War in the Middle East: If it Comes,
Get Ready for the Worst
by Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
January 22, 2003: Assessing what will happen if and when American military forces
invade Iraq presents the analyst with a formidable challenge. Very little factual
information has been released. The Bush Administration is holding their cards
close to its chest. The special interests that influence the press and news
media are beating the war drums and doing their best to ratchet up anxiety.
The news itself is dominated by psychological operations, or psyops as it is
called in the Pentagon, as all the various parties work to intimidate the others.
As an example
of how pro-war, one-sided (and misleading) the news commentators are, a recent
news item on expected casualties compares the situation today with the results
of the Gulf War in 1991. The “experts” say they expect the war to
be even shorter because there are so many more precision-guided munitions. Accordingly
casualties and collateral damage will be low.
A few “wild
cards” that could upset the calculations are mentioned but quickly passed
over. These wild cards include no use of chemical warfare (CW) agents, no use
of biological warfare (BW) agents, and no urban warfare (no fighting in Baghdad).
There is no known basis for expecting any of these provisos to hold and strong
reasons for expecting exactly the opposite.
There seldom
is any mention of the use of “deception and denial” practices, such
as the use of cheap decoys to draw the fire of precision-guided munitions. This
significantly complicates targeting and greatly reduces the effectiveness of
the precision guided munitions. Iraq is known to have been incorporating these
techniques into its defenses since the 1991 war.
Perhaps the
most glaring omission is any significant consideration respecting 1) a new wave
of terrorism against the United States that should be anticipated following
a U.S. attack on Iraq and 2) the consequences of an Iraqi attack on Israel.
The damage associated with either of these two consequences could dwarf the
estimates of damage and casualties generally associated with a war in Iraq.
The potential for terrorist attacks against the United States in response to
an attack on Iraq should be of very real concern to all Americans. We remain
exceeding vulnerable to terrorist attacks, notwithstanding all hype associated
with the new Homeland Defense Department. As will become evident below, the
threat is not just Iraqi terrorist attacks but those by any number of a large
assortment of terrorists and sponsors sympathetic to Iraq and/or antagonistic
towards the United States.
Should an invasion
take place, great fanfare will be made to portray it as a coalition effort in
which 40 plus nations are now believed to have pledged their support to President
Bush. However, no effort is being extended to ask what constitutes an ally or
what the motivations of the various “coalition” members are, or
how many were blackmailed or bribed into joining and how useful their contribution
will be, aside from enabling President Bush to speak of the extensive international
effort that has joined together in the war against Saddam.
I hope the
experts are right; that the war will be short and not involve much destruction.
However, I cannot but help fear that the optimistic prognostications merely
represent the group think that seems to characterize the Bush Administration
and, with it, an absence of conflicting or pessimistic views. As explained in
Woodward’s Bush at War, only positive attitudes are allowed. There do
exist, however, strong views that conflict with the official line and serious
concerns respecting the advisability of going to war against Iraq and where
that action may lead.
From my perspective,
leaving aside the serious omissions identified above, there are several aspects
that have received only minuscule attention and deserve much more: the nature
of the threat, the demise of U.S. internal security and how easy it will be
to repair the damage, problems that beset our own leadership, and the opposition’s
goals.
The
Threat
Before going
to war, it is important to objectively study the threat. In the case of Vietnam,
there was no realistic assessment of North Vietnam, its motivations, convictions,
and staying power. Nor was there any appreciation of the nature of its support,
which included China, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and all the Soviet East
European satellites. The Best and the Brightest, as those who ran the Vietnam
War were described by David Halberstam in his best selling book, knew it all
(in their minds), but were disastrously short in humility and wisdom. The U.S.
strategy, to the extent it existed, was seriously flawed by an unrealistic assessment
of the threat and an arrogance that made military experience and expertise largely
irrelevant.
We appear to
face similar problems in the wars on terrorism and Iraq today. There is no evidence
of a reasonable or objective understanding of the threat. The threat is not
just Iraq (that is, Saddam Hussein) or the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. They are important
but minor players in the overall scheme. What is missing is the overall scheme,
who the players are and how they fit together.
Since 1955,
international terrorism has not been just a bunch of independent actors, as
repeatedly described in official documents over the past decade. U.S. intelligence
and leadership seem to have had a most difficult time understanding the real
world, which contains few, if any, independent actors.
International
terrorism has been, and still is, state supported. The principal sponsors and
supporters are Russia and China. (For a excellent brief discussion of this,
see J. R. Nyquist, “The Enemy Behind Our Enemy.”
