It may not be very grown up of me, or anything, but almost every night for the last six months, I have lain awake for a while at about 3 or 4 am worrying about the war and what will go wrong. These may well be displacements from other worries, that I can do something about and prefer to ignore. But I thought I would write down all the things that frighten me, now, so I can come back in a year’s time and see whether I was right. That’s certainly a trick I have found helpful agianst hypochondria. By keeping copious notes as death approaches me on tube trains, in Romanian hotel rooms, and so on, I have been able to establish that I have suffered around 412 fatal heart attacks in the last fifteen years without ever actually dying, and this knowledge helps me bear the next one with a little more fortitude. On the other hand, my predictions about politics, God, the Internet, and even, so far, the war, have proved gratifyingly correct.
So, here, in no great order, is a list of bad things I worry will come during the war.
- Saddam, who’s had a year to prepare, and has nothing to lose, will manage to get chemical or biological weapons into Israel. Israel nukes Baghdad.
- The American troops get quickly to Baghdad, and discover that they’re still no use at fighting without air superiority. British troops have to do the job for them. We lose 10,000 men for nothing much in the way of national interest.
*In some versions of this nightmare, the Israelis then nuke Baghdad anyway. We lose a quarter of our army. Americans accuse us of anti-Semitism. - Saddam turns out to have mined, perhaps with chemical weapons as well, the approach roads to Baghdad. A large American force is trapped ahead of these minefields.
- A crazed Pakistani officer launches one of his own nukes at the American and British troops in Kuwait.
- Saddam or someone manages to retaliate against Detroit, Los Angeles, or London. The first two are certainly softer targets than Washington.
- 200-300 “Allied” troops are killed. Alternatively, 20,000 to 30,000 are. I really don’t know which is worse. I used to think it self-evident that a quick war with light casualties was the best. But it will only encourage the warhards into the next war, and sooner or later, they will start one that is completely catastrophic. High casualties might constitute a smaller and sufficiently instructive catastrophe sooner.
- The Turks invade Kurdistan anyway.
- Saddam survives, as a hero to the Muslim world.
(I did say that some of these are improbable)
In the medium term, say about ten years, I see nothing encouraging at all. Here are the bad things that I fear will have happened in ten years’ time.
- We will still be at war, with an enemy which becomes more clearly defined as all Muslims, and everyone else not subject to America.
- There will be no Arabs West of the Jordan river. That seems a matter of simple logic. We have established that Arabs and Jews can’t share the West Bank. One or the other must therefore leave. Neither will leave except at gunpoint. No American government can or will force an Israeli government to turn its guns on the settlers in the middle of a war. Therefore the guns will at some stage be turned on the Palestinians, to drive them out.
- American troops will be occupying Saudi Arabia, as a peacekeeping force.
- There will be growing popular resistance, in both America and Britain, to the continuing presence of hundreds of thousands of troops in the Middle East, which we cannot afford. Some of this will be distinctly anti-Semitic.
- The Anglo-American armies of occupation will have been sucked into a vicious low-level guerrilla warfare, which we can neither win nor afford to lose.
- The Chinese will be quietly aiding and suppporting the Muslim bloc, because 1.1bn people who hate the USA are a constituency you just can’t ignore.
- This war will not have a stimulating effect on the economy
- Afghanistan? Where’s that?
- The great debate in Washington is about whether to invade Iran or Syria next.
- A full-blown trade war between the EU and the USA will have impoverished both, and screwed Britain, now trusted by neither side, really badly.
Some of these predictions are bound to be false. The one thing absolutely certain is that they can’t all come true. But I’d be surprised if not one of them did, and I know that they are all things I have lain awake in the night and worried about. So I write them down, in a sort of time capsule. It will be interesting, if it’s possible, to look at them again in ten years’ time.