Three Wars At Once

The Post Chronicle™

Security&Terrorism
Eye On Iraq
By Martin Sieff
Feb 9, 2007

"One war at a time," U.S. President Abraham Lincoln famously said when dismissing a proposal to risk war with the British Empire, the most powerful nation on earth, when he already had his hands full waging the U.S. Civil War. But as the United States heads for a full-scale confrontation with Iran, it risks fighting three separate wars simultaneously in the same theater of operations.

The first war is already raging at fill intensity, and the United States and the Iraqi government are still losing it: That is the struggle against the Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

This weekend Lt. Gen. David Petraeus will get his fourth star. Petraeus will succeed Gen. George Casey, slated to be the U.S. Army's next chief of staff, as the next U.S. and allied ground forces commander in Iraq. He has already made clear he wants to saturate Baghdad with troops and clear insurgents out of Sunni majority neighborhoods to end their violent onslaught in the Iraqi capital of 6 million people.

In recent weeks, far from abating, Sunni insurgent violence in Baghdad has reached new levels of intensity with scores and even hundreds of people at a time being killed in mass terror bomb attacks.

However, even while U.S. policymakers await hopefully but uncertainly to see the results of Petraeus' new strategy, they're also hunkering down for a looming confrontation with Iran over its refusal to heed United Nations Security Council Resolution 1737 of Dec. 23 and abandon its nuclear development program.

A second U.S. aircraft carrier battle group has been dispatched to the Persian Gulf. An aviator admiral with no experience of dealing directly with land warfare but with almost unrivalled experience in directing carrier-launched aircraft against mainland targets, Adm. William Fallon has been chosen by President George W. Bush to head Central Command or CENTCOM, the U.S. command that includes both Iraq and Iran. And the U.S. government has sent new batteries of Patriot anti-ballistic missiles out to the region to protect U.S. bases and ground forces, Israel and other potential targets of Iranian ballistic missile attacks.

Meanwhile, the Iranians appear to be expecting a U.S. attack. In the past three days, they have announced successful tests of their new, state-of-the-art Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missile system, jut received from Russia, and of their older but still potentially dangerous Sark anti-ship missile system, also supplied by Russia.

The Iranians would have other forms of retaliation available too. In the event of a U.S. air strike on their new nuclear centrifuges and other faculties, they would almost certainly unleash the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the highly popular Iraqi Shiite leader, which is particularly strong across southern Iraq and in the Sadr City Shiite poor neighborhoods of Baghdad, where 2 million people live.

But if the U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft strike Iranian nuclear facilities, then Washington policymakers could end up directing three separate but overlapping wars at the same time.