Volume 50, Number 5 · March 27, 2003
War and Its Consequences
By Thomas Powers
The New Face of War
by Bruce Berkowitz
Free Press, 245 pp., $26.00
The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military
by Dana Priest
Norton, 429 pp., $26.95
War Without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response
by Dilip Hiro
Routledge, 513 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm
by Dilip Hiro
Thunder's Mouth/Nation Books, 271 pp., $12.95 (paper)
When talking stops and shooting starts, all the arguments over UN inspections in Iraq, still the subject of heated debate as I write, will be filed under ancient history, and new questions will take their place: How will the war go? After the fighting, then what? The American war plan for Iraq has gone through three stages over the last nine months, all discussed with unusual candor in public. The current plan calls for an initial two or three days of devastating attacks by powerful and extremely accurate weapons. The targets of these weapons, according to retired Air Force Lieutenant General Tom McInerney, who discussed the strategy with Greta Van Susteren on the Fox News channel January 20, is to destroy 'the centers of gravity' of the Iraqi military—the 'command and control apparatus' which is difficult to hide. In the first Gulf War, when only 20 percent of the ordnance was precision-guided, the bombing campaign devastated the Iraqi water supply, electricity production, and transportation system. This time, with precision weapons closer to 80 percent of the total, it is the Iraqi military, not the national economic infrastructure, which will be struck in the opening salvo. Ground forces will follow hard on the heels of the initial strikes. 'In eight or nine days we'll have forces on the outskirts of Baghdad,' McInerney told viewers. 'We'll own 75 percent of that country.'
Review, 5385 words
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