Stardate 20030125.1817

(On Screen): John Quiggin posts, in part:

I can't see though, how the ultra-confidence of Den Beste and others in a quick, complete, nearly bloodless military victory squares with the insistence that the war has to start in the next couple of months before the weather gets too hot for fighting. The only obvious route to a quick and easy victory arises if Saddam's armies mutiny and refuse to fight at all, and presumably hot weather will not reduce the chances of this. More generally, if we agree that a change in the weather will upset everything how can we rule out some other unforeseen contingency of the kind that wars have produced since time immemorial.

Although not strictly relevant to this post, I think it's worth noting at this point that, even in purely military terms, a decision to go to war without letting the UN process reach a conclusion will have substantial costs, by curtailing any Turkish involvement and therefore foreclosing the "Northern option'

We can't rule out contingencies and surprises. That's never been possible, in war or in any other human activity. If we refuse to act without absolute certainty of result, none of us would ever get out of bed in the morning.

I think that the chance is excellent that almost all of the Iraqi army will indeed refuse to fight. We have been making a massive psyops effort to try to bring about that exact situation, and it's important to note that Saddam is feared but not loved. People serve him and follow his orders because they fear the consequences of not doing so, which in past times have been dire (torture and death). But when it looks as if there are no longer any consequences to ignoring his orders, but following them leads to certain death (by American bombing), there will be little loyalty and little incentive to do what Saddam says.

But you can never know for sure. That's how it is.

As to Turkish involvement, that got curtailed as soon as an Islamist party won the election there. UN resolution or no UN resolution, they're damned hinky about getting involved. But the reality is that there's no need for a "northern option" because this isn't going to be that kind of war. This won't be armies maneuvering against armies, but mostly our airforce killing their leaders. The overall campaign will be based on trying to kill as many political and military leaders as possible through pinpoint bombing, and then moving in on the power vacuum afterwards. That's the theory, anyway.

Which means that for the most part, movement of our troops won't be opposed. We're certainly not going to rely on that, and any opposition they meet will be annihilated, and we'll have plenty of force in place to deal with concerted opposition, but the general idea here is that most of the troop movement is going to be acceptance of surrenders or moving across uncontested ground, not active combat to take locations. We're ready to fight if we need to, but we don't expect to need to very often (as I understand it).

The "northern option" is not one anyway, for reasons of terrain. The area is horrible for movement of traditional mechanized forces:

The territory in Turkey along the Iraqi border is dreadful for staging that kind of force, and the territory of northern Iraq contains a series of lateral mountain ranges with only a small number of easily-defended passes through which mechanized forces could reasonably move. If you were in Syria and wanted a path to Iran, it wouldn't be too bad. But for movement from Turkey to Baghdad, it sucks. And it is terrible territory through which to run supply lines. Basically, you wouldn't want to use it unless you had no choice or were certain there were no defenders.

The only thing we really wanted from Turkey was permission to use Incirlik airbase. Anything beyond that was pretty much gravy, and when it really came down to it, Turkey was going to let us use Incirlik because they really would not have any choice.

The biggest reason for that was that they need to be able to influence what happens post-war. For Turkey the nightmare scenario was always the creation of an independent Kurdistan. If Turkey helps us, then we've promised them there won't be one. If Turkey spits in our face, and if the Kurds do cooperate (which they will) then a Kurdistan would have been a real possibility. So that argument for Turkish cooperation is much more important than anything relating to UNSC approval. The current government hates the idea of fighting beside the heathen against other Muslims, and they hate the idea of fighting without an unambiguous UNSC resolution authorizing conflict. But they hate the idea of an independent Kurdistan even more.

The situation is more complicated than that because the Turkish military is only somewhat under control of the Turkish government, and the military there is far more friendly to us than the current government. It's not at all clear that the military would permit the government to cut us off entirely, and the military there has long been willing to depose governments that they saw as being too radical or too non-secular. Of course, we'd rather not see yet another Turkish military coup happen now, but equally the government there would also rather not see that happen, and it would hurt them (the Islamist government) a lot more than it would hurt us.