States set a deadline, January 15, 1991 for all Iraq forces to be out of Kuwait, but Saddam ignored the deadline. That triggered Desert Shield, or the build-up of troops in the region and eventually led to Desert Storm, a all-out attack to free Kuwait. It can be clearly said that due to the extreme power and sophistication of the U.S. and her allies that Saddam and his tiny nation of 17 million people stood no chance against the military might that is the United States and its Allies.
Here is a quick table showing combat losses
Iraq Equipment Losses Coalition Equipment Losses
Type Lost On hand Lost On hand
Tanks 4,000 4,230 4 3,360
Artillery 2,140 3,110 1 3,633
APC 1,856 2,870 9 4,050
Helicopters 7 160 17 1,959
Airplanes 240 800 44 2,600
Little Known Info About the War: On the final night of the war--within hours of the cease-fire--two U.S. Air force bombers dropped specially designed 5,000-pound bombs on a command bunker fifteen miles northwest of Baghdad in a deliberate attempt to kill Saddam Hussein. The decision to seek United Nations involvement was part of a larger, more cynical strategy of the Bush administration to circumvent Congress, to bypass the constitutional authority of Congress--and only Congress--to declare war. During the very week King Fahd was persuaded to invite U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in order to defend his monarchy from the alleged threat of an Iraqi invasion, a U.S. intelligence officer who was secretly sent to Kuwait by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf reported that Iraq had began withdrawing its Republican Guard divisions from Kuwait entirely. Several weeks before the Baghdad was bombed on January 17th, 1991, U.S. intelligence agents successfully inserted a computer virus into Iraq 's military computers. It was designed to disable much of Baghdad 's air-defense system. The largest tank battle of the war, which has previously has gone unreported in any detail, conclusively demonstrated the superiority of American tanks and fighting doctrine over that of the Soviets. As a whole, the battles of the ground war showed that American military maneuverability clearly outclassed the plodding tactics of the Iraqis, who emphasized pitched engagements and linear movements as they had been taught by their Soviet advisers. The size of the Iraqi army in the Kuwait Theater of Operations was probably much smaller than claimed by the Pentagon. On the eve of the war, Iraq may have had as few as 300,000 solders, compared to 540,000 estimated by the Pentagon. In official reports, the Pentagon has admitted that of the 148 American servicemen and women who perished on the battlefield, 24 percent of the total killed in action were victims of 'friendly fire '. Eleven more Americans were killed when un exploded Allied munitions blew up, raising the 'friendly fire ' percent to 31 percent. Most solders said that the thousands of unexploded mines and bomblets they encountered, were more dangerous than enemy fire. Chronology: Important Events
1990 Hussein accuses Kuwait on 17 July of oil overproduction and theft of oil from the Rumailia Oil Field.
1990 On 25 July US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, tells Hussien that the Iraq/Kuwaitt dispute is an Arab matter, not one that affects the United States.
1990 Hussein invades Kuwait on August 2. President Bush freezes Iraqi and Kuwatti assets. The United Nations calls on Hussien to withdraw.
Aug 6,1990 Economic sanctions are authorized.
Aug 7, 1990 Secretery of Defense Cheny visits Suadi Arabia. The 82nd Airborne and several fighter squadrons are dispatched.
Aug 8. 1990 Iraq annexes Kuwait
Aug 9, 1990 The UN declare 's Iraq 's annexation invailid
Aug 12, 1990 The USA announces intrediction program of Irai shipping.
Aug 22, 1990 President Bush authorizes call up of reserves.
Aug 25, 1990 Military interdiction authorized by the UN
Sep 14, 1990 Iraqi forces storm a number of diplomatic missions in Kuwait City.
Nov 8, 1990 Bush orders aditional deployments to give "offensive option" to US forces.
Nov 20, 1990 45 Democrats file suit in Washington to have President Bush first seek Congressional approval of military operations. (eventually thrown out)
Nov 22, 1990 President Bush visits the troops for Thanksgiving.
Nov 29, 1990 UN Security Council authorizes force if Iraq doesnt withdraw from Kuwait by midnight EST Janu. 15.
Nov 30, 1990 Bush invites Tariq Aziz to Washington and offers to send Secretary of State James Baker to Baghdad.
Jan 9, 1991 Baker and Aziz meet in Geneva. The meeting is 6 hrs, but no results.
Jan 12, 1991 Congress votes to allow for US troops to be used in offensive operations.
Jan 15, 1991 The deadline set by the UN Resolution 678 for Iraq to withdraw.
Jan 16, 1991 First US government statement of Operation Desert-Storm made.
Marlin Fitzwater announces, "The liberation of Kuwait has begun..."
The air war started Jan 17 at 2:38 a.m. (local time) or January 16 at 6:38PM EST due to an 8 hour time difference, with an Apache helicopter attack.
US warplanes attack Baghdad, Kuwait and other military targets in Iraq.
Jan 17, 1991 Iraq launches first SCUD Missle attack.
Jan 30, 1991 US forces in the Gulf exceed 500,000.
Feb 6, 1991 Jordan King Hussein lashes out against American bombardments and supports Iraq.
Feb 13, 1991 US Bombers destroy a bunker complex in Baghdad with several hundred citizens inside. Nearly 300 die.
Feb 17, 1991 Tariq Aziz travels to Moscow to discuss possible negotiated end to the war.
Feb 22, 1991 President Bush issues an ultimatum of Feb 23 for Iraqi troops to withdraw from Kuwait.
Feb 23, 1991 Ground war begins with Marines, Army and Arab forces moving into Iraq and Kuwait.
Feb 25, 1991 Iraqi SCUD missle hits a US barracks in Saudi Arabia killing 27.
Feb 26, 1991 Kuwaiti resistence leaders declare they are in control of Kuwait City.
Feb 27, 1991 President Bush orders a cease fire effective at midnight Kuwaiti time.
Mar 3, 1991 Iraqi leaders formally accept cease fire terms
Mar 4, 1991 Ten Allied POWs freed
Mar 5, 1991 35 POWs released
Mar 8, 1991 First US combat forces return home.
