, war planners would try to dispatch U.S. or coalition forces to protect the oil fields before he could set them ablaze. But if he did, the result could be far worse than in 1991. Besides the fact that Iraq has more than twice as many wells as Kuwait, oil-field firefighters say the natural pressure in Iraq’s oil wells may be double that of the Kuwaiti wells, meaning that fires would be more intense. In addition to polluting the air, the wells could foul the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, sources of water for drinking and irrigation, as well as dump 2 million to 3 million barrels of oil a day into the Persian Gulf.
Jeff Miller of Cudd Pressure Control, one of the oil-field firefighting companies the Pentagon has retained to cap burning wells, says that while firefighters were able to extinguish the 1991 fires at the rate of one blaze per day, it would take much longer in Iraq. “This looks like six to seven days per well in some locations, and multiply that by the number of wells, and you’ve got a huge environmental disaster.” According to Miller, the Defense Department has contingency plans in place for his 38 employees as well as dozens of other firefighters from three other companies. “They all have pagers, kind of like doctors,” he says. If called, it would probably take them 24 to 48 hours to arrive, probably on military and civilian cargo planes that also carry their equipment.
4. Saddam puts civilians in harm’s way.
As Air Force planners methodically pore over target lists, there is one wild card they can’t control: a decision by Saddam to use human shields in Baghdad or other Iraqi cities. The opening phase of the war would be a massive air campaign on Baghdad to cut off Saddam’s command and control. Military officials worry that Saddam could put Iraqi civilians or western reporters inside high-value targets, which the Pentagon may have to strike regardless. “It could be a very dangerous situation,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers recently acknowledged. Central Command also fears that Saddam might kidnap U.N. weapons inspectors, holding them hostage before the United Nations was able to pull them out of the country.
Such tactics could be part of a larger scorched-earth campaign Saddam would execute in his final days. The United States has gathered intelligence indicating that he would destroy mosques and power plants in an attempt to pin blame on western invaders. Saddam could even destroy the four key dams controlling the water supply in Iraq, flooding the southern marshlands and potentially killing thousands. During Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military considered such a tactic to flood Baghdad, and now planners face the threat of Saddam’s pulling out every stop to slow down a U.S. advance. Says Judith Yaphe of the National Defense University, “I don’t trust him to leave anything sacred.”
5. Terrorists acquire Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
Whether or not Saddam is currently allied with al Qaeda, a war could push them closer. Indeed, the CIA has assessed that Saddam may well deliver chemical or biological weapons to terrorists as his “last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.”
Even if this didn’t happen, the chemical and biological weapons stocks could still slip out of the country in the chaos following an invasion. “You can take one of the mobile biological labs and drive it across the border,” says Pollack. “The greater possibility is they get across into the open arms of Syrian and Iranian border guards.” These regimes already have their own programs to build weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But terrorists could well obtain smaller quantities of harmful agents, especially if, as U.S. officials allege, the stocks have been secreted all over the country. “There’s nothing to say that an Iraqi bioscientist doesn’t have a pile of the stuff in his freezer,” says one former defense official.
For the U.S. military, anything connected to WMD is a top-priority target. Air Force planners have spent months trying to locate these stockpiles and determine whether or not they are safe to bomb. U.S. ground forces would blanket the country as quickly as possible, using defectors and scientists to locate the stockpiles.
Even short of a WMD attack, the risk of terrorism would be much higher if there is war. Iraq, for one, would try to hit U.S. targets. “They’re putting terror teams out there,” says one source with access to intelligence. More broadly, al Qaeda and other groups could use the war as further motivation to go after Americans.
6. Once Saddam is ousted, Iraq descends into chaos.
After war, Iraq could prove hard to control. The fate of Saddam himself is perhaps least worrisome because, even if he somehow escaped, few experts believe he could ever mount much of a guerrilla campaign. “If he is able to thumb his nose at us like Osama bin Laden, the United States is going to look ridiculous,” says Edward Walker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. “But he won’t be a threat once he’s out of power, so it’s more symbolic.”
But Iraqis, freed from Saddam’s repressive grip, could unleash a wave of revenge killings that could spin out of control. “After a period of bloodletting, there will have to be law and order,” says one U.S. official. This would most likely take thousands of U.S. soldiers camping out in Iraq for many months. While most Iraqis probably would be happy to be rid of Saddam, there is great resentment after years of American-led sanctions. If the Iraqi death toll in a war is high, U.S. forces could be greeted very coldly.
American planners have devised a process for ruling Iraq that begins with an American general in charge and evolves over a period of more than 18 months into an Iraqi government. But no decisions have been made about who exactly would govern Iraq then. Iraq’s numerous tribes, for example, could end up battling one another in a power struggle. U.S. officials think they can control it. “If we’re the most powerful player in the region, they will want to be allied with us,” says one planner. “If we have to pay for it, so be it.”
Experts can spin out countless other scary scenarios. Kurdish parties could be tempted to push for independence. The country could split between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Or neighbor Iran could meddle. “On some days, I get up thinking this will be relatively quick and we will be left with a pretty good situation afterwards,” says one U.S. official involved in the planning. “On other days, I wake up and think, `Holy sh – -.’ “
Copyright 2003 by US News and World Report
