Military maps out worst-case scenarios
By John Yaukey
Gannett News Service
Top military planners have compiled a list of a half dozen worst-case scenarios surrounding an invasion of Iraq.
They include:
• Chemical and biological weapons: No small number of military and intelligence analysts believe Saddam Hussein will use chemical and possibly biological weapons once it appears troops are nearing Baghdad. Intelligence reports indicate that Saddam has authorized his field commanders to use chemical weapons — most likely mustard gas and the nerve agent VX — against a U.S.-led invasion.
Although U.S. troops are equipped with gas masks and protective suits, chemical and biological weapons could still cause significant injuries and even deaths.
• Saddam's last stand in Baghdad: By all indications, Saddam has pulled most of his elite Republican Guard troops back to Baghdad for what could be a bloody urban battle that claims massive civilian casualties and possibly hundreds or thousands of U.S. troops.
The Iraqi army has reportedly dug trenches around Baghdad and filled them with oil. The plan is to light them ablaze to both obscure vision into the city and prevent civilians, whom Saddam plans to use as human shields, from fleeing.
• Civilian shields: Military planners fear Saddam plans not only to use civilians as human shields, but also that he plans to kill many of his own people in an attempt to make it look as though they were massacred by U.S. troops. Iraq has reportedly tried to order U.S. military uniforms for this purpose.
• Environmental disaster: When they retreated from Kuwait in 1991, Saddam's forces lit the nation's oil fields ablaze, creating an environmental and economic disaster for the small nation. By all accounts, Saddam will do the same with his own oil fields as invading troops approach them. According to intelligence reports, Saddam has wired about 1,500 wells for destruction.
Blowing up that many oil wells could pollute the air across thousands of square miles, foul the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where Baghdad draws much of its potable water and dump as many as 3 million barrels of oil a day into the Persian Gulf.
• Passing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists: Saddam has never been generous with his weapons of mass destruction, preferring to hoard them for his own wars. But if it appears his regime is toppling, experts say there is a significant risk he might try to pass his chemical and biological weapons off to terrorists as a final act of revenge.
• Chaotic aftermath: Postwar Iraq will be fraught with perils rooted in ancient ethnic tensions. Keeping the peace among the armed Kurdish factions in the north, the restive majority Shiites in the south and the Sunni Muslims that form the bulk of Saddam's ruling Baath party will keep U.S. troops busy.
War could create as many as 1.5 million refugees, adding to the 1 million Iraqis already displaced.
Failure to restore order to all of this quickly would leave the United States vulnerable to an international rebuke as a brutish colonial giant repeating the mistakes of its European predecessors a century ago.