Military Presence
Allied Forces
AFGHANISTAN - 300 troops
AUSTRALIA - See Australian Info Sheet
BAHRAIN - 400 personnel, 36 aircraft
BANGLADESH - 6,000 troops
BELGIUM - 1 frigate, 2 minesweepers, 2 landing ships, 6 C-130 planes
BRITAIN - 43,000 troops, 6 destroyers, 4 frigates, 3 minesweepers, 168 tanks, 300 armored vehicles, 70 jets
CANADA - 2 destroyers, 12 C-130 planes, 24 CF-18 bombers, 4500 troops, Field Hospital (1 Canadian Field Hospital)
CZECHOSLVAKIA - 200 chemical warfare specialists
EGYPT - 40,000 troops (5,000 special forces paratroopers)
FRANCE - 18,000 troops, 60 combat aircraft, 120 helicopters, 40 tanks, 1 missle cruiser, 3 destroyers, 4 frigates
GERMANY - Jagdbombergeschwader 43 consisting of 18 Alpha-Jets and 212 soldiers stationed in Erhac/Turkey during the gulf war. 5 Minesweeper, 2 Supply Vessels, 500 sailors altogether.
HONDURAS - 150 troops
HUNGARY - 1 medical unit
ITALY - 3 frigates, 4 minesweepers, 10 Tornado Aircraft
KUWAIT - 11,000 troops, 2 missle boats, 1 barge, A-4 Skyhawks (exact # unknown) Leaders: Emir of Kuwait
NEW ZEALAND - 50 medical soldiers and 2 C-130 's
NIGER - 500 troops
OMAN - 25,500 troops, 63 airplanes, 4 Exocet-armed ships
POLAND - 1 Hospital Ship
QATAR - 1 squadron of Mirage F-1E fighters
ROMANIA - 180 chemical warfare experts
SAUDI ARABIA - 118,000 troops, 550 tanks, 180 airplanes Leaders: King Fahad Leader of Saudi Arabia
SOUTH KOREA - 5 C-130 transport planes, 1 medical unit
SYRIA - 17,000 troops, 300 T-62 tanks
UNITED ARAB EMRIATES - 40,000 troops, 80 planes, 200 tanks
UNITED STATES - 540,000 troops, 6 aircraft carriers, submarines, 4,000 tanks, 1,700 helicopters, 1,800 airplanes Leaders: George Bush President of the United States Dan Quayle Vice President of the United States Colin Powell Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff. Norman Schwarzkopf CENTCOMM Commander Jim Baker Secretary of State John Sununu President 's Chief of Staff Dick Cheney Secretary of Defense Brent Scowcroft President 's National Security Advisor Bob Dole Republican Leader of the Senate George Mitchell Democratic Leader of the Senate Sam Nunn Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin House Armed Services Committee Chairman Info compiled from various sources
Causes
Prior to World War I, under the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913, Kuwait was considered to be an autonomous caza within Ottoman Iraq.
Following the war, Kuwait fell under British rule and later became an independent emirate. However, Iraqi officials did not accept the legitimacy of Kuwaiti independence or the authority of the Kuwaiti Emir. Iraq never recognized Kuwait 's sovereignty and in the 1960s, the United Kingdom deployed troops to Kuwait to deter an Iraqi annexation.
During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Kuwait was allied with Iraq, largely due to desiring Iraqi protection from Shi 'ite Iran. After the war, Iraq was heavily indebted to several Arab countries, including a $14 billion debt to Kuwait. Iraq hoped to repay its debts by raising the price of oil through OPEC oil production cuts, but instead, Kuwait increased production, lowering prices, in an attempt to leverage a better resolution of their border dispute. In addition, Iraq began to accuse Kuwait of slant drilling into neighboring Iraqi oil fields, and furthermore charged that it had performed a collective service for all Arabs by acting as a buffer against Iran and that therefore Kuwait and Saudi Arabia should negotiate or cancel Iraq 's war debts. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 's primary two-fold justification for the war was a blend of the assertion of Kuwaiti territory being an Iraqi province arbitrarily cut off by imperialism, with the use of annexation as retaliation for the "economic warfare" Kuwait had waged through slant drilling into Iraq 's oil supplies while it had been under Iraqi
protection.
The war with Iran had also seen the destruction of almost all of Iraq 's port facilities on the Persian Gulf, cutting off Iraq 's main trade outlet. Many in Iraq, expecting a resumption of war with Iran in the future, felt that Iraq 's security could only be guaranteed by controlling more of the Gulf Coast, including more secure ports. Kuwait thus made a tempting target.
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
Ideologically, the invasion of Kuwait was justified through calls to Arab nationalism. Kuwait was described as a natural part of Iraq carved off by British imperialism. The annexation of Kuwait was described as a step on the way to greater Arab union. Other reasons were given as well. Hussein presented it as a way to restore the empire of Babylon in addition to the Arab nationalist rhetoric. The invasion was also closely tied to other events in the Middle East. The First Intifada by the Palestinians was raging, and most Arab states, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, were dependent on western alliances. Saddam thus presented himself as the one Arab statesman willing to stand up to Israel and the U.S.
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Iraq and the United States pre-war
Prior to the Iran-Iraq War, U.S.-Iraqi relations were cool. The U.S. was concerned with Iraq 's belligerence toward Israel and disapproval of moves towards peace with other Arab states. It also condemned Iraqi support for various Arab and Palestinian nationalist groups such as Abu Nidal, which led to its inclusion on the incipient State Department list of states that sponsor terrorism on December 29, 1979. The U.S. remained officially neutral during the outbreak of hostilities in the Iran-Iraq War, as it had previously been humiliated by a 444 day long Iran hostage crisis and expected that Iran was not likely to win. In March 1982, however, Iran began a successful counteroffensive (Operation Undeniable Victory). In a bid to open the possibility of relations to Iraq, the country was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Ostensibly this was because of improvement in the regime 's record, although former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense Noel Koch later stated, "No one had any doubts about [the Iraqis '] continued involvement in terrorism....The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran." [1]
With Iran 's newfound success in the war and its rebuff of a peace offer in July, arms sales from other states (most importantly the USSR, France, Egypt, and starting that year, China) reached a record spike in 1982, but an obstacle remained to any potential U.S.-Iraqi relationship - Abu Nidal continued to operate with official support in Baghdad. When the group was expelled to Syria in November 1983, the Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld as a special envoy to cultivate ties.
