WASHINGTON: Although US military planners talk of a quick, short war with Iraq, it is fraught with uncertainties.

This was brought home in a computer simulated war game carried out last year by the Brookings Institution, a large Washington think tank, which showed such a war could be more complicated, more unpredictable and less clear cut than any of the rosy scenarios painted by the Bush administration suggest.

The players in the war game were former US senior government civilian and military officials as well as several non-governmental Middle East experts.

One of the clearest findings in the war game was that an invading force of 300,000 American troops — the number now nearly assembled there — would be the bare minimum required. The simulation showed that anything short of that number would severely handicap both a military victory and post-war control over the political chaos likely to follow.

Another phenomenon that emerged was an inherent conflict between the military and political teams within the simulated American government.

The military players in the war game wanted a quick, overwhelming victory with a minimum of casualties and a rapid advance on Baghdad. But the civilian government players wanted to spread out the troops, by sending some American force to northern Iraq to keep the various Kurdish factions and the Turks from fighting each other. The United States has some troops in northern Iraq already, but recent meetings with the Kurdish factions provide further evidence of deep divisions there.

The civilians in the simulated war also wanted some American forces to deploy to western Iraq to prevent the Iraqis from firing Scud missiles at Israel. Those anti-missile troops would not be available for the quick assault on the Iraqi capital, which is why the military simulation players opposed spreading the American forces out into western Iraq.

Once the war game reached the stage where Baghdad had fallen — with an estimated 1,000 American casualties and 5,000 to 10,000 Iraqi civilian casualties — there was further disagreement between the American civilian and military leadership.

To begin with, they could reach no agreement on who should replace a fallen Saddam Hussein. In one scenario, a Republican Guard general offers to use his elite division to remove Saddam from power. But that offer is turned down by the war gamers because the American side could not agree on who should rule in the wake of Saddam Hussein.

The game study concluded: President Bush would be wise to resolve this issue before embarking on any Iraq venture. But in reality, this issue still has not been resolved. There has been deep disagreement between the diplomatic arm of government — Colin Powell’s state department — and the military, headed by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Ever the realist, Powell advocates a conservative approach to a postwar Iraq, and the state department has angered many exiled Iraqi opposition leaders with his insistence that Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party be left in place — minus its upper echelons — to provide stability and continuity to running the country. Democratic elections, the state department says, must wait.

The top civilian staff at the Pentagon, however, have been ardent and ideologic advocates for an immediate transition to democracy — which political realists point out could lead to an ethnic bloodbath.

Another sticky ethnic issue cropped up in the war game — that of the Kurdish people who now straddle the border into Iraq and Turkey. In the Brookings’ war game scenario, the Turks make a race to control major cities and oil fields across the border in Iraq, forcing diverted American troops to make a difficult choice: whether to side with the Turks or the Iraqi Kurds. The American team opts to back the Turks for strategic reasons having to do with Turkey’s membership in Nato.

The Kurds, under that game scenario, were to be barred from asserting their independence — an outcome that dovetails with the worst expressed fears of northern Iraqi leaders.

The Brookings’ war game suggested that the United States would not have the necessary troops or the desired political support from Jordan or Saudi Arabia to prevent Iraq from firing Scuds at Israel from western Iraq, and postulated that some Iraqis would be deliberately left behind the advancing American line to stage surprise attacks on the American troops surrounding Baghdad.

The war simulation built in an added hurdle for US-led troops: widespread terrorist attacks and the use of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — chemical or biological but not nuclear. In fact, over the weekend, reports emerged indicating that international terrorists were already assembling to train around Iraq.

The Brookings’ simulation resulted in sobering predictions of widespread upheavals in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, often provoked by Iraqi agents. US allies such as Israel, Jordan and Turkey would come under extreme military and domestic political pressure — already occurring in the guise of Turkish refusal to admit 62,000 US troops to its soil for an attack.

All in all, the Brookings simulation suggested that the coming conflict in Iraq is a mine-field of political and military dangers, some of which have not even been thought about.—dpa