Six Deadly Fears
The U.S. military is confident of victory in Iraq-but at what price?
3 Iraq's oil wells are turned into fields of fire.
As they retreated from Kuwait in 1991, Iraqi troops committed one final indiginity: They torched the country's oil wells. It took oil-field workers nine months to put the fires out, and Central Command is expecting Sadadam would use the same tactic if the U.S. invades. According to intelligence officials, there are signs that Saddam has already wired some of Iraq's 1,500 oil wells to explode on his orders.
This time, war planners would try to dispatch U.S. or coalition forces to protect the oil fields before he could set them ablaze. But if he did, the result could be far worse than in 1991. Besides the fact that Iraq has more than twice as many wells as Kuwait, oil-field firefighters say the natural pressure in Iraq's oil wells may be double that of the Kuwaiti wells, meaning that fires would be more intense. In addition to polluting the air, the wells could foul the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, sources of water for drinking and irrigation, as well as dump 2 million to 3 million barrels of oil a day into the Persian Gulf.
Jeff Miller of Cudd Pressure Control, one of the oil-field firefighting companies the Pentagon has retained to cap burning wells, says that while firefighters were able to extinguish the 1991 fires at the rate of one blaze per day, it would take much longer in Iraq. "This looks like six to seven days per well in some locations, and multiply that by the number of wells, and you've got a huge environmental disaster." According to Miller, the Defense Department has contingency plans in place for his 38 employees as well as dozens of other firefighters from three other companies. "They all have pagers, kind of like doctors," he says. If called, it would probably take them 24 to 48 hours to arrive, probably on military and civilian cargo planes that also carry their equipment.
4 Saddam puts civilians in harm's way.
As Air Force planners methodically pore over target lists, there is one wild card they can't control: a decision by Saddam to use human shields in Baghdad or other Iraqi cities. The opening phase of the war would be a massive air campaign on Baghdad to cut off Saddam's command and control. Military officials worry that Saddam could put Iraqi civilians or western reporters inside high-value targets, which the Pentagon may have to strike regardless. "It could be a very dangerous situation," Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers recently acknowledged. Central Command also fears that Saddam might kidnap U.N. weapons inspectors, holding them hostage before the United Nations was able to pull them out of the country.
Such tactics could be part of a larger scorched-earth campaign Saddam would execute in his final days. The United States has gathered intelligence indicating that he would destroy mosques and power plants in an attempt to pin blame on western invaders. Saddam could even destroy the four key dams controlling the water supply in Iraq, flooding the southern marshlands and potentially killing thousands. During Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military considered such a tactic to flood Baghdad, and now planners face the threat of Saddam's pulling out every stop to slow down a U.S. advance. Says Judith Yaphe of the National Defense University, "I don't trust him to leave anything sacred."
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