From 1983 to 1990, the US government approved around $200 million in arms sales to Iraq, according to the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI). [2] These sales amounted to less than 1% of the total arms sold to Iraq in the relevant period, though the US also sold helicopters which, although designated for civilian use, were immediately deployed by Iraq in its war with Iran. [3]
An investigation by the Senate Banking Committee in 1994 determined that the U.S. Department of Commerce had approved, for the purpose of research, the shipping of dual use biological agents to Iraq during the mid 1980s, including Bacillus Anthracis (anthrax), later identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program, as well as Clostridium Botulinum, Histoplasma Capsulatum, Brucella Melitensis, and Clostridium Perfringens. The Committee report noted that each of these had been "considered by various nations for use in war." [4] Declassified U.S. government documents indicate that the U.S. government had confirmed that Iraq was using chemical weapons "almost daily" during the Iran-Iraq conflict as early as 1983. [5]
Chiefly, the U.S. government provided Iraq with economic aid. Iraq 's war with Iran, and the consequent disruption in its oil export business, had caused the country to enter a deep debt. U.S. government economic assistance allowed Hussein to continue using resources for the war which would have otherwise had to have been diverted. Between 1983 and 1990, Iraq received $5 billion in credits from the Commodity Credit Corporation program run by the Department of Agriculture, beginning at $400 million per year in 1983 and increasing to over $1 billion per year in 1988 and 1989, finally coming to an end after another $500 million was granted in 1990. [6] Besides agricultural credits, the U.S. also provided Hussein with other loans. In 1985 the U.S. Export-Import Bank extended more than $684 million in credits to Iraq to build an oil pipeline through Jordan with the construction being undertaken by Californian construction firm Bechtel Corporation. [7] [8]
Following the war, however, there were moves within the Congress of the United States to isolate Iraq diplomatically and economically over concerns about human rights violations, its dramatic military build-up, and hostility to Israel. Specifically, the Senate in 1988 unanimously passed the "Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988," which would have imposed sanctions on Iraq. The legislation died when the House balked as a result of intense lobbying against it by the Reagan administration. [9]
These moves were disowned by some Congressmen though some U.S. officials, such as Reagan 's head of Policy Planning Staff at the State Dept. and Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs Paul Wolfowitz disagreed with giving support to the Iraqi regime.
The relationship between Iraq and the United States remained collaborative until the day Iraq invaded Kuwait. On October 2, 1989, President George H.W. Bush signed secret National Security Directive 26, which begins, "Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security." [10] With respect to Iraq, the directive stated, "Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East."
In late July, 1990, as negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait stalled, Iraq massed troops on Kuwait 's borders and summoned American ambassador April Glaspie for an unanticipated meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Two transcripts of that meeting have been produced, both of them controversial. According to the transcripts, Saddam outlined his grievances against Kuwait, while promising that he would not invade Kuwait before one more round of negotiations. In the version published by The New York Times on September 23, 1990, Glaspie expressed concern over the troop buildup, but went on to say:
[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late '60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via [Chadli] Klibi [then Arab League General Secretary] or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.
Some have interpreted these statements as signalling a tacit approval of invasion, though no evidence of this has been presented. Although the State Department did not confirm the authenticity of these transcripts, U.S. sources say that she had handled everything "by the book" (in accordance with the US 's neutrality on the Iraq-Kuwait issue) and had not signaled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein any approval for defying the Arab League 's Jeddah crisis squad, which had conducted the negotiations. Many believe that Saddam 's expectations may have been influenced by a perception that the US was not interested in the issue, for which the Glaspie transcript is merely an example, and that he may have felt so in part because of U.S. support for the reunification of Germany, another act that he considered to be nothing more than the nullification of an artificial, internal border. Others, such as Kenneth Pollack, believe he had no such illusion, or that he simply underestimated the extent of American military response.
In November 1989, CIA director William Webster met with the Kuwaiti head of security, Brigadier Fahd Ahmed Al-Fahd. Subsequent to Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait, Iraq claimed to have found a memorandum pertaining to their conversation. The Washington Post reported that Kuwaiti 's foreign minister fainted when confronted with this document at an Arab summit in August. Later, Iraq cited this memorandum as evidence of a CIA-Kuwaiti plot to destabilize Iraq economically and politically. The CIA and Kuwait have described the meeting as routine and the memorandum as a forgery. The purported document reads in part:
We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country 's government to delineate our common border. The Central Intelligence Agency gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that broad cooperation should be initiated between us on condition that such activities be coordinated at a high level.
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Invasion of Kuwait
At the break of dawn on August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops crossed the Kuwaiti border with armor and infantry, occupying strategic posts throughout the country, including the Emir 's palace. The Kuwaiti Army was quickly overwhelmed, though they bought enough time for the Kuwaiti Air Force to flee to Saudi Arabia. The heaviest fighting occurred at the Emir 's Palace, where members of the royal guard fought a rear guard action to allow the royal family time to escape. A cousin of the Emir, who commanded the guard, was amongst those killed. Troops looted medical and food supplies, detained thousands of civilians and took over the media. Iraq detained thousands of Western visitors as hostages and later attempted to use them as bargaining chips. Hussein then installed a new Iraqi provincial governor, describing this as "liberation" from the Kuwaiti Emir; this was largely dismissed as war propaganda.
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Diplomacy
Within hours of the initial invasion, the Kuwaiti and United States of America delegations requested a meeting of the UN Security Council, which passed Resolution 660, condemning the invasion and demanding a withdrawal of Iraqi troops. On August 3, the Arab League passed its own resolution condemning the invasion and demanding a withdrawal of Iraqi troops. The Arab League resolution also called for a solution to the conflict from within the Arab League, and warned against foreign intervention. On August 6, the Security Council passed Resolution 661, placing economic sanctions on Iraq.
