deterrable. I do share his concern, especially about the 1993 attempted assassination of former President Bush, which, as we, I think, would both agree, if that attempt had succeeded, imagine the consequences for Saddam Hussein. And yet he tried anyway, and that tells you something about his sense of vengeance.

And, I do acknowledge that is a point that works against my broader argument, but everything else we have seen from Saddam Hussein since 1991 suggests that he knows we are watching, we are vigilant, we are containing him, and if he moves against Kuwait again, if he moves against the Kurds, if he uses weapons of mass destruction, if he ever is tied in a documentable way to al Qaeda in a way that, in my judgment, he has not yet been, if any of those things happen, we will overthrow him, and he knows it. And, there is a bipartisan consensus in this country in favor of doing that.

And, I think you have seen the consequences that he has not moved against Kuwait. For example, in 1994, he moved a couple of brigades south. And then Secretary Perry announced Operation Vigilant Warrior to send 50,000 Americans back to that region. Saddam immediately backed off. He has not attacked the Kurds, except in that one moment in 1996 when they were actually fighting each other, and he took sides in that war temporarily. In other words, he is opportunistic, he is dangerous, he is ruthless, but he also wants to survive. And most of his actions, especially since Desert Storm, prove that he cares more about survival than about anything else.

Now, I acknowledge all of the caveats. It is not a perfect case. There is room for debate and for worry here, and I do think that Saddam is not-you cannot make a slam dunk case that he is always deterrable. But the overall body of evidence suggests that if we can take his weapons of mass destruction away from him, prevent him from getting a nuclear weapon, and keep our military presence in that region robust, I believe that containment can continue to work.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Dr. O'Hanlon can be found in the Appendix on page 390.]

Mr. WELDON. Thank you both. You made some excellent points. I am sure that we will have some engaging questions for you.

I would like to start out with two questions, and then defer to my colleague and ranking member.

Frank Anderson, former Near East Division Chief for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said recently, and I quote, "What he is going to do," referring to Saddam, "is what he has always done: push us right to the edge," meaning that Saddam Hussein will play this game holding out the fact that he is going to be open to inspections, but then when you get into the details, as we have just seen recently in a discussion by Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadanhe told reporters just several days ago, "Well, they are not going to come in and disrupt our country, they are not going to inspect our presidential facilities, which means we are not going to have the kind of aggressive, capable inspections that the President is calling for."

So, do you agree with Frank Anderson? Do you think this is going to continue as an attempt by Saddam to split the coalition, as he is trying to do with the French and the Germans and some of the other nations that have not gone along with our President's : request?

Dr. COHEN. I absolutely agree with that, and I think the difficult thing we have to do is admit that he is better at that game than we are. He is a pro. He has been winning. If you just look at where we have been since where we were, early on, when we had UNSCOM that was effectively ripping apart his nuclear program. As Mike mentioned, I ran the Air Force's study of the Gulf War. One of the things that sobered us was what really took down that nuclear program was review and inspections, not bombing.

If you looked, though, at the progression since then, he has just gotten better and better. They were able to thwart the end of the UNSCOM inspections. They have been out from under the inspections now for four years. They have also been able to thwart sanctions.

So, I think we have to accept that fact. He is really good at this. He has got friends overseas, or countries that at least have enough of a common interest that they will work with him and help him to thwart us. So if we go down this path, I think we are going to play a losing game.

Dr. O'HANLON. Mr. Chairman, I agree with this concern. That is why I think you have to front-load the inspection process. I agree very much with Secretary Powell's point that we need a new resolution, because you need to demand results in the first couple of months while our military lever is poised and ready to strike within a time frame that is soon enough that we could have a war before the summer heat.

So, you need to demand some results, essentially this fall, and I think you can do that by telling Saddam, "listen, we are very confident. We can't tell you exactly how many liters of anthrax that you have. We are very confident that you have this many liters of preparatory agent or constituents and this many liters of sarin. And we know how many artillery shells we have seen in your documents that you have developed and have not yet been accounted for." You need to see some of those things, presented and destroyed, in the first couple of months.

