Veterans for Common Sense

It is Feb. 7, 2003, just after U.S. troops have seized several Iraqi airfields to be used as staging areas. Suddenly, Scud missiles — armed with both chemical and conventional warheads — strike the airfields. Hundreds of Americans die. The U.S. battle plan is thrown into disarray. The Iraqis (it turns out) meekly abandoned their airfields with little resistance precisely to make them easy targets.

We don’t know if there will be a war or, as this imagined story suggests, how it might unfold. But the fact that we don’t know overhangs the economy. It weighs on confidence. Companies hesitate to make commitments.

The uncertainties can’t be dispelled by low interest rates or lofty reassurances. At a recent congressional hearing, Democratic Rep. Pete Stark quizzed Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Stark: [President Bush has] an obsession, it appears, to plunge us into war. [On] the assumption that we will be there one or two years and [spend] $100 billion [or] $130 billion a year . . . what effect would this have on our economy?

Greenspan: The numbers you quote are clearly very much on the high side. . . . I would be very doubtful if the impact on the economy is more than modest, largely because this is not Vietnam or Korea. Korea . . . had a really monumental effect, because the economy was so much smaller.

Well, maybe. Since 1950, the economy’s gross domestic product has grown from $1.7 trillion to $9.2 trillion in 2001 (figures in inflation-adjusted 1996 dollars). A war would probably last some months, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the costs to the federal budget at $6 billion to $13 billion a month: not crushing for so wealthy a society.

But the true economics are murkier. What happens to oil prices? Might war trigger a recession? Would a swift victory revive confidence? Because no one knows, “scenario building” — the next best alternative — is now in vogue.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington reports the following: Saddam Hussein’s army totals about 375,000 men; his air force has 316 planes, maybe half operational; the air defenses are extensive; weapons of mass destruction are unknown. For a CSIS conference, Cordesman provided three war scenarios, and economists judged the consequences.

The “benign case” anticipates rapid victory. Much of Hussein’s army surrenders or defects. Because uncertainty lifts, the economy fares better than under a “no war” scenario. The temporary loss of Iraqi oil is no big deal. Iraq’s production now represents about 2 percent to 2.5 percent of world oil use. Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf suppliers offset the loss. Their surplus capacity is about 6 percent of global oil consumption, says analyst Adam Sieminski of Deutsche Bank. The United States might also release oil from strategic reserves.

By contrast, Cordesman’s other scenarios — though deemed less probable — are scarier. In the “intermediate case,” fighting lasts up to three months. Iraqi attacks slightly damage other Gulf oilfields. Oil prices, now about $25 a barrel, hit $42 by early 2003. In the worst case, Iraq badly damages other oilfields. Production drops by at least 5 million barrels a day, out of a total global consumption of 77 million barrels a day.

Oil prices hit $80 a barrel. Intense urban fighting incites the U.S. antiwar movement. Social unrest spreads in the Middle East. In the intermediate case, unemployment (now 5.7 percent) reaches almost 6.5 percent by late 2003. In the worst case, it goes to 7.5 percent.

Another dark assessment comes from Yale economist William Nordhaus, writing in the New York Review of Books. He says that a worst case (including a long-term occupation and reconstruction of Iraq) could cost $1.6 trillion over a decade. Only about half this total would be federal budget costs; the rest would reflect slightly higher oil prices and slower economic growth.

“It seems likely,” he says, “that Americans are underestimating the economic commitment involved in a war.” (One omission in his math: In the next decade, U.S. GDP should exceed $100 trillion; even his cost is less than 2 percent of the national income.) Life after major wars is not like life before them. They change — for better or worse — the political, economic and psychological landscape in basic ways.

A quick and successful war against Iraq might transform the Middle East by empowering Arab moderates. A long and messy war might destabilize the region and, by showing that U.S. power is exaggerated, abet terrorism, tensions and conflicts around the world. Pax Americana would recede; a power vacuum would develop.

The wisdom of war depends on the answers to these questions and one other: What’s the alternative? If it’s peace and prosperity, then war makes no sense. But if fighting now prevents a costlier war later, it makes much sense. To be blunt: If Saddam Hussein gets nuclear weapons and threatens his neighbors (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) or drops one on Tel Aviv, prompting Israeli retaliation, we’ll face a horrendous war.