This is not mere hypothesis or unjustified assertions. It is fact, although
admittedly a politically incorrect fact. Other nations heavily involved are
Syria, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and a whole host
of African countries like Libya, Algeria, and the Sudan.
As an indication
of how widely terrorism has spread and the threat the United States faces when
our leaders talk about war on terrorism or war on Iraq, there is now an Anti-North
American Revolutionary [Terrorist] Movement in Latin America. It’s center
appears to be Venezuela. It is supported by Cuba and Brazil. Terrorists from
Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Iran, Iraq, and Al-Qaeda are involved. The terrorists
are Marxists and their roots go to Russia (specifically the GRU) and China.
Their activities have increased over the past year, with coordination trips
to the Middle East and reciprocal visits to Cuba and Venezuela by Middle East
terrorist group representatives. They have ready access to the United States
heartland through their drug trafficking. Manufacturing or smuggling in large
quantities of toxins and biological warfare agents would be simple and involve
minimal risk of detection.
The threat
of international terrorism and especially the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) is also incomplete without recognizing the close ties that
join international terrorist operations with narcotics trafficking and international
organized crime.
Traffickers
and terrorists are almost indistinguishable. Narcotics trafficking networks
were even established with the plan to use their smuggling mechanisms and networks
for inserting saboteurs or terrorists and supplies (such as biological and chemical
warfare agents) when needed. The idea of constructing a strategy to effectively
wage war on international terrorism without including international narcotics
trafficking in the threat is, at best, naïve.
Continuing,
narcotics trafficking is the primary component of international organized crime,
and the financial money laundering networks that service organized crime and
narcotics trafficking also service international terrorism – not 100 percent,
but close enough to make any threat assessment incomplete if it does not include
the narcotics trafficking and organized crime financial apparatus as part of
the threat. There is no indication that any of this is part of the thinking
that underlies the war on terrorism or nature of the threat that should be considered
when planning a war on Iraq.
To better appreciate
the importance of these dimensions of the threat, the annual revenues of international
organized crime is estimated at over $2 trillion. (A 1999 U.S. interagency study
put the range of their money laundering each year at no less than $900 billion
and possibly in excess of $2 trillion.) This has led to massive corruption of
international banking, finance, top law firms (most of which are tied to banking),
governments, intelligence services, law & order apparatus, the courts, businesses,
and, of course, politics around the world, including or especially the United
States. The top money laundering countries in the world are the United States,
Israel, and Great Britain, followed by Russia and a whole host of smaller countries
around the world. This has been going on for over forty years. Its size has
been over a trillion dollars a year for over a decade. The only reason why it
is so large and successful is that it is politically protected.
Terrorists,
supposedly operating at arms length from the respectable agencies of power in
international organized crime, are often used as “enforcers” when
necessary to “reason” with important political, government, or other
officials. When President Bush made the financing and money laundering links
that support international terrorism a priority target, he was taking on, witting
or unwitting, the two trillion-dollars-a-year apparatus that also services international
narcotics trafficking and organized crime. The financing structure is not just
a bunch of charitable institutions collecting donations and dispensing funds.
They are just a minor part of an immense criminal operation that is covertly
linked to terrorist groups.
It should be
readily evident that many of our “allies” in the war on terrorism
and members of the coalition being formed to justify U.S. actions directed toward
regime change in Iraq are more strongly associated with the threat than with
the United States. It is equally evident that most of the weight in the threat
would like to see America destroyed or, at the very least, “cut down to
size.” In the wake of 9-11, suddenly the real and present possibility
of cutting America down to size had to have become evident in the minds of most
of the key players in the threat. This may be one reason why there have been
no serious follow-on attacks. The terrorists could have been advised to “cool
it” for a while. Those at the top of the power structure may have been
surprised at how effective the attack was, and what that meant to them in the
interdependent economic structure they had been putting together. They first
had to reason through how to position themselves so that they would not get
burned too badly when terrorism resumed, or, better still, be prepared to capitalize
on the economic chaos anticipated to accompany more serious attacks on the U.S.
homeland in response to a U.S. attack on Iraq.
U.S.
Internal Security and Prospects for Repairing the Damage
U.S. internal
security is what the U.S. war on terrorism and, to a certain extent, the possible
war on Iraq is all about. With 9-11 and the follow-on anthrax attack, U.S. vulnerability
suddenly became an issue. How dare they strike us! How dare they embarrass those
responsible for our nation’s security.
