Stardate 20030322.1558

(Captain's log): I remain very happy about how well things are going in the war. Much progress is being made and so far the cost has been very low. Many of the things I worried about before combat began have not materialized. But it is much too soon to become complacent or to assume that everything will continue to go well. There are many challenges we are certain to face, and many things which might complicate events. I have confidence that our military is resilient, and that it will be able to deal with it, but in doing so the ultimate human cost to both sides could very easily skyrocket. I believe we will win – I'm certain that we will win – but we do not yet know what the human cost of that victory will be.

There is a chance that the war could end suddenly and unexpectedly with a rapid collapse of Iraqi resistance (such as with a coup and surrender) but I think that's unlikely, and the war is likely to last quite a long time. And so it should: a good victory is more important than a fast victory, and I want General Franks to take as much time as he thinks he needs. (And that's very likely; President Bush seems inhumanly patient, and I don't think he will press General Franks to speed up operations in order to relieve political or diplomatic pressure.)

There are a lot of things which we may face, or which we unquestionably will face, which still worry me. For each in the list below, I provide my guess of probability, but I do have to warn that these are what engineers refer to as SWAGs, scientific wild-ass guesses. It's little more than my intuition about how likely they are.

By far my biggest worry now is Turkish involvement (20% chance). What's becoming clear is that the leaders of the AKP are inexperienced and are not operating on the same wavelength as we are. The negotiations about use of their territory failed, and apparently the reason why is that they misjudged the situation. It's reported that they seem to have assumed that their participation was critical (that the US had no "Plan B") and thus that they could hold out both for more money and, more importantly, for the right to move substantial forces into the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. Now they're being told that we won't permit that, but what I'm most afraid of is that the government of Turkey will again misjudge the situation and decide that they can get away with it. Thus the nightmare scenario would be a very large and aggressive movement of Turkish forces (say, a division or more) a long way into Iraqi territory (20 miles or more) where they'd be met by strong Kurdish resistance. Right now the Kurds are strongly cooperating with the US, and we have some people attached to their command and would have the ability to call for airstrikes, and we might have to. When all is said and done, we need Kurdish cooperation now more than Turkish in the aftermath of the war, and I really don't want to see us be forced to bomb the Turkish military. Our negotiators failed to impress the AKP with the fact that they were not actually essential in the previous round of discussions. I hope that they are more emphatic now in making clear that we will slaughter their army if it goes too far into Iraq. Otherwise we may actually have to, and that would be extremely bad.

I'm worried about Ansar al Islam (100%). What will they try to do? How powerful will they end up being? Will they remain concentrated in a pocket, or will they spread out?

I'm also worried about the Badr Brigades (100%). How many of them are there? (Estimates range from a few hundred to as many as 30,000.) Where are they? What do they intend to do?

I'm worried about some sort of major targeting error in the bombing (10%). We're using precision guided munitions, but a bomb which is programmed with the wrong coordinate will not hit the right target. A laser guided bomb will miss if the person controlling the laser gets confused and designates the wrong thing. At least once in Afghanistan, a soldier on the ground made a mistake in calling for an airstrike and ended up transmitting his own coordinates instead of those of the target he wanted to hit. And there's also the possibility of target misidentification, where a structure is thought to be military but actually turns out not to be. When we're using hundreds of PGMs and laser-guided bombs, the potential for catastrophic human error is everpresent.

I'm deeply worried about red-on-red atrocities. There are three ways in which this might happen which worry me. First, there may end up being attacks by some Iraqi civilians against others for revenge and reprisals (50%) to settle old scores, in the period before we can reestablish order; this is most likely to be Kurds or Shiites against Sunnis. I'm also concerned about rampages by retreating troops (20%), especially the Republican Guard, where some largely Sunni formation decides to take it out on a non-Sunni village or town or part of the population of some major city.

I am also worried about deliberate slaughter of Iraqis (20%) ordered by Saddam.