The War Before the Day After

With the Bush administration poised to open its war with Iraq, too much of the debate has moved from justifying the war to speculating about the problems of postwar reconstruction and political control. We have discounted the war almost as if it were already over.

This tendency flows from two assumptions that may (or may not) be inaccurate. One is the notion that the Iraqis will not fight. The second is that American wonder-weapons will overcome Iraqi defenses and ensure a short, painless war. The best and the brightest who led America into Vietnam evinced identical hubris and technological myopia. One more reason to question this war is the simple doubt that Bush's goals can be achieved as promised.

We must abandon the notion that George W. Bush's aim is to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Disarmament is an international concern and figures into administration rhetoric because it offers a way to gain public support for preemptive war. The real aim is to get rid of Saddam. A stated intention to put Iraqi leaders on trial for war crimes makes that goal crystal clear. No foreseeable Iraqi disarmament will satisfy the Bush administration. Oil may be a collateral factor, but it is viewed as instrumental — that is, control of oil may finance the enterprise.

Achieving these goals requires two things: capturing Saddam and his minions and securing the oilfields so they cannot be destroyed in any scorched-earth defense. Therefore, a war plan must provide for instant insertion of forces into Baghdad and into the oil fields in the south and north (around Basrah, Kirkuk and Mosul). This would require airborne operations around Baghdad and in the north to seize the nearby airfields from which forces can enter the cities. This will be the role of the 82nd Airborne Division and special operations forces. To avoid city fighting — the obvious defensive tactic (which Saddam himself has discussed) — the airfields will be used as bases from which to helicopter raiding forces into Saddam's palaces and hideaways, and to neutralize Iraqi command nets with wonder-weapons in an air campaign conducted alongside (not prior to, as in the Gulf War) the main event. The net result will be several detachments of American forces in isolated forward positions that will become magnets for Iraqi counterattacks. The forward bases will have to be relieved by a ground offensive from Kuwait — saved, as it were, by a cavalry charge across the desert.

It is more than 300 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad and at least another 200 to Mosul, with Kirkuk in between (hence the U.S. desire for a northern force entering through Turkey). There are only two approaches: straight up the Tigris River through Basrah (very narrow tactically, and on the wrong side of Baghdad to relieve the airbases, though this route offers better roads), or through the desert west of the Euphrates river and its extensive marshland. The offensive will probably take the latter route. The most recent speculations are that the U.S. Marines and the British will secure the Basrah oil installations and the lower marshes, while the U.S. Third Army marches on Baghdad. The critical question is, how long will this take? The offensive will require fording the Euphrates and dealing with marshes, all of which may be flooded if the Iraqis open their upriver dams. The whole operation will be a bridge-builder's nightmare, and while attack forces will have a certain amount of flexibility, supply lines will not.

The advance will go faster with leapfrogging, i.e. if heliborne forces of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment create a succession of intermediate bases. But this point-to-point advance will have its counterpart in the Iraqi defenses. The 101st is just beginning to arrive in Kuwait, but they must still remove the helicopters from their plastic cocoons and make them airworthy, which will cause a delay. Bush could go sooner, but if he does, the attack forces won't be as flexible. U.S. forces are optimized for night fighting, and the next new moon is April 1, with rapidly diminishing nighttime illumination starting about March 25. This is just about when the 101st will be ready.

The Iraqis do not have a "line" in the conventional sense, but occupy critical nodes in a transportation network. And scattered groups of Iraqis, sometimes just one or a few soldiers, will also serve to delay the advance. Planners during the Gulf war assumed the Iraqis would fight and they did not; this time they are assuming the Iraqi military will cave. But that thinking ignores Bush's goal of regime change. Plenty of Iraqis — Ba'ath party members, citizens angry at the way their nation is being treated, people oppressed by a decade of sanctions — may see reason to take up arms. American e-bombs have no effect on simple assault rifles, and the key weapons here will be rifles and land mines.

All of which brings us back to Baghdad. There is significant danger of a super-Mogadishu scenario, where raiding parties are trapped and forward bases are assaulted, while Saddam's rings of defenses outside the city delay or halt the American cavalry charge. Baghdad may end up looking more like Custer's last stand, or the British paratroopers beleaguered at Arnhem in 1944, than the triumphal procession Bush planners anticipate. Of Arnhem it was said that the forward troops were just "a bridge too far" from their comrades. One shudders to think that phrase may apply again today.

John Prados is a senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. His current book is Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby.