Be it recorded that last
time the United States and its allies went to
war with Iraq during Operation Desert Storm in
1991, I won a dinner bet
with a New York editor who'd bought into the
idea of a prolonged tank and
infantry battle on the Kuwaiti border. Having
had a small amount of
experience in that region, I doubted that Saddam
Hussein's army would
stand and fight. I figured once the shooting
started, the war would be over
in two weeks.
My thinking had nothing
to do with the individual courage or"patriotism"
of Iraqi soldiers. These qualities are human
constants. It had to do with
understanding that Iraq isn't really a nation
in the sense that, say, Norway or
Mexico are: i.e. a people joined by bonds of
language, culture, religion,
a sense of shared history and common destiny.
Awaken most at gunpoint
at 4 A.M. and ask them who and what they are,
and "Iraqi" would be just
about the last answer you'd get.
Instead, most inhabitants
of Saddam's desert paradise would name their
ethnic group or religious sect--be it Shiite,
Kurd, Chaldean, Sunni--their
village or tribe. Ethnically, Iraq makes the
former Yugoslavia look
coherent. It's not a nation, it's a geographical
absurdity cobbled together
for their own purposes by the British and French
after World War I from
the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.
Far from feeling loyalty
to the Baghdad dictator, most frontline
soldiers were unwilling conscripts held in place
by fear. Saddam kept
his best-trained and most loyal units close to
him. The military position
they were defending was a meaningless line in
the sand. As soon as they
became more afraid of the army in front of them
than the tyrant behind
them, I reasoned, they would surrender en masse.
As indeed, they did.
But not before an appalling bloodbath that won't
soon be forgotten by the Americans who took part.
Even many who merely
witnessed the carnage on CNN, which has been
careful not to re-broadcast the
most disturbing footage of fleeing soldiers and
civilians being annihilated
from the air, came away horrified.
A friend who served in
Desert Storm told me that far from clamoring to
push on to Baghdad, most officers felt immense
relief when the war ended.
Their objective was to push Saddam out of Kuwait,
not to conquer Iraq.
Slaughtering a fleeing mob offended their honor
and cauterized their souls.
Much of the he-man rhetoric about "finishing
the job the first time," comes
from the kind of people who get a vicarious thrill
sitting in their studies
boasting of American power and sneering at European
weakness.
I thought of that conversation
recently after reading in the Los Angeles
Times of President Junior's plan to reduce the
citizens of Baghdad to a state
of "shock and awe" with a cruise missile attack
of unprecedented scope
and ferocity. Certain of the fervid enthusiasts
around Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld also think that tactical nuclear
weapons may be deployed
--lovely, antiseptic word--to take out Saddam's
deepest bunkers.
But let's assume that
this is largely propaganda, scare talk designed
to send Saddam running. What worries many in
the Pentagon nervous about
President Junior's scheme to occupy Iraq is not
knowing whether soldiers who
fled in terror during Desert Storm will fight
desperately to defend their
homes and families against foreign invaders.
Will U.S. and British
troops, as everybody assumes, race through the
Iraqi desert as easily as German tanks penetrated
Poland on Sept. 1, 1939?
(Historical analogies, see, can cut both ways.)
Or will they meet determined
resistance, sabotage, booby traps, and other
nasty surprises? Nobody knows.
The administration's strategy of loudly proclaiming
that Iraq poses a dire
threat to U.S. security while making a public
spectacle of massing troops
along its border as if it were scarcely capable
of self-defense makes no sense.
The Germans, at least, knew that Polish horse
cavalry posed no real danger.
We Americans are new at this business of pre-emptive
war.
It's these uncertainties
and more that caused the conservative thinkers
at the Cato Institute to object that "the assumptions
that underlie the
administration's policy range from cautiously
pessimistic to outright fallacious.
"Far from the unpredictable madman portrayed
in President Junior's speeches,
Saddam Hussein has shown himself as cold-blooded
a realist as Stalin.
Left to his own devices
and assured of massive retaliation to aggression
against the American homeland, he can be and,
indeed has been,
successfully deterred. "If Hussein believes that
his political survival is being
threatened, and there is nothing he can do about
it," they warn "he may
respond in a dangerous and unpredictable manner-with
weapons of mass
destruction."
In short, if Saddam can't
retaliate, invading Iraq is pointless; if he
can, it's potentially catastrophic. Take your
pick.