The economy’s fate ultimately hinges on these issues. It’s unsatisfying to say that they are a matter of judgment and that we don’t know and, probably, can’t know the answers. But that is what candor compels.

Mitchell Lambert came back from the Persian Gulf War with lasting souvenirs — rashes, lumps, headaches and seizures.

He’s convinced that those symptoms relate to the four months he spent serving his country in the Mideast more than a decade ago.

“We unfortunately were exposed to a little bit more dangerous stuff than what we should have been,” the 30-year-old Medina County resident said.

But Lambert, like thousands of other veterans, has found that the federal government, at worst, disagrees and, at best, is simply fumbling to find a link between service in the Gulf War and a host of medical disorders.

More than a third of the 700,000 active-duty and reserve U.S. veterans who served in the Gulf War say they suffered health problems from their service in 1990 and 1991 and have filed claims for disability payments.

In about 20,000 of those cases, the veterans’ illnesses can’t be explained.

With the country on the cusp of going back to war in the Mideast, the mystery illnesses take on added urgency — particularly because the United States is no closer to understanding the cause now than it was a decade ago.

More than 200 government-funded studies costing $200 million have failed to uncover a link between service in the Gulf War and veterans’ health, although one small study found that deployed veterans were twice as likely to contract amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, as nondeployed vets.

And although unexplained illnesses affect Gulf veterans, they also affect the citizenry at large — people whose closest link to sand was a beach.

The answers are few and far between.

“We do not have scientific evidence that this-and-this would cause a syndrome, across the board, over time,” says Jim Benson, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

That’s little comfort to those whose lives were torn apart by months spent in the Mideast.

“Most of us came down with some kind of diarrhea and headaches,” says vet Bob Toth of Canton, who heads the Stark County Veterans Service Commission. “It’s improved vastly, but it lingers.”

Unexplained symptoms

Lambert served as an Army cavalry scout in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

When he returned home to Lafayette Township, he came down with bronchitis, pneumonia, open and oozing rashes, grainy vision, muscle spasms and tremors.

“The other day,” he says, “we went to the zoo with the kids and, all of a sudden, my heart started to act funny. There was this piercing, painful sensation in the back of my head for just five minutes, and the arrhythmia was much greater than it normally is.”

He’s convinced that his medical problems stem from things he was exposed to during the Gulf War: a fire at a motor pool of vehicles carrying depleted uranium, smoke from oil well fires and Iraqi mustard gas drums.

A married father of two, Lambert works as a technician for a medical services company. He is often sick and worries about the future.

“I can deal with my shoulder,” he said, referring to an injury he suffered during training in Germany. “But this other stuff — there’s nothing I can do with it. It’s — I don’t know — a very difficult position to be in.”

The VA is paying Lambert on two disability claims — for the shoulder injury and for headaches that may stem from the shoulder complaint.

He’s asked for compensation for other disabilities, too — for more than 40 lumps that cover his legs, throat and arms and for post-traumatic stress disorder. He has yet to hear from the government on either of those claims.

Mental, physical fallout

When 33-year-old Akron veteran David Reed returned home after seven months in Saudi Arabia, he no longer felt strong enough to practice tae kwon do, in which he has a black belt. And his happy, sociable temperament was gone.

“You could have hit me over the head with a 2-by-4 and I might have said something,” said Reed, who works as a bus driver. “Now, you look at me and it might set me off.”

The VA sent him to a counselor and a psychiatrist. When he blew up at a supervisor at work, his employer sent him to anger-management classes and suspended him for four days.

Then there are the “real wrenching stomachaches — like someone’s grabbed ahold of your stomach and is wringing it out like a wash cloth,” Reed says.

His vomiting, diarrhea, fevers and achy joints have worsened over time.

The VA agreed that Reed has an undiagnosed illness and approved his claim at 0 percent. That means he doesn’t get any money for that illness now, but that could change if the symptoms worsen.

To add insult to injury, he went to the Mideast with a full head of hair and came back without it.

The VA told him that male pattern baldness was to blame. Reed doesn’t think so.

“It’s not natural for a 21-year-old man to lose his hair,” he says.

