Six Deadly Fears
The U.S. military is confident of victory in Iraq-but at what price?
U.S. military planners are working to confound Iraq's ability to use these weapons. The invasion plan is designed to move swiftly, sow confusion, and cut off Saddam's command and control. Already, U.S. forces are conducting psychological operations to persuade local commanders to ignore orders to use weapons of mass destruction or face war-crimes charges in the aftermath. But the orders could still be carried out by the Special Security Organization, a powerful agency headed by one of Saddam's sons.
Iraq is most experienced at loading chemical weapons into artillery shells that could be used on the battlefield. Unprotected Iraqi civilians could be killed, and U.S. forces might still take casualties despite their protective gear, but U.S. forces could take out artillery batteries relatively quickly. Biological weapons could be scarier still, particularly if Saddam employed a nonconventional delivery system, such as aerosol sprayers hidden along major roads. "We might not even realize we've been slimed," says Michael Eisenstadt, a military expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Defenses against exotic agents like botulinum toxins are limited.
According to Powell, Iraq retains several dozen long-range Scud missiles it could use to hit nearby U.S. military command posts or against Israel in order to draw a response that could provoke the Arab world. But U.S. Scud-hunting techniques have improved since the last war, and special operations troops may already be scouring the western Iraqi desert to neutralize any remaining launchers.
In his presentation to the United Nations last week, Powell revealed a newer, more serious threat: Iraq has been testing unmanned aerial vehicles with a range of more than 300 miles. Combined with spraying technology that Iraq has previously developed, these could deliver deadly biological agents to a number of neighboring countries and nearby U.S. military bases.
2 Saddam Hussein makes a bloody last stand in Baghdad.
Baghdad is the one true prize in the fight for Iraq, but it could prove a costly one for U.S. troops. Many analysts think most Iraqis would simply hunker down in their homes and wait out the war. But the streets of the capital could provide a last-ditch defense for Saddam's most loyal troops: the Special Republican Guard and his fiercely disciplined security forces. "If you have 100,000 people willing to defend Saddam, that can cause a lot of casualties," says Kenneth Pollack, an Iraq analyst at the CIA during the Gulf War. Troops and tanks that make easy targets in the open desert are harder to attack in an urban setting, and war planners worry that civilian casualties and so-called collateral damage could weaken support for the U.S. war effort.
The Army's 1993 experience in Mogadishu, Somalia, where 18 Rangers were killed by Somali militiamen, is still fresh in the minds of officials at the Pentagon. In recent months, U.S. soldiers and marines have been assaulting mock cities in Louisiana, California, and Guam to prepare for what they might encounter in Baghdad. Marine Corps officials have also traveled to Israel to study how the Israeli Defense Forces quelled the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank town of Jenin. Yet military officials are still hopeful that after a massive bombardment of Saddam's power centers and wholesale defections of Iraqi troops, they might never have to apply what they've learned.
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