Thursday, August 08, 2002

Now we read that Saddam plans to draw US forces into Iraq’s cities rather than deploy his armies in the desert. Apparently, he thinks that he can bog us down in house to house fighting, popping up to shoot at us from a rabbit warren of tunnels and bunkers underground.

Hmmm.

As I recall, a favorite tactic in modern mobile warfare is to bypass enemy strongholds in order to capture and hold strategic chokepoints. If Saddam hides his army, we could set up an interdiction plan to control his borders, destroy his media outlets (and replace them with ours), secure his oilfields, and generally starve him out in the open. This would take more than a few weeks of bombing followed by a few days of combat, as in Bush vs. Saddam I, but would be even more effective. We could create an UN-administered zone containing the captured territory and leave him the ruler of a land-locked, resource poor slum.

As for using his Scuds to launch terror weapons from Baghdad at Israel or Kuwait, does anyone think that we have not improved our ability to shoot down his largely ineffective missiles since the Gulf War?

$6 per barrel oil, anyone?