Pearl Harbor in reverse
Jack Beatty, Atlantic Monthly, September 25, 2002
Richard Perle, a Pentagon official during the Reagan years, says that unseating Saddam will be "a cakewalk." Perhaps, ventured Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, Perle should join the first wave into Baghdad to experience his hypothesis. An estimated one million Iraqis are tied in with Saddam's regime or party. They face imprisonment, war-crimes trials, or reprisal murders if Saddam loses power. The collateral damage that will accompany a bombing campaign could rally even more Iraqis to Saddam, making the war more lethal and the U.S. occupation more hazardous. Regimes as cruel as Saddam's have successfully used foreign aggression to galvanize resistance. Stalin scourged the Russian people, yet he successfully appealed to their nationalism to defeat the Nazis. Pol Pot, after killing more than a million of his fellow Cambodians, was able to mobilize support against the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. Saddam's strategy will be to draw us into the cities. In the open we can target his artillery, neutralizing his capacity to deliver chemical weapons. That will be difficult to do in the streets of Baghdad. Saddam will want to make us kill civilians to get at him, knowing that the bomb blasts, the collapsing houses, the bloody faces and torn bodies will be shown throughout the Arab world by al Jazeera, exacting a potentially catastrophic political price.
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