Turkish Front?

We are asking Turkey to base 80,000 troops in Turkey? When the Turkish public opposes strongly letting us use their country as a launching pad? When most of the conscript regular Iraqi army is up there? When all of our heavy armor is stockpiled south of Iraq?

If we invade from Turkey, we will need to destroy many Iraqi regular divisions on the way to Baghdad. We will need to ship armor to Turkey. We will need a logistics system to rival what we are building in the south. We will have to deploy significant forces in Kuwait anyway to keep Saddam from lunging south in a desperation move to grab something of value—or at least destroy it.

We only need to invade northern Iraq with 10th Mountain and maybe the British air mobile brigade that is going to be sent to the war. That plus Turkish troops to occupy northern Iraq and keep the regular Iraqi army busy. Hey, maybe 10th Mountain (and special forces, of course) will be used against the al Qaeda remnants regrouping with Iranian help in Kurdish areas.

Our main effort will come from an arc ranging from Jordan in the west to Kuwait in the east, with the mission of bypassing the regular Iraqi army and hitting Baghdad from the west. It all depends on our diplomacy for where the bulk of the heavy armor will strike from: mostly Jordan or mostly Kuwait, with some from Saudi Arabia perhaps. We can avoid the Iraqi army so that we can risk accepting their defection and also avoid the burden of taking them prisoner in the advance on Baghdad. Otherwise we’d have to waste time and resources and lives destroying them just in case.

Plus, after turning down the American request for hosting 80,000 troops, the Turkish government will look good for paring it down to a single truncated division with a British addition and a relatively small amount of air power above what we already deploy there.

Finally, the ‘dispute’ keeps the Iraqis focused on the north and helps to freeze their troops in place.

On to Baghdad. Soon please. I start to worry about events and outside influences that could derail the invasion.