The decision by the West to repel the Iraqi invasion had as much to do with preventing an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a nation of far more importance to the world than Kuwait. The rapid success of the Iraqi army against Kuwait had brought Iraq 's army within easy striking distance of the Hama oil fields, Saudi Arabia 's most valuable. Iraqi control of these fields as well as Kuwait and Iraqi reserves would have given it an unprecedented monopoly in the vital commodity. Saudi Arabia could put up little more resistance than Kuwait and the entire world believed the temptation for Saddam to further advance his ambitions would prove too great. The United States, Europe, and Japan in particular saw such a potential monopoly as dangerous.
Iraq had a number of grievances with Saudi Arabia. The concern over debts stemming from the Iran-Iraq war was even greater when applied to Saudi Arabia, which Iraq owed some 26 billion dollars. The long desert border was also ill-defined. Soon after his victory over Kuwait Saddam began verbally attacking the Saudi kingdom. He argued that the American-supported Kingdom was an illegitimate guardian of holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Saddam combined the language of the Islamist groups that had recently fought in Afghanistan with the rhetoric Iran had long used to attack the Saudis.
The addition of Allahu Akbar to the flag of Iraq and images of Saddam praying in Kuwait were seen as part of a plan to win the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and detach Islamist Mujahideen from Saudi Arabia. There was further escalation of such propaganda attacks on Saudi Arabia as western troops poured into the country.
President George H. W. Bush quickly announced that the US would launch a "wholly defensive" mission to prevent Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia - Operation Desert Shield - and US troops moved into Saudi Arabia on August 7. On August 8, Iraq declared parts of Kuwait to be extensions of the Iraqi province of Basra and the rest to be the 19th province of Iraq.
The United States navy mobilised two naval battle groups, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Independence, to the area, where they were ready by August 8. The United States also sent the battleships USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin to the region, and they would later become the last battleships to actively participate in a war. Military buildup continued from there, eventually reaching 500,000 troops. The consensus among military analysts is that until October, the American military forces in the area would have been insufficient to stop an invasion of Saudi Arabia had Iraq attempted one.
A long series of UN Security Council and Arab League resolutions were passed regarding the conflict. One of the most important was Resolution 678, passed on November 29, giving Iraq a withdrawal deadline of January 15, 1991, and authorizing "all necessary means to uphold and implement Resolution 660", a diplomatic formulation authorizing the use of force.
The United States, especially Secretary of State James Baker, assembled a coalition of forces to join it in opposing Iraq, consisting of forces from 34 countries: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, The Netherlands, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States itself. US troops represented 74% of 660,000 troops in the theater of war. Many of the coalition forces were reluctant to join; some felt that the war was an internal Arab affair, or feared increasing American influence in Kuwait. In the end, many nations were persuaded by Iraq 's belligerence towards other Arab states, and offers of economic aid or debt forgiveness.
Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. and President Bush visit U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia on Thanksgiving Day, 1990.
The United States gave several public justifications for involvement in the conflict. The first reasons given were the importance of oil to the American economy and the United States ' longstanding friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia. However, some Americans were dissatisfied with these explanations and "No Blood For Oil" became a rallying cry for domestic opponents of the war, though they never reached the size of opposition to the Vietnam War. Later justifications for the war included Iraq 's history of human rights abuses under President Saddam Hussein, the potential that Iraq may develop nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction, and that "naked aggression will not stand."
Although the human rights abuses of the Iraq regime before and after the Kuwait invasion were well-documented, the government of Kuwait set out to influence American opinion with a few spectacular, but embellished and false accounts. Shortly after Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait, the organization Citizens for a Free Kuwait was formed in the US. It hired the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton for about $11 million, money from the Kuwaiti government. This firm went on to manufacture a campaign which described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and letting them die on the floor. A video news release was widely distributed by US TV networks; false supporting testimony was given before Congress and before the UN Security Council. The fifteen-year-old girl testifying before Congress was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States; the supposed surgeon testifying at the UN was in fact a dentist who later admitted to having lied. (For more, see Nurse Nayirah.)
Various peace proposals were floated, but none were agreed to. The United States insisted that the only acceptable terms for peace were Iraq 's full, unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. Iraq insisted that withdrawal from Kuwait must be "linked" to a simultaneous withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and Israeli troops from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon. Morocco and Jordan were persuaded by this proposal, but Syria, Israel, and the anti-Iraq coalition denied that there was any connection to the Kuwait issue. Syria joined the coalition to expel Saddam but Israel remained officially neutral despite rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. The Bush administration persuaded Israel to remain outside the conflict with promises of increased aid, while the PLO under Yasser Arafat openly supported Saddam Hussein, leading to a later rupture in Palestinian-Kuwaiti ties and the expulsion of many Palestinians from Kuwait.
On January 12, 1991 the United States Congress authorized the use of military force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Soon after the other states in the coalition did the same.
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Air campaign
A day after the deadline set in Resolution 678, the coalition launched a massive air campaign codenamed Operation Desert Storm: more than 1,000 sorties per day, beginning early morning on January 17, 1991. Weapons used included smart bombs, cluster bombs, daisy cutters and cruise missiles. Iraq responded by launching 8 Scud missiles into Israel the next day. The first priority for coalition forces was destruction of the Iraqi air force and anti-aircraft facilities. This was quickly achieved and for the duration of the war Coalition aircraft could operate largely unchallenged. Despite Iraq 's better-than-expected anti-aircraft capabilities, only one coalition aircraft was lost in the opening day of the war. Stealth aircraft were heavily used in this phase to elude Iraq 's extensive SAM systems and anti-aircraft weapons; once these were destroyed, other types of aircraft could more safely be used. The sorties were launched mostly from Saudi Arabia and the six coalition aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf.
