Gambling With History

By: Gene Lyons

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: ie: a people joined by bonds of language, culture, religion, a sense of shared history, and common destiny. Awaken most at gunpoint at 4 am 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.