Started Threatening Storm
Just a quick note: I’ve just started Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm. So far, I’ve gotten through what may be called the prelude to the book — the history of US/Iraqi relations through the end of the first Gulf War. Reading it now, with this second Gulf War all but over except the mopping up and the (much more complicated and important) reconstruction, is an interesting experience.
I haven’t gotten to the bulk of the book, where he talks about the various scenarios on how best to deal with Iraq. His conclusion, well known, is that Iraq should be invaded and Saddam overthrown, and the country reconstructed. I am aware that the war had gone better than his most optimistic forecast, of a six week war with some 500 American combat deaths. Some points he makes early in his narrative are startingly prescient, even though these were not presented as predictions.
Pollack, for example, noted that the Shia intifada in 1991, while a great threat to the Baathist regime, was actually fairly limited, with just some tens of thousands of people rising up against Saddam. Most people, fearing retribution, sat it out, and waited to see which way things would go. This was how it went when we invaded; the Iraqi populous couldn’t be convinced that Saddam was actually gone until American armor actually arrived in the center of Baghdad. If the most optimistic hawks had read Pollack, they may have predicted joyous crowds at liberation, but now on the first day or week.
The other point was on how badly Saddam misjudged American intentions and resolve in 1990/1991. Fundamentally, he believed that America would not accept heavy casualties — he was reading Vietnam and Beirut at the time — and that his military could inflict these casualties. He was wrong about both these counts.
One can’t help but think that he believed similar things this time around, with modifications. Presumably, his interpretation of Somalia was that, still, America was unwilling to sustain casualties. Handing out copies of
Black Hawk Down suggests that he somehow thought that disorganized militia driving around on pickup trucks with .50 caliber machineguns on the back could somehow inflict these casualties. Apparently, he didn’t notice that the American forces in Somalia didn’t have armor.
I’ll see how the rest of the book goes. It’s good so far, Pollack was the most interesting talking head I saw on TV in the first day of war.