Jerry Brito

Yeah, if anyone survives

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Hi! I'm here to liberate you! Here’s White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card on Fox News Sunday today talking about how the Iraqi people will welcome the columns of American Abrams tanks filing into Baghdad:

SNOW: There’s a lot of talk about the “day after.” I was in Turkey this week and a lot of people there are saying, “What is the United States going to do the day after?” The “day after,” if Saddam is toppled from power, do you expect to see celebrations in the streets?

CARD: I do. I think the Iraqi people are crying out for liberation and freedom. And they’ve been denied it. …

SNOW: So you’re not worried about after shocks in Iraq?

CARD: I think the Iraqi people would welcome freedom with jubilation. And I hope that they will get it. I hope that they can get it without war, but it’s up to Saddam Hussein.

But CBS News says it got a copy of the U.S.’s war plan that says that “one day in March the Air Force and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq.” That’s more in one day than “were launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War. On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise missiles.”

“There will not be a safe place in Baghdad,” said one Pentagon official who has been briefed on the plan.

“The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before,” the official said.

The battle plan is based on a concept developed at the National Defense University. It’s called “Shock and Awe” and it focuses on the psychological destruction of the enemy’s will to fight rather than the physical destruction of his military forces.

“We want them to quit. We want them not to fight,” says Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the Shock and Awe concept which relies on large numbers of precision guided weapons.

“So that you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes,” says Ullman.

Meanwhile, the L.A. Times reports today that war planners are also looking at tactical nuclear bombs for deeply burried targets in Iraq.

So, I’m not sure there’s going to be anyone left in Baghdad to welcome the liberating U.S. forces as they come in. If there are, I’m not sure they’ll be too jubilated. I mean, with all the death and destruction and all.

Jan 26, 2003 | Comments