I don't expect a prediction, just whining because a prediction was requested. Nobody advocating a withdrawal wants to say what the results might be.

Kurdish Demonstrators Back War Against Hussein but Want Gas Masks
The New York Times By C. J. CHIVERS January 29, 2003

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq, Jan. 28 — A small group of Kurds gathered outside a United Nations compound here today, voicing support for a war to remove President Saddam Hussein from power but demanding international help to protect Kurdish civilians from chemical or biological attacks.
    The demonstration, which included several survivors of previous chemical attacks by the Iraqi military, was modest in size and subdued in tone.
    The protesters simply stood quietly outside the compound, in a cold rain, holding photographs of their injured and their dead. But the undercurrent of support for war stood in relief to larger and more strident demonstrations occurring in nations around the world.
    "We want to change the Iraqi regime," said Dr. Fayaq Muhammad Golpi, a surgeon and head of the Anti-Chemical Weapons Society of Kurdistan, the nonprofit group that organized the event. "If this change is peaceful, it would be better than if there was war. But the change is necessary, even if this means fighting."
    The demonstration also brought to the surface the persistent public worry here about the Kurds' vulnerability to a chemical or biological strike by Mr. Hussein.
    Sulaimaniya, like the large Kurdish cities of Erbil and Dohuk, is a short drive from Iraqi Army positions. As Kurds count down the days to a war they expect to start soon, they know that this is a land virtually without chemical protective gear, where medical supplies are limited and specialized drugs to combat chemical injury are all but nonexistent.
    For example, there are nearly four million people in the region of northern Iraq that is beyond the control of Mr. Hussein's government. Recent tours of markets here found only about two dozen aging gas masks for sale in Erbil, many with cracked eyepieces and almost all with expired filters. In Sulaimaniya, merchants say a stock of about 200 masks sold out long ago.
    It comes as little surprise, then, that Kurds express deep misgivings about their fate at the hands of a desperate or vengeful President Hussein if the United States attacks Iraq.
    "We are afraid," said Muhammad Amin Abdullah, standing in a line of people holding photographs of Kurds killed in a chemical attack by Iraq on the town of Halabja in 1988.
    An estimated 5,000 Kurdish civilians died in that attack. In dozens of interviews in the last two months with Kurdish doctors and officials, all have said that Kurds are not much better protected today than they were then, and that to improve preparations they need outside help.
    To that end, demonstrators today delivered a letter to the United Nations asking for shipments of chemical protective equipment. Dr. Golpi, who treated victims of chemical attacks when he was with Kurdish guerrillas in the mountains in the 1980's, said the United Nations must also provide antibiotics, eyedrops, ointments and bandages.
    The supplies would be necessary, he said, if a significant number of people were injured by nerve or mustard gas, which Iraq used on Kurds in the 1980's, or biological agents, which Kurds believe that Iraq now possesses.
    United Nations officials here declined to comment on the request, citing a policy under which its employees are generally forbidden to speak with foreign journalists in northern Iraq.
    In Washington, an American official said the Bush administration was reviewing options to provide that kind of assistance. "We're looking at it very seriously," he said.
    The official said there were several possible obstacles, including restrictions in United Nations resolutions and American trade law on importing materials into Iraq, as well as concerns that some chemical defense gear could fall into the hands of Iraqi agents. But he added, "We're looking at it with an intent to be helpful."
    In recent weeks, people opposed to renewed military action in Iraq have demonstrated in scores of cities, including Montreal, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels, Sydney and Istanbul.
    Some demonstrators have used gimmicks, including 30 people who removed their clothes and lay down in a street in Britain, aligning their naked bodies to form the word peace.
    Kurds resorted to no such tricks. Unlike the demonstrators elsewhere, these Kurds expressed a sentiment that is common here. They said they lived close enough to Mr. Hussein to know his government and to fear it.
    They said they were willing to risk war to have him removed.
    Later in the day, flashes of Kurdish optimism returned. Abdul-Razzaq Mirza, the minister of relations and cooperation for the eastern Kurdish zone, said he was confident that even if no one else offered assistance to defend against chemical or biological attacks, the United States would do so before long.
    "They have not given it to us yet," he said. "But I am sure they are going to help us. They are not going to leave us to genocide again."