On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 10:56 AM, Elyn Wollensky wrote:
Tim nailed it. This just broke on Dow Jones ... ;~/. e
Rumsfeld to order Syria invasion plan
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--An intelligence source says U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week ordered the drawing up of contingency plans for a possible invasion of Syria, Newsday reported Thursday. According to
I'll make another prediction/analysis: the widespread looting and chaos now being seen in Baghdad, Basra, and other large cities is completely understandable. Not just because people (peasants, unemployed, Shiia, etc.) see the chance to grab some television sets and microwave ovens. This component is understandable in the way the Rodney King riots were understandable. No, the more interesting reasons are these, the second being the more interesting: 1. Iraq has been a welfare state for essentially its entire lifetime. From the 1920s to the 1960s, a typical backwater royalist welfare state. Since the 1960s, a socialist/central planning/fascist state. (Much like Israel, actually, but that's another discussion.) Much of the population was dependent on stuff distributed by the central government, using oil revenue. Since the U.N. sanctions, this has been called "food for oil." The mechanics are well-known: oil is pumped, money goes to buying food and stuff, government distributes the stuff, with a limited amount of U.N. supervision. This has now stopped, of course. And since much of the population has no independent source of income, no factories producing stuff that the rest of the world wants to buy, the effects are obvious. (Germany and Japan were in different situations: each had substantial armaments, vehicle, steel, etc. facilities. After being repaired, and perhaps after shifting for a while to making motorcycles and lawnmowers and such, these industries re-emerged and aided in the rebuilding. We all know their names: BMW, VW, Mitsubishi, Toyota, etc. Iraq has far fewer such industries, per capita. Offhand, even with their 30 million population, I cannot think of a single "Made in Iraq" item, from even before the 1990 events.) They will be a handout state for the next 20 years, perhaps longer. There is little chance that investors will pay to rebuild their infrastructure, given the lack of ability of the peasants to pay. And here's the more interesting, from our perspective, reason: 2. "Stay Behind" strategy. First some background. A key component of U.S. and NATO plans to deal with a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was to absorb an initial military defeat, if such was inevitable, and then to have commandoes and sappers "melt into the population." Mao had used such a strategy many times in the 1940s and NATO planners were well aware of the effectiveness. The Vietnam experience added more support. The French Resistance was notably less successful, but also had not been prepared in advance. (Still, were I a professional military analyst writing detailed reports on such resistance movements, this would be part of my "compare and contrast" set of cases. It's possible the Iraqi/Baathist resistance will be no more effective than the French Resistance was.) There were various names for the "Stay Behind" plans, several of which emerged during the cases in Italy of right wing bombings and political scandals. (P2, Gladio, etc.) One URL is: <http://www.citinv.it/info/ustica/staybeh.htm> The Stay Behind strategy involved the obvious things: pre-positioning of armaments (RPGs, bazookas, C4, rifles, terrorist supplies) at hidden locations, false identity papers prepared by the best forgers (indeed, by governments themselves!), and training for just such "stay behind" exigencies. The plan would be to let the Soviet invaders take control...then make it essentially impossible for them to keep control. Sabotage, both major (power plants, factories) and minor (snipping power lines when possible, sabotaging water pumps, all things a single person can do easily). Propaganda. Assassinations. Snipings. Etc. (A friend of mine was actively involved in doing this in an Eastern European nation occupied by the Soviets. In modern parlance, he was a terrorist. But the Soviets eventually gave up and left.) OK, what's the relevance to Iraq? Saddam and his associates surely knew well of these strategies. If viewed over the long term, the cheering today as his statues are toppled is relatively minor if the U.S. is ultimately forced to withdraw (for whatever reason) and the heirs to Saddam get back in power. Knowing a military defeat in open combat was inevitable (I said as much many weeks ago, that the military outcome was inevitable, though one could hope for an unfolding train wreck to dull American citizen-unit enthusiasm), and knowing that even the "fedayeen" commandoes would likely eventually fail, the "stay behind" strategy was probably a topic of much debate, and funding. * Pre-positioned supplies. Not hard in a desert, where thousands of bunkers were built, where thousands of desert sites covered with sand and only knowable through GPS coordinates--the new treasure maps--are trivial to set up) * Extensive foreign bank accounts, now available to hire suicide bombers (money going to their families, of course). They'll be vastly better-funded than the Palestinians are. * Snipings, bombings, sabotage. * Most importantly, as the infrastructure continues to be in sad shape and as 30 million continue to live essentially as beggars, resentment of the occupation force can only grow. Yeah, a lot of Iraqis are waving U.S. flags and photos of Rambo (seriously) and saying "We love Bush," this is the enthusiasm of the moment. Wait until a few years have passed and they still haven't climbed out of the poverty of Liberty City (the slum formerly known as Saddam City). (Because a slum of a few million people has essentially nowhere in the world ever climbed out of poverty, even in well-developed countries with strong free market systems. At least not in the past several decades. Reasons left as an exercise.) Meanwhile, there will be groups with access to the offshore accounts, to the buried supplies, who will have a very strong incentive to into power. Getting into power means control of the billions of barrels of oil. Neighboring countries will find that it's to their advantage to keep the U.S. bogged-down in Iraq. The last thing Iran, Turkey, Syria, or even Saudi Arabia wants is a Westernized state in their midst, a base to launch other "liberations" from. So though they'll pay lip service to the idea of being happy Saddam is gone, they'll be sure to keep a trickle or even a river of terrorists and supplies heading into Iraq. And so there are many reasons for a "stay behind" strategy and almost no reasons against it. The perfection of their papers, and the necessity of the U.S. to deal with former Iraqi bureaucrats, means that many of the Iraqis the U.S. works with can very easily also be part of the underground, the resistance. Expect lots of double and even triple agents. A lot of Iraqis may seek to cover their bets by working both sides, just so they can later produce documents (encrypted, one assumes) proving their longstanding alliance to whichever side is dominant ten years from now. So, as many analysts have said, the military victory of our Abrams tanks over their obsolete tanks was the easy part. A harder part will be the police force action of the next several months, and dealing with the American public's frustration with mounting costs, longer deployments of troops, and periodic bombings and snipings. And then the really hard part takes over. A year from now, two years from now, and Baghdad resembles Beirut or Nablus, and 100,000 troops are still patrolling the streets. And there is no boom in building semiconductor and television factories, as the optimists are expecting. And most of the nation is getting handouts from their new government, the U.S. puppet. Yep, grounds for optimism. The poverty of the West Bank, except a factor of ten larger. --Tim May