It would be a crowning monument to my hubris if I ended up in a war in Iraq, after killing off George Bush just to prevent us from going to war in Iraq! Was it possible for me to change anything? Or was the best that I could do be to simply delay the inevitable? Had I managed to improve anything in the last five years?
I followed the travels of Tom Ridge and Condi Rice as they bounced around the Middle East. I got nightly updates as they met with anybody they could think of to calm down the situation. Erdogan was not happy with Hussein, and agreed to allow combat patrols out of Incirlik, as well as logistic support across the border. We could even send troops and equipment across the country by train as needed. Kuwait was also on board, since they still had harsh memories of what Hussein had done to them in 1991. Most of the rest of the neighbors weren’t as cooperative. Iran would love to see us bogged down in Iraq; they were traditional enemies, but they hated us as well. A fight would weaken us both and leave them in a stronger position. They would not be looking for peace to break out. The same was true in Syria. Jordan did want peace, but was relatively defenseless against the Iraqis, as was Saudi Arabia. Condi told us that she had asked the Jordanians and the Saudis to attempt some diplomatic pressure, and try to get Hussein to back off. According to them, Hussein simply replied that it was a training exercise, and they needed to mind their own business. That was also what we heard from the neutrals Swedes and Swiss.
A real sore spot was Israel. They were watching the developing situation with considerable alarm, and for good reason. Even though they were not the target of any attack, Saddam Hussein was probably targeting them with his missiles. During the Gulf War, which they sat out of since an Israeli presence would have destroyed the coalition, Hussein had fired missiles at them, simply hoping for a response. If he did the same, and the Israelis responded with a counterattack, it could blow up any hope of an Arab solution to the problem. I wanted this as contained as possible.
I even called Vladimir Putin in Russia to see if he could pressure the Iraqis into backing down. This was a long shot at best. Iraq was a long time buyer of Russian weapons. Putin had no overwhelming interest in not selling them more, as long as the Iraqis paid cash on the barrelhead. They had been manipulating the oil-for-food program for years, and pouring the funds into Russian weapons. I simply told Vladimir that if he couldn’t help us, to stay out of our way, because if we had to go in, Iraq wasn’t going to be a customer for long.
Eric worked NATO, and got a lot of sympathy but not much assistance. Britain agreed to assist, and began to mobilize some troops, but most of the rest simply said they would wait and see. I sighed, but couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t their fight. I told him to simply come home, and we would figure it out if we needed to.
When Tom and Condi returned, I met with them together, and then we had a full meeting of the NSC. It didn’t seem as if any of our diplomatic efforts were paying off. Hussein continued to slowly funnel troops and armored vehicles towards a general area south of Kirkuk, and was beginning to conduct wartime drills with them. He would surge his troops forward, and then stop and back away. Routine training exercises were the explanation, not that it was our business to ask! The Kurdish government, such as it was, was getting nervous and had invited us to bring in troops. Unfortunately, that is nowhere near as easy as you might think. That was a big focus of the meeting.
America has a large and powerful army, but it isn’t easy to get them anywhere fast. If the shit were to hit the fan, there would be limited things we could do quickly. We could shuttle an Air Force wing or two into Incirlik within a few days. Incirlik was far enough away from Iraq that they couldn’t attack there, but that worked the other way, as well. Combat flights into Iraq would need tanker support. We could send in the Marines, but the nearest beach was in southern Iraq, near Basra. The Marines would need to fight their way north, through the Iraqis, to meet the Kurds in northern Iraq. That was simply insane. Theoretically we could ship them through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea, and then land them in northeastern Turkey, but there were a bunch of treaties designed to prevent that sort of thing, and no way was Russia going to be amused by our sending our Navy into the Black Sea.
The Navy could sail a carrier or two into the Gulf, and fly combat patrols, as well as launch Tomahawks from several different directions, but that ignored one of the fundamentals of combat. You can bomb a country, strafe it, fly over it, sail around it, hell, you can even nuke it, but you can’t control it until you stick a teenager with a gun on it. We needed to get troops into position. That isn’t easy. I could order the 82nd Airborne into position, and they would get elements in place within 24 hours. After that it gets dicey. The 82nd is primarily an infantry outfit, though if they had trucks they would have some mobility. During the Gulf War we sent them in first, but only the fact that Hussein held off on attacking American units saved them from being anything more than a speed bump.
It would take a heavy armor presence to really stick it to the Republican Guard. The nearest American armor was maybe a brigade’s worth in Germany, perhaps 100 M-1 Abrams tanks and a matching number of M-2 Bradleys and other vehicles. Those could be loaded on trains and shipped by rail from their locations into eastern Turkey. That might take two weeks, if we were lucky. We could probably scrape up about another brigade’s worth by pulling everything else possible out of Europe, and by asking for assistance from the Brits. They were the only ones I could see helping us. Again, maybe in two to three weeks they might be showing up. If we needed to bring in a heavy division, the only place we would get one or two of those was from here in the States. That would require moving the division to the nearest port, loading it onto appropriate shipping, and then sending it across the Atlantic and through the Med to Turkey, where they would disembark and be rail freighted to eastern Turkey. Even at high speed, that was going to take at least a month and probably more. Another possibility was the 101st Air Assault Division, the ‘Screaming Eagles’; they could be brought in, but they would go after the 82nd, and since nobody had developed a helicopter that could fly across the Atlantic Ocean, their gear mostly needed to be shipped as well.
Just as problematic, all of our contingency planning for Iraq was based on a repeat of the Gulf War. We had several divisions’ worth of equipment pre-loaded on ships at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. They could sail for Kuwait in a heartbeat — but we weren’t attacking from Kuwait! To do any good in Kurdistan, we would need to sail them through the Red Sea into the Med, and then up to Turkey. It would probably take just as long as bringing in a division from the States.
I sat there while General Peter Pace, the Marine replacement for Richard Myers as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave us a briefing on what units could be sent to Iraq as needed. Ever since the Gulf War, most military planning had been focused on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the southern half of Iraq. Not as much planning had gone into the northern half, and it was showing. We didn’t have a huge range of options. At the end, all of the eyes turned to me.
“Okay, so this is why they pay me the big bucks, I guess,” I said, with a wry smile. “First, if the Iraqis move into Kurdish territory, we will back up the Kurds. Does anybody here have an issue with that?” I looked around, and mostly saw nods of agreement. “Going once… going twice… Sold! The Kurds are our official allies. Condi, start figuring out how we go about formally recognizing the Kurds as a nation. Somebody will have to draw some borders up, etcetera, that sort of thing. Talk to the British, see if we can get them on board, anybody else you can think of, too.”