The future's so bright, we gotta wear ... night-vision goggles

Pat Lang has posted a paper he says came from his brother Erasmus about the worst-case scenario for expanding the Iraq War into a regional war with Iran. I'm not sure about Erasmus' background. But Pat Lang seems to think it's a good statement of the worst case. It's called How Bad Could It Get? (paper undated; blog entry that links it dated 04/13/06). Here's a sample. It is one paragraph in the paper, but I've broken it up in four for posting here.

If we launch an attack on Iran with absolutely no warning at all we would achieve tactical surprise in Iran at the cost of exposing a lot of Americans to capture or death. We will have small detachments of Americans with Iraqi Army and police units all over the country and these Badr and Dawa officered units would turn on us in a second. Don't think Tet, think the Indian Mutiny.

The Green Zone would come under immediate siege from the Iraqi army and police units in Baghdad while the Mahdi Army would come boiling out of Sadr City to cut all of our supply routes into the city. Farther south the vital bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates are mostly in small to medium sized Iraqi cities and would fall into the hands of the Shia at once. This, of course, can be prevented by strongly garrisoning these bridges with American troops but, the very act of doing so would tell the Iranians that we were about to bomb them. With even relatively short notice the Iranians could probably disperse a significant percentage of the assets the air strikes are designed to destroy. Bit of a pickle we're in here.

If we don't seize the bridges in advance there is a good chance that the Shia will destroy them. The Iraqi military engineers have always been first rate this would be a piece of cake for them. With the bridges gone are supply lines would be gone too. Of course we can recapture the bridging sites and put pontoon bridges up as replacements - if we have enough bridging material and the combat engineers on hand to do so - and of course if we begin to beef up our bridging train it will tell the Iranians that we're coming to bomb them. Taking the bridging sites back will be no walk in the park either. If the Iranians get some troops up with good wire guided anti tank missiles and Sam 14s it will be bloody and it won't be quick. Meanwhile the Shia will have destroyed every supply column on the roads that wasn't heavily guarded which, if you start heavily guarding them in advance, will tip your hand to the Iranians.

Just keeps getting worse, doesn't it? (my emphasis)

That paper discusses a number of the risks that we should be hearing about from our Potemkin press corps. But mostly we won't.

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