In addition to that, and an important point that I would add, I believe the nuclear program is easier for us to essentially contain than the chemical and biological programs, because it is even though they have gone underground with the basement bomb program, usually you need fairly large infrastructures, centrifuges, that sort of thing, to enrich uranium, unless they get lucky and buy fissile material on the black market. Therefore, I think that we have a pretty good chance of making the inspections work to keep the nuclear program in check, and to me that is the single most important thing.

So, if we have an inspection process that demands results in the first two or three months, keeps a lid on the nuclear program, and even if there are small infractions and violations on the chemical and biological front, I still think that is a fairly robust containment policy. But we have got to see results in the next few months.

Mr. WELDON. Second question. Dr. Cohen, in your testimony you mentioned that the Iraqi military is far less capable than it was ten years ago, and I would agree with that. And you mentioned that there would be no problem in ultimately achieving victory, and I also agree with that.

Dr. O'Hanlon, in your testimony you basically acknowledged the same, but you do say that a greater strategic threat to U.S. forces is the likelihood that large numbers of Iraqi civilians could perish. and that Saddam Hussein will make sure of that. And I think that is perhaps one of the greatest risks we face strategically, because Saddam, knowing that his military is far less capable, knows that he can't in any way stand up against a coalition force or the U.S. alone. Therefore, he has got to win this on the TV sets and in those groups in this country that are just against war under any circumstances, and I think that is already beginning to happen.

I saw an article yesterday in the Christian Science Monitor that a group in Alexandria, Virginia said that they are now recruiting volunteers to act as human shields. These are U.S. citizens. And I quote, "They are trying to recruit old people". "It is more comfortable to ask someone who is nearing the end of their lives to do this,". So American groups, planning to take American citizens into Iraq to place them in urban areas and inner-city areas where the likelihood of them being killed is very high.

What are your comments on that, and what are your suggestions? I mean, Saddam obviously knows this. He has used this ploy in the past. So it is not just now a problem of the Iraqis and the collateral damage to innocent civilians, but now what appears to be a deliberate attempt by American-based groups to take Americans over to Iraq so that they, in fact, can become human targets.

Dr. COHEN. Well, let me, if I could, try to respond at a number of levels. First, just in terms of the law of war, what we are obliged to do is to make every reasonable effort to safeguard civilian lives. But, in war civilians do get hurt, and I have complete confidence that the American military will do everything that it can do. If it fails and civilians are killed and hurt, as is quite likely, we are not culpable in any-certainly in any legal or, I would argue, in a moral sense.

You know, I agree with a basic point that Michael made, which seems to me central. We should not be talking about cakewalks, we shouldn't be talking about something that will be effortless. I think where we may disagree a little bit is I can imagine a range of outcomes. I can imagine something that is very sudden, and really very cheap in terms of loss of life on our side and Iraqi civilians. And, I can imagine some of the darker scenarios that he sketched out, and I think when you make your decision, you have to accept that that is the case.

But, I just think that it is very, very unpredictable. I think in that context we have to walk into this with our eyes open and accept that. I think part of the challenge of leadership is going to be to prepare people for that.

One final point that I hate to make, but I think I have to make it, it is one of the ways in which our determination will be understood, particularly in that part of the world, is if we make it clear that we are going to do this anyhow.

Dr. O'HANLON. Mr. Chairman, I do agree with Eliot Cohen, first of all, that there is a range of possible outcomes. I hope very much this is very quick. I think there is a decent chance, if we put 200,000 forces in Kuwait and in surrounding countries, the Iraqi military will take this matter into its own hands.

But one of the reasons I think you don't want to think in terms of cakewalks, because putting 200,000 forces in Kuwait is by itself not a cakewalk, and, therefore, to generate the very kind of outcome that we most want, we have to be braced for and prepared for the actual big conflict.

On the issue of casualties, I do worry. I didn't know this particular case that you mentioned. I do worry about the general issue of Westerners in Baghdad when this war begins, whether they are inspectors that Saddam decides not to let go, whether they are journalists. I think that we do have to face this is more of a question for down the road if we get into this war, but I think this is an idea that won't go over well in many quarters, but I think it is actually worth raising right now-there may be certain circumstances under which we want to negotiate an asylum arrangement for Saddam if that is the way to get him not to use his weapons of mass destruction and not to kill hostages.

