Friday, 14 March 2003

Predictions. With the Iraq endgame almost in sight, I'll pull out the crystal ball and risk a few conjectures about how events will unfold over the next few weeks. (We can revisit these later and laugh at how wrong I was.)

America's next move. Bush will address the nation, read the relevant sections from UNSC Resolution 1441, and announce that the United Nations has failed to live up to its obligations to America and failed to enforce its own plainly worded resolutions. He will not announce that America is withdrawing from the U.N., but he'll make it clear that America will not be bringing any of its security issues to the UNSC in the future—and that, once the dust has settled in Iraq, he intends to propose significant U.N. reforms (read: to eject France from its permanent Security Council seat). In the short term, the only part of the speech that will matter is the part giving Saddam a week or less to disarm and announcing the start date for military action.
Britain's next move. Blair will tough it out and send Britain to war alongside the U.S., hoping for a fast, clean war without many casualties on either side. If this happens, which is likely, he will emerge with a personal victory—but with a lot of unanswered questions about the reliability and unity of Britain's Labor party, and how the U.K. will preserve its "special relationship" with the United States in light of the rift between America and some of Britain's European Union partners. More than any other player, Tony Blair would really benefit if Iraq's vaults and secret files revealed damning evidence of French or German collaboration with Saddam, as others in the blogosphere have speculated.
Russia's next move. The Russians have calculated, correctly, that France is going to take the fall for whatever Russia does this round. If a resolution does actually come to a vote, there's a chance Russia will abstain at the last minute, to preserve some influence over post-war Iraq's oil contracts and debt repayments; otherwise they'll continue to play France for the fool, and try to leave Americans with the impression they could be convinced to abstain under certain (undefined) circumstances. It's a low-risk, no-lose scenario for the Russians, and with the relatively low stakes on the board for them, it's one they're happy to pursue.
France's next move. Having made the maximum use of its Security Council seat to weaken Tony Blair and damage American interests, France will deliver its coup de grace after the dust settles in Iraq: A new UNSC proposal to declare Israel in "material breach" of UNSC Resolution 1435 (which it is), and threatening "serious consequences" unless the Israelis pull back to their pre-1967 borders and begin dismantling settlements. France will then pull out the diplomatic stops to decry "American hypocrisy" and portray the U.S. as all too eager to enforce UNSC resolutions against Arabs, but absent or veto-wielding when it's time to police the Jews. This will deepen the rift between America and France (to put it mildly), but if Chirac stays true to form this will not concern him—and in any case France will be looking to change the subject after the American-led coalition prevails in Iraq.
Saddam's last move. Saddam almost certainly has a stash of nerve gas and some rockets squirreled away, but his diplomatic strategy has boxed him in: He can't threaten to use these weapons without admitting he has them, which eliminates their value as a deterrent. (His other problem is that these weapons aren't going to be that effective against the United States military, either: For well-prepared, highly mobile troops, "decon and move on" is the name of the game. The only effects of these weapons on American soldiers will be to delay them half an hour and really tick them off, which is probably not going to help Saddam any.) To use a weapon of mass destruction effectively, Saddam needed to be able to threaten retaliation against a fixed and valuable target—most likely Tel Aviv or Kuwait City—but either such threat would prompt an immediate call to arms, and at this late date it would simply trigger the invasion that's already on his doorstep. There are a few "vengeance" options that Saddam could pursue, such as handing over his smallpox cultures to an Al Qaeda agent as the bombs begin falling, but frankly that doesn't seem to be his style: He'll go down fighting, probably waste his chemical weapons in a futile attack (or lose them to Special Forces before the war begins), and then most likely die at the hands of his former subjects.
The war itself will last for about as long as it takes an M1A1 Abrams tank to roll from the Kuwaiti border to the Baghdad city limits. The rules of the game change dramatically once the first American soldier's boot touches Iraqi soil; once that happens, the odds of Saddam remaining in power are nil, and most Iraqis aren't interested in dying for a lost cause. Casualties will be higher than in Afghanistan, but lower than the number of civilian deaths that would have resulted if Saddam had remained in power for the rest of 2003.
North Korea will begin an all-out effort to produce enriched uranium within 72 hours of the war's start. Beyond that I won't try to predict the behavior of Kim Jong Il; he's just too insane. I suspect, though, that before it's all over at least some part of North Korea will be radioactive.
Iran will experience a popular uprising against the hard-line clerics, which will probably succeed without much in the way of outside help: Once the Iranians see their neighbors getting a liberal democracy, they're going to want one of their own. With the American military machine parked next door in Iraq, the mullahs will be unable to bring out the heavy guns and crack down on civil unrest. A cautiously friendly government (about as friendly as Jordan, say) will rise to power, and end Iranian funding of Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.
Germany will experience a wave of self-doubt as the Americans pack up and leave their army bases, never to return: The troops who depart Germany for Iraq will not be coming back again. Schröder will leave office in disgrace (though perhaps not immediately), having gained nothing and lost much from his anti-American misadventure.
And what of Al Qaeda? I think they may have been trying to stage a major terrorist attack on American soil to coincide with the start of hostilities, but with the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed those plans may have been disrupted or compromised. I don't believe the rumors that Osama bin Laden has been captured, but the evidence coming from Pakistan suggests rather strongly that he's still alive—which means, of course, that he's up to no good. They'll launch an attack in the first week of the war, but it'll be something on the order of Kenya or Bali: A truck bomb against a "soft" target, with little to no effect on the Great Game.