The next coalition targets were command and communication facilities. Saddam had closely micromanaged the Iraqi forces in the Iran-Iraq War and initiative at the lower levels was discouraged. Coalition planners hoped Iraqi resistance would quickly collapse if deprived of command and control. The first week of the air war saw a few Iraqi sorties but these did little damage, and thirty-eight Iraqi MiGs were shot down by Coalition planes. Soon after, the Iraqi airforce began fleeing to Iran. On January 23, Iraq began dumping approximately 1 million tons of crude oil into the gulf, causing the largest oil spill in history.
The third and largest phase of the air campaign targeted military targets throughout Iraq and Kuwait: Scud missile launchers, weapons of mass destruction sites, weapons research facilities and naval forces. About one third of the Coalition airpower was devoted to attacking Scuds. In addition, it targeted facilities useful for both the military and civilians: electricity production facilities, nuclear reactors, telecommunications equipment, port facilities, oil refineries and distribution, railroads and bridges. Electrical power facilities were destroyed across the country. At the end of the war, electricity production was at four percent of its pre-war levels. Bombs destroyed the utility of all major dams, most major pumping stations and many sewage treatment plants.
In most cases, the Allies avoided hitting civilian-only facilities. However, on February 13, 1991, two laser-guided "smart bombs" destroyed the Amiriyah bunker facility, which the Iraqis claimed was for the auspices of an air shelter. U.S. officials claimed that the bunker was a military communications center, but Western reporters have been unable to find evidence for this. The White House claims, in a report titled Apparatus of Lies: Crafting Tragedy, that US intelligence sources reported the bunker was being used for military command purposes.[11] In his book, Saddam 's Bombmaker, the former director of Iraq 's nuclear weapon program, who defected to the west, supports the theory that the facility was used for both purposes.
We sought refuge several times at the shelter.... But it was always filled.... The shelter had television sets, drinking fountains, its own electrical generator, and looked sturdy enough to withstand a hit from conventional weapons. But I stopped trying to get in one night after noticing some long black limousines slithering in and out of an underground gate in the back. I asked around and was told that it was a command center. After considering it more closely, I decided it was probably Saddam 's own operational base.
Iraq launched missile attacks on coalition bases in Saudi Arabia and on Israel, in the hopes of drawing Israel into the war and drawing other Arab states out of it. This strategy proved ineffective. Israel did not join the coalition, and all Arab states stayed in the coalition except Jordan, which remained officially neutral throughout. On January 29, Iraq attacked and occupied the abandoned Saudi city of Khafji with tanks and infantry. However, the Battle of Khafji ended when Iraqis were driven back by Saudi forces supported by US Marines with close air support over the following two days.
The effect of the air campaign was to decimate entire Iraqi brigades deployed in the open desert in combat formation. The air campaign also prevented effective Iraqi resupply to forward deployed units engaged in combat, as well preventing the large (450,000) battle-hardened Iraqi troops from achieving force concentration essential to victory.
The air campaign had a significant effect on the tactics employed by opposing forces in subsequent conflicts. No longer were entire divisions dug in the open facing U.S. forces but rather were dispersed, e.g. Serbian forces in Kosovo. Opposing forces also reduced the distance of their supply lines and area defended. This was seen during the war in Afghanistan when the Taliban preemptively abandoned large swaths of land and retreated into their strongholds. This increased their force concentration and reduced long vulnerable supply lines. This tactic was also observed in the Second Gulf War whereby the Iraqi forces retreated from northern Iraqi Kurdistan into the cities.
The success of the air campaign has had the adverse effect for the American military of forcing all potential opposing forces of embracing tactics which minimize the effects of air power.
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Ground campaign
A US Army convoy crosses the Iraqi desert.
On February 22, 1991, Iraq agreed to a Soviet-proposed cease-fire agreement. The agreement called for Iraq to withdraw troops to pre-invasion positions within three weeks following a total cease-fire, and called for monitoring of the cease-fire and withdrawal to be overseen by the UN Security Council. The US rejected the proposal but said that retreating Iraqi forces would not be attacked, and gave twenty-four hours for Iraq to begin withdrawing forces.
On February 24, the US began Operation Desert Sabre, the ground portion of its campaign. US forces pulled plows along Iraqi trenches, burying their occupants alive. Soon after, a convoy of Marines penetrated deep into Iraqi territory, collecting thousands of deserting Iraqi troops, weakened and demoralized by the extensive air campaign. The US anticipated that Iraq might use chemical weapons; General Colin Powell later suggested that a US response to such an act might have been to destroy dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, flooding Baghdad, though this was never fully developed as a plan.
General Colin Powell briefs President George H. W. Bush and his advisors on the progress of the ground war
The United States originally hoped that Saddam would be overthrown in an internal coup, and used CIA assets in Iraq to organize a revolt. When a popular rebellion against Saddam began in southern Iraq, the United States did not support it due to the fact that the coalition refused to aid in an invasion. As a result, not only was the rebellion brutally subdued, but the main CIA operative who was tasked with organizing the revolt was disavowed and accused of "disobeying orders to not organize a revolt".
In their cowritten 1998 book, A World Transformed George Bush and Brent Scowcroft discussed the possibility of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 1991:
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guidelines about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep ', and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs... Would have have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable 'exit strategy ' we could see, violating another of our principles... Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome. (quoted in Losing America, pg 154)
The "Highway of Death"
Iraq did not use chemical weapons and the allied advance was much swifter than US generals expected. On February 26, Iraqi troops began retreating out of Kuwait, setting fire to Kuwaiti oil fields as they left. A long convoy of retreating Iraqi troops — along with Iraqi and Palestinian civilians — formed along the main Iraq-Kuwait highway. This convoy was bombed so extensively by the Allies that it came to be known as the Highway of Death. One hundred hours after the ground campaign started, President Bush declared a ceasefire and on February 27 declared that Kuwait had been liberated. Journalist Seymour Hersh has charged that, two days after the ceasefire was declared, American troops led by Barry McCaffrey engaged in a systematic massacre of retreating Iraqi troops, in addition to some civilians. McCaffrey has denied the charges and an army investigation has cleared him. (Forbes, Daniel)
A peace conference was held in Iraqi territory occupied by the coalition. At the conference, Iraq won the approval of the use of armed helicopters on their side of the temporary border, ostensibly for government transit due to the damage done to civilian transportation. Soon after, these helicopters — and much of the Iraqi armed forces — were refocused toward fighting against a Shiite uprising in the south. In the North, Kurdish leaders took heart in American statements that they would support an uprising and began fighting, in the hopes of triggering a coup. However, when no American support was forthcoming, Iraqi generals remained loyal and brutally crushed the Kurdish troops. Millions of Kurds fled across the mountains to Kurdish areas of Turkey and Iran. These incidents would later result in no-fly zones being established in both the North and the South of Iraq. In Kuwait, the Emir was restored and suspected Iraqi collaborators were repressed. Eventually, over 400,000 people were expelled from the country, including a large number of Palestinians (due to PLO support for Saddam Hussein).