This is also
a very serious aspect of the possible war on Iraq that is almost never discussed:
our invading Iraq might serve as a trigger for terrorist attacks on America
by a wide variety of our enemies as indicated in the above “threat”
discussion.
Presumably,
this is what the new Department of Homeland Security is about: defending America
against terrorist attacks. What has been missing in the discussion respecting
this new department is “Why? What happened to U.S. internal security?”
and will the new Department fix the problem, what ever it is, which the administration
evidently does not want the public or Congress to understand.
Understanding
what happened to U.S. internal security also should be part of a threat assessment
because what constitutes a threat is highly dependent upon the state of our
defenses – and, U.S. internal security is now at low tide.
U.S. internal
security was, in essence, destroyed by the Presidential Administrations and
Congress during the 1970s. The base of the destruction was laid earlier, but
the coupe de grace was executed in the 1970s.
For example,
in 1974, the FBI opened or reopened more than 55,000 cases of “subversives
and extremists.” The implementation of the Privacy Act coupled with the
Freedom of Information Act led to many lawsuits against FBI agents conducting
background security investigations and maintaining surveillance on political
extremists and terrorists. As a result, by 1976, the number of FBI investigations
had dropped to 20,000. Then, guidelines promulgated by President Ford’s
Attorney General, Edward Levi, made it illegal to conduct surveillance on people
who were not known to have committed a crime or about to commit a crime. One
year later, the number of active surveillance cases had plummeted from 20,000
to 102, and by 1982, the number had fallen to 14: four organizations and 10
individuals!
In 1969, the
White House directed that all intelligence files containing names of U.S. citizens
be destroyed. Those files were indispensable in many background security investigations.
Between 1973 and 1979, the number of FBI background security investigations
also fell from 21,000 to 50! During this time frame, Congress cut Defense Department
Investigatory Services by 27 percent and in 1981 their backlog of investigations
had grown to 83,000. In effect, background investigations for all but the most
sensitive posts were dispensed with. The doors for wide spread infiltration
were opened wide.
By the end of the 1970s, terrorists and subversives were able to act with near impunity on U.S. soil. The Attorney General’s list of subversive and Communist groups was thrown out the window. It is no accident that there was a flood of foreign intelligence agents and terrorists into the United States. 1979 was the year of the Mariel Boat lift from Cuba in which hundreds of Cubans fled to the United States. The major portion of those Cubans admitted into Miami were AIDs carriers, criminals, and intelligence agents (including terrorists and drug traffickers).
Cuba, it is
important to note, was a Soviet satellite and a major training and coordination
center for international terrorism. It is likewise no accident that terrorists
regarded the United States as a preferred rest and recreation site because there
was no internal security, and that the 1980s became known as the decade of the
spy because of the massive intrusions into and compromise within U.S. national
security agencies. In the 1990s, operations of foreign intelligence services
were even more disastrous that they had been in the 1980s decade of the spy.
Neither the White House nor the Congress seemed to care.
The influx
of terrorists, intelligence agents, sabotage specialists, and drug traffickers
was further facilitated by the gradual tearing down of immigration controls
that had begun in 1965. The flood of immigrants was supported by the White House
and key members of Congress, and still is. Estimates on the number of illegal
immigrants roaming the American streets and coffee houses ranges from one to
five million, not counting all those given amnesty and citizenship because the
magnitude of the numbers of illegals was so embarrassingly large. How many have
been deported in the wake of 9-11? Have any been deported?
The important
point in all of this is that the internal security apparatus that was destroyed
in the 1970s (and continuing in years after) represented an enormous cumulative
investment – people, files, knowledge, skills – painstakingly developed
over many years. It cannot be easily or quickly recovered. It will take a long
period of time and all those who have blended into our culture, including those
whose files were destroyed by direction of the White House in 1969, may never
be recaptured by those now trying to identify terrorists and subversives.
How many are
now living and enjoying life in the United States while waiting for their assignment?
Even internal security specialists have no idea. The number would have to exceed
20,000 (a minimum of 5,000 each from the Middle East, Russia, China, Cuba and
10,000 or more drug traffickers with terrorist roots) and could reach as high
as 100,000 or more.
Will the Department
of Homeland Security solve this problem? Impossible. Their main effort will
be to integrate a hodgepodge of agencies into one. Moreover, none of the key
intelligence agencies are part of this integration. Most important, the White
House is unlikely to let the CIA, which reports directly to the White House
and is often used as a mechanism for implementing White House interests that
the White House wants kept secret, be placed under any other agency.
