Fox News is reporting Saddam “might strike first.” This is hardly a surprising idea. I suggested it myself many months ago. I’m sure other bloggers have done the same.
In military terms, what other choice does he have? He can and has dug in defensive positions, but there is no guarantee US troops will oblige him with a frontal assault. If he has any good generals still among the living, they will have told him to expect the enemy everywhere at once. Their hardened positions will be bypassed and beaten into the ground with ordinance. Only in Baghdad itself can his troops hide among the populace and attempt to lure US troops into bloody fighting. It is hopeless if he tries a set piece defense. He must be creative. He must hit first.
He’ll want to hit US/UK troops with chem and bio while they are still marshalling. He will desire a telling blow to take temporary initiative and damage morale. The next most important move is to goad Israel rash action. The current Israeli administration is seen by Arab states as likely to respond reflexively. If Saddam hits an Israeli town with Sarin or VX…
I do not think he would use Smallpox in the Middle East. Israel has a modern health infrastructure and would survive it… but it would spread rapidly into Palestinian and other poor densely populated areas of the third world with an effect too horrible to contemplate.
If I were in his shoes, I would be working my staff into the ground looking for a way to get at the carriers. I don’t think there is one, but I don’t have his resources at my fingertips either. A one man suicide submarine maybe? A missile pre-positioned in the hold of a cargo ship 100 miles from the formation in the Gulf? I’m sure every one is thinking through the contingencies.
The US ships moving through the Suez after the abandonment of the Turkey represents a target rich environment for a pre-emptive strike. If I were a Captain on one of them, I’d have a prickle in the back and an excessively tight arsehold until I sailed into blue water.
A major terrorist attack in America using Smallpox and the kitchen sink are certainly options, but are tactically a bad idea. The last thing he wants is to kill off some anti-war demonstrators and turn the rest into true believers.
He only has two options. Give up now or fight. Saddam is not a personally suicidal type. Nor is he a coward. If he fights he will use everthing at his disposal. His win condition is high allied casualties and long delays in their war plans. He may hope if he holds on long enough:
- Tony Blair will be forced to withdraw.
- The American public will turn on the war due to terrible scenes of carnage and American’s in body bags.
- His French allies will build up global pressure.
- The Israeli’s will trigger an Arab-Israeli war.
- His agent provocateurs, assasins, saboteurs and suicide bombers in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and else here will cause serious harm to enemy Arab leaders.
It is just blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever done wargaming.
If I was Saddam right now I’d sit it out. A preemptive strike would not help, it would hinder; it would galvanize the US and UK public and probably get the french and russians to change their plans and join the attack.
By contrast, doing nothing and making diplomatic noises leaves the USA looking still like the aggressors to 90% of the world. Any actual NBC weapons can be saved for just after war becomes inevitable. Which it isn’t, yet.
Um, what makes yo uthink that Saddam cares about Palestinian lives?
Those Scuds he fired are inaccurate enough that there was no way he coudl guarentee they would not land on Palestinians if fired into Israel. Didn’t stop him. (And yes, it did kill Palestinians.)
Julian Morrison is right.
When two rivals are more or less evenly matched a preemptive strike can give one of them a decisive advantage. This is not the case here. Iraq isn’t evenly matched, militarily, with the US, she cannot hope to prevail in battle. Her only strategy is to postpone the war as long as possible and hope it will not happen. So I think there will be no preemptive strike.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time wargaming. In a war game, if you’re the general and you order a unit to move, it will move. The biggest problem facing Saddam in planning for the war is knowing who will actually carry out his orders and who won’t. A premptive strike done half-assed will only piss everyone one off more than they already are.
Using chem/bio weapons against US troops (or worse, against civilians) would confirm their existence and verify the Iraqi threat. In that case the American public is apt to see that the body bags could have contained their children here rather than the soldiers there.