Iraqi forces were heavily outnumbered from the start - approximately 750,000 Allied troops to approximately 450,000 Iraqi troops. A further 100,000 Turkish troops were deployed along the common border of Turkey and Iraq. This caused significant force dilution of the Iraqi military by forcing it to deploy its forces along all its borders (except ironically its bitter enemy Iran). This allowed the main thrust by the Americans to not only possess a significant technological advantage but also a large advantage in force numbers.
The main surprise of the ground campaign was relatively low Allied casualties. This was due to some tactical errors on the part of the Iraqis such as deploying tanks behind sand berms which offered no protection against the kinetic energy rounds of the M1 Abrams tanks and also gave away the position of the Iraqi tanks from a great distance. The Iraqi forces also failed to utilize urban warfare in Kuwait City, which could have inflicted significant casualities on the attacking forces. Urban combat would have reduced the greatest advantage of the Allies, long range killing. In the desert M1 Abrams tanks scored kills out to 4 kilometers. Rarely in urban combat does fighting range exceed 1 km, a range at which theoretically the M1 Abrams tank was vulnerable to the 125mm gun of the T-72 tanks that the Iraqis possessed.
On March 10, 1991, Operation Desert Farewell began to move 540,000 American troops out of the Persian Gulf.
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Coalition involvement
Members of the Coalition included Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States of America. Germany and Japan provided financial assistance instead of military aid.
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Canada
Canada was one of the first nations to agree to condemn Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait and it quickly agreed to join the U.S. led coalition. In August Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent the destroyers HMCS Terra Nova and HMCS Athabaskan to enforce the trade blockade against Iraq. The supply ship HMCS Protecteur was also sent to aid the gathering coalition forces.
After the UN authorized full use of force in the operation Canada sent a CF18 squadron with support personnel. Canada also sent a field hospital to deal with casualties from the ground war. When the air war began, Canada 's planes were integrated into the coalition force and provided air cover and attacked ground targets. This was the first time since the Korean War that Canadian forces had participated in offensive combat operations.
Canada suffered no casualties during the conflict but since its end many veterans have complained of suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.
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Casualties
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Casualties During the War
Gulf War casualty numbers are controversial. Coalition military deaths have been reported to be around 378, but the DoD reports that US forces suffered 147 battle-related and 325 non-battle-related deaths. The UK suffered 24 deaths, the Arab countries lost 39 men (18 Saudis, 10 Egyptians, 6 from the UAE, 3 Syrians, and 1 Kuwaiti), and France lost 2 men. The largest single loss of Coalition forces happened on February 25, 1991, when an Iraqi Scud missile hit an American military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia killing 28 U.S. Army Reservists from Pennsylvania. The number of coalition wounded seems to have been less than 1,000.
Independent analysts generally agree the Iraqi death toll was well below initial post-war estimates. In the immediate aftermath of the war, these estimates ranged as high as 100,000 Iraqi troops killed and 300,000 wounded. According to "Gulf War Air Power Survey" by Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, (a report commissioned by the U.S. Air Force; 1993-ISBN 0-16-041950-6), there were an estimated 10-12,000 Iraqi combat deaths in the air campaign and as many as 10,000 casualties in the ground war. This analysis is based on enemy prisoner of war reports.
The Iraqi government claimed that 2,300 civilians died during the air campaign.
One infamous incident during the war highlighted the question of large-scale Iraqi combat deaths. This was the `bulldozer assault ' in which two brigades from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) used anti-mine plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury Iraqi soldiers defending the fortified "Saddam Line." While approximately 2,000 of the troops surrendered, escaping burial, one newspaper story reported that the U.S. commanders estimated thousands of Iraqi soldiers had been buried alive during the two-day assault February 24-25, 1991. However, like all other troop estimates made during the war, the estimated 8,000 Iraqi defenders was probably greatly inflated. While one commander, Col. Anthony Moreno of the 2nd Brigade, thought the numbers might have been in the thousands, another reported his brigade buried between 80 and 250 Iraqis. After the war, the Iraqi government claimed to have found 44 such bodies. [12]
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The Post-War Effects of Depleted Uranium
In 1998, Saddam government doctors reported that Coalition use of depleted uranium caused a massive increase in birth defects and cancer among Iraqis, particularly leukemia. The government doctors claimed they were unable to provide evidence linking depleted uranium to the cancer and birth defects because the sanctions prevented them from obtaining necessary testing equipment. Subsequently, a World Health Organization team visited Basra and proposed a study to investigate the causes of higher cancer rates in southern Iraq, but Saddam refused.
