WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- Should war come to Iraq, Saddam Hussein believes that made-for-television tragedies, including piles of bomb-mangled dead civilians, will create worldwide revulsion against military action and might quickly lead to a cease-fire.
Of course, that plan assumes the world's media will cave in to his manipulation and become a co-conspirator in this horrific ruse.
It is familiar ground. He practiced this treachery during the 1991 Gulf War. The Iraqis captured more than 1,000 Westerners and Japanese in Kuwait and then placed them as human shields at 70 sites in Iraq. The game? Either the human shields would scare tender-hearted coalition bombers away from his military infrastructure or, failing that, Saddam's sacrifice of innocents would create graphic images to underscore his fabricated charges of allied brutality. Either way, the dictator won.
He knew coalition forces followed strict rules of engagement requiring them to avoid or at least minimize the killing of innocent civilians. He used the potential death of civilians to try to undermine international and domestic support for the American-led coalition.
The most blatant of these staged tragedies was his claim that on Feb. 13, 1991 a coalition precision-guided bomb hit the Amiriyah bunker in Baghdad. The bunker, which dated back to the Iran-Iraq war, had been converted into a military command center, identifiable by barbed wire, camouflage and armed guards.
Khidir Hamza, the former director general of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, wrote in his book "Saddam's Bombmakers," that during the Gulf War, the Amiriyah bunker functioned as a command center, indeed likely as "Saddam's own operational base." In war, it is necessary to bomb the enemy leader's operational base.
Unbeknown to the allies, however, Saddam had packed the bunker with innocent civilians. As soon as they were dead, the Iraqis ushered in the television cameras. Soon grisly pictures of the charred bodies of more than 300 dead, mostly women and children, beamed around the world.
Saddam boasted that innocents were being butchered by coalition bombs. "Cease-fire," he cried.
At the time, Iraq claimed the Amiriyah bunker was an air raid shelter that had been deliberately bombed. However, the coalition did not know that at night civilians were housed on the top floor, while military operations were run out of the lower floors. According to Finland's 1991 Helsingin Sanomat, the Finnish firm Perusyhtyma and the Swedish company ABV have built 29 similar dual-use shelters in Baghdad. Coalition targeting experts must beware of this tactic.
For a dictator who, as Secretary of State Colin Powell detailed before the U.N., used 1,600 prisoners as chemical agent guinea pigs, brutal sacrificing of people for regime interests is typical. Long after the first Gulf War, Baghdad has continued to hide behind innocent civilians.
Saddam used Iraqis, alongside some foreign volunteers, as shields in 1998 against the U.S.-British bombing Operation Desert Fox. He appears prepared to do the same today.
Last month, in anticipation of another American-led attack, Saddam started packing his bunkers and critical infrastructure with more innocents. Iraqi deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz publicly welcomed foreign volunteers to come to Iraq and serve as human shields. Saddam plans to assign these human shields to hospitals, water-treatment plants and other civilian installations to dissuade U.S. commanders from targeting those facilities. No doubt, those facilities have military value otherwise they would not be assigned to human shields.
Saddam uses other tricks to protect his arsenal. During the Gulf War, he placed two military aircraft next to the ancient Mesopotamian Ur ziggurat near Tallil. According to then-CNN reporter Peter Arnett, one evening while covering the Gulf War a scud missile launcher was parked on the lawn of the al-Rashid Hotel, the Baghdad home for most foreign journalists.
According to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, recently, Saddam built a mosque in the middle of an ammunition depot and a dual-purpose plant capable of manufacturing biological agents in a residential neighborhood.
Today around Baghdad, Saddam has placed air defense missile systems near civilian areas, including parks, mosques, hospitals, hotels, religious sites and even cemeteries. He has parked surface to air missile systems in civilian industrial centers and rocket launchers next to soccer stadiums that are in use.
In April 2002, commercial satellite imagery showed that Saddam constructed 15 military revetments -- holes in which military vehicles are parked to protect them against air strikes -- near a school outside Baghdad. Some of the revetments were only a few yards from the school wall.
Last year, Saddam directed civilian taxis and buses be painted military colors to look like army vehicles. Camouflaged-painted vehicles could become targets for coalition laser-guided bombs.
Saddam knows that Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 prohibits the co-location of military hardware with civilian facilities. But Saddam has never adhered to international law. He has stiff-armed 17 U.N. resolutions to disarm and he will continue to use the Geneva Conventions against coalition forces.
As war looms, President Bush stated "Saddam Hussein regards the Iraqi people as human shields, entirely expendable when their suffering serves his purposes." Bush said, "America views the Iraqi people as human beings who have suffered long enough under this tyrant." This tyrant must go for the good of all Iraqis and the safety of the world.
Powell told the United Nations, "Nothing points more clearly to Saddam Hussein's dangerous intentions and the threat he poses to all of us than his calculated cruelty to his own citizens." Relying on human shields to protect his military jewels and staging tragedies for television as a tactic to win sympathy demonstrates Saddam's utter depravity.
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(Robert Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and a Fox News contributor.)
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("Outside View" commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers who specialize in a variety of important global issues.)
