Pete Hamill: Victory or disaster?

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Victory or disaster?
Pete Hamill
Sunday, March 9th, 2003

Maybe they're right.
Maybe those men in the safe offices of Washington have this all figured out. Maybe the Iraqis, after burying their dead, will greet the conquering Americans with flowers and music. Maybe Shiite will embrace Sunni and all dance with Kurds. Maybe a benevolent American viceroy will turn Iraq into an Arab Minnesota, noisy with town meetings and democratic consensus. Maybe the endless killing of Israelis and Palestinians will come to a sudden, exhausted end. Maybe Al Qaeda will announce its own demise.

And maybe they're wrong.

We will soon find out.

The American generals now say the war scenario is simple. They plan to create "shock and awe" by pouring 3,000 missiles into Iraq in the first two days. Each has the power to cause more death than a hundred Rhode Island nightclub fires. Then the tanks and infantry would move into the rubble. Special ops forces would hunt down Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, his two sons and other leaders of the Ba'ath Party. They would be captured and tried later for war crimes. Or they would be killed. That would decapitate the Iraqi state. Its army would quickly surrender. The oil fields would be secured. The heavy fighting would end, with no additional work except the elimination of fanatical holdouts. Quick war. Easy victory. Piece of cake.

Under this scenario, the rest of the world also would be in a state of shock and awe. The Muslim lands would be cowed into submission to the will of America, and the fearful clash of civilizations would not happen. In the most graphic way, the French, Germans and Russians would know who's the boss. Forever. So would the North Koreans. And the Iranians. And anybody else who dared to defy American power. We have no way to know whether any of this will turn out according to the scenarios. Years ago, in Vietnam, a tough young colonel told me: "Wars are plans that go wrong."

If the rosy Washington scenarios go wrong, there could be horror on a scale we've never before witnessed. Those opposed to the war have their own scenarios, and they are laden with doom. Maybe they are right, too.

In these worst-case scenarios, the Iraqis would fight. They would unleash their last reserves of weaponized VX gas or liquid botulinus toxin ?- their supplies of anthrax, sarin and Tabun almost certainly have decayed into uselessness.

The civilian population would resist the conquering Americans with urban warfare and terrorism.

The Iraqis almost certainly do not have nuclear bombs, but the Israelis do, and nobody knows how they might react if there were assaults from Iraq on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Haifa. Baghdad is a city of 5 million human beings. One nuclear bomb would kill millions.

It's also possible, in these worst-case scenarios, that the Muslim world would erupt. Most of the dead in Iraq would be Muslims. Bombs inevitably would destroy mosques along with fortresses. In this scenario, President Bush would become the chief recruiting agent for the forces of terror lord Osama Bin Laden.

From Israel to Indonesia, there would be sustained campaigns of terrorism, some conceived by Al Qaeda, others by local groups or freelance sleepers. The American city would not be immune. New York would not be immune. The subways would not be immune. Our children, friends, relatives would not be immune. Neither would the Constitution.

Under this scenario, the Muslim world, with its 1 billion people, would not be alone in its outrage. All of Europe and most of the Americas south of the Rio Grande could rise in fury and contempt. Allied governments would fall. The U.S. would become the most hated country in the world. Some Americans abroad would be in danger. All would be objects of contempt.

A war that dismisses the United Nations would also destroy the UN itself, depriving the world of the basic forum for sorting out differences without killing. In the new anarchy of raw power where preemptive war is the basic American doctrine, the U.S. would be alone.

In fact, nobody knows which scenario will prevail: the best case or the worst. Every scenario is a form of prophecy, and prophecy is an unreliable art.

There remains the wan hope that neither scenario will become real. A third way remains possible. Somehow, this third scenario goes, mature, intelligent people would continue the tedious process of talking and inspecting, defanging the vile Iraqi regime. Hans Blix, the chief UN arms inspector, says "substantial" disarmament has begun in Iraq, with the destruction of some of the Al Samoud missiles and that he would need months to finish his work. That process ?- advocated by France, Germany, China and Russia ?- should go on, methodically and patiently.

Perhaps that process will continue, even though the American government is now advocating a St. Patrick's Day deadline for Iraq to disarm, while sneering at the word "process." Washington supports the peace process in Northern Ireland and wants a peace process to begin again in the Mideast. The Bush people are trying ?- for now ?- a diplomatic process with the North Koreans.

But they don't want a process in Iraq. They want instant regime change. They want instant disarmament. They want to view the corpses of Saddam and his sons. They want to destroy the village in order to save it.

The ordinary people I meet feel a general sense of impotence, as if they have no say in any of this ?- or if they do speak out, that they are communicating with the deaf. Many have put their lives on hold, unable to make even the simplest decisions. They are filled with baffled questions. Within days, they should begin getting some answers.

Beware the Ides of March.