How to tell if We're Winning in Iraq
Excerpt:
If Saddam Hussein still has working Scud missiles, he can be expected to fire them at Tel Aviv as soon as the war gets underway. He'll do this for the same reason he did in '91: to try to incite Israeli retaliation, which would enflame the Arab world, widen the war, complicate postwar politics?-in short, to bring the world down with him. The missiles may be tipped with chemical warheads. Saddam chose not to go chemical in '91 (though he could have), mainly because the first President Bush suggested we might retaliate with nukes. This time, knowing that defeat means his own death, Saddam might fire the CWs, if he has any; it's hard to deter a man with nothing to lose. If he does launch missiles, chemical or otherwise, he'll probably do so early because waiting is not an option. In military jargon, he's in a "use them or lose them" situation. American fighter-bombers will no doubt try to knock out Scud sites in the first wave of the attack. If we see Patriot air-defense missiles being fired from Israeli (or Kuwaiti) territory, then we will know the bombers didn't get all the Scuds. If, on the first or second night, we don't see streaks rising or warheads in-coming, then we can surmise we did destroy the Scuds?-or possibly that Iraq had no such missiles in any shape to fly. Incidentally, Scud-hunting is a very tough task. The missiles are small, mobile, and easily camouflaged. In 1991, U.S. and allied aircraft launched a few hundred air attacks on what were thought to be Scud sites, but intelligence officials concluded after the war that the strikes destroyed only a few Scuds?-possibly no Scuds at all.