The Cost - An Army and A Leg

Jason Motlagh at Asia Times lays out the staggering cost (in US lives) of a pre-emptive strike on Iran using conventional air power.

Expensive as nation-building efforts in Iraq have been for US forces, some observers fear that a preemptive strike to disrupt Iran's alleged nuclear-weapons program could backfire and cost the United States an army.

Nearly 2,900 US troops have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, along with another 21,000 wounded in a US$400 billion enterprise that could rise to "well over $1 trillion", according to the Iraq Study Group Report released last week.

The US military at present depends almost exclusively on a single supply line that runs south through Shi'ite-dominated southern Iraq into Kuwait. William Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Washington, DC-based Free Congress Foundation, argues that if that vital linkage were cut, US forces would not have enough fuel to defend themselves under attack or get out of the country. Simply put, a move on Iran could render 140,000 troops hostage in the desert.

Iraq has the world's second-largest crude-oil reserves and was once a major oil exporter, but ongoing instability has created a shortage of refined oil products. "Our forces, if cut off from their own logistics, could not simply fuel up at local gas stations as German General Heinz Guderian's Panzer Corps did ... in the 1940 campaign against France," Lind wrote in the December issue of The American Conservative.

There are two possible ways Iran could sever the supply line in response to a US or Israeli attack - seen as one and the same by Iranian officials - on its nuclear facilities: Shi'ite militia loyal to Tehran could be summoned to fight against US forces across the south, while a riskier strategy would have Iranian armored divisions moving into Iraq in an attempt to cut supply lines and turn toward Baghdad.

The annals of war history in Mesopotamia provide an ominous case study. In 1915, a British force invaded what is now Iraq and ventured up the Tigris River, stopping in the city of Kut just south of the capital. They become bogged down when their supply line was cut along the river, and 11,000 troops eventually surrendered, after 23,000 allied casualties were sustained to save them.

Today, armed groups such as Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, which has clashed on and off with coalition forces, and the Badr Organization, the paramilitary wing of the Shi'ite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), could mobilize and turn supply roads into a "shooting gallery 400-800 miles long", according to Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East Intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Like the Hezbollah guerrillas who managed to resist an incursion by a far superior Israeli military over the summer, they would enjoy the support of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

"It might then be necessary to 'fight' the [US supply] trucks through ambushes on the roads," Lang wrote in a recent Christian Science Monitor op-ed. He calls this a "daunting possibility", noting that transport vehicles loaded with supplies would be defenseless against weapons currently in use among Iraqi insurgents, such as rocket-propelled grenades, small arms and improvised explosive devices - especially "against irregulars operating in and around their own towns".

The second option, according to Lind, would be for the Iranian military to deploy forces in sync with a Shi'ite insurrection at the US flank. Armored divisions could move to cut supply lines and then possibly attempt to encircle US troops from the south in a "classic operational maneuver".

"At present, US forces could be vulnerable to such an action by the Iranian army," asserts Lind, one of the originators of the "Fourth Generation War" theory, which describes the return to decentralized warfare. "We have no field army in Iraq; necessarily, our forces are penny-packeted all over the place, dealing with insurgents. They would be hard pressed to assemble quickly to meet a regular force, especially if fuel was running short."

To those Pentagon war hawks who contend that US air power would destroy exposed Iranian armored divisions, Lind says a spoiler might come in the form of a desert sandstorm. "Like the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, [the Iranians] could wait until the weather promised a few days of protection. After that, they would be so close to our own forces that air power could not attack them without danger of hitting friendlies."

Other security analysts counter that this scenario is a stretch. A "large-scale Iranian land invasion is just not going to happen", John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told Asia Times Online. "Do you know what the US Air Force calls Iran's ground military? Targets.

"Look at the Iraqi Republican Guard when they tried to stand and fight the US - they just disintegrated." As for the tactical advantage of bad weather, he said, "A big sandstorm would just shut everything down, for both sides ... It's too much of a wild card."

Many observers are also skeptical over the willingness of Shi'ite groups such as Muqtada's to take their cues from mullahs next door. For all his anti-US vitriol, Muqtada has styled himself as an Iraqi nationalist critical of Iranian influence and is not as close to Tehran as some of his rivals are. He cooperated with Sunni militants earlier in the insurgency and two weeks ago called on a top Sunni sheikh to issue three fatwas, one of them against inter-sectarian killing, stating: "We Iraqis - Sunnis and Shi'ite - will always be brothers."

There are further doubts as to how many active militants Muqtada commands, and whether they would obey his orders when push comes to shove.

Meanwhile, other prominent Shi'ite leaders such as Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the SCIRI, continue to deal openly with US officials. "It's illogical to believe that Hakim has gone through all of this simply to do the bidding of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Khamenei, Pike said, just days after the Iraqi cleric met with President George W Bush in Washington and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London. "These people are Iraqis first."

But any coordinated effort that interrupts traffic along the US supply line could have grave consequences. Air deliveries could not exceed 25% of daily requirements in the event overland lines were compromised, according to Lang, and alternative ground supply lines through Jordan or Turkey could meet resistance from Ankara officials loath to cooperate or Sunni insurgents in deadly al-Anbar province, which must be traversed to reach Jordan.

Another weak point in the current supply line is that storage facilities at the Kuwaiti entrepot are replenished by a steady stream of goods shipped through the Iran-controlled Strait of Hormuz. Iranian warships and sea mines would delay, or severely reduce, inbound supply shipments, as they did during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Global oil markets would also quake.

Iran "would close off the entrance to the Persian Gulf and try [to] close our lines of communication from Kuwait to up to [140,000] troops stranded in the middle of Iraq", retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey recently said on the US cable news channel MSNBC's Hardball. "You'd see a huge insurgent effort against our supply lines. We'd be in a crisis mode within a week of the first air strike."

The Desert Storm veteran went on to call the idea of using conventional air power to knock out Iranian nuclear facilities "preposterous".