RUSTLINGS

"He has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwanted flattery. He was a politician of monumental littleness".

--Theodore Roosevelt

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It's contagious. Go shopping, don't be in a rush, ... and see if you don't find it to be an uplifting experience. Must be that buying gifts for others makes you focus on people one at a time. What they might like, who they are, what they mean to you. And you can't miss the bright smiles of children as they shine in the excitement of the Christmas Season.

Life goes on ... it always has, it always will. Different people, different circumstances, but man adapts. Especially if he realizes that in the final say, one has little control over the ultimate stage on which he plays.

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"I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose."

--Woodrow Wilson

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One finds it easy to forget the earthquake hysteria and go to other things. One does NOT find it easy to ignore the Persian Gulf crisis as more and more families have relatives being sent to the Middle East.

The following report in a recent Human Events publication gave an overview that I found informative.

War Decision Should Hinge

on Key Answers

Despite George Bush's efforts last week to soothe Congress over the Persian Gulf crisis "We have not crossed any Rubicon, or point of no return," he told lawmakers the President is said to be moving this country toward a likely war with Saddam Hussein (written prior to this week's events).

Those familiar with the President's thinking say that, unless Saddam begins to retreat from Kuwait, Bush believes he will have to move military against the Iraqi dictator sometime next year. Hence, U.S. lawmakers have to consider not only whether Congress is to be consulted before hostilities break out, but whether war is in the national interest, whether the bloody game is eventually worth the candle.

Currently, there are three basic options open to the President. He can begin pulling the troops out of Saudi Arabia, and thus face a humiliating defeat at the hands of the man who has swallowed Kuwait and whom he has likened to a new "Hitler." He can continue the "sitzkrieig" in the desert and hope that our lethal deployment, coupled with the embargo, will finally bring Saddam to his knees. Or he can begin the "liberation" of Kuwait.

Human Events has so far supported the President's decision to shield Saudi Arabia with U.S. troops and squeeze Saddam with increased airpower and a tightening of the embargo. But we have not yet been convinced that we must rush into hostilities. Why not, as many are telling the President, give the embargo time? Before the U.S. involves itself in a fiery conflict in the desert, whose outcome seems far from certain, a number of questions still have to be resolved.

Will the embargo work? The verdict is still out, but Sen. Jim Sasser (D.-Tenn.) said, after meeting with the President and his aides last week, that "They didn't say that sanctions are not working, but concede it could take longer than some anticipated." Well, what's wrong with waiting? Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were stationed in Europe for more than 40 years and never went to war, and communism finally collapsed. Saddam is surely likely to collapse in a far shorter time period if the embargo sticks.

Laurie Mylroie, a fellow at Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies, is an expert on Saddam Hussein and his regime. Western journalists, denied permission to travel, she says, "see only the shops in Baghdad, overflowing with booty from Kuwait. Because most of the population cannot afford to buy them, these goods appear abundantly available."

Yet Kurds in the north, she writes, "report that within days of the invasion, the price of flour jumped 1,200 per cent. Soon they could not buy it at all. On September 12, 50 people died in food riots in the northern city of Mosul. A Czech who had been working in that region and who was held hostage there until mid-October, reported: `The embargo was felt much earlier than anybody could imagine. Our building project came to a virtual halt at the end of August. Within a month, the price of rice on the black market climbed 1,200 per cent. The lines for bread have extended from the customary 20 minutes to five to six hours.'"

These problems are likely to hit Baghdad sooner than expected, she says, with corn for chicken feed already in short supply and fowl and eggs rapidly disappearing. By some estimates, 40 per cent of Iraq's industry has shut down. The population, Mylroie notes, is responding to these hardships with an unprecedented level of complaint, seeking out Westerners in the face of potentially harsh punishment to revile the regime.

An army is virtually useless without spare parts for its tanks and motorized equipment. From all indications, the Iraqis, because of the embargo, will not have the spare parts necessary to fight a lengthy war.

It is possible, of course, that the embargo may prove ineffective, and that Mylroie is exaggerating its effects. The Congress, however, has as its solemn duty the task to discover whether the embargo has a realistic chance of succeeding before jumping into war.

Could the U.S. be involved in "another Vietnam" if it crosses into Iraqi-held territory? Former Assistant secretary of Defense Richard Perle has written a piece arguing that offensive operations against Iraq and Kuwait would not be like Vietnam. When North Vietnamese tanks and artillery were destroyed, the Soviets rapidly replaced them, but Iraq, says Perle, "is cut off from its sources of resupply. Each tank lost, each anti-aircraft battery destroyed is one that cannot be replaced." The war, he concludes, is easily winnable.

Perle may well be right, but Edward Luttwak, who holds the Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggests a ground war which is being "contemplated" in addition to massive bombardment (but NOT in the Perle scenario) would result in high casualties, and in many ways might be worse than Vietnam.

"Above all," he says, "Iraqis have gathered much artillery in Kuwait. There was little of that in Vietnam and none of that at all in Grenada or Panama. Yet it is rapid-firing artillery that characterizes ground combat and inflicts most casualties. Hence, few of the U.S. Army and Marine officers now in Saudi Arabia have a real idea of what we are facing."

Who is right? Perle or Luttwak and Johnston? Both the President and the Congress need to come to a determination.

Along the same lines as the last question, which scenario is the most likely? The Wall Street Journal's military correspondents, John Fialka and Andy Pasztor, say here is one scenario that has been laid out by military planners: "Within the first 30 minutes of a massive air strike against Iraq, the phones between Iraqi field commanders in Kuwait and headquarters in Baghdad go dead. In two days, Iraq's air force and air defenses are shattered. In a week, its formidable armored force in Kuwait is bombed into a junk heap. U.S. and allied ground forces simply have to mop up. The cost: a few hundred American casualties."

But far grimmer outcomes are also considered possible. U.S. air strikes don't work as planned. Within a few days, U.S. ground forces are drawn into a grueling fight against entrenched Iraqis using chemical weapons. A Stalingrad-like building-to-building struggle grinds on for weeks, even months, amid the ghostly, looted ruins of Kuwait City. The cost, as many as 20,000 American dead, wounded and missing. Most estimates say there will be from six to eight weeks of intense fighting, with casualties climbing past 15,000. And no matter what happens in the air, a ground attack by U.S. forces is likely to be needed.

"At some point," says retired Edward Meyer, a former Army chief of staff, "you're going to have to do something with those dug-in troops. And a head-on fight, he said, could cause 10,000 to 30,000 U.S. casualties. Against Iran, the Iraqis were very good at defensive warfare."

What, for instance, happens to the casualty rate if we are forced to conquer Baghdad as well as Kuwait? And even if we defeat Saddam, will the Iraqis welcome us with open arms as liberators, or will we face a revolutionary Moslem population seething to get even?

Will the Saudis and the Egyptians actually fight their brothers when the guns go off? Maybe so. But the Los Angeles Times recently ran a piece suggesting that Saudi and Iraqi soldiers were fraternizing at the front. And what did Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak mean when he said his soldiers would not consider participating in a military strike against Iraq, and that they would only "enter Kuwait as a peacekeeping force." That statement, we know, greatly disturbed Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole (R.-Kan.).

Ultimately, we acknowledge, war may be the only viable solution to the Gulf crisis. Saddam is a mean, loathesome leader who may have to be fought. So far, however, the Administration has not made a convincing case that war is better than the current policy of containment.