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Saddam Gunning for Pilot to Ransom John L. Perry, NewsMax.comSaddam Hussein is another step nearer his goal – shooting down a manned American plane and holding its pilot hostage until sanctions against Iraq are lifted. For that, the Iraqi dictator can thank his newfound communist friends in Beijing. Engineers for hire from Chinese companies, typically fronts for the People's Liberation Army, have in recent months been digging away in the sands of Iraq. There, they have been burying in trenches mile after mile of high-tech fiberglass cables. No ordinary fiberglass, this is state-of-the-art technology obtained, surreptitiously or openly, from the United States during former President Bill Clinton's open-handed policy toward China, from which flowed millions of dollars for his 1996 re-election campaign. Making a World of Difference Where do those super-cables lead? They connect Saddam's numerous radar sites to his mobile ground-to-air missile batteries, via well-trained commanders in remote-control centers, enabling his gunners to triangulate and target instantly the inbound U.S. jets. Heretofore, there was no such sophisticated interconnection, and Iraqi's hit-or-miss missile marksmanship was almost guaranteed to miss. Despite indignant denials from top Beijing officials that this was going on and contradictory promises to stop the project immediately, China has been dramatically upgrading Saddam's ability to blast United States and British war planes from the sky. Result: Now in Saddam's cross hairs are the planes patrolling the northern and southern no-fly zones imposed by the United Nations to keep Saddam from making war on his own rebellious people native to those regions of Iraq. In the past, Iraqi air defenses were so technologically primitive that allied patrol planes, with their high-tech ability to thwart Saddam's radar or dodge his missiles, have been in relatively little danger. Patience Paying Off The international poster boy for patience, Saddam has been biding his time for 10 years. His doggedness – and the tentativeness of his foes – is beginning to pay off. In the sky above Iraq, the situation is now fundamentally changed. American aircraft and American airmen are in serious peril. The loss of a single multimillion-dollar U.S. plane and the loss of a single American aviator are serious-enough consequences. But the strategic fallout now goes far beyond that. Saddam has left no doubt in the minds of American intelligence officers that he is no longer merely taking potshots at U.S. planes entering the no-fly zones, which he refuses to accept. He's going for a kill. A Pilot's the Prize Would he enjoy knocking down a sophisticated American jet? Certainly. His bragging rights in the mostly technologically poor Arab states would definitely be enhanced. What Saddam is really after is one of those American pilots. He wants one to have to "punch out" and float down alive inside Iraqi territory. There, with great showmanship on the world's television screens, Saddam would personally parade his shackled prisoner for everyone to see. Another public-relations coup. The ultimate insult, however, would be for Saddam to put the pilot on public trial in an Iraqi kangaroo court in Baghdad, have him found guilty of high crimes against the people of Iraq and sentenced to death. Behind the scenes, in what diplomats like to refer to as "back channel" negotiations, Iraqi officials would be bargaining – the pilot's life for U.S. agreement to have the United Nations lift all sanctions against Iraq. Win-Win for Iraq Either way those negotiations might turn out, Saddam would win. If President Bush caved, Saddam would be sanctions-free to resume all international trade, including importation of materials to speed up his development of weapons of mass destruction, in return for a free flow of Iraqi oil. If Bush refused to bargain, Saddam could hang by the neck or decapitate by sword his hostage – and go gunning for the next, and the next, American plane and its pilot. It is unthinkable that an American president would sit back, gulp and let an American hero go to his doom – especially when Saddam would have proved he could repeat the performance. The bottom line is that this is a maddening no-win predicament for the United States. On a Precarious Perch It comes to a head at the very time Bush is walking a wobbly tight rope regarding Iraq:
Bush seemed for a short while to be making some headway on that. Then the warfare between Palestinians and Israelis grew worse and worse, with the United States drawn ever closer to siding with Israel – thus making it all the harder for "moderate" Arab states to support Bush's narrow-focus sanctions plan. Edging Closer, Closer Taking advantage of that, Saddam – with the help of the communist Chinese, who understand quite well what's going on here – has been getting closer and closer to shooting down a manned American plane. American pilots are also keenly conscious of that, and their commanders have gone public in expressing growing concern for the safety of their crews. Granted that knocking down one of those light, defenseless drone planes, as happened recently, is no big deal, in itself. It could have been accomplished by an Iraqi foot soldier with passable eyesight and a shoulder-fired ground-to-air missile. It might not have been necessary for Saddam to call upon his newly improved missile batteries. If the downed unmanned plane has any significance it is this: The likelihood is that it was targeted to fly over and photograph at low level those fiberglass-cable installations so critical to Iraq's new air-defense capability. If Iraq can keep such photos from getting back to a drone's home base, it makes it that much more difficult for the United States to use "smart bombs" to destroy the radar network. Tricky Targets Without those improved radar sites, it is extremely difficult for Saddam to shoot down an American pilot. Part of the trouble, though, is that even when the United States knows precisely where the new fiberglass cable nodes are, they are not easy to destroy. First, they are buried beneath the sand, running exactly where it is not easy to discover. Second, even if U.S. bombs are smart enough to take them out, there are the diligent communist Chinese engineers ready and waiting to plant some more. The odds are with the Chinese and Iraqis in such a situation. Could the United States put enough pressure upon Saddam to cause him to call off the Chinese worker ants if it were to bomb the living daylights out of some other military target of even-greater significance? Unpredictable Poker Opponent That's debatable, given Saddam's demonstrated squirrelly mentality. It is, to say the least, a high-risk game for Bush to up the ante. On one hand, he has to weigh just how effective, militarily, such serious bombing would actually be. On the other, he has to calculate precisely how much tighter he could ratchet up the bombing pressure on Saddam without pushing over the edge America's traditional allies among the Arab oil states around the Gulf. With each passing day, with each escalation in the Palestinian-Israeli warfare, Bush's options narrow on how to cope with the slippery Saddam. They'll Say Anything Could Bush perhaps persuade Beijing to bring home its cable-layers? A better question is: What good would their word be? High-ranking communist Chinese officials have already looked Secretary of State Colin Powell in the eye and promised many weeks ago to "cease and desist" Operation Fiberglass at once. Another set of them is still maintaining with a straight face that what's going on in Iraq isn't going on in Iraq. One thing, though, is anything but ambiguous: George W. Bush is going to have to "do something" about Iraq before Iraq does something about him. An American boy in the dock in Baghdad would be intolerable – morally, politically, diplomatically, militarily. What If … What If? A few days ago, a retired Army general and former secretary of state, Alexander Haig, was lamenting in public what a disastrous mistake it was when the previous President Bush make the fateful decision not to continue the enormously successful war against Iraq to the point of taking out Saddam Hussein. Those not privy to father-son chats in the Bush family are left to wonder if the younger has ever asked the older, "How come you done me like you did, Daddy?"
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