Complaints aren’t new

Complaints like Reed’s and Lambert’s aren’t new. They’ve surfaced at other times, in other wars.

“There’s this cluster of people who come back with symptoms that the medical community can’t diagnose,” says Phil Budahn, another VA spokesman.

But in the early ’90s, servicemen and women came back to a greater galaxy of benefits and more know-how about how to access them.

“Many World War II soldiers came back, maybe missing a leg,” Benson says. “But they didn’t expect much, and they didn’t ask for much from their government.”

The Gulf War illnesses have turned into a decadelong nightmare for the government — one it doesn’t want to encounter again and one it never envisioned in the first place.

“We weren’t expecting this,” says Dr. Francis O’Donnell, a medical research consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, which oversees the health care of the armed forces.

He says the military tried to guard against the Mideast’s known threats, such as malaria and sand fly fever, and did a good job in controlling those diseases.

And the government has made some changes since the war. There are now research sites devoted to Gulf War illnesses and registries to track veterans’ symptoms. And VA policy has been improved to provide free health care for two years after discharge to combat veterans who have served since November 1998.

If the United States goes back to war in the Persian Gulf, O’Donnell says, the Defense Department will put more emphasis on educating soldiers about the environmental threats they face and on ways to protect themselves — everything from using insect repellant to chlorinating water to wearing their uniforms the proper way to fend off biting insects.

Before deployment, the government will do more environmental surveillance to make sure troops aren’t exposed to unknown or unremedied hazards.

O’Donnell says servicemen and women will be told what — if any — hazards are found so they won’t be plagued later by lingering doubts about unknown dangers.

Wary of return to Gulf

Even though their military careers are over, many Gulf War veterans are wary about the United States going back to the Persian Gulf again.

One is Toth, who heads Stark’s veterans commission. He suffered a 10 percent hearing loss in one ear because he lived too close to huge generators that thundered without stop for eight months in Saudi Arabia.

Toth, now 55, says he wouldn’t want to return to the sand, the heat and the worry about what the next day would bring. He fervently wishes the veterans’ medical complaints were resolved once and for all.

But he’s glad he served when he did.

“You trust in your government, you do your duty, you don’t question it,” he says. “You just hope you’re in that number of people who return — and return healthy.”

Carol Biliczky can be reached at 330-996-3729 or cbiliczky@thebeaconjournal.com

Here are a few examples of commonly repeated errors:

1. “But as U.N. weapons inspectors prepare to return to Iraq for the first time since Saddam kicked them out in 1998, the U.S. faces a delicate balancing act: transforming the international consensus for disarmament
into a consensus for war.” –Randall Pinkston, CBS Evening News (11/9/02).

One of the most common media errors on Iraq is the claim that the U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998 because they were “kicked out” or “expelled.”

http://www.fair.org/extra/0210/inspectors.html

The inspectors, led by Richard Butler, actually left voluntarily, knowing that a U.S. bombing campaign was imminent. This was reported accurately throughout the U.S. press at the time: “Butler ordered his inspectors to evacuate Baghdad, in anticipation of a military attack, on Tuesday night” (Washington Post, 12/18/98).

2. “The last weapons inspectors were pulled out of Iraq nearly four years ago. Baghdad charged that there were spies on the team, and the United States complained that Iraq was using the accusation as an excuse to
obstruct the inspectors. After the team withdrew, the U.S. and Britain waged a four-day bombing campaign.” –L.A. Times (11/19/02)

Treating the use of the U.N. weapons inspection team for espionage as a mere Iraqi allegation might be referred to as “Saddam Says” reporting. In fact, reports of the misuse of the inspectors for spying were made in early 1999 by some of the leading U.S. newspapers, sourced to U.S. and U.N. officials.

http://www.fair.org/activism/unscom-history.html

These papers reported as fact that “American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors” (New York Times, 1/7/99) in order to “eavesdrop on the Iraqi military without the knowledge of the U.N. agency” (Washington Post, 3/2/99) as part of “an ambitious spying operation designed to penetrate Iraq’s intelligence apparatus and track the movement of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein” (Boston Globe, 1/6/99).

