Hi Tom,

This is typical misrepresentation:

"One side is comprised of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of the career military, nearly every Middle East expert at the State Department, and the vast majority of intelligence analysts and CIA operations officers who know the region. These folks generally think that the idea of attacking Saddam is questionable at best, reckless at worst. On the other side are a few dozen neoconservative think tank scholars and defense policy intellectuals. Few of them have any serious knowledge of the Arab world, the Middle East, or Islam. Fewer still have served in the armed forces."

This makes it appear as if a few eggheads who sit on their duffs and write articles for Foreign Policy Review are all gung ho for Saddam's throat and the JCOS and every military, ste department and CIA man is saying "horrible idea - reckless!"

Many military men want to oust Saddam - many career spooks do too. Generals and the JCOS and their entourage have been risk-averse since the Vietnam war.
The State department - is not in the business of ousting leaders and are supposed to be diplomats - of course they are not for conflicts - it makes their jobs tougher!

No one wants to lose men and be blamed for failureand it's easiest to avoid conflict and sit around collecting paychecks and dining with defense contractors' families.

The bottom line is this - Saddam is working towards nuclear weapons and has more resources to do so than any despot on the face of the earth. Whether he completes a bomb in a month or three years is irrelevant - he WILL complete one. When he does he can either give it to terrorists to use in the US and try and avoid nuclear destruction of Iraq - which would be forthcoming if we could point the finger at him - or he can take out Israel and declare the region Zion-free. Other nations will not know if he has more bombs - and will kow-tow. This is what keeps the Saudis distant too - they know their regime is more fragile and they fear Saddam.

If D.C. is taken out, much of our defense and manpower infrastructure goes with it. Yes, the US will survive, but the senior intelligence community and the politicos will be dead - and like a chicken with the head cut off the remote body will either overreact or fail to react intelligibly.

No one man represents so great a threat as Saddam. He is a megalomaniac. The posters and statues and billboards will attest to that. Megalomaniac are a particularly irrational breed of dictator - and Saddam has far more liquid cash at his disposal than did Hitler in WWII - particularly since he spends almost none of it on his people or urban renewal.

Yearly - hundreds of millions go towards arms and NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) research. There are many who refuse to help him in foreign lands. No one will outright sell him nuclear materials. But the black market is a scary place and if you have the resources, almost anything can be secured for a price, especially if you can wait for awhile to secure them.

The problem with Saddam ousting scenarios is this:

Saddam is viewed as a despot - his people are viewed as victims, almost as prisoners of Saddam.

This view makes the conventional tank-rolling, Iraqi burying methods of the gulf war seem harsh and unjust to the Iraqi civilians and to the international community who lean left and would shout foul from the top of the rooftops.

So Bush is presented the JCOS formula - build up, build up, build up some more, finance some new weapons programs and then go over in an overwhelming wave of air power, bombing the re-established Republican Guard, taking out communications and weapons depots and scaring the civilians and Saddam. Then rolling in tanks from some basecamp(s) and taking Iraq over rolling into Baghdad and doing a hunt for him once we control most, or all, of the country.

This may be the conventional war model - but it really is a poor solution to the Saddam dilemma.

The neohawks are no such thing - since these individuals and group have been hawkish all along (However the term NEO is applied to NAZIS often and so being a NEOHAWK has the subliminal associations the writer wishes to convey;-)

In the post 9-11 world the conventional army has shown its limitations. You can't bag terrorists easily - the terrorists are not sitting on some battlefield or hilltop awaiting handcuffs and a flag of victory to be planted.

The vietnam conflict would have been much easier and winnable had we invested in precision targets - covert forces and an attitude which did not let the left shame our endeavors - and make our leaders half-assed and half-witted.

If Bush want to see this through, and he does, he has the choice of playing it by the book - in which case Saddam likely will get away - and we "terrorize" a nation of "victims" with no victory - or we do it the smart way- covertly and with large numbers of special forces under an umbrella of airpower and selective drops of equipment and personnel.

The one-man assassination route is out. Oh, there are dozens of mercenaries which would be willing to do it - and one of them would likely sooner or later succeed - but then every leader would be facing the same thing - assassins and snipers everywhere they turned. Not a pretty picture.

So it must be a big operation - but not TOO big. It must move faster than lightning and yet silent without the thunder.

The Saddam conflict will REVOLUTIONIZE warfare - it will be the prototype of the wars and conflicts we will most likely face in a world of terrorists and despots on the verge of going nuclear.

The use of intelligence cannot fail now - the world moves to fast. Within five minutes of an aerial bombing - Saddam is ferreted away into a labyrinth of tunnels and underground fortresses some of which connect his palaces.

No, this sort of an operation is very tricky. We are not after the shopkeeper in Baghdad who has Saddams poster plastered in his window, nor the four fingered beggar who sits daily next to the fountain outside the hotel. We are after Saddam and his immediate support structure or administration.

To do so requires a new style of warfare - and a type the JCOS and the old-world hawks are still inexperienced at.

So they call up one of their "friendly" journalist and leak a piece critical of Bush or "skeptical" of his advisors. They are jealous of the power these folks have - and the fact that they are no longer in the catbird seat.

Read these articles with a grain of salt the size of an M1A1. Their are journalists out there who nurture their relationships with the JCOS and do their bidding in return for a hot story and a topside track into whats going on.

Bush will have to make the final decision - and the JCOS are threatening to say "told you so" if he does not do it their way. Politically it jeopardizes Bush.

So the JCOS are blackmailing Bush and Rumsfeld is meeting nothing but static and stonewalling from these folks, when telling them about the "new military".

These dinosaurs were raised and bred in an era of big contracts and big offices, and by playing it safe and brownnosing - got you promoted.

They are bureaucrats NOT tacticians. As such their input should be measured in this context.

The new USA needs new ideas and new technologies - and an army of special forces which are backed by realtime intel, and soon more robotic unmanned intelligence and support as well.

Just my twenty cents,

SDAI-Tech1