Stardate 20020216.1312

(On Screen): The Warblogger Brain trust continues its analysis of the upcoming war in Iraq (if there is one). Between us, Sergeant Stryker and Douglas Turnbull and I have largely concluded that an open-field set piece battle is very unlikely. (Props also to the participants in my forum for many good suggestions and criticisms.) The most likely scenario is for the Iraqis to kiss off the countryside, to not oppose an initial invasion, and to fort up in cities with their troops distributed among civilians.

The good Sergeant points out a study of the effects of the bombing on Baghdad itself in 1990; it did little, in fact, because it was so highly targeted. The Iraqi government soon discovered what kinds of things we'd hit and what we would leave alone, and distributed their command and control.

I think that these things can be dealt with. But it's necessary to keep in mind what Saddam's overall strategy is. His goal is to slow the war down and to make it bloody. His top priority is two-fold: to shed American blood, and to make Americans shed Iraqi civilian blood. That, in combination with a perceived military stalemate, would permit him to win the TV war. International outrage would rise, pundits would bitch, the cries of "Quagmire!" would begin, voters would demand victory and, Saddam hopes, the US government would then negotiate to gain something it could take back to its voters and try to claim as a victory which still left Saddam in power. In other words, he wants an Iraqi equivalent of the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, which "ended" the Viet Nam War. From Saddam's point of view, time is on his side. The slower things go, the better for him.

If he fights in his cities, then either the US stays outside and lays siege, which leads to perceived stalemate, or the US bombs aggressively and kills a lot of civilians, or the US goes in to fight it out, in which case there are a lot of dead civilians and also a lot of dead and wounded Americans. All of those are victories for him.

Siege is complicated; it's not merely a matter of isolating the enemy. You have to have a way to force him to eventually give up. Traditionally that meant starving him out, but if we surround a major city such as Baghdad and cut off food supplies, it would have to be presumed that there would be considerable stockpiles of food in the city. The Iraqi military would seize them to feed the soldiers, and it would be the civilians who starved leading to a political catastrophe for the US.

What is needed is a way to lay siege and force them out rapidly, and I think that water is the key. While there are stockpiles of food, there are not generally stockpiles of drinking water, and humans go through a lot more water than food anyway. So it would be necessary to bomb and destroy all water supplies for the city: pumping stations, water treatment plants, water towers and reservoirs. This would make the city uninhabitable for nearly everyone, civilian and soldier alike, and force them to leave. While it might be true that if the government became stubborn that civilians might start to die of thirst, the soldiers would too and that might be intolerable to them.

In addition, it would be necessary to destroy the electric power grid and to take out the phone system. All of these things can be done because they are concentrated into a relatively small number of locations which can be bombed, and they can't be disguised or moved. We should already know where all major electric distribution stations and phone exchanges are already.

The problem is that in the case of Baghdad, there's a major river flowing through the middle of it, and only eliminating electricity and phone isn't enough.

The presence of the river raises a different idea, but I don't have access to sufficiently good terrain maps to know if this is possible. Sometimes a siege can be won through flooding.

If the area is right, you can build a dam just below the besieged installation and let the water rise. If the city is protected by dikes, those can be bombed. That, too can force evacuation. Put most of a city 8 feet deep in water and it becomes uninhabitable, and one advantage is that the water rises slowly enough to permit evacuation, especially if the psyops people make sure the residents know what is coming.

And if we let our imaginations run riot, there's an oddball approach. Poison Gas is banned by international treaty, but non-poison gas is permitted. What if substantial parts of the city were hit with stink-bombs? I'm completely serious: there exist chemicals which have putrid odors but which are not otherwise poisonous, which we humans are sensitive to in extremely small concentrations. A good example is Butyl Mercaptan, which can be produced industrially in multi-ton lots. (Butyl Mercaptan is the active ingredient in a skunk's spray.) The problem with Butyl Mercaptan is that it is somewhat flammable if the concentration is high enough, and it does us no good if it burns when it is first distributed. (If we want fires, there are a lot better ways of making them.) But there are other chemicals which are relatively harmless but impossible to tolerate which might serve better, and research has been going on into their use as weapons for civilian police operations. A high-tech high-capacity equivalent of a crop duster could render large parts of the city uninhabitable in short order that way without killing many people. But it is more likely to be released with the use of a large number of bursting canisters because they could be released from higher altitude at higher speed which would be much less risk to the aircrew. Another alternative would be a specially adapted UAV, which could fly low and slow without risking pilots. Air-burst artillery shells or rocket delivery are also a possibility.

That would drive the Iraqi military out of the city, away from its human shield, where it would become vulnerable to air strikes and could be engaged on the ground with more conventional methods.

It would also create the mother of all refugee problems, so we'd have to be ready with food and shelter for the millions of civilians driven out of the city by such tactics.

Those kinds of chemicals can be chosen so that they break down with time, which would mean that eventually the city could be repopulated. And in the meantime it would not damage essential infrastructure.