The only way I can see for Saddam to lose slowly enough to accomplish those things is if he can tie up the invading forces with bloody fighting inside Baghdad. To do so he needs his people to fight the invasion immediately (and not three years later, as was the case the last time foreigners “liberated” Iraq). I don’t see how a pre-emptive strike would help him with that…
There is a certain amount — a certain amount — of excessive fear of chemical and biological weapons. It would do for us to remember that, except in trench warfare situations, these are terribly difficult to use effectively in battle. The main reason being that they are completely dependent on the wind. If the prevailing winds are against you, you can’t use them at all. If they’re sideways to you, they’re very difficult to use against an enemy.
Chemicals disperse quickly, in most cases. Bio weapons are even worse in this regard because it may be days before the enemy is sufficiently crippled to be rendered ineffective.
Time is against Saddam in any conflict, and odds of his being able to take out lots of allied forces with chemicals or germs are fairly low, even if we didn’t have protective gear and technologies. We aren’t fighting in trenches! (Thank God.)
Chemical and bio-weapons are most useful against killing large numbers of civilians. Or for inflicting long-term morale damage on your enemy. They’re really terror weapons more than anything, and there are effective ways of dealing with that.
So our real worry is less about how many of our boys will be gassed or infected to death, than it is how many Iraqi, Israeli, and other citizens he tries to take out with these weapons.
When Saddam is certain his end is very near – he will attempt to bring down everyone and everything with him. He will only want to leave spoils and massive clean-ups for his enemies after his demise.
I don’t think the best strategy for him would be to attack first. The only kind of *pre-emptive* attack I can see him making first is via terrorism – single soldiers – back gate…
Otherwise his best bet will be to attempt to bring the Americans and the British in to the cities. Likely they’ve been training to attempt to draw in urban warfare and they may believe they can fend the enemy similar to Somalia.
Saddam may believe he has some sort of victory by creating a more divisive world. This game coincides well with al Qaeda, other terrorist organizations and other political movements who are threatened by America and her real allies.
This is a war of ideas among other things.
Elizabeth: so are you suggesting Saddam will make a *post-emptive strike*? Sorry, I couldn’t resist it 🙂
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/2020/GMA030310Iraq_weapons_evidence.html
“Is Weapons Case Against Iraq Disintegrating?”
Aparrently evidence that Bush has been relying on is not just bous, it’s transparently bogus.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/884624.asp
“FBI probes fake papers on Iraq
Investigation eyes possible role of foreign intelligence service”
It weren’t us, guvnor, it were the guy over there. Honest!
ho ho Perry. 🙂
We’ll see what happens this week. The next 24 hours will be very telling. Got coffee?
I just read the article from MSNBC – link provided by Julian. This is an area I have just began to explore.
The March 7th report to the UN Security council by ElBaradei points to the information the US has relied on in regard to whether or not Iraq attempted to purchase equipment from Niger for a nuclear program.
This possibly false information was supposedly submitted to the CIA by a 3rd country (?).
I did not read in that article that the FBI is responsible for faking the documentation. My take on the article is that the FBI is responsible for the investigation.
Depending on where ones opinions are coming from it may be an agreeable avenue… or not an agreeable avenue to resolve this issue.
That is a matter of opinion.
Whatever you may think about the ideas I put forward… here is what Saddam is saying:
Wargames are useful in examining real-world events, but they have their limits. Battles and small unit engagements can be effectively simulated, but wargames tend to break down as the scale expands. The problem is that political and economic factors increase the complexity exponentially — I’ve yet to see any game that handles these factors well, and I doubt that the best the DoD has come up with does any better than what is commercially available.
Beyond that there is the simple fact that player(s) will behave differently than real actors in a real conflict because the stakes are radically different. A proper simulation has to come up with a way of making player(s)’ game calculus the same as an actual actor(s)’ operating in the real world. In laboratories in which behavior is investigated to validate game theoretical/economic concepts, money payoffs are typically used, but even those sorts of incentives have limited utility in simulating a complex political conflict between nation states.
Consider that Nazi Germany developed nerve gas and had it available throughout much of World War II. Why was it never used, even when Hitler was in his bunker dreaming of miracles that could resurrect his shattered Reich? I won’t try to provide a complete answer here — there are treatises that deal with this question in some depth. However, I can sum things up by saying that deterrence actually seems to work when the combatants are nation states.
