Opening with A Bang

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COLLATERAL DAMAGE Civilian casualties are a political and military nightmare. Human-rights groups estimate that about 3,500 Iraqi civilians died in the 1991 war. U.S. officials refuse to estimate the numbers of civilian expected deaths in a second Gulf War. It could get extremely messy, with the carnage broadcast instantly around the world. "What appears on al-Jazeera TV in the region is going to determine success maybe even more so than the actions on the ground," says retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who ran Central Command from 1997 to 2000. "All the explanations afterwards won't counter those first images."

U.S. war planners are using computer programs like Bugsplat, which predicts the blast pattern of a bomb, to show which aircraft approaches generate the least collateral damage. On most bombs, fuses can be set to detonate after the bomb has burrowed into its target, which can further reduce collateral damage. "War is inherently violent. People are going to die," Myers said last week. Americans should not look to the relatively antiseptic wars for Kuwait and Kosovo as a guide. If it were to come down to fighting block by block in Baghdad, the images could be brutal. "We have to be mentally prepared for that," Myers said.

Human shields pose another public-relations predicament. The Pentagon has made it clear that it would treat voluntary human shields differently from hostages forced to stay at military targets. Volunteers, a senior Pentagon official says, are "working in the service of the Iraqi government and may, in fact, have crossed the line between combatant and noncombatant." That's another way of saying they could be legitimate targets, he adds. The U.S. military would not assure the safety of any of the several dozen human shields in Baghdad. A group of them headed home to Britain last week after the Iraqis told the volunteers they could not protect certain sites, like hospitals.

SADDAM'S LAST STAND The Iraqi leader has pulled his Adnan Republican Guard division from the northern city of Mosul toward Baghdad, suggesting that he is more interested in a showdown in his capital than in defending Iraq's borders. The same ethnic tensions that make Iraq tough to govern should make it easier to push Saddam and his defenders into Baghdad. The Kurds have virtual autonomy in northern Iraq. In the south, U.S. troops face an uncertain reception. While Shi'ite Muslims disdain Saddam's Sunni-led government, they are also wary of a coalition that allowed Saddam to crush a 1991 Shi'ite uprising at the end of the Gulf War. The western reaches of Iraq are mostly empty desert.

The Americans say they would like to keep Iraqi infrastructure unharmed. If things went as planned, key civilian sites like bridges and water and power systems would largely be spared, bringing home the message that the U.S. target is Saddam, not the Iraqi people. Such a strategy would make reconstruction easier when the war ended.