June 13, 2003

Deceiving Saddam

Was the New York Times an unwitting collaborator in Pentagon misdirection?

By Richard A. Muller

On Feb 2, 2003, the New York Times and other papers leaked the Pentagon's plan for the imminent invasion of Iraq. It called for "unleashing 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles in the first 48 hours of the opening air campaign, an effort intended to stagger and isolate the Iraqi military and quickly pave the way for a ground attack to topple a government in shock. some experimental weapons are expected to be used-including high-powered microwave weapons that could flash millions of watts of electricity to cripple Iraqi computers and equipment."

I was fascinated by the plans and horrified by the leak. The Times had given away the most valuable information that Saddam Hussein could possibly want. The Iraqis now knew how to prepare, and they did that by hunkering down to counter the coming shock and awe. They would fight the battle in same way the great boxer Muhammad Ali did as his career waned: rope-a-dope, absorbing blows until the tormenter grew tired.

Only it didn't happen. After a small aerial attack on Baghdad that may or may not have killed Saddam, the military thrust ground troops rapidly and deeply into Iraq. The Iraqis were caught off guard as their southern oilfields were suddenly seized. I sat mesmerized as CNN's live video carried me rapidly over kilometers of desert. From the TV screen I could estimate the speed of the tanks and I could see that they would arrive in Nasiriyah within a few hours.

Saddam could see that too, unless he had shielded his satellite TV dishes to prevent destruction from the threatened high-powered microwave attack that never materialized. But he couldn't get his troops to Nasiriyah in time to stop the Americans from taking a key (and undefended) bridge across the Euphrates.

Reporters asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when the shock and awe would come. Soon, he replied. Why had the military changed its battle plan? they asked. Because of the opportunity, Pentagon briefers replied. The putative decapitation had supposedly created disarray in the Iraqi military, so a last-minute change made sense.

I'm skeptical of this explanation. My guess is that the Pentagon just didn't want to admit that it had purposely leaked a discarded battle plan to the Times, and that its publication had successfully tricked the Iraqis into preparing for the wrong attack.