Looking one direction:
The US intends to shatter Iraq “physically, emotionally and psychologically” by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days.
It is based on a strategy known as “Shock and Awe,” conceived at the National Defense University in Washington, in which between 300 and 400 cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days. It would be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 GulfWar.
“There will not be a safe place in Baghdad,” a Pentagon official told America’s CBS News after a briefing on the plan. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before.”
“You’re sitting in Baghdad and, all of a sudden, you’re the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out,” Mr Ullman said. “You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power and water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.”
And looking the other direction:
Facing its most chronic shortage in oil stocks for 27 years, the US has this month turned to an unlikely source of help — Iraq.
Weeks before a prospective invasion of Iraq, the oil-rich state has doubled its exports of oil to America, helping US refineries cope with a debilitating strike in Venezuela.
The trade, though bizarre given current Pentagon plans to launch around 300 cruise missiles a day on Iraq, is legal under the terms of UN’s oil for food programme.
But for opponents of war, it shows the unspoken aim of military action in Iraq, which has the world’s second largest proven reserves – some 112 billion barrels, and at least another 100bn of unproven reserves, according to the US Department of Energy. Iraqi oil is comparatively simple to extract – less than \$1 per barrel, compared with \$6 a barrel in Russia. Soon, US and British forces could be securing the source of that oil as a priority in the war strategy. The Iraqi fields south of Basra produce prized ‘sweet crudes’ that are simpler to refine.
On Friday, Pentagon sources said US military planners ‘have crafted strategies that will allow us to secure and protect those fields as rapidly as possible in order to then preserve those prior to destruction’.
(Via Long Story, Short Pier)