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WAR is never something to be entered into lightly. But the latest argument put forward against an American intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein is a military one that seems at best ill-informed, at worst a kind of gleeful and irrational pessimism.
This time, it's claimed, it will be significantly harder and costlier to defeat Saddam Hussein and his armies, despite the fact that Iraq is poorer and less well-endowed with modern weapons than it was before the Gulf War.

Some, including former Secretary of State Jim Baker, claim that this fight will be tougher because Iraqi troops will be "fighting to defend their homeland." And experts quoted by The New York Times and others warn that the Iraqi dicator will withdraw his armies into his cities, making a "clean" Gulf War-style campaign impossible and drawing America into a disastrous urban quagmire reminiscent of Stalingrad, Grozny, the "Black Hawk Down" battlefield in Somalia, etc.

First off, how much difference would it make that Iraqi troops are defending the mother country, as opposed to the mother country and occupied Kuwait?

True, we really don't know the depth of loyalty to Saddam felt by Iraq's populace in general and its armed forces in particular. But we do know that one in six Iraqis lives in angry exile, while at least half the country's population is made up of oppressed Kurds and Shiites. And the rest live under one of the cruelest quasi-totalitarian regimes in existence.

The "urban quagmire" argument is more superficially persuasive. Saddam does apparently intend to withdraw into his cities if America and her allies attack - we know this from an interview he gave to a sympathetic British member of parliament. An urban environment can theoretically negate some of the advantages offered by air superiority and possession of modern armor. (The Russians learned this in Grozny - before they pounded the Chechen city into submission with bombing and artillery).
And it is also true that until recently America's armed forces were not particularly well-trained or equipped for combat in urban areas, after a half century spent preparing to fight Soviet tank divisions on the Central European plain.

But the analogies with Stalingrad are foolish. Stalingrad was defended by Russians, a people with a long history of annihilating invaders, with the assistance of the winter snows. If all peoples defended undeserving regimes with such tenacity, no one would ever invade anybody else.

Saddam's troops are not Russians, nor even Vietnamese. They are Mesopotamian Arabs with a long history of being conquered by invaders. Nor is it at all clear that U.S. forces would have to take Baghdad block by block as the Germans sought to reduce Stalingrad, or as our own Marines retook Hue in 1968. We would more likely strike key areas and command-and-control centers using the extraordinarily accurate sensor and missile technology we now possess.

Baghdad is not Mogadishu, where U.S. forces were forbidden armor and heavy weapons. (And even there, a handful of American soldiers fought off and killed thousands of their enemies).
Nor is it Berlin in 1945: Saddam may recall Hitler in his cruelty, but not in the loyalty that he inspires or the generals he can rely upon. Moreover, we could also employ an ancient and devastating tactic: simply lay siege to Baghdad, cutting off water, food and electricity, while announcing that civilians were free to leave the city.

Yes, Saddam might refuse to let his civilian population leave, preferring to use them as human shields. But it would be hard to do so for long. (And the Geneva Convention suggests the responsibility for civilian deaths in such a situation falls on the party who turns them into human shields.)

None of this is to say that war with Iraq is a riskless exercise. Saddam's Republican Guard may stand by him and fight hard against the invader. And the dictator may use nerve gas or bioweapons on his own cities in the hope of taking along some Americans. But risks can be weighed up, guarded against, and found worth the running. And while some generals may be skeptical about the political merits of a war to unseat Saddam, none has said that we can only take Baghdad with frightful loss.

Is it worth losing, say, a thousand American lives to liberate 18 million people from a dictator who threatens a whole region with weapons of mass destruction? That's a decision for the people's representatives to make. But the notion that Saddam has stumbled on some kind of magical strategy for negating American might is simply wrong.