Stardate 20021016.2103

(On Screen): There are just too many good blogs out there! I long since gave up on visiting all the ones I like on a regular basis, so it was only today that I found an article by Donald Sensing talking about the possibility of a coup in Iraq. He concludes that the most likely perpetrators of a coup would be Saddam's inner circle who would rather live without him than to die with him.

He spends a lot of time analyzing something along the lines of a traditional coup, where the plotters take out Saddam and his sons and perhaps a few others in hopes of cutting a deal afterwards to avoid invasion and occupation. It occurred to me after reading it that there's an entirely different scenario. Instead of trying to stop war and hoping to be in charge afterwards, some of Saddam's inner circle may be looking for a way to survive it. It's sort of like a coup, kind of, but not exactly.

With apologies to my Christian friends, think of it as the "30 pieces of silver" scenario. One of the serious problems with Donald's scenario is that the actual process of killing Saddam will be extremely difficult. Saddam trusts no one. Either someone would have to try to smuggle in a gun and kill him directly, and then hope that his bodyguard doesn't retaliate on the spot, or else it would be necessary to find a sufficient cadre of men to command and send in to defeat the bodyguard more or less as a military operation. That would be difficult because the kind of facility where Saddam is likely to be holed up will be specifically designed to easily defend against attack by light infantry. So even if members of the inner circle were willing to betray Saddam, they might not easily have the ability to kill him.

One of Saddam's personal defenses, as Donald points out, is that he'll try to be somewhere we don't suspect, and the possibility is that he's got a secret bunker, or ridiculous number of known ones. It occurred to me as I was reading that someone in his inner circle might proffer us a deal: he would tell us when Saddam had gone to ground, and tell us where Saddam was, and we'd hit the place with bunker busters and kill Saddam ourselves. In exchange, the traitor's own location would not be bombed, and after we'd won the traitor would be given amnesty, permitted to keep his Swiss bank account, and allowed to retire to wealthy and obscure exile.

If, when the time comes, we seem to miraculously bag Saddam and his sons early in the war, don't be too surprised if it comes out later that someone in the top ranks ends up getting treated with kid gloves. (We'd want to keep our side of the bargain, because we might want to encourage others elsewhere to do the same at some later time and other place.)