U.S. fears terrorists will imitate snipers
The U.S. intelligence net has caught terrorists abroad talking admiringly over the past several days about the sniper attacks that paralyzed much of the Washington area in October, and this has raised fears within the government that Islamic extremists will deploy snipers to other American cities soon, U.S. officials have told National Journal.
"Terrorists in general engage in cross-group learning," said one official knowledgeable about the recent overseas discussions of the sniper attacks. They "take note of how we react to calamities, like other terrorists attacks." They saw how "two men with a rifle" shooting out of a $250 used Chevrolet "occupied the entire region, resulting in significant disruption of daily activities," the official said. "This has no doubt given ideas to terrorists."
If President Bush does wage war against Iraq, it could trigger sniper attacks against Americans in a number of cities, officials warned. If this happened, American civilians would find themselves in greater personal danger from warfare than at any other time since the Civil War. Back then, armies swirled around civilians and sometimes deliberately destroyed their property, as in Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's fiery march through the South in 1864.
Although crashing hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, had an enormous effect on Americans, the easier and cheaper sniper attacks demonstrated to terrorists that "small-level operations can have enormous effect as well," said a Pentagon analyst. He added that the sniper attacks showed how enemies can exploit the media to bring worldwide attention to their demands.
Along with the worry that sniper killings will become part of the terrorists' "kit bag," as one U.S. official put it, there is another rising concern within the Bush administration: What has Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein been doing in all the tunnels and underground caverns he has been furiously digging since United Nations inspectors left his country in 1998? "They have gone from a few dozen at the time of the Persian Gulf War to a few hundred now," said one defense official familiar with the latest intelligence on Saddam's underground facilities. Another government official said the probing done over Iraq by U.S. aircraft, satellites, and radar suggests that huge "catacombs" have been dug in some areas.
For the moment at least, Bush has opted for trying U.N. inspections first and perhaps war later. Inspectors, if admitted, should be able to find the underground facilities that U.S. reconnaissance of Iraq has revealed.
"But how will they know they found all of them?" asked one Pentagon official in declaring that disarming Saddam will be a long, difficult, and constant process, no matter how hard the U.N. inspectors work.
Another complication to the new intelligence on Saddam's underground works, defense officials told National Journal, is that Iraq has been doing a lot of legitimate digging. The projects, they said, include irrigation ditches, sewage plants, and transportation tunnels. Several foreign contracting firms are building the facilities and training Iraqis in the process.
"What happens when the foreign firms leave?" asked a defense official. They leave behind them freshly trained Iraqi crews and the latest excavation equipment, making it easy for Iraq to build hideaways for military research and weapons of mass destruction. This dual-use phenomenon is troubling to U.S. analysts trying to figure out, for example, whether a legitimate railroad tunnel is really for a railroad and whether underground parking lots are really for cars.
If U.N. inspectors discover a dual-use facility, which may look innocent at the time of their visit, how does the United Nations assure the United States that it will stay that way rather than become a biological laboratory after the inspectors leave? How could a U.N. team keep constant track of what's going on in the now hundreds of underground facilities the United States knows about without becoming a permanent presence in a sovereign nation?
"Those are all excellent questions, with no answers," conceded one U.S. official pondering the what-ifs in Iraq.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly sounded the alarm about Saddam's underground facilities. He told the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18 that, for example, "Even the most intrusive inspection regime would have difficulty getting at all of his weapons of mass destruction. Many of his WMD capabilities are mobile.... He has vast underground networks and facilities and sophisticated denial-and-deception techniques."
Officials differed about what it would take to destroy or disable the suspicious tunnels and underground rooms.
"Don't think of the kind of deep tunnels North Korea has dug," said one official.
The worrisome underground facilities, described as "all over" Iraq, are not so deep that it would take special, bunker-buster weapons to destroy them, said one Defense official. The job could be done by precision-guided weapons already in the U.S. arsenal, he said.
Using nuclear bunker-busters against Iraq's underground network would provoke a violent reaction in the Arab and Muslim worlds, warned the government official focusing on the what-ifs of going to war against Iraq.
"It would be seen as the most blatant and aggressive and brutal and inhuman way in which the United States is coming after the Muslim world and the Arab world. It would have a disastrous reaction."
The known and unknown risks of going to war against Iraq, including sniper attacks on the U.S. homeland and high casualties in Baghdad city fighting, are being cited by those pressing for containment of Saddam rather than war. One official in this camp argued that there are "several more rungs on the escalation ladder." While Saddam "ranks high in the pantheon of dictators, if the disarmament objective could be achieved," he would not be "a whole lot different" from other dictators the United States tolerates. "It's the weapons of mass destruction that make him special."