I need to get these predictions in about our coming war with Iraq, aka "Saddam's Last Dance," before events overtake them, and morph them into hindsight.

Yeah, I call it a dance - not out of any feelings of flippancy on my part, but in recognition of the intricate timing, communication, and coordination it takes to run large-scale combined arms operations, and do it right. If you've ever witnessed the precision choreography of things such as a front-door, back door SEAD (Suppresion of Enemy Air Defense) mission, where fire from disparate artillery batteries that may be miles apart, is laid on multiple targets to keep a fighter-bomber safe on the way to it's target, then briefly suspended to create a shrapnel-free window while it makes it's run, then resumed along a completely different set of targets along the plane's egress route from the target area, often requiring that artillery shells be in the air as the plane is actually dropping it's ordnance, you would too. Multiply that little operation about ten thousand times throughout the theater of the war, and there you have the reason that the modern US war machine is so much more than the simple sum of it's parts, and Paper Tigers like the Iraqi army curl and blacken in our oh-so-unfriendly fire.

When Do We Dance?

The most likely month is November. I will be amazed if it doesn't go down by the end of Febuary. It could go as early as September, if Dubya wants to make a statement to the world, and start it on 9/11.

There are a few good reasons for this. First, it's going to take some time to replenish our stocks of smart weapons. By all accounts, we used enough of them in Afghanistan to make an all-out war now impossible. Unfortunately, now that the US, and only the US, has demonstrated the ability to conduct military operations with near-surgical ability to avoid collateral damage, and civilian casualties, both the world community and our domestic peaceniks will scream in horror if we reverted to dumb bombs and the like, though the rest of the world still employs them. We're stuck with precision warfare, nailed to it by our own success..

No doubt the world would be running to the ICC the first time some F-18 pilot overshot the target with a Mk-82, and took down an apartment building that happened to be next door to an Iraqi command center, and try to get everybody from the pilot to the President jailed for genocide.

We need to attack in cooler weather, as the troops will be in their NBC suits. I think we can count on Saddam to use whatever WMD he has left to go out with a bang, as he knows this one won't stop before his head is put on a pike. He'll probably toss a good fraction of them toward Israel, in fact, as many as his long range delivery systems will allow, but more on that later.

We could actually get it done sooner, were the need urgent, but Saddam isn't going anywhere, and the planners in the Pentagon will want to give themselves every advantage.

Dance Partners

The International Front

This is the most trivial and obvious prediction I will make.

Our former partners in GWI, the Saudis, are going to sit this one out, as it dawns on them what an Iraq free of Saddam is going to do for their clout with the US, and their odds of being able to maintain their oppressive, reactionary regime. No matter. It will let them get used to the idea that we don't need them anymore.

The only other country in the Middle East that has any juice whatsoever is Egypt, but they will remain too firmly attached to the two billion a year we send them to offer anything more than sputtering indignation.

Russia will protest, until such time as some bright boy in Washington offers to ensure that the eight billion dollars or so that Iraq owes them for arms sales on credit will be paid out of the oil export revenue of the follow-on regime.

Iran will need to be watched, so that they do not attempt to exploit the disintegration of Iraq, and grab some of the land on the border either during the war, or immediately after. I suspect that a few stern missives from Washington will suffice to prevent this.

Neither India or China are in any position to do anything other that squawk, though I suspect they won't do even that. Israel will, of course, back us. No other country matters.

The Domestic Front

This callup will generate numerous human interest stories about these military families, some with both the husband and the wife in uniform, forced to leave their small children with family and friends as the DoD cruelly sends them off to do what they actually get paid for. (If you're thinking I think it's the height of parental irresponsibility for both of them to be in the service at the same time, if they've minor children, you'd be absolutely correct)

Professional demagogues like Sharpton and Jackson will rush to the nearest microphone to point out that once again, minorities are being forced to go and fight in unfair proportions the White Man's War, for Big Oil, and/or the military-industrial complex, and/or Wall Street. (I wonder if they'd agree to only allowing minority enlistment in the services to the exact proportion of their makeup of the overall population?)

Congress will try to walk the fine line, wetted fingers in the air to detect the faintest changes in the current of public opinion, showing support for the President, (or at least, "for the troops") while simultaneously carping that they haven't been consulted enough about the ways and means of waging the war, as if a group composed largely of attorneys has some special insight that the generals in the Pentagon that have made this sort of thing their career do not, and should have.

