Political leaders are preparing their peoples for war. Mighty military machines are ready for action, as thousands of troops take up positions near the borders of Iraq. The bitterness of the rhetoric between Washington and Baghdad suggests war is inevitable, probably imminent. But whether that is true depends on calculations still being made by two men – Presidents George Bush and Saddam Hussein.
Saddam must decide whether he really wants to fight a war he cannot win and which could – if it goes the way he and some in the US say it might – end his rule and turn his country into the dust.
Meanwhile, Bush – for all his declared yearning for peace – is said by sources in both Washington and the United Nations to be a man with his mind set: it has become politically inconceivable, say insiders, for him to face an electorate in the future with Saddam Hussein left in power.
The consequences of their decisions are potentially catastrophic: for there are now two rival accounts of how this war would play out, if it happens.
One is that Saddam’s tyranny will implode like the Afghan Taliban and collapse after minimal casualties under pressure from without and within. The other, given credence by recent remarks from Washington and Baghdad, foresees a spiral into a furnace of chemical, biological, even nuclear, weaponry. While Iraq is said to be contemplating a ‘scorched earth’ response to invasion, the US has promised ‘overwhelming force’ with ‘no options’ excluded.
Saddam continues to play with fire the way he has done since becoming president of Iraq in July 1979. But now the question is: can he be mad enough to face one last, invincible enemy? Or is he a canny survivor who will take the world to the edge of war, then climb down to remain in power? Last week’s stonewalling of the UN suggests that Saddam is spoiling for a fight, regardless. He is quoted by his latest biographer, the British journalist Con Coughlin, as recently as last August, saying: ‘If they come we are ready. We will fight them on the streets, from the rooftops, house to house. We will never surrender.’
In a remarkable interview on Swedish television a week ago, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz admitted he presumed there would be a war and that Iraq would lose it. But, he insisted, Iraq would win ‘politically’, inasmuch as the US would be exposed to the world as bully and aggressor.
What makes Saddam think he can fight? He inhabits a deluded, paranoid world of absolute power within the confines of its own myopic authority. He is surrounded by acolytes and hard men of the ‘Tikrit Clan’ from his home town.
What would make Saddam think he had a chance? He probably thinks he can take courage from the fallout of the last Gulf war. In 1991, the Americans did call for an insurrection, but took a calculated decision not to back the Kurdish and Shia rebels who undertook it, expecting allied support.
It was a betrayal of which Saddam took bloody advantage, and from which he thinks he can learn a lesson this time round. In April 1991, the road south from Baghdad towards the Shia port of Basra wound through the land – and Shia sacred cities – to which Saddam laid waste, a cemetery for what his Republican Guard did to the rebels once in flight from the surrounds of the capital.
How nasty could Saddam’s and America’s war get? Most analysts expect Saddam’s army to surrender as soon as it knows it will not get shot in the back, and collapse into the centre of the country.
But the Pentagon is divided over what would happen next, and how quickly Saddam’s regime would fall. The vision of Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is that this would take days or weeks, as opposition groups rose to welcome the invader. But generals in the army and marines contest that view, worried that not enough emphasis is placed on ‘worst-case scenarios’.
Coughlin finds that ‘as Saddam grew older, he came to believe, as had Hitler, in providence. Just as Hitler had refused to accept the advice of his generals that the Third Reich was doomed, so Saddam refused to countenance the concept of defeat.’
The worst-case model for Baghdad would be a miniature fall of Berlin, with the Republican Guard, loyal to Saddam, fighting street for street.
Already, Saddam has mobilised the Republican Guard in key positions around the capital. He has started to obstruct runways at a cluster of air bases towards the Jordanian border, one of the places from where an invasion would come. Spy satellites have spotted similar moves at bases along the south-eastern frontier near Kuwait and around the capital.
US intelligence reports claim to know about a ‘scorched earth’ policy of throwing whatever weapons Saddam has at the invading army, contaminating water supplies, igniting oilfields, burning food stocks and wreaking havoc among the population.
Can Saddam avoid war? There are many who believe, warily, that war can be avoided. Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix – along with French and Russian diplomats at the UN – think that if Saddam wants to prove that he has no nuclear programme and has destroyed his weapons of mass destruction, he can avert war and even remain in power.
The head of the nuclear branch of Blix’s inspectorate, Mohammed al-Baradei, drew a gasp from reporters at UN headquarters on Thursday when he reminded them that the ‘final objective’ was to disarm, not depose, Saddam – as though everyone had forgotten.
One French diplomat said: ‘If Saddam can prove, and put a lot of visible energy into proving, that he has taken action to destroy the arsenal he had in 1998, then he has a chance to make it very hard for the Americans to attack him. But he had better be quick.’
This would mean full access for the inspectors to up to 1,000 more listed sites, said Blix, plus sites claimed by US and British intelligence to contain ‘evidence’ of banned weapons. Blix has chastised Britain and the US for withholding intelligence, but is expected to get what he has asked for soon.
Saddam would also need to hand over scientists for interview, maybe even outside Iraq, and documentation pertinent to the destruction of weapons.
Such a climbdown by Saddam would endorse what logic there is in his past – namely, survival at all costs. But it may be too late, even without an invasion, with the appetite of his internal opponents whetted and his own weakness finally revealed.
There is the possibility that Saddam is more or less telling the truth. That, as former inspector Scott Ritter insists, he has little or no means of fighting a war and seeks to ‘maintain his credibility at home by standing up to the Americans but does not want to fight them’, as one Arab source put it.
But it will be hard for Saddam to prove a negative against an American war machine committed to proving the opposite and fighting him. And in the final analysis, the decision over whether to fight or comply may not be Saddam’s to make. For all the protestations of the Bush administration, there is a widespread feeling that its mind is made up; that the men who shied from deposing Saddam last time are hellbent on reckoning with their mistake. A convergence of sources have settled on the end of January or February as the time for inevitable attack.
Many UN officials admit they are waiting to see when – not whether – the US is going to strike. Whatever other ‘geopolitical and security’ motives the Bush administration may have for war, ‘it is something to do,’ said one expert.
Sources say the US is compiling what Washington will call a litany of ‘material breaches’ by Saddam, whatever he does. An omission here, a non-compliance there, ‘which, though none may necessarily constitute a casus belli alone, will together amount to one; the whole being greater than the sum of the parts,’ said an official.
That being the case, Arab sources at the UN make a point they think the US has failed to grasp: ‘If Saddam presumes,’ said the source, ‘that the Americans were going to fight the war anyway whatever he did, then why would he hand over a list of his weapons to fight back with, and tell his enemy where to find them?’ – Guardian Unlimited Â