Posted on 03/05/2003 10:01:17 PM PST by gaucho
Moscow, Russia :Gazeta.ru WWW-Text in Russian 03 Mar 03 [Gazeta.ru article: " Husayn Preparing Surprise for Americans"]
No one knows whether he [ Saddam Husayn ] has biological weapons , for instance, live smallpox spores, but disarmament expert Kirill Sheluchenko believes that he does certainly have a "retaliatory weapon " which the Americans will be unable to neutralize. Namely, a special subunit of the Iraqi Armed Forces which is prepared to sacrifice itself in a war with Israel .
Everyone in the Near East is preparing for war. It is not only the forces of the anti- Iraq coalition that are preparing but also the Iraqis themselves and their neighbors. Syria ,Jordan , and Iran are hurriedly putting up camps to accommodate the Iraqi refugees. Kuwait is evacuating the civilian population from areas bordering Iraq .Turkey is demanding aid from NATO in building air defenses against potential Iraqi air strikes. The Israeli Government is issuing the population with gas masks and training them to operate in emergencies. Tel Aviv well remembers the Iraqi missile attack of 1991 and is afraid of a repeat performance. However, Saddam Husayn has already promised not to carry out strikes against Israel in the event of war. And Tariq 'Aziz has said that Iraq simply has no delivery vehicles capable of hitting targets in Israel since the country has fully carried out the demands of the United Nations and destroyed all its missiles with a range of over 150 km.
However, the main question to which very many people would like to know the answer today is whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and is prepared to use them in the event of aggression .
The activity of the group of international inspectors in Iraq both during the period up until 1998 and following the resumption of the inspections makes it possible to say with a great degree of certainty that Iraq had stocks of chemical weapons but has now completely eliminated them. Furthermore the reason for its giving up the chemical weapons is that Iraq has won all the wars that it wanted to win with these weapons (we would remind you that chemical weapons were used in the war with Iran and against the Kurds).
Chemical weapons can also be said to have lost their former significance in modern warfare. It is pointless to use them against the highly organized US Army, which has very good reconnaissance, including chemical and biological intelligence. The negative political repercussions arising from the use of the prohibited weapons would only complicate Iraq 's diplomatic position. On the whole, for a whole series of political, military, and technical factors Iraq has no reason to produce, store, or use toxins.
There is no such clarity on the issue of biological weapons . It can only be stated that the inspectors working in Iraq have failed during three months of intensive work to find any evidence at all that Iraq has biological weapons or is attempting to develop them. The inspectors have found traces of chemical weapons , prohibited missile launchers , and documentation attesting to Iraq 's attempts to initiate its own nuclear program but there are no traces of "biological weapons ." Perhaps, they have been hidden well, perhaps, they simply do not exist, but the Americans still feel an unpleasant chill at the thought. And that is why they are training special units to collect and send home the supposed remains of servicemen killed by weapons of mass destruction . And the troops are preparing for the fact that they may encounter the use of biological weapons -- anthrax and live smallpox spores -- by Iraq .
Although biological weapons per se are more effective and their use in the Near East may cause a pandemic ( smallpox can only be stopped by means of fire), there is no reason to say that, first, Husayn has these weapons and, second, that he is prepared to use them on his own country's territory.
If Baghdad decides to use weapons of mass destruction , obviously it has no other means of delivering them apart from outdated MiG-21's and Su-22's fitted with decantation devices for the dispersion of toxins.
These aircraft 's additional fuel tanks could be adapted, for instance, to act as such devices. However, Iraq is surrounded by a ring of air defense systems. The outdated MiG-21's and Su-22's are unlikely to be able to break through it in order to carry out a bombing raid on neighboring states. Although such attempts cannot be ruled out, even attempts that are not authorized by Saddam Husayn .
But Baghdad 's most formidable "retaliatory weapons " will not be MiG's with tanks of anthrax but shuhada [Islamic warriors]. The Americans have to face up to a fundamentally new phenomenon in the guerrilla movement. Over the past few years Iraq has been busily training special sabotage units for a war with Israel . Furthermore, everyone knows about this -- the subunits have taken part in military parades and are part of the Iraqi Army elite.
The Iraqi shuhada are fundamentally different from the Palestinian suicide bombers . These people do not aim simply to die and take the lives of several Israeli civilians. They are trained by the state machine and, in effect, have unlimited capabilities when it comes to choosing the means of carrying out their sabotage. They are trained not at temporary camps somewhere in the Syrian desert but in well-equipped military bases. Their arsenal does not just include homemade shahid belts but special industrially-made equipment, specially designed for operations to inflict the greatest damage on the enemy. Including, possibly, environmental damage.
The shuhada have been kept well secret and trained to act independently, including during a time of occupation. They will not take part in the battles for Baghdad or Basrah, they will bide their time.
They probably have no need of centralized command and control and will have great freedom when it comes to choosing a time and place for action. They will perpetrate one act of terrorism per week, say, in the area assigned to each terrorist or subunit. These tactics are used, for instance, by gunmen in Chechnya , who have had no centralized command and control for a long time now ; that is how the Iraqi shuhada may also operate.
At the same time it would be naive to expect any regular acts of terrorism from such technically well-trained experts. Nothing is now preventing them from preparing targets for future attack, digging secret passageways, mining buildings, and planting containers of anthrax spores in areas where the occupying administration is thought to work.
Mindful of the continuing fears regarding Iraq 's possession of biological weapons , the threat posed by shuhada subunits seems doubly dangerous. Particularly if Iraq has live spores of smallpox agent. In this case it is just a matter of time before tragedy turns into catastrophe since the shuhada may not only attack US units that enter Iraqi territory using these weapons but also Israel and military bases in neighboring countries where US troops are based, for instance, Kuwait . The number of casualties from this kind of guerrilla war may run to tens of thousands and neither the US Administration nor its allies may be ready for such casualties.
No.
If anyone need be afraid, it's Saddam of a B61-11 suppository.
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