The legislators don't know a five paragraph order from a hole in the ground, but they need to feel like they are protecting their turf, and making the Executive come and smooch their asses to get permission to deploy the troops is the only way they can do it.

Remember all their dire predictions about our first dance with the Iraqis, or more recently, the Dire Afghan Winter that was gonna get us bogged down in the mountains against the invincible mujahideen? They sure hope you don't.

If I were Dubya, I'd bring Biden and the rest of the leadership in, give them an extremely detailed plan of attack for them to leak to the press and Saddam, and then at the last minute, decide that this other plan, (the real one) was what we needed to do instead. I'd use the leaks as an excuse for the change, and the word treason a few times in the process.

Not that it will really matter - we'll do what we want to do, and a complete copy of the final marching orders faxed to Saddam's secret HQ Of The Day won't help him do a thing to stop it.

What Would Saddam Do?

I will be surprised if the regular Iraqi infantry divisions offer more than token resistance before surrendering. The collapse this time will be even more rapid than in GWI, as though that's possible. They remember what happened last time, of course, and are surely not as inclined to go down in martyrdom as Saddam would like them to be.

His air defense network will last a bit longer, as the missile crews will hang around long enough to light the fuse on a few SA-8s before they skeedaddle or get blown away by the HARM missiles off a Wild Weasel. Their Command and Control systems have been rebuilt since GWI, with hardened fiber-optic communications, but still lack the early warning, tracking and co-ordination features to make their numbers on the ground representative of their real-world defensive abilities. As in GWI, Allied, err, US aircraft will be able to overwhelm and destroy Iraqi air defenses at selected points, creating gaps for follow-on flights to use with no real opposition.

This will leave Saddam to rely on his WMD, Weapons of Mass Destruction. He still has some, and I think we can count on him using them in his wargasmic death throes.

Latest estimates of his WMD capability have him still in possession of hundreds of tons of mustard gas, various nerve agents such as VX, Tabun, and Sarin, along with stockpiles of anthrax, botulism toxin, and several other minor biological agents, one of the more curious of which is aflatoxin, which is only known now to be a carcinogenic agent with only long-term effects, and no immediate ability for incapacitation.

He's got a few problems with long range delivery. He's got plenty of artillery shells and rockets with chemical and/or bioweapon capability, but not so many of the longer range rockets needed to hit targets in Saudi Arabia and Israel, not that he's likely to be firing at the former this time around. Sources agree, though, that he's got enough pieces to have built at least a few more SCUDs, and he only needs one or two to hit Israel and create terror there, and try to goad Sharon into launching his own retaliation.

He's got a few aircraft fitted with tanks for dispersing sprays, with the range to get to Tel Aviv, but it's very unlikey that they'd survive the trip to get there. Still, reports are that in the last few years, he's tested using some of his obsolete fighters as remotely-piloted drones in low-altitude, single aircraft runs that would attempt to sneak in under our air defenses.

Neither the size and nature of his stocks, nor his delivery methods at hand, are enough to be more than an annoyance to the US forces, but they are capable of terror attacks, especially if he can get them into Israeli territory.

Now, I don't claim to understand that man's mind, but whatever else you can say about him, the man is not stupid. Surely he knows that his regular forces are going to fold about seventeen nanoseconds after the first bomb lands on Iraqi soil. He knows he has no hope of delaying, much less defeating, the US in a standup fight. His meager stock of WMD are not lethal or extensive enough to stop US forces.

But there is a strategy that I fear that he is smart enough to use, and it should give out planners pause.

It's based on a few facts. One, urban combat greatly favors the defender, and largely nullifies US command of the air. It also levels the field as regards the quality of American armor. The M1s that outrange and outfight the Iraqi T-72's in the open desert have nothing like that same advantage when engagement ranges are measured in dozens and not thousands of meters. Furthermore, urban close combat allows infantry to ambush armor from above and behind, allowing them to be much more effective. Urban combat is one of the few areas that largely remains a battle of attrition.

This plays into Iraqi strength, and US weakness. Should Saddam choose to let his conscript infantry divisions on the outlying areas collapse, as they surely will in any case, and choose to defend only the major cities, especially Baghdad, with his Republican Guard divisions, it will prove to be a bloody task to root them out.

This of course, presupposes that the Republican Guard units will remain loyal and fight. I am afraid that they will. Though they were pounded in in GWI, they never routed the way the Iraqi regulars did. Given the immense advantages urban combat gives the defense, and the greater morale that fighting from prepared defensive fortrifications gives the defender, I doubt they'll fold before giving at least some strong resistance. The Republican Guard units have been given special urban combat training, as their missions include internal security.