3. “Many [in Iraq], of course, are bitter over the 12-year-long U.S.-supported embargo, which Baghdad claims has led to thousands of infants and elderly people dying from preventable diseases.” –Time (11/25/02)

The topic of sanctions is also often covered in a “Saddam Says” fashion. In fact, there are detailed reports on the deadly effects of sanctions that come from respected international health organizations and public health experts, not from the Iraqi government. For example, UNICEF published a report in August 1999 that found that sanctions against Iraq had contributed to the deaths of 500,000 children under five. Richard
Garfield, a public health specialist at Columbia University, estimates that 350,000 children have died as a result of sanctions and the lingering effects of the 1991 Gulf War. See: The Nation, 12/6/01;

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011203&s=cortright

To describe a death toll in this range as “thousands” is like saying that “dozens” of people died in the World Trade Center attacks.

4. “The Pentagon also points out, the Bush administration also points out very, very strongly, that the Iraqi regime itself is to blame for all of
these problems. If they simply complied with U.N. Security Council resolutions and disarm, there would be no sanctions, there would be no problem getting medical supplies, doctor, pediatricians, to all parts of
Iraq.” –Wolf Blitzer, CNN (11/7/02)

It’s not at all clear that sanctions against Iraq would automatically be lifted if the country disarmed; President George Bush the elder declared in 1991, shortly after the sanctions were imposed, “My view is we don’t want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.” His secretary of state James Baker concurred: “We are not interested in seeing
a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.”

President Clinton made a point of saying that his policy toward Iraq was exactly the same as his predecessor’s. His secretary of state Madeleine
Albright stated in her first major foreign policy address in 1997: “We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted. Our view, which is unshakable, is that Iraq must prove its peaceful intentions…. And the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussein’s intentions will never be peaceful.” See Institute for Public Accuracy, 11/13/98;

http://www.accuracy.org/iraq.htm

For further information, go to www.fair.org or send e-mail to fair@fair.org

SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — It was California’s own Hiram Johnson who said, in a speech on the Senate floor in 1917, that “the first casualty, when war comes, is truth.”

What would he make of the Bush administration?

In a policy shift that reaches across all the armed services, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior aides are revising missions and creating new agencies to make “information warfare” a central element of any U.S. war. Some hope it will eventually rank with bombs and artillery shells as an instrument of destruction.

What is disturbing about Rumsfeld’s vision of information warfare is that it has a way of folding together two kinds of wartime activity involving communications that have traditionally been separated by a firewall of principle.

The first is purely military. It includes attacks on the radar, communications and other “information systems” an enemy depends on to guide its war-making capabilities. This category also includes traditional psychological warfare, such as dropping leaflets or broadcasting propaganda to enemy troops.

The second is not directly military. It is the dissemination of public information that the American people need in order to understand what is happening in a war, and to decide what they think about it. This information is supposed to be true.

Increasingly, the administration’s new policy — along with the steps senior commanders are taking to implement it — blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other. And, while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the American electorate.

One of Rumsfeld’s first steps into this minefield occurred last year with the creation of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence. Part of its stated mission was to generate disinformation and propaganda that would help the United States counter Islamic extremists and pursue the war on terrorism.

The office’s nominal target was the foreign media, especially in the Middle East and Asia. As critics soon pointed out, however, there was no way — in an age of instant global communications — that Washington could propagandize abroad without that same propaganda spreading to the home front.

Faced with a public outcry, Rumsfeld declared it had all been a big misunderstanding. The Pentagon would never lie to Americans. The Office of Strategic Influence was shut down. But the impulse to control public information and bend it to the service of government objectives did not go away.

This fall, Rumsfeld created a new position of deputy undersecretary for “special plans,” a euphemism for deception operations. The special plans policy czar will sit atop a huge new infrastructure being created in the name of information warfare.

On Oct. 1, in a little-noticed but major reorganization, U.S. Strategic Command took over all responsibilities for global information attacks. The Omaha-based successor to the Strategic Air Command has solely focused up to now on nuclear weapons.

Similarly, the country’s most venerable and historic bombing command, the 8th Air Force, which carried the air war to Germany in World War II, has been directed to transfer its bomber and fighter aircraft to other commands so that it can focus exclusively on worldwide information attacks.

The Navy, meanwhile, has consolidated its efforts in a newly formed Naval Network Warfare Command. And the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, or JSCP, prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now declares information to be just as important in war as diplomatic, military or economic factors.

