Winning the war is very sure: What happens later is the real cause for worry

Of course, Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein rejected US President George W. Bush’s ultimatum for him and his sons to leave Iraq or be blown out of power. I may have called him incessantly "Saddam Insane" but he’s not that daffy.

If Saddam ever slunk off into exile, he’d be dead. Hundreds of thousands of people – whose families were wiped out by massacre, or gassed, or destroyed in his torture chambers – are just slavering to get their hands on him and his two murderous sons.

Saddam will only exit feet first, or in pieces: Blasted by bombs, missiles, rockets, or whatever, out of his bunker. Or he might leave one of his several look-alike "doubles" behind, in rigor mortis, naturally, hoping to deceive the avengers, or any US-Brit-Spanish and Aussie searchers. (I talked to a Frenchman yesterday, but, no, they don't expect him to turn up in French Riviera.)

Saddam’s goose may indeed be cooked, but he expects, I suppose, to be converted into canard l’orange, or paté de fois gras in a blaze of glory. He’s posed for too long as a reincarnation of his townmate, the immortal 12th century Muslim warrior-hero, Saladin (Salah al-Din) who defeated the crusader armies and recaptured Jerusalem before his death in 1193. To ruin his "legend" by turning tail and running now, would for Saddam be too humiliating. And he’s a vain man.

Indeed, Saddam was born on April 28, 1937 into the Sunni Muslim al-Bejat clan of the al-Bu Nasir tribe in the village of Al-Ouja (on the Tigris River) in Tikrit in the same place as Saladin. But Saladin was a Kurd – a race which Saddam not only persecuted but poison-gassed (with 200,000 Kurds massacred, by the way) – while Saddam might be the reincarnation instead of Adolf Hitler.

Moreover, Saddam and his currently dominant and bullying Tikrit faction are Sunni Arabs, a distinct minority in a land where only one out of five Iraqis are Sunnis. Saddam, incidentally, means in Arabic: "One who confronts." That’s for sure. He certainly is confrontational.

* * *

Suddenly, everybody seems to be a military expert. Millions of words are being said or written about the coming Anglo-American offensive once the 48-hour ultimatum given by Dubya to Saddam and his boys to "git out" expires – sometime around midnight, our time.

Bush didn’t say exactly when, but by now units like the 101st, the Airborne’s "Screaming Eagles" must be ready to board their UH-60 Black Hawks capable of not only delivering a Sunday punch but of leap-frogging in the dark to land 12-man contingents per chopper behind enemy lines, and their heavily-armed Apache AH64 "Longbow" helicopters, with their cannon (30 mm, 1,200 rounds), eight Hellfire AT missiles and 38 70-mm rockets, capable of taking out tanks, heavy bunkers, and whizzing along at 170 miles per hour.

The US has 1,000 Apache helicopters in service with six armies – probably half of them ready to be hurled into Iraq.

The 101st were the first to smash into Iraq in Desert Storm in 1991. It’s possible they’ll get the same honor now. They’ve been inside Iraq before.

Gregg Howa, reporting yesterday out of "Camp New Jersey" in Kuwait, where the newly-arrived 101st Assault Division troops are billeted, warns however that most of the Airborne’s present complement today are "untested in combat". Many of the originals who saw action in the Gulf in 1991 have been retired or rotated out, and many of the new troopers still have to be bloodied in battle. In fact, the 101st’s famous Rakkasan brigade, which went to Afghanistan last year has already been decimated of veteran fighters by a third.

Would you believe? The Hollywood movie best known by the 101st’s soldiers now in Kuwait (the last third of the three Brigades are still arriving from the US) is Black Hawk Down, which depicted the August 1993 debacle in Mogadishu (Somalia) in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by RPG rockets wielded by a few dozen among a thousand primitive militia. Eighteen American soldiers were lost in a single night of fighting there against the ragtag "army" of Somalian warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, armed only with automatic weapons, RPGs and mines.

The failed mission had been dubbed "Operation Gothic Serpent" (where do they get those names?) and what complicated matters, the Americans were to gripe later, was that most of the US troops down there "in the armpit of Africa" had to operate under the supervision of the United Nations.

The US Rangers and Delta Force were slaughtered, some in the crashed choppers, and others in the valiant but futile efforts by their comrades to drive in and extricate the survivors. The world was shocked and America was chastened and angered to see TV sequences of the corpses of dead Americans, stripped and battered, being dragged by jeering mobs through the streets of Mogadishu. (There were 2,000 American Rangers and Delta Force troopers in Mog, as they say, of which 160 were sent out on that disastrous mission.)

Can this happen in Iraq? The US military under Tommy Franks, their commanding general, are determined that it won’t. The problem is that, in over-reaction, the US will send in its Black Hawks, Apaches, and its special forces and airborne, backed by overwhelming and perhaps excessive force – which could flatten Baghad entirely. (That’s the good, old American way, unfettered by those "sissies" in the UN – the critics say.)

Who knows, the planners may have devised a way to save Baghdad without levelling it, or avoid urban house-to-house fighting. But at this stage, it’s all guesswork – and your guess is as ignorant as mine.

