BY NORM DIXON
US President George Bush will order a massive military attack on Iraq sometime in the next six months. However, the US ruling class has yet to agree on exactly how the war will be conducted, what its eventual scale will be or on its exact timing.
Various battle scenarios are being leaked to the capitalist media from the highest levels of the US government and their pros and cons are being discussed in the leading US establishment newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
On July 29, the NYT published an article based on comments by "senior administration and Pentagon officials" that reported that the Bush administration was considering a military strategy, known as the "inside-out" approach. It would involve the sudden insertion of 50,000-70,000 crack US and British troops to rapidly seize control of Baghdad, Iraq's capital.
The military goal would be to kill or isolate Iraq's top political and military leaders, shut down Iraq's military command centres and neutralise President Saddam Hussein's elite military units, which are concentrated near Baghdad. According to this scenario, the immediate decapitation of Iraq's political and military structures would trigger the defection or surrender of the rest of Iraq's armed forces.
The unnamed US officials who spoke to the NYT conceded that such a strategy was "risky". Airborne and ground assaults on "strategic targets" in Baghdad would be preceded by "intense air attacks". Such an attack would inevitably result in massive civilian deaths in Baghdad. Intense Iraqi anti-aircraft fire directed at low flying US warplanes and the likelihood of house-to-house fighting between Hussein's elite troops and invading US soldiers could result in significant US casualties.
The NYT, and most other mainstream commentators, have counterposed this "inside-out" strategy to an earlier leaked scenario that was published in the July 5 NYT. That plan envisaged a massive land invasion of Iraq by up to 250,000 troops. US and British troops would attack from Turkey and Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait.
Upon closer examination, the latest scenario is not an alternative battle plan at all, but a more refined variation of the first. As the July 29 NYT noted: "Something near the 250,000 figure might have to be deployed to the region anyway, to make sure that any forces that drop into Baghdad do not become isolated or surrounded, bereft of a land line providing military support, food or ammunition."
While the officials who spoke to the NYT used the excuse that the strategy based on the swift seizure of Baghdad by a smaller military force was aimed at forestalling Hussein's use of "weapons of mass destruction" against the invaders, it was obvious that its primary purpose was to address or at least defuse the concerns of a small but important section of the US ruling elite.
Fearing consequences
There is a fear within these circles that the possible political consequences of a large-scale invasion of Iraq large domestic antiwar protests fuelled by large numbers of US casualties, explosions of anti-US sentiment in Middle Eastern and Muslim countries that could threaten Washington's key allies in the region and the disintegration of Iraq could outweigh the benefits of toppling Hussein for the US.
The July 14 London Observer reported that the original invasion plan leaked to the NYT came "from within the Pentagon, from the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top professional soldiers who drew it up in the first place".
The July 28 Washington Post reported that "some top generals and admirals in the military establishment, including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" argue that Saddam Hussein "poses no immediate threat and that the United States should continue its policy of containment rather than invade Iraq to force a change of leadership". The newspaper added that some senior State Department and CIA officials share this view.
According to the Washington Post, the "possible negative consequences of attacking Iraq" cited by the critics include: "that Iraq could split up under a US attack, potentially leading to chaos and the creation of new anti-American regimes and terrorist sanctuaries in the region"; the danger of large civilian and US casualties in urban fighting in Baghdad; and uncertainty about the "costs of a post-victory occupation, which would presumably require tens of thousands of US troops, not only to keep the peace and support the successor regime, but also to prevent Iraq from breaking up".
The Washington Post report stated that a major goal of US policy in a post-Hussein Iraq "would be to prevent the creation of an independent state in the heavily Shiite south or an independent Kurdish state in the north". A US defence official told the newspaper that, in return for Turkey's and the Arab states' tacit support for the impending military action against Iraq, Washington had promised that Iraq would not be broken up. "I think it is almost a certainty that we'd wind up doing a campaign against the Kurds and Shiites", the official confessed.
The "inside-out" strategy seeks to allay fears that Washington will be forced to directly crush Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite majority the very people US propaganda claims it is "protecting" by overthrowing Hussein by holding out the possibility that once Baghdad falls, the Iraqi armed forces would defect.
An unstated premise of the plan is that the Iraqi military dominated by Iraq's minority Sunni elite would be preserved largely intact. The US would install a new regime headed by the former Iraqi military officers it has been cultivating for the past several years including generals with long track records of crushing the Kurds and Shiites. The Iraqi military would quickly resume its traditional task of defending Iraq's "national integrity".
The "inside-out" plan is also aimed at reassuring Washington's increasingly nervous Middle Eastern and Muslim allies. The new approach "could appeal to skittish Gulf allies whose bases would be required for a war", the July 29 NYT observed.
"Those states are quietly advocating the quickest and smallest military operation possible, to lessen anti-American protests on their streets. In that sense, the war planning includes the political dimension of trying to tip reluctant allies into supporting, tacitly at least, the operation... 'The worst scenario from our point of view would be a big war by air and land and with lots of bombs and civilian casualties', said one [Gulf state] official."
War preparations
Meanwhile, preparations for war continue unabated. The US has almost completed runway repairs at three former Iraqi air bases in northern Iraq, now under the control of pro-US Kurdish militia, the Middle East Newsline news agency reported on July 29. The runways will be able to accommodate US warplanes and cargo aircraft.
On July 23, former senior UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter told a meeting in Boston that the Third Marine Expeditionary Force in California has been ordered to have 20,000 marines ready for deployment in Iraq by mid-October. The US Air Force has also been directed to have three air expeditionary wings ready for combat operations in Iraq by mid-October. Ritter added that Boeing and other weapons manufacturers have been told to accelerate the production of satellite-guided bombs.
The US has spent more than US$1 billion to improve an air and naval base in Qatar, including an air command centre, in case Saudi Arabia refuses to allow the US to launch attacks from its soil. Heavy arms and equipment for a full mechanised brigade are permanently stored in Qatar. Thousands of US troops are already stationed in Kuwait and Qatar, with 5000 more in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. All up, there are around 20,000 US military personnel near Iraq's borders.
The July 19 London Daily Telegraph reported that the British defence ministry is planning "a mass mobilisation of key reservists beginning in September". Britain has also pulled its troops out of NATO's rapid reaction corps and cancelled or scaled down its involvement in a number of European military exercises. Britain has also withdrawn the bulk of its troops from Bosnia and Afghanistan. The newspaper interpreted these moves to be in preparation for joining the US Iraq invasion force.
The Telegraph reported that "British military planners are working on the basis that Britain will provide a very large force, including an armoured division, a naval task force and substantial numbers of combat aircraft".
The July 29 London Independent reported that HMS Ocean, one of Britain's largest warships, is being refitted to allow troops to make amphibious landings from the vessel. Washington has asked Britain to supply up to 30,000 troops for the attack on Iraq.
From Green Left Weekly, August 7, 2002.
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