The strategic capabilities plan is the central war-fighting directive for the U.S. military. It establishes what are called “Informational Flexible Deterrent Options” for global wars, such as the war on terrorism, and separate plans written for individual theaters of war, such as Iraq.

To a large extent, these documents and the organizational shifts behind them are focused on such missions as jamming or deceiving enemy radar systems and disrupting command and control networks. Such activities only carry forward efforts that have been part of U.S. military tactics for decades or longer.

But a summary of the strategic capabilities plan and a raft of other Pentagon and armed forces documents made available to The Times make it clear that the new approach now includes other elements as well: the management of public information, efforts to control news media sources and manipulation of public opinion.

The plan summary, for instance, talks of “strategic” deception and “influence operations” as basic tools in future wars. According to another Defense Department directive on information warfare policy, military leaders should use information “operations” to “heighten public awareness; promote national and coalition policies, aims, and objectives … [and] counter adversary propaganda and disinformation in the news.”

Both the Air Force and the Navy now list deception as one of five missions for information warfare, along with electronic attack, electronic protection, psychological . attacks and public affairs. A September draft of a new Air Force policy describes information warfare’s goals as “destruction, degradation, denial, disruption, deceit, and exploitation.” These goals are referred to collectively as “D5E.”

In order to do a better job of deception, the joint chiefs have issued a “Joint Policy for Military Deception” that directs the individual services to work on the task in peacetime as well as wartime. Specifically, it orders the Air Force to develop better doctrine and techniques for incorporating deception into war plans.

The Air Force, in response, now defines military deception as action that “misleads adversaries, causing them to act in accordance with” U.S. objectives. And, like the other services, it is increasingly folding its “public affairs” apparatus — that is, the open world of media relations — into the information warfare team.

“Gaining and maintaining the information initiative in a conflict can be a powerful weapon to defeat propaganda,” the Air Force said in its January doctrine.

That echoes a statement by Navy Rear Adm. John Cryer III, who worked on information warfare in the Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia during the Afghanistan war: “It was our belief … we were losing the information war early when we watched Al Jazeera,” Cryer said at an October conference, meaning that the U.S. perspective was inadequately represented on the Arab world’s equivalent of CNN. “We came around, but it took a lot longer than it should have.”

Of course there is nothing wrong with making sure the U.S. point of view gets represented in the news media, both abroad and at home. Done properly, that is a prescription for more openness and less unnecessary secrecy.

The problem is that Rumsfeld’s vision of information warfare seems to push beyond the notion that American ideas and information should compete with the enemy’s on a level playing field. And Rumsfeld’s vision, with its melding of public information and deception, is taking root in the armed services.

The new Air Force doctrine, for example, declares that the news media can be used not only to convey “the leadership’s concern with [an] issue,” but also to avoid “the media going to other sources [such as an adversary or critic of U.S. policy] for information.” In other words, information warfare now includes controlling as much as possible what the American public sees and reads.

The disinformation campaign being constructed goes against even the military’s own stated mission. Truthfulness, the Air Force says, is a key to defeating adversaries. Accordingly, the service branch adds, “U.S. and friendly forces must strive to become the favored source of information.”

The potential for mischief is magnified by the fact that so much of what the U.S. military does these days falls into the category of covert operations. Americans are now operating out of secret bases in places like Uzbekistan and the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq; Special Forces units are said to be inside western Iraq as well. In the meantime, the armed forces are making use of facilities in the Arab states along the Persian Gulf.

In all these cases and more, the U.S. and other western news media depend on the military for information. Since reporters cannot travel into parts of Iraq and other places in the region without military escort, what they report is generally what they’ve been told.

And when the information that military officers provide to the public is part of a process that generates propaganda and places a high value on deceit, deception and denial, then truth is indeed likely to be high on the casualty list.

That is bad news for the American public. In the end, it may be even worse news for the Bush administration — and for a U.S. military that has spent more than 25 years climbing out of the credibility trap called Vietnam.

William Arking can be reached at: warkin@igc.org

British and American warplanes are attacking Iraq’s air defences almost daily, and making practice runs on other targets. US special forces are reported to be on the ground in western and northern Iraq, and military engineers are preparing and upgrading airfields in the Kurdish zone. In many ways, the war on Iraq has already begun.