* * *

Will Saddam’s elite Republican Guard fight? Mr. Bush had warned them in his speech "do not fight in a dying cause . . . And it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders’."

Dubya also, with an eye on a prospective 112 billion barrels of oil in proven reserves, told the Iraqi military: "Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people." Surely, the income from that vast oil reserves, second in size only to next-door Saudi Arabia’s, would go a long way towards funding Iraq’s postwar relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction of the country.

Former Iraqi Oil Minister (1987 to 1990) Issam A. R. Al-Chalabi told me before he left to return to Amman, Jordan, yesterday that he estimated "probable" oil reserves at just over 250 billion barrels (not 525 billion) but, he pointed out, in the case of oil "Iraq remains a virgin land!" He reiterated that oil exploration and development has merely scratched the surface. His statistics: 525 structures have been "disco-vered and delineated, but only 125 have been drilled. Se-venty-three fields have been found, but only 15 of them have been developed and are under production."

The very articulate (in English, too) Al-Chalabi – a Mechanical Engineering graduate and former professor of the University College London, and ex-President of the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC) – said that only "old technologies of the sixties and seventies have thus far been applied in Iraq, and none of the later advanced technologies in exploration, drilling, operation and management." It’s increasingly clear that my friend Issam, with American blessing (if they manage to "save" the oil fields) will play a major, if not primary, role in the oil industry of postwar Iraq. I kidded Al-Chalabi about visiting him in Baghdad when he becomes the "oil czar", but he just laughed merrily.

He promised to "rescue" for me at least a collection of Saddam stamps, which depict the "hero" of Baghdad in various warlike poses. Unfortunately, he shrugs, he didn’t have any Saddam or Iraqi stamps at home: "Everybody e-mails me these days."

The rescue of the rich oil fields in the south, and in Kirkuk in the north, though, remains somewhat iffy. Up to three days ago, it was reported from "inside" that Saddam had been keeping oil production going at full tilt – which meant he had not yet begun seeding them with explosives.

"You can’t destroy an oil well by hitting it with a scud or al-Samoud missile, or shelling it, or trying to blow it up from above," Al-Chalabi had explained. "You have to blow it up from within."

The latest dispatches indicate, alas, that this latter process may have begun. If Saddam adopts the same "scorched earth" policy he conducted in Kuwait when his forces retreated, we’re looking at a huge environmental disaster which would poison the waters of the Gulf, the desert itself, neighboring countries like Kuwai, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain – and doom the Iraqis themselves to penury for years to come.

Will Saddam Insane do it? As far as he’s concerned: Why not?

The task facing the Americans, Brits, Spaniards and Australians – the only active forces committed to the war – is to safeguard those oil fields. How they’ll do it, or whether they’re already doing it, we’ll see in the days to come.

A word to the wise: It might be a good idea not to press the Turks to say "yes" to US deployment in Turkey, with the trade-off being billions of dollars in aid and loans and the entry of Turkish troops into Northern Iraq. (I hear the earlier $15 billion aid and credit packaged has already been taken off the table.)

It was a blessing in disguise that Turkey’s parliament voted "No" to the landing of 62,000 American troops including the 4th Division and its heavy tanks in Turkey.

Of course it will be tougher now for the US to open a northern front from which to drive, through Tikrit, to Baghdad. But that’s better than allowing the Turkish Army to come in to beat up the millions of Kurds there and seize the Kirkuk oil fields into the bargain. Even the "Turcomans" in Iraq don’t like the Turkish Army. In the end, the Yanks might have been forced to turn around and fight the Turks to protect the Kurds, and indeed, the Turcomans and the Shiites. (They don’t need those Turkish air bases either, which were useful only in interdicting the old ‘No Fly’ zones.)

Moreover, this is a different Turkey, dominated by a strongly Islamist party, from the Turkey which once joined America in the battles of Korea and Vietnam. No wonder the new Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, head of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, was cold to Mr. Bush’s entreaties for a new vote to be put to his parliament. He scoffed that first he had to receive a vote of confidence from the legislature. C’mon Tayyip effendi! The new Turkish ruling party, devoutly Islamic, really hates Americans and would like nothing better than to bash the Kurds, both the 12 million Kurds they have in Turkey and the Kurds in Iraq.

Keep them out, is my advice. They’ll cause major headaches later. War is hell. But "peace" with Turkey inside Iraq could be worse than hell.

* * *

Erratum: I was wrong about Cotabato Archbishop Orlando B. Quevedo, OMI. He’s Ilocano, all right, but his family hails not from Caoayan, Ilocos Sur (where all the Q’s come from, like Quirino, Querol, Querubim etc.). His family came from Sarrat, Ilocos Norte, and he grew up in Cotabato. I was set straight by our mutual cousin and tocayo, Max Edralin. I used to visit the Oblates in Cotabato, in fact, and was twice their speaker in the old days at the Notre Dame College there. My "cronies" were the late Father C.B. Billman, who was my early mentor, and Monsignor Jim McSorley, both wonderful men and fellow hard drinkers (I’m reformed) in the Oblate community.