As a further
indication of the dilemma we face, the destruction of U.S. internal security
during the Ford and Carter administrations also contributed to the enormous
expansion of narcotics trafficking and organized crime in the United States,
most of which is directly attributable to operations of foreign intelligence
services who are also major supporters of international terrorism. (Extensive
details on the Soviet and Chinese narcotics trafficking intelligence operations
are presented in the book Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America, published by
Edward Harle Ltd., in 1999.) The growth in narcotics trafficking and organized
crime in turn has led to the unavoidable and unrelenting parallel growth of
corruption and immorality within the political, business, finance, government,
legal, and law and order communities of the United States. Corrupted and compromised
people can be called upon for assistance by terrorists and their supporters
when necessary. For example, efforts within U.S. Customs to stem the flow of
cocaine into the United States during the Reagan Administration were curtailed
because the cash flow generated by the cocaine was the main sources of dollars
used to pay the interest on the Latin American debt bomb owed to the New York
banks.
Leadership
Pogo once remarked:
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Until the United
States looks back and asks, “How did we get in this predicament?”,
nothing the United States does is likely to have anything other than at best
a temporary effect.
Are WMD in
the hands of Iraq a problem to the United States – today? If there is
a regime change in Iraq, will that solve the problem? It should be apparent
that the answer is no. After Iraq there is Syria. Then Iran. Then North Korea
and China. How about Russia? President Lula of Brazil has indicated his intentions
to resume Brazil’s nuclear weapons program. Lula is a committed Marxist,
good friends with Chavez (another Marxist and President of Venezuela) and Castro.
There are now
nearly two dozen nations, mostly of the terrorist variety, that are working
on biological warfare agents, which in certain respects are a more serious threat
than nuclear weapons because they are cheap, easy to smuggle into the United
States, may be impossible to trace, and can kill people by the millions or be
used in very selective operations to disable individuals or organizations.
Anthony Sutton
described the heart of the problem most succinctly in the title of his book,
The Best Enemy Money Can Buy. It is hard to identify a threat (previous discussion
above) that has not been aided significantly by U.S. White House direction.
This includes the Soviet Union, its satellites, China, and so on. The Soviet
Union likely would not have survived through the 1920s if not assisted by the
White House and U.S. industry. Nuclear weapons technology was first proliferated
to the Soviets during Lend Lease by the White House. The man in charge was Harry
Hopkins, who we now know to have been a Soviet agent. Nuclear weapons materials
were reportedly provided to Israel in the mid-1960s at White House direction
through the CIA.
The decision
to move U.S. capital and industry overseas was made in the White House in 1961
as part of the revision of the Basic National Security Policy that was under
the direction of White House Advisor Walt Rostow, who was denied a security
clearance because of his socialist views and communist connections by the State
Department and Air Force (See the Ordeal of Otto Otepka by William Gill).
Massive transfers
of technology to the Soviet Union began in 1972 as part of SALT I. Suppression
of intelligence on Soviet activities was also stepped up during Nixon-Kissinger
administration, to avoid upsetting détente and arms control initiatives,
and their China initiative opened the flood gates to technology and industry
transfer to China.
Information
on Soviet (and Chinese) drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorism was
buried during just about every post-1960 U.S. administration. This was in support
of long-standing White House policies not to embarrass or confront the Soviets,
although in several cases the subverting of information on sensitive Soviet
operations would seem to have been done as an internal CIA initiative with no
information provided to the White House. While the role of the Soviet Union
as the granddaddy of terrorism began to surface during the Reagan Administration,
this was all changed the instant the Bush Administration came into being and
intelligence collection directed toward the Soviet Union and its “successor,”
Russia, was severely cut back.
Today’s
leadership does not seem any more interested than past administrations in recognizing
let alone meeting the threat to the United States. A classic indication of the
problem is contained within the book Bush at War by Bob Woodward. He describes
an NSC meeting at which CIA director George Tenet in discussing the anthrax
attack recognized the possibility of state sponsorship – because the anthrax
was too sophisticated for typical terrorists. Vice President Cheney’s
assistant, Scooter Libby, cautioned against any mention of state sponsorship
and Tenet quickly said he had no intentions of raising the issue. Vice President
Cheney, who chaired the meeting in the President’s absence, quickly agreed:
“It’s good that we don’t because we’re not ready to
do anything about it.”