This war is a good deal more secret than the very public preparations being made by the US and its allies for an invasion of Iraq. No attempt has been made to conceal the build-up of forces in the region, with the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group in the Gulf and four more groups en route or preparing to sail. Enough equipment for an armoured division is already in Kuwait, and more is on the high seas.

In Kuwait, 2,200 Marines are conducting a month-long amphibious exercise called Eager Mace ’02. When General Tommy Franks, who would command any assault, arrives in the Gulf next month with 600 of his staff for a “command and control” exercise, it would not be surprising if they were outnumbered by accompanying press and TV crews.

All this helps to maintain the pressure on Saddam Hussein’s regime. As the United Nations deploys inspectors to find and eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, it stresses that any “material breach” of the Security Council resolution that sent them there will trigger full-scale war. But it would take many weeks, and far more reinforcements, to mount an invasion, and what is happening out of the public eye is important.

Last summer, the rules of engagement for coalition aircraft patrolling Iraq’s “no-fly” zones were quietly changed. The first hint of this was a raid in early September by more than 100 British and American warplanes. The biggest attack in nearly a year, it was aimed at blinding the main air command and control centre in western Iraq – essential, said military analysts, if the regime’s Scuds were to be pushed out of range of Israel. Before, coalition aircraft hit back only at missile or artillery batteries that opened fire on them, or loosed AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles at radar units “locking on” to them.

The Iraqis were reported to have deployed new types of mobile missile launchers, and to be hiding them near civilian areas. So British and American aircrews were ordered to hit air defence command bunkers and the fixed communications that link them to missile and gun positions. The dry announcements by General Franks’s US Central Command of each engagement merely speak of attacks “in response to recent hostile actions”, and carry a routine assurance that “coalition aircraft never target civilian populations and infrastructure and go to painstaking lengths to avoid injury to civilians and damage to civilian facilities”. But when the communiqués are strung together, the intent becomes clear: to destroy Iraq’s air defences piece by piece.

This is proving more difficult than expected, because Iraq has a fibre-optic communications network deep underground. Several centres have been hit repeatedly by what CentCom calls “precision-guided weapons”, probably JDAM “smart bombs”, aimed through global positioning satellites, to keep them out of action.

In September and October, there were more air raids on Iraq than in all of the previous eight months. Since Iraq accepted the UN resolution on 14 November, US and British planes have gone into action on 10 days out of 11. The coalition’s technological superiority is such that there is little danger of aircraft being shot down.

Given the volume of British and American attacks, and the risk to Iraq that any hit on a coalition warplane could give Washington an excuse to start a war, some analysts have questioned whether every raid is a response to hostile action by Baghdad. “It appears the rules of engagement have been broadened to the point that anything related to a future air campaign can be taken out,” said one. Preparations for such a campaign have not stopped there: US press reports say pilots from the Abraham Lincoln are staging practice “strike missions” over Iraq, acquainting themselves with targets they may be called on to attack. While officially unacknowledged, such activity is scarcely covert. But the Pentagon has gone out of its way to deny reports of what US and British special forces might be doing inside Iraq.

Claims that special forces are scouting western Iraq for Scud missile launchers, so their threat to Israel can be eliminated quickly when hostilities begin, were described as implausible by one expert. “Saddam is not going to have his Scuds in the open. For one thing, that would be a material breach of the UN resolutions,” he said. “They will stay well hidden, almost certainly underground, until he intends to use them. You don’t want to have special forces undertaking a long, risky and probably fruitless search for them when war could still be months away.

“In the north, it is different. I have no doubt that in the Kurdish area, where they can operate freely, special forces are preparing themselves and their equipment and training local fighters to assist them. The forces were critical to the success of the Afghanistan campaign, especially in designating targets for air attack.”

The tempo of war preparations was crucial, the expert added. “How do you continue to maintain the pressure on Iraq? By continuing the build-up, but not so that you have large numbers of troops waiting for months. That applies as much to the special forces as to any other kind of force. You get the equipment in position, but leave most of the troops behind.”

But the covert nature of much of the preparations means that war could come sooner than many think.