Taking The First Shot

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

It could come sooner, later or not at all. Predicting how the script will play out is almost impossible: war is an activity that almost always seems to be governed by Murphy's Law (if anything can go wrong, it will). Nonetheless, this is how a war with Iraq might start -- and how some Pentagon planners think the U.S. might win quickly and with minimum casualties:

Mid-November comes, and Iraqi troops still occupy Kuwait. The worldwide embargo shows no signs of squeezing Iraq hard enough to force a withdrawal; on the contrary, maintaining the embargo against defections gets more difficult every day. The U.S. has at long last finished its military buildup. Every plane, ship, tank and soldier it needs to fight Iraq is in place; so are substantial Arab League forces. President Bush hesitates to order an assault that would certainly bring death to some hostages (as well as to many troops) and cause some U.S. allies to desert the anti-Iraq coalition. But Saddam Hussein offers a provocation -- perhaps killing hostages, perhaps a terrorist outrage -- that allows the U.S. to justify an attack.

A plan being called in Pentagon circles "the Half War" goes into effect. Some 700 U.S. aircraft flying from Saudi Arabia and carriers in the Persian Gulf turn a 75-mile-wide area of Iraq north of the Kuwait border into what some Air Force officers call a "parking lot" -- an area that has been completely leveled. F-117A fighter-bombers take out Iraqi antiaircraft missiles. Tomahawk cruise missiles from the battleship Wisconsin hit communications centers, truck junctions, munitions depots. B-52 bombers blast targets with highly accurate missiles. Most important, a variety of weapons * throw a suffocating "electronic blanket" over the area, jamming and disrupting Iraqi military communications (but not U.S. communications, which operate on different frequencies).

Somewhat surprisingly, there is no bombing of Iraqi chemical-weapons or nuclear facilities, electric power lines or dams in the north. Nor is there any ground fighting, at least initially. The Iraqi troops in Kuwait are totally cut off from the main army in Iraq proper. No supplies or reinforcements can reach them through the "death zone"; no radio messages or other communications can penetrate the electronic blanket. The Iraqis quickly withdraw -- or if they do not, U.S. airborne and amphibious assaults coupled with a ground attack flanking Kuwait break them up quickly (a lot of Iraqi tanks are destroyed by air raids too). In the most optimistic scenario, Saddam Hussein's generals depose him and sue for peace.

Maybe. But even in the Pentagon there are commanders who consider this all an Air Force pipe dream. Other experts point out that the script is modeled on the stunning Israeli success in the Six-Day War of 1967. But 23 years later, technology is vastly different, and the Iraqis are much better armed, trained and led than the Egyptians were then. "You don't win a war only with air strikes," says Zeev Eytan at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. Administration estimates of American casualties in a quick-hit war run to 5,000 to 10,000 dead, about half the Pentagon estimate for a more or less conventional war but still frighteningly high.

What could go wrong? For one thing, Iraqi air defenses, consisting largely of the latest Soviet missiles and sophisticated, radar-guided antiaircraft guns, are formidable -- the more so because Saddam Hussein's troops captured four batteries of American-made Hawk antiaircraft missiles in Kuwait (ironically, U.S. antimissile weapons are ineffective against them). The U.S. air attacks would probably still be effective, but not costless.

Iraq might launch air attacks of its own. U.S. commanders doubt that they can destroy the Iraqi air force on the ground; Iraqi airfields are too well protected. In the air, the planes are no match for the U.S. Air Force but could still do damage. Iraq also could launch missile attacks on Saudi Arabian cities and oil fields, killing civilians and destroying wells that the U.S. forces are in the Middle East to protect.

Most important, suppose the Iraqi army in Kuwait chose to fight rather than run -- and worse, that forces from the north crossed the "parking lot" after all and came to their relief. If the U.S. were forced to push out well-dug-in troops by ground assault, American soldiers eventually might be engaged in house-to-house fighting in Kuwait City -- a type of battle that has long proved especially drawn-out and bloody.

No one doubts that the U.S. would win. Iraq's military machine is widely considered overrated. Its 1 million troops consist in large part of flabby reserves, and they are not so much battle tested from the eight-year war against Iran as battle weary. Many of its vaunted 5,500 tanks are obsolete; only about 700 are top-ranked T-72s. Even Saddam Hussein's dreaded chemical- warfare potential might be less terrible than thought: chemical weapons are difficult to handle in the searing heat and shifting winds of the desert.

But would an American victory really come swiftly and at low cost? That could happen, but it would be most unwise to count on it. As a senior British defense staff officer puts it, "There has never been a battle that went totally according to plan." It is a maxim that George Bush -- and the Pentagon hawks -- should bear in mind.

With reporting by Jon D. Hull/Jerusalem and Bruce van Voorst/Washington