The World Health Organization was nonetheless able to assess the health risks of Depleted Uranium in a post-combat environment thanks to a 2001 mission to Kosovo. A 2001 WHO fact sheet on depleted uranium concludes: "because DU is only weakly radioactive, very large amounts of dust (on the order of grams) would have to be inhaled for the additional risk of lung cancer to be detectable in an exposed group. Risks for other radiation-induced cancers, including leukaemia, are considered to be very much lower than for lung cancer." In addition, "no reproductive or developmental effects have been reported in humans" as a result of DU exposure. [13]
The U.S. Department of State has also published a fact sheet on depleted uranium. It states: "World Health Organization and other scientific research studies indicate Depleted Uranium poses no serious health risks" and "[d]epleted Uranium does not cause birth defects. Iraqi military use of chemical and nerve agents in the 1980 's and 1990 's is the likely cause of alleged birth defects among Iraqi children." In regard to cancer claims, the fact sheet states that "[a]ccording to environmental health experts, it is medically impossible to contract leukemia as a result of exposure to uranium or depleted uranium," and "[c]ancer rates in almost 19,000 highly exposed uranium industry workers who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory projects between 1943 and 1947 have been examined, and no excess cancers were observed through 1974. Other epidemiological studies of lung cancer in uranium mill and metal processing plant workers have found either no excess cancers or attributed them to known carcinogens other than uranium, such as radon." [14]
However, some claim that the effect is more severe as the Depleted Uranium ammunition would fragment into tiny particles when it hit the target. [15]
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Cost
Kuwaiti oil wells on fire.
The cost of the war to the United States was calculated by Congress to be $61.1 billion. Other sources estimate up to $71 billion. About $53 billion of that amount was paid by different countries around the world: $36 billion by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States; $16 billion by Germany and Japan (which sent no forces due to the treaties that ended WWII). About 25% of Saudi Arabia 's contribution was paid in the form of in-kind services to the troops, such as food and transportation.
US troops represented about 74% of the combined force, and the global cost was therefore higher. The United Kingdom, for instance, spent $4.1 billion during this war.
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Media
The Gulf War was a heavily televised war. For the first time people all over the world were able to watch live pictures of missiles hitting their targets and fighters taking off from aircraft carriers. Allied forces were keen to demonstrate the accuracy of their weapons.
The big-three network anchors led the network news coverage of the war. ABC 's Peter Jennings, CBS 's Dan Rather, and NBC 's Tom Brokaw were anchoring their evening newscasts when air strikes began on January 16, 1991. ABC News correspondent Gary Shepard, reporting live from Baghdad, told Jennings of the quietness of the city. But, moments later, Shepard was back on the air as flashes of light were seen on the horizon and tracer fire was heard on the ground. On CBS, viewers were watching a report from correspondent Allen Pizzey, who was also reporting from Baghdad, when the war began. Rather, after the report was finished, announced that there were unconfirmed reports of flashes in Baghdad and heavy air traffic at bases in Saudi Arabia. On the "NBC Nightly News", correspondent Mike Boettcher reported unusual air activity in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Moments later, Brokaw announced to his viewers that the air attack had begun. But it was CNN who gained the most popularity for their coverage. CNN correspondents John Holliman and Peter Arnett and CNN anchor Bernard Shaw relayed telephone reports from the Al-Rashid Hotel as the air strikes began. Newspapers all over the world also covered the war and TIME Magazine published a special issue dated January 28, 1991, the headline "WAR IN THE GULF" emblazoned on the cover over a picture of Baghdad taken as the war began.
US policy regarding media freedom was much more restrictive than in the Vietnam War. The policy had been spelled out in a Pentagon document entitled Annex Foxtrot. Most of the press information came from briefings organized by the military. Only selected journalists were allowed to visit the front lines or conduct interviews with soldiers. Those visits were always conducted in the presence of officers, and were subject to both prior approval by the military and censorship afterward. This was ostensibly to protect sensitive information from being revealed to Iraq, but often in practice it was used to protect politically embarrassing information from being revealed. This policy was heavily influenced by the military 's experience with the Vietnam War, which it believed it had lost due to public opposition within the United States.
At the same time, the coverage of this war was new in its instantaneousness. Many American journalists remained stationed in the Iraqi capital Baghdad throughout the war, and footage of incoming missiles was carried almost immediately on the nightly television news and the cable news channels such as CNN. A British crew from CBS News (David Green & Andy Thompson) equipped with satellite transmission equipment travelled with the front line forces and having transmitted live TV pictures of the fighting en route, arrived the day before the forces in Kuwait City, transmitting live television from the city and covering the entrance of the Arab forces the following day.
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Consequences
Saddam Hussein in a propaganda picture overseeing a war scene in the foreground
Following the uprisings in the North and South, no-fly zones were established to help protect the Shi 'ite and Kurdish groups in South and North Iraq, respectively. These no-fly zones (originally north of the 36th parallel and south of the 32nd parallel) were monitored mainly by the US and the UK, though France also participated. Combined, they flew more sorties over Iraq in the eleven years following the war than were flown during the war. These sorties dropped bombs nearly every other day. However, the greatest amount of bombs was dropped during two sustained bombing campaigns: Operation Desert Strike, which lasted a few weeks in September 1996, and Operation Desert Fox, in December 1998.
Widespread infrastructure destruction hurt the Iraqi population. Years after the war electricity production was less than a quarter its pre-war level. The destruction of water treatment facilities caused sewage to flow directly into the Tigris River, from which civilians drew drinking water, resulting in widespread disease.
Economic sanctions were kept in place following the war, pending a weapons inspection regime with which Iraq never fully cooperated. Iraq was later allowed to import certain products under the UN 's Oil for Food program. A 1998 UNICEF report found that the sanctions resulted in an increase in 90,000 deaths per year. Many argue that the sanctions on Iraq and the American military presence in Saudi Arabia contributed to an increasingly negative image of the United States in the Arab world.
A United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on weapons was established, to monitor Iraq 's compliance with restrictions on weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Iraq accepted some and refused other weapons inspections. The team found some evidence of biological weapons programs at one site and non-compliance at many other sites.
In 1997, Iraq expelled all US members of the inspection team, alleging that the United States was using the inspections as a front for espionage; members of UNSCOM were in regular contact with various intelligence agencies to provide information on weapons sites back and forth. The team returned for an even more turbulent time period between 1997 and 1999; one member of the weapons inspection team, US Marine Scott Ritter, resigned in 1998, alleging that the Clinton administration was blocking investigations because they did not want a full-scale confrontation with Iraq. He also alleged that the CIA was using the weapons inspection teams as a cover for covert operations. In 1999, the team was replaced by UNMOVIC, which began inspections in 2002. In 2002, Iraq — and especially Saddam Hussein — became targets in the United States ' War on Terrorism, leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.
