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A recent banner headline on Kuwait's Arab Times newspaper raises the fear that's on everyone's minds these days: "On track...to another Beirut." The Kuwaitis are jittery because, among Iraq's Arab neighbors, they have put the most chips on the table in a bet that the American invasion of their northern neighbor will eventually succeed.
If the U.S. prevails, the Kuwaitis will finally be rid of Saddam Hussein, who invaded and pillaged the country in 1990. But if this military campaign somehow fails, the Kuwaitis won't just be still stuck with a hostile northern neighbor. They could face a backlash in the Arab world for allowing the U.S. to use Kuwait as a base to attack a fellow Arab country.
The Kuwaitis got a jolt in the early hours of Sunday, Mar. 30, when an Iraqi missile hit a jetty off on the shoreline of Kuwait City, damaging a nearby shopping area. The missile seems to have been fired from the nearby Faw Peninsula, which is supposedly under Allied control. After an initial spurt of missile attacks in the war's first 48 hours, Kuwaitis thought the threats were pretty much over. "We are getting very blasé about all this," says a Kuwaiti woman.
CAUSE FOR WORRY. Could the sense of blasé turn into angst if the American-led war against Iraq turns into the quagmire that Iraqi officials gleefully predict? True, American military units have penetrated deep into Iraq and are building up their forces on the approach areas to Baghdad. Western casualties remain relatively light. So-called friendly fire still seems to pose a more deadly threat than the Iraqi military.
Another perspective, however, clearly has some American military and political leaders worried. Before the conflict began, the pro-war camp in Washington talked itself into something close to complacency, creating the expectation that the Iraqi forces would quickly implode as soon as GIs set foot in Iraq. The resistance, while not necessarily stiff or effective, has been more persistent than the Saddam's-Iraq-will-crumble theorists expected.
The nature of the resistance, too, provides cause for worry. So far it has largely consisted of guerrilla-type harassment -- sniping at convoys, ambushes of lightly armed rearguard units, and dirty tricks such as Iraqis offering to surrender and then shooting. Most ominous of all was the suicide bombing at a checkpoint near the Shiite holy city of Najaf in central Iraq that killed four American soldiers on Mar. 29. According to the U.S. military, a taxi driver in civilian dress approached the soldiers with gestures seeking their help as if his car had broken down. Then, with U.S. soldiers close by, he detonated his vehicle.
STEADY DRIP. The Iraqis seem to be taking a leaf from the book of other groups in the Middle East that have become masters of inflicting pain on technologically superior forces. The most feared model is the Lebanese Hezbollah, which waged a deadly war against the occupying Israelis in South Lebanon until the Israeli authorities decided that maintaining a continued presence in Lebanon wasn't worth the steady drip of casualties. The Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, too, have managed to terrorize the Israelis with suicide bombings despite ruthless Israeli efforts to crush these groups.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calls these groups "dead-enders," and American officials say once Saddam's Baghdad regime is gone, they'll melt away. Rumsfeld & Co. could well be right. But on the other hand, resistance could also continue, making a post-Saddam Iraq challenging to govern. Guerrilla forces willing to die in attacks would pose a formidable, long-term challenge for an occupying power.
As the war goes on, the risks of unrest in the surrounding Arab and Muslim worlds will rise as well. Before the U.S. invasion, Saddam had lost much of the support he once enjoyed among surrounding Arab populations. But the war is restoring some of his popularity in countries such as Jordan. Whatever Arabs think of Saddam, they're pleased that he has held out this long against a superpower that promised to crush him like a gnat.
BUMPS BEFORE BAGHDAD? Certainly, sympathy is growing for the Iraqi people, among whom casualties are inevitably rising. The 50 or so that Iraq reports killed in an explosion in a Baghdad market on Mar. 28 was a public relations setback for the U.S.-led coalition. No matter whose ordnance turns out to have caused this incident, and two similar ones, many in the Arab world will blame the U.S.
It's not easy to evaluate the early stages of a war, and this one is no exception. A few weeks from now these setbacks may seem like no more than insignificant bumps on the road to Baghdad and Saddam's ouster. But they could also be a sign that Operation Iraqi Freedom is taking on similarities to Israeli efforts to control Lebanon -- as a long, difficult, and thankless endeavor.
Reed, BusinessWeek's London bureau chief who has written extensively about the Middle East, is covering the war from Kuwait City Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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