I don't know how many countries in the world would want him. I think Belarus comes to mind as one of the few places I could imagine, and maybe one or two others. But that kind of a thing, as politically delicate of an issue as it may be to raise in a country where Saddam has been our nemesis for a decade, I think it is the sort of thing that we may have to consider, because there are going to be these issues of hostages. It may not be the human shield people, but it may be the journalists and others who are covering the

war.

Dr. COHEN. If I could just add two things, one to maybe counterbalance things a little bit. The Serbs tried the human shield technique a little bit, and they pretty soon fell off of it. People's sense of self-preservation, it seems to me, eventually is going to kick in. I think the other thing, though, that we have to be prepared for is in the aftermath of a successful military operation, there is probably going to be a lot of Iraqi-on-Iraqi bloodshed. There have been a lot of people who have suffered under this regime. If we think back to the Shi'ite revolts against the Iraqi regime immediately after the Gulf War, there was a lot of ugly stuff. That is going to happen actually in the aftermath of this kind of conflict as well. Mr. WELDON. Mr. Skelton.

Mr. SKELTON. That is one of the items that concerns me a great deal, what happens after. At end of the day, I think history will be written about what happened after the de-weaponizing and the changing of the guard in Iraq.

Mr. O'Hanlon talked about some 50- to 100,000 American troops. Look on the dark side each of you and then again on the bright side as to what could happen. I am deeply concerned about this. I have been pushing. We finally got some language in the proposed resolution making reference to the aftermath, but I am not sure that there is a plan in force now. There was a plan for Bosnia that has worked pretty well, a plan for Kosovo that is beginning to

able, and if they refuse to follow orders to do so, they will be all right.

And, I would suspect that we have a fair amount of credibility, or we will have a fair amount of credibility, in the context of a war in which it is very clear that we intend to get rid of that regime. So, it seems to me that is going to be the centerpiece of that effort. So, the issue of holding individuals accountable and having a tremendous effort to communicate that probably is the most likely way to prevent it from happening, or to make sure that it happens only in a limited way.

Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. The gentleman that we had here testifying. I believe it was in this committee, I am also on the Committee on International Relations, so I get them mixed up, so excuse mestated, when I asked him the question, what did he think Saddam Hussein would do were he backed into a corner if we were to attack, and he was very adamant that he felt that he would unleash everything that he has. Do you agree with that?

Dr. COHEN. Saddam is a survivor. In that way he is unlike Hitler. This is not a man who is going to commit suicide. He will go down trying to get somebody else. He is a very vengeful man, but I think he wants to stick around. At some point is he capable of doing this? Obviously. But the thing to remember, it is not Saddam who is going to be firing the rocket or opening the canister, it is going to be he has to have other people, in the bureaucratic context, do that, and they will not do that until they get authoritative direction from him.

You know, one thing, during the Iran-Iraq war, Mirage pilots did not fly without personal orders from Saddam Hussein. It is that kind of system. This is an extremely centralized system, which also makes it a very vulnerable system in some important ways. So what we have to focus on is the operators, the people who would actually have to press the buttons or open the canisters or do whatever has to be done.

Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Dr. O'Hanlon.

Dr. O'HANLON. Congresswoman, I think it is a very important question. I think there is good news and bad news that I would add to what Eliot has said. I agree with what he has already stated.

In terms of the chemical and biological threat, I believe that we are pretty well prepared militarily. In some ways I am worried more about what Saddam might be able to do against the United States homeland. Although the good news there is he has devoted his intelligence operatives in the last years to try to acquire technology to build weapons of mass destruction, he has not infiltrated Western countries as much, for example, as Hezbollah may have cased certain Western targets. So, I think there is reason to hope that that worst-case scenario of an attack on the homeland would not happen, but we have to be braced for the possibility.

I also think I am relatively optimistic about the Scud missile threat. I actually think that even if Saddam has a couple dozen of these, the technology is probably not much better than it was back an 1991, when these rockets broke up in descent, and I think if he tried to deliver a chemical or biological agent against Israel, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait with those rockets, I think he would not do very