Once the door to state sponsorship is opened, the implications are nearly all “politically incorrect” – embarrassing not to mention frightening. Who would want to suggest that those most capable might be Russia, Cuba, and China – even Israel? The number of biological warfare facilities in Cuba today staggers the imagination. Moreover, it is not a recent phenomenon. Cuba was a participant in Warsaw Pact biological and chemical warfare research, development, test, and operations beginning in 1961. It operated covertly through Czechoslovakia.
Cuban chemical
warfare instructors stated in 1984 that Cuba had sufficient chemical agents
in the United States to poison 30 percent of the U.S. water supplies. Today,
they could launch a massive covert biological warfare attack on the United States
and the chances of U.S. intelligence being alert to the possibility or being
able to diagnose what was happening has likely not changed since the anthrax
demonstration of October 2001.
This is not
being alarmist. The only truly alarming part of the biological warfare threat
is the efforts of U.S. intelligence at White House direction to sweep the biological
threat under the rug since 1969 and the lack of U.S. interest in advanced biological
warfare capabilities as the Russian biological warfare expert, Ken Alibek, learned
after he defected to the United States. His experiences are described in his
book Biohazard (See "Assessing the CBW Threat.")
The other leadership
practice that has been evident for over a year and that undermines the decision-making
process is the combination of group think and an evident lack of tolerance for
conflicting opinions. Complicating this practice is an extreme sensitivity to
the release of information that is not carefully scrubbed and scripted. This
is most evident in the iron cage place around information respecting 9-11 (who
knew what and when) that has culminated in the absurd creation of a committee
to investigate the issue.
Those professionals
who have been involved in command operations or intelligence know that immediately
after a major crisis or failure, like 9-11, there are high-priority efforts
at the top of all agencies to understand what happened when information is fresh
in people’s minds so that internal problems can be fixed. These studies
– unexpurgated – should have been major inputs to the planning behind
the Department of Homeland Defense. Such studies should have been completed
long ago at NSA, CIA, and DIA for example. If they have not been done, the action
is not to form a committee to learn what happened but to fire every senior official
of each intelligence agency, beginning at the top. The only evident reason for
forming a committee is to white wash or quiet the claims of gross malfeasance
and appease the public by appointing a committee to investigate the incident.
Probably most
disturbing was President Bush’s public remarks at CIA headquarters shortly
after 9-11. He stated: “George [Tenet, director CIA] and I have spent
a lot of quality time together over the past few weeks…I want you to know
that I trust the CIA…Everyone should trust the CIA.” To anyone with
any knowledge of the CIA, this was an unbelievable statement, especially following
as it did on the heels of a number of articles written by former CIA operators
and analysts castigating the CIA management, tradecraft, politically correct
promotions policy, and operations. As though this were not enough, no one mentioned
the years the CIA swept information on Soviet sponsorship of international terrorism
under the rug and even discredited many of their own sources in an effort to
kill a DIA study that identified the Soviet Union as the major sponsor of international
terrorism. The real tragedy, supported in the Woodward “history,”
Bush at War, is that it seems likely that the President may really believe what
he said.
Enemy
Goals and Objectives
A final item
in a threat assessment concerns the goals and objectives of the enemy. This
is a difficult problem because we have such a wide variety of enemies, as indicated
earlier. At times it seems that U.S. policy is principally designed to make
enemies or create antagonisms. However, the difficulty lies not so much in identifying
the various interests of the variety of hostile elements but in integrating
them and understanding the manner in which they will influence actions and responses.
The terrorist
situation today differs from past conflicts. The terrorists do not seek to destroy
our military forces or to destroy the people. Their objectives are dominantly
political and involve two different sets of vested interests: those of the terrorists
themselves and those of the organizations or states that support or sponsor
them. One targets the people only to destroy their faith in their government.
The stated
objectives of Osama bin Laden are especially interesting because they indicate
how clearly the enemy is thinking. They believe the way to bring down our political
system is to target our economic “supremacy” – specifically,
the dollar. Given the deep weaknesses in the U.S. economic system today, this
should be of considerable concern. The concern is not just for terrorist attacks,
but equally important what their associates in international organized crime
and money laundering might consider doing. With revenues averaging over a trillion
dollars a year for the past 15 to 20 years, their cumulative investments give
them rather significant leverage over the international financial markets.