On the other hand, in a WW II strategic level wargame that allowed Germany to use nerve gas, and said gas useage was effectively modeled, I suspect that most players of the German side would use it. Wouldn’t a German player use a surprise nerve gas strike on the Russians at the Battle of Kursk or on the U.S. during the Normandy Invasion if it allowed the player to win these pivotal battles? Clearly, in the real world, there was a larger political context in which these battles were fought — and whatever the temptations on the German side, the nerve gas was never used.
Clausewitz was correct in his formulation that war is politics pursued by other means. The use of poison gas — if Saddam has it — would be a political disaster. The opposition to the war would be utterly discredited, thus eliminating the Baathist regime’s only real hope for survival. Even a cult-of-personality despotism like Iraq’s Baathist regime is still bureaucratic, and bureaucracies are political creatures. The use of poison gas is such an obviously bad political move that it just isn’t going to happen.
Paul Hager is right to bring up “Clausewitz was correct in his formulation that war is politics pursued by other means.”
But is Saddam sane enough to to be pursuing politics anymore?
Certianly, he has manipulated the world quite successfully into prolonging the pre-war setup practically indefinitely, and partyl responsible for changing the rules of the gmae of who needs to prove what…
Even better was Saddam’s relentless launching of SCUD missiles into Israel during the 1991 war. His goal: Piss off the Israelis enough to retaliate and the whole region explodes, with Saddam as it’s leader, despite the fact that he attacked first…
But then again, he gassed Iran. He gassed the Kurds. OK, OK, I know, everyone hates the Kurds anyways, but gassing Iran has no political benefits whatsoever that I can see.
Does this mean that Saddam has a certain snapping point, a moment where political reason, albeit through war, fails altogether?
— brendan
I believe that one of the things Saddam will be doing will be to dress his own people up in american and brittish uniforms and film them killing citizens. This will be done with the intention of galvanizing public opinion worldwide against the US and Britian.
This discussion, like most, make assumptions if American restraint that would be unwarranted in case of major American casulties. By adopting foolish, unproductive economies–mostly socialist kleptocracies–the world has abandoned the Imperium to the U.S. A single SSBN, and America has many, could annihilate most nations. Try wargaming this conflict with the gloves off. What are you going to do? Get a U.N. Security Counsel resolution? Commence an action in the I.C.C.? Proclaim a fatwa?
This discussion, like most, make assumptions if American restraint that would be unwarranted in case of major American casulties. By adopting foolish, unproductive economies–mostly socialist kleptocracies–the world has abandoned the Imperium to the U.S. A single SSBN, and America has many, could annihilate most nations. Try wargaming this conflict with the gloves off. What are you going to do? Get a U.N. Security Counsel resolution? Commence an action in the I.C.C.? Proclaim a fatwa?
This discussion, like most, make assumptions if American restraint that would be unwarranted in case of major American casulties. By adopting foolish, unproductive economies–mostly socialist kleptocracies–the world has abandoned the Imperium to the U.S. A single SSBN, and America has many, could annihilate most nations. Try wargaming this conflict with the gloves off. What are you going to do? Get a U.N. Security Counsel resolution? Commence an action in the I.C.C.? Proclaim a fatwa?
It would be reasonable for us to look to Saddam’s psychology and history to discern what future actions might be. Saddam modeled himself after Josef Stalin. As a result he created a similar state governed by similar means.
If one looks to Soviet stratagy used by Stalin one realizes he used the expanse of Russia to stretch the German’s supply lines, used the climate to wear down German troops, and created a focus of engagement at Moscow. The resulting attrition in terms of manpower and material were beneficial to the Allies in the subsequent invasion at Normandy.
Saddam was wise enough to recognize that he faced an opponent that had overwhelming military superiority as demonstrated by the 1st Gulf War. The sensible stratagy is to indirectly oppose the US led “coalition” in a fashion similar to the opposition of the Soviets by the Taliban in the 80’s. The United States will find it difficult to sustain a protracted conflict both in economics and political terms. As long as Saddam can hide and survive there is the possibility that he can ultimately prevail – although perhaps in an unconventional sense. It will be interesting to see how event play out