U.S. Troops: Ready, Set...Gone

In special-forces circles they call Captain Mark's 12-man team a force multiplier. Military commanders use terms like quick-reaction force or special ops when discussing his work, but mostly they convey its nature with knowing looks. Captain Mark, a pseudonym, simply says he has a "cool-guy job." However you describe him, you have only to study Captain Mark's travels in the past few years--Haiti, Georgia, Afghanistan--to work out what the bearded 33-year-old does. His 5th Special Forces Group "A team" of language specialists, weapons trainers, logistics men, forward bomb spotters and CIA paramilitary intelligence gatherers is essentially a fuse, a fire starter, a 12-man conflict catalyst. If your country pops up on Captain Mark's deployment orders back at Fort Campbell, Ky., and you're not already at war, chances are you soon will be. And by now, Captain Mark has been inside Iraq for more than a month.

His war has already begun. Just as they did before the 1991 Gulf War, British and American commanders are doing everything they can to soften up Iraq for invasion. "We're on the offensive," says a senior Western diplomat in neighboring Kuwait. "We're in there. This war starts on our terms."

In Iraq's northern and southern no-fly zones, from which Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's planes have been barred since shortly after the 1991 war's end, the number of missions flown by British and American warplanes has jumped sharply in recent months. Pilots are flying four missions a week, and they've expanded their target list from Iraqi air defenses that actually lock on to their jets to all surface-to-air installations, threatening or not. They're also hitting military headquarters and surface-to-surface missile systems.

Psy-ops have also been stepped up. Propaganda leaflets are dropped daily, promising punishment or death to Iraqi troops who resist or who unleash chemical or biological weapons. In the Kuwaiti desert, Western camera crews that taped 3rd Infantry Division troops storming a mock Iraqi street were being co-opted by military media strategists, who privately say street fighting forms no part of the war plan. The exercises were designed to spook Baghdad.

There are actual plans for ground fighting, though, in conjunction with Iraqi opposition groups, similar to the special-forces linkups with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Taliban in 2001. In the northern Iraqi autonomous zone of Kurdistan, U.S. troops are readying the various Kurdish militias for war. They are conducting weapons training and policing an alliance among them. And since September, at Taszar air base in Hungary, the U.S. has also been providing combat training to 5,000 Iraqi rebels, including Kurds and Shi'ites from the south. Another group trained at Taszar will become advisers to the special forces and are expected to help form any post-Saddam military administration.