IT MIGHT BE CALLED Operation Scare and Divide. That’s what the American military was carrying out Thursday as the prelude to the full-scale, massive attack on Iraq designed to produce “shock and awe” among the Iraqis and prompt the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. But if Scare and Divide works and causes the Iraqi military to fracture, with surrenders reaching into the upper ranks, then the larger assault might not be needed. The Saddam regime would disintegrate.
This effort prior to the main assault on Iraq came as a surprise to the military experts on TV, who had trouble explaining what was going on. And it showed President Bush’s willingness to be a take-charge commander-in-chief. Rather than stick with the script created by the Pentagon, Bush seized on the chance to take out Saddam and his top commanders and tried to wipe them out in a bunker outside Baghdad. One report said deputy Iraqi prime minister Tariq Aziz was tracked to the bunker after he appeared on television to deny he was defecting. Whether Saddam was killed or not wasn’t known.
The bombing of the facility where Saddam was thought to be Wednesday turned out to be the first step in Scare and Divide. If Saddam were killed–there’s a dispute inside the Bush administration on this point, but no one knows for sure–that would cut the head off the Iraqi regime. It would represent a crushing blow to the Iraqis and more than a mere tipping point in favor of the American-led coalition. Without Saddam, Iraqi resistance to American forces will fall apart. Even with Saddam’s fate unknown, defense officials said there were indications the Iraqi military was beginning to break up.
At Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s first wartime briefing, he pressed ahead with the campaign for quick Iraqi collapse. He appealed directly to Iraqi troops, asking if they “want to die fighting for a doomed regime.” And he urged them to defy any order from Saddam or his top aides to use any weapon of mass destruction or to cause any large amount of destruction, period. He said: “Do not follow orders to destroy dams or flood villages. Do not follow orders to destroy your country’s oil . . . See those orders for what they are–the last desperate gasp of a dying regime.”
Both the experience of the Gulf War in 1991 and fresh intelligence from special ops personnel in Iraq now has given American and British officials some hope for an early crumbling of the Iraqi military. In the Gulf War, Iraqi troops were so cowed by bombing they began surrendering to American TV crews. Now, even before the fighting began, a number of Iraqis had been recruited to quit Saddam’s side and join the new government after Saddam is ousted.
This entire operation generated havoc among military experts on American TV. When Saddam’s meeting place was hit, some of them declared it marked the start of the full-blown war effort. It wasn’t. When a reporter asked Rumsfeld if Operation Scare and Divide was a deviation from “what we have been led to believe about the war plan,” the defense secretary responded: “I don’t believe you have the war plan . . . a fact which does not make me unhappy.”
So the war began with shock and awe in the media and perhaps among the Iraqi elite. Some specific sites were hit, but the war that Rumsfeld said will involve “a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before”–that is yet to come.
There were a few other interesting developments in the first 24 hours of war with Iraq. At least one of the three or four missiles Iraq fired at Kuwait was a Scud, a weapon the Iraqis had told United Nations arms inspectors they had none of–yet another “smoking gun” for the multilateralists.
And the twin economic scare scenarios didn’t occur. One projected event was a surge in oil prices. Instead they plummeted. The other speculated that war with Iraq might prompt pandemonium in the financial markets. On the contrary, the run-up to the war, and now the war itself, have been accompanied by a strong stock market surge.
Also, predictions that the “Arab street” would erupt across the Middle East with riots and violent protests against America proved false. This prediction is a hardy perennial of opponents of American intervention anywhere. It was wrong in the Gulf War and in Afghanistan and it’s wrong today.
The Bush administration now counts 44 countries in the coalition of the willing, the nations allied in the war against Iraq. New members include the South Pacific nations of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the Solomon Islands. The role of these tiny nations is small, but the roles of a number of Arab nations who aren’t officially coalition members is large. These include Qatar, where the American military headquarters is located, and Saudi Arabia, where American air bases are active in war operations. Adding the unnamed countries, the anti-Iraq coalition is the broadest in modern times, with more members than opposed the Nazis in World War II or the Iraqis in the Gulf war.
Finally, the United States showed that it can fight Iraq and terrorists at the same time. American troops began a major operation in Afghanistan to rout the remaining elements of al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, just as bombs were dropping in Iraq.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