At a conference
in Austria five years ago, an Europol intelligence official expressed his concern
that it would not be long before international organized crime controlled the
financial markets because of the strength and influence they had amassed. These
people are not dumb. They are smart, powerful, and connected. They are well
informed about the economic state of the United States and the dollar, including
its weaknesses and vulnerabilities. They saw 9-11 and without question its impact
on their interests and investments. It would be naïve to fail to recognize
their logical interests and preparations to capitalize on the chaos should a
second shoe drop. Moreover, to a degree, they are not sympathetic to the United
States and many would like to see the United States cut down to size. Their
main concern is their own interests, not those of the United States.
Although U.S.
administrations – not just the current Bush Administration – seem
to see the American economic system as a tower of strength, one has to wonder
what are they comparing it against? Certainly not the United States of fifty
years ago when debts of all sorts were, relative to today, almost nonexistent,
when the dollar was worth ten times what it is today, when U.S. industry was
strong and exports far exceeded imports, when a family could live on the income
of one wage earner, when U.S. education was the best in the world, when our
society was not bombarded by illegal drugs, and when the societal regression
we find ourselves in today was only beginning.
It is hard
to think of a serious problem America faces today that was not recognized twenty-five
years ago. Not one administration in the intervening years has taken steps to
address the root causes and all the problems are worse today.
State sponsors
such as Russia and China and nearby terrorist states, like Cuba, should be of
major concern. Their objectives have been to destroy our culture and political
system. Our weaknesses (including the inability of our leaders to see what has
been happening) have increased significantly over the past forty years, thanks
to successes in covert intelligence operations that our enemies have realized,
such as those in narcotics trafficking. Today, there are numerous terrorist
states (Cuba, Russia, and China, for example) that could make the anthrax demonstration
of October 2001 look like child’s play as indicated earlier. Today, the
threat of nuclear attack is greater than ever before because the proliferation
bogyman has guaranteed our inability to retaliate. Should a nuclear bomb explode
in one of our cities, it is unlikely, as in the case of the October 2001 anthrax
attack, that we would know the source of the attack, especially if it were dressed
up to look like a terrorist event. How long could any administration or Congress
survive the results of just one modest nuclear explosion in a major U.S. city?
Equally of
concern should be the tremendous impact of the Vietnam War on U.S. economic
strength, political will, and respect for authority. The damage done by this
war was horrendous. It is again no accident that one of the objectives stated
by high-ranking Marxist and Left officials over the past five years has been
to “get the U.S. involved in more Vietnams.” As hard as it is to
believe, this could be exactly the direction in which we are headed. No one
would have believed it in 1962 and few will believe it today, but the indicators
are present.
There is also
a large portion of the Left, both at home and abroad, that would like to see
the United States cut down to size politically and economically in the interests
of furthering the destruction of U.S. national sovereignty and facilitating
our entry into the New World Order. Remember, that in a brief moment of honesty,
progress into the New World Order is what the first Gulf War was all about,
as stated over and over by President Bush and Dr. Henry Kissinger. Might not
this, in effect, help explain why today’s President Bush told leaders
of Congress shortly after 9-11 that he did not want a Congressional Declaration
of War: namely, because it would have had the effect of placing us on a return
to a Constitutional Republic and taken us off the path of policeman for the
New World Order? If Congress set about to declare war, might someone ask, “How
can we declare war on a nation that has not attacked us and is not known to
be about to attack us?”
Bottom
Line
Notwithstanding
the general lack of information and massive propaganda assault that dominates
the news and political commentaries, still a troubling pattern can be seen.
• The
potential and likely consequences of initiating war with Iraq go far beyond
what the public is being told and directly threatens the lives and livelihood
of all Americans. War is most unpredictable, especially when the threat is not
adequately assessed.
• Most
lacking in discussions of the possible war is the likelihood of major terrorist
attacks against the United States, the impact of Iraq use of weapons of mass
destruction on U.S. forces and Israel, problems of urban warfare, terrorist
interests in attacking U.S. allies, and the nature a serious attack on the U.S.
economy and the dollar might take and its consequence.
• There
is a growing concern at senior levels within the U.S. military that a war with
Iraq will not be a short in-and-out operation, is more likely to involve tens
or hundreds of thousands of casualties rather than mere hundreds, and that long-term
occupation of Iraq and perhaps other Middle East countries has to follow.
It is also
evident that opposition to President Bush’s approach is growing both at
home and abroad in parallel with mounting concern for the anti-Saddam invective
and the ease with which the reason for invading Iraq seems to change. These
points will be addressed next week.
Next Week:
Is An Attack Imminent?
© 2003
Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
January 22, 2003