Guest commentary: Hey, we could lose in Iraq
By GREGG DOBBS
Scripps Howard News Service
Thursday, August 22, 2002
naplesnews.com
Can you believe it? We might soon launch an all-out war, and all with a minimum of national debate. Supersonic fighters taking off, missile launchers turning their turrets, soldiers shipping out. And preparing the battlefield with massive quantities of weapons and water, ammo and anesthetics, food and fuel . . . and body bags. Plenty, if we're smart. Unlike the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein chose to live to see another day, this time, outgunned or not, he can be expected to go for broke.
Yet when House Republican leader Dick Armey said two weeks ago that he thought we were rushing foolishly toward costly confrontation, the story came and went. When GOP luminaries like Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, then Lawrence Eagleburger and Dick Lugar raised concerns last week, it was buried in the back pages. And our leading Democrats? Inexplicable silence. I fear that a column headlined Iraqidelic, Baaaaaby. would attract more eyes than something stark like, We could lose this war.
You see, we could. The administration talks like victory is a no-brainer. How short sighted! Compared to the defenses we'll face in Iraq (and the reluctance of many allies to join the crusade), the war in Afghanistan was a cake walk, and we can't even declare victory there yet! Osama bin Laden still seems to be on the loose, and by all accounts the country itself is turning back to the ungovernable mess that has always made it vulnerable to conquerors and, more recently, terrorists.
What would victory look like in Iraq anyway? Killing or capturing Saddam Hussein? Sure, that's the primary purpose of the exercise, but if we couldn't find a foreign figure like bin Laden in the wasteland of Afghanistan, it'll just be harder to detect Saddam in the tunnels and bunkers of a land he has designed for his own protection.
What's more, I was told when I covered Iraq 20 years ago that Saddam Hussein never sleeps two nights in a row in the same place. Slippery people slip away.
Meantime, we'd have to try to occupy Iraq's cities. Picture our forces patrolling the streets in chemical weapons suits. And picture our tank crews, once removed from the safety of the desert, incinerated by enemies springing from Baghdad balconies and dropping Molotov cocktails down their tubes. I saw that happen to the Shah's troops during the revolution in Tehran. It's not pretty.
Intelligence? Defense Secretary Rumsfeld himself said earlier this month that even in Afghanistan, the bad guys have learned to "burrow underground" and thwart our surveillance. My God, if that's what they can do in Afghanistan, just think of the obstacles in Iraq! Our own people cannot possibly blend in, and from what I've seen of locally recruited American agents elsewhere, they will be pushing their agenda, not ours. Hardly a formula for success when miscalculations can be fatal.
Then, consider this: If we invade, we are counting on the conciliatory cooperation of a handful of exiled Iraqi opposition groups. But these are mainly people who were once part of Hussein's bloodthirsty regime themselves, so even in the event that we catch or kill Saddam, they can be expected to return to their own tried-and-true ways if it enhances their chances of succeeding Saddam.
Of course we have another goal in Iraq too: finding and confiscating Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. But can we? Fat chance. He has had 1,001 Arabian nights to hide them in 1,001 Arabian places. And while we're searching, what might Saddam do to deter us? Attack the Zionist Jews in Israel? Attack the dissident citizens of his own country? Drive millions of Arabs to higher levels of anti-Americanism? Trigger a bigger war between the Arab world and Israel... and us? Now back to those body bags. Just before the Gulf War, I flew on Air Force Two with Vice President Quayle to Europe. Perhaps fatigued by jet lag, he told me that we had shipped 10,000 bags to the war zone. Of course Pentagon planners hoped we wouldn't need most of them, but it was possible and they knew it.
Who holds onto that memory today? Evidently no one with the power to remind us. Iraqidelic, Baaaaaby!
_______________________________________________
Greg Dobbs was an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ABC News, and now hosts a talk show in Denver. His e-mail is: dobbsnews@yahoo.com. |