Much of the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard, (which alone can mobliize up to 25,000 men in four brigades) and Saddam's myriad other intensely loyal security forces, to include his police and internal security forces, are stationed in Baghdad, or close to it.

The next fact to consider is Saddam's demonstrated lack of regard for his own civilians, and his propensity to use both them, and foriegn nationals as "human shields." Has anyone forgotten his broadcast interviews with those little British kids, where he so avuncularly patted them on the head?

These things - the nature of urban combat, his ability to use chemical weapons, his use of hostages, and the stationing of the only troops likely to be loyal to him in the area of Baghdad, and the knowledge that he will not survive this conflict, all, to me, signify that he will use a hellish strategy that looks something like this:

1. At the first sign of the US, I keep wanting to say, "Allied," attack, (would that this were so) he will immediately launch whatever long-range weapons he can muster agaist Israel. These weapons will have chemical and bioweapon warheads, and he may toss in some some dirty radioactive warheads in the mix.

2. He'll leave the conscript infantry units on the frontier to dissolve. His Republican Guard divisions and his other security troops will immediately deploy to prepared defensive positions in and around city of Baghdad, entrenched cheek by jowl with the civilian population of the city. This will effectively nullify the ability of the US to use the carpet bombing B-52 raids that decimated entrenched Iraqi troops in GWI. He may choose to defend a few of the other larger cities in a similar manner.

3. As soon as US troops begin to make inroads against the screening forces around the city, they will be in range of his more numerous short-range chemical weapons, that is, artillery and rockets. While these weapons will do no more than slow the pace of combat operations for the US forces, they will kill many of his own unprotected people.

4. US troops will be forced to fight block-by-block into the heart of the city. Casualties will be heavy. His security forces will fight in a motley array that will make it difficult for the attackers to tell civilian from combatant. Consequently there will be civilians killed by US troops. These incidents will be heavily promoted by the press. Saddam will further arrange to have a large number (a few hundred, maybe even thousands) of his own people killed in a manner suggesting mass execution by the US forces, and release the "evidence" to the global media.

5. At some point, after the weeks of fighting it will take to destroy the entrenched Iraqi forces in detail, Saddam will order a massive release of whatever WMD munitions he has left on the entire city proper, ensuring that he will have plenty of escorts to preceed him into hell. As a large proportion of the city dies, he will be still hundreds of feet down in his bunker, exhorting whatever remains of his forces to fight to the last man. This attack wil be explained by Saddam as not his own doing, but the work of the US forces. The Arab world, will of course, believe him. These are the folks that think that the Jews staged the WTC attacks.

6. US soldiers will come home in hundreds of bodybags. Weeping mothers and wives will be the steady fare for the evening newscasts. After thousands of deaths, mostly Iraqi, the world will begin to call for a cease-fire, and a negotiated peace. This is absolutely Saddam's only way to survive this war other than just fleeing the country as soon as the war starts. This is when Bush must demonstrate Churchillian resolve, ignore the storms of criticism. and stay the course. Hopefully, we will continue until we root him out of his bunker.

7. Eventually, we will control the city. I give it no more than a fifty-fifty chance that we will ever lay hands on Saddam or his body. I expect he will commit suicide, or have a few of his most fanatic followers kill him, and burn his body so completely that it will prove impossible to be sure that he is in fact dead. This way, he can become the great unconquered warrior in legend, if not in life.

How do we prevent this scenario from happening? I see only one way - to undermine the will of the his most loyal troops. We must, before the war starts, make it clear that it is Saddam and his inner circle that we're after, and let the Iraqi defenders know that they will suffer in direct proportion to their willingness to fight. They must also be told that any complicity on their part in the release of WMD will after the war be prosecuted by military tribunals. I truly have no clear idea whether or not this subversion of morale is possible.

One way or the other, however, we must get the job done.

The Aftermath

The appearance of stable, liberal democracies in both Iran and Iraq mean the doom of the Middle Eastern oil theocracies. The Saudis will soon realize that pro-Western regimes in those states, along with our closer economic ties to Russia, will mean that our tolerance for their repressive regime is at an end, as we will no longer need their oil.

We'll sit and wonder, as we come face to face with the prospect of a whole new region of the world beginning to move from repression and ignorance to freedom and enlightenment, "Why didn't we do this ten years ago?"

Sometimes the sins of the father are visited upon the son. Bush 43 has to clean up the mess Bush 41 left behind.

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