"The air strike will not only diminish Colonel Gadhafi's capacity to export terror, it will provide him with incentives and reasons to alter his criminal behavior."
-President Ronald Wilson Reagan 1986
"We know we can't make the world risk-free, but we can reduce the risks we face and we have to take the fight to the terrorists. If we have the will, we can find the means."
-President William Jefferson Clinton, as quoted in the Gore Report, 1997
The security counsel put the final touches yesterday on a written demand that Iraq cooperate with international arms inspectors- but threatens no force if Baghdad fails to comply.
-Associated Press, 1998
Quotes and resolutions don't alter the physical reality of the world, however. The F-111s flown out of England hit barracks occupied by members of Gadhafi's family, but not by the Libyan leader himself. In 2004, after the 9-11 Commission asked CIA Director George Tenet how Osama Bin Laden "escaped Predator drone crosshairs three times," his explanation was technical. He explained the UVA didn't yet have the capabilities it now holds, that back in the day, the best it could do was call in a Tomahawk strike from sea, that a 45 minute delay would exist between target acquisition and the arrival of the missile.
But these explanations are in the future. For now, it is March of 2003, and the American public hears no arguments for air strike options. They have more faith in air power than Billy Mitchell did at his most extreme. If you can drop a "smart bomb" in a pickle jar, why do you need to send a tank to crush it?
Ruzhyo, a former Spetznez agent, slips into Northern Iraq via Turkey, where Turkish soldiers suddenly jumped into the war. A convoy of Ural flatbed trucks bounce down a dirt track. The Russian arms merchant is a wealthy Oligarch, the country's new class of 'capitalist pigs' loosely affiliated with the so-called Russian Mafia.
The Retired elite soldier rides atop crates of his country's superior Kornet (AT-14) ATGM system. Russians understand better than Americans the need for the proper tools to carry out one's political will. This missile is ideally fired at tanks from BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, but can, and probably will, be fired from the shoulder in this conflict.
Doubtlessly, the Americans in the pentagon of theirs will angrily demand the Turks surrender their ambitions, drawing the meek Turkish reply: "We were only trying to help." The American aircraft will spare their NATO partner's soldiers, and everything will return to normal. No harm, no foul. Except Ruzhyo and company will have transferred the arms from trucks to smaller caravans by then, and newly acquired danger will appear in postwar Iraqi cities.
Ruzhyo takes special care to keep himself and the Kornet stash far removed from the GPS jammers and NVG (Starlight scopes) coming out of Syria. The Russian remembers to keep his carriage far to the right of the Tigris at all times, so to avoid the air strikes. Those poor saps.
Overhead
After more than twelve years of the Iraqi air defense playing smart, the airmen aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln were briefed that for one special night, they would lapse into not being so bright. The HARM anti-radiation missile seemed to teach the SAM people in charge of the KARI defense network to never shine too brightly or too long at a NATO plane; cold lessons at the hands of aerial knights had taught them that, but now, a spook, what's his name? Goodly, Goodman? This good guy gave one of those dreadfully cryptic briefings. For some odd reason, spook tech crews gimped over, totally mute, and retooled all the HARM seekers. A national intelligence matter, the good guy said, and had the ordinance crew fix them to Hornet hard points.
So the spook says fly over Northwestern Iraq, and you'll find such-and-such type of radiation emitting at such-and-such point, and we want it dampened by the anti-rad missiles.
So after re-tanking from some KC-135s out of Qatar or Bahrain or wherever, a flight element of F/A-18c jets flew uneventfully to a cluster of life parked outside Syria.
Detection equipment warbled. The EA-6b Prowler crew, probably less cryptically briefed, talked them through the firing process. That's all it took. They didn't even properly see where the rads were coming from, and didn't see the points-of-impact. No Bomb Damage Assessment follow-up flight would ever be called.
The microwave emissions- they were microwave- flickered dark, forever silenced.
Right Side of the Tigris
Ruzhyo also didn't directly witness the unwitting beacons die, but when the flight of Navy planes barreled over his Bedouin camp, he figured the Saddam paramilitary buddies had switched on the Global Positioning Jammers. Well, that's just what you get for broadcasting yourself to the Americans like that. Radiation kills.
"Let the buyer beware."
I'm sorry if you don't like the minimalist approach in this chapter.
