Six Deadly Fears
The U.S. military is confident of victory in Iraq-but at what price?
Donald Rumsfeld likes making lists. This is a man, after all, who lives by a collection of maxims known as "Rumsfeld's Rules." Yet few lists the defense secretary has ever compiled are more ominous than the one that now sits on his desk at the Pentagon. It is a collection of things that could go wrong if the United States goes to war with Iraq, and for months he has been steadily adding to it. He has yet to cross anything off.
With Colin Powell's address to the United Nations ratcheting up pressure on Saddam Hussein (story, Page 26) and a military conflict drawing ever closer, there is remarkable consensus among war planners about one thing--that the United States would win a second Gulf War, and in short order. "On the military side, the outcome is not in doubt," says one top officer. Iraq's ramshackle and ill-trained Army, they argue, would be little match against overwhelming U.S. military superiority. With 125,000 troops already in the region and the northern half of Kuwait converted into a vast marshaling yard, the Pentagon last week launched another round of deployments, sending the 101st Airborne Division and the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk toward the Persian Gulf. More than 42,000 British troops are poised for an attack, and cargo ships continue to bring a stream of tanks and armored vehicles into Kuwaiti ports. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, whose 24th Mechanized Infantry Division helped execute the famous "left hook" attack against an Iraqi Army stronger than today's in Operation Desert Storm, puts it this way: "The Iraqis have no good military options. There is no technique, no tool that they can now adopt that will have any military significance on the outcome of the conflict."
Yet beneath the confidence among U.S. officials about the outcome, a general unease exists about the unintended consequences of trying to take down Saddam Hussein's regime. It could go smoothly: Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution estimates that as few as 100 U.S. soldiers may be killed. If things go badly, he predicts, that figure could hit 5,000. Saddam, many fear, like the biblical Samson, will bring the walls of the temple down around himself. "Based on a fair amount of trying to figure Saddam and his cronies out, I wouldn't try to predict how they will behave," remarks one senior Pentagon planner. "That's what makes them so dangerous." The following are scenarios that war planners tell U.S. News keep them up at night. Some of their worst-case scenarios they refuse to divulge, for fear of giving Saddam any more ideas.
1 Iraqi forces unleash their chemical or biological weapons arsenal.
After the 1991 Gulf War, the CIA reported that Saddam Hussein had ordered his troops to use chemical weapons if American troops crossed a certain line in Iraq. They didn't, and a fusillade of deadly gases was never launched. This time around, any war would go all the way to Baghdad, and U.S. intelligence is reporting that Saddam recently authorized his field commanders to use chemical weapons to combat a U.S. invasion. Most likely, Saddam would use artillery-delivered mustard gas and nerve agents against U.S. ground elements advancing on Baghdad. If so, says McCaffrey, "it's going to create conditions of abject misery, but it will have no impact on the pace of the operation."
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