Many returning coalition soldiers reported illnesses following their participation in the Gulf War, a phenomenon known as Gulf war syndrome. The number of children born in soldier 's families with serious congenital defects or serious illnesses is also alarmingly high, 67%, according to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs. [16] There has been widespread speculation and disagreement about the causes of the syndrome and birth defects (though the government has attempted to downplay the seriousness of the situation). A report published in 1994 by the Government Accountability Office said that American troops were exposed to 21 potential "reproductive toxicants". Some factors considered as possibly causal include exposure to radioactive depleted and non-depleted uranium used in munitions, oil fires, or the anthrax vaccine.
The People 's Republic of China (whose army in many ways resembled the Iraqi army) was surprised at the performance of American technology on the battlefield. The swiftness of the coalition victory resulted in an overall change in Chinese military thinking and began a movement to technologically modernize the People 's Liberation Army.
A crucial result of the Gulf War, according to Gilles Kepel, was the sharp revival in Islamic extremism. The change of face by Saddam 's secular regime did little to draw support from Islamist groups. However, it, combined with the Saudi Arabian alliance with the United States and Saudi Arabia being seen as being on the same side of Israel dramatically eroded that regime 's legitimacy. Activity of Islamist groups against the Saudi regime increased dramatically. In part to win back favour with Islamist groups Saudi Arabia greatly increased funding to those that would support the regime. Throughout the newly independent states of Central Asia the Saudis paid for the distribution of millions of Qur 'ans and the building of hundreds of mosques for extremist groups. In Afghanistan the Saudi regime became a leading patron of the Taliban in that nation 's civil war, and one of the only foreign countries to officially recognize the government.
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Technology
Missouri launches a Tomahawk missile.
Precision guided munitions (PGMs, also "smart bombs"), such as the United States Air Force guided missile AGM-130, were heralded as key in allowing military strikes to be made with a minimum of civilian casualties compared to previous wars. Specific buildings in downtown Baghdad could be bombed whilst journalists in their hotels watched cruise missiles fly by. PGMs amounted to approximately 7.4% of all bombs dropped by the coalition. Other bombs included cluster bombs, which break up into clusters of bomblets, and daisy cutters, 15,000-pound bombs which can disintegrate everything within hundreds of yards.
Among the numerous special forces from the United States, the Light Armored Recon (LAR) played a powerful role in the removal of Iraqi troops. Light Armored Vehicles (LAV) provided logistic command centers, logistics posts, mortar positions and long range suppressing fire with their powerful 50mm guns.
Scud is a low-technology rocket bomb that Iraq used, launching them into both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Some bombs caused extensive casualties, others caused little damage. Concerns were raised of possible chemical or biological warheads on these rockets, but if they existed they were not used.
America 's Patriot missile defense was used for the first time in combat. The US military claimed to have shot down many Scud rockets in flight, with an effectiveness of 100%. Afterwards, it was demonstrated that the Patriots ' effectiveness was primarily psychological: some claim that their effectiveness was as low as between 0% to 10%. However, there really is no good evidence to prove whether the Scuds were intercepted or not, so no figures are really backed up by undisputed facts. The higher figures tend to be calculated based on the percentage of Scud warheads which were known to have impacted and exploded compared to the number of Scud missiles launched, but due to factors such as duds, misses and impacts which were not reported, this is not really a good way to measure effectiveness. The lowest figures are typically based upon the number of interceptions where there is proof that the warhead was hit by at least one missile, but due to the way the poorly built Al-Hussein (Scud derivative) missiles broke up in flight, it was often hard to tell which piece was the warhead, and there were few radar tracks which were actually stored which could be analyzed later, hence the very low figures. Realistically the actual performance was probably somewhere in between. The US Army maintains the Patriot delivered a "miracle performance" in the Gulf War. [17]
Global Positioning System units were key in enabling coalition units to navigate easily across the desert. Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and satellite communication systems were also important.
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Military awards
This T-shirt was worn by members of the Florida National Guard in Kuwait during the Gulf War. The shirt is stylized in a parody of Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts, reading "Hard Luck Cafe" in a circle with a background of an oil field. Below the logo reads, "Kuwait City, Kuwait: under new management."
The Kuwait Liberation Medal.
The U.S. Southwest Asia Service Medal was established in March of 1991 to recognize those U.S. military members who had participated in the Gulf War. The governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also issued a medal, known as the Kuwait Liberation Medal, which was first created in 1994 and is an authorized foreign military decoration for wear on U.S. military uniforms.
Political / Diplomatic aspects
In his 17 March 2003 address to the nation, U.S. President George W. Bush demanded that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his two sons Uday and Qusay leave Iraq, giving them a 48-hour deadline [1]. All three refused this demand.
Since the invasion began without the explicit approval of the United Nations Security Council, some legal authorities regard it as a violation of the U.N. Charter. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in September 2004, "From our point of view and the U.N. charter point of view, it was illegal." [2] There have been no formal charges under international law.
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Military aspects
United States military operations were conducted, first, under the name Operation Iraqi Liberation [3], which was changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom, United Kingdom military operations as Operation Telic, and Australian operations as Operation Falconer. Approximately 100,000 United States troops and 45,000 British, and smaller forces from other nations, collectively called the "Coalition of the Willing," entered Iraq primarily through a staging area in Kuwait. Plans for opening a second front in the north were abandoned when Turkey officially refused the use of its territory for such purposes. Forces also supported Iraqi Kurdish militia troops, estimated to number upwards of 50,000.
Facing them was a large but poorly-equipped military force[4][5][6]. The regular Iraqi army was estimated at 290,000–350,000, mostly conscript, troops, with four Republican Guard divisions with 50,000–80,000 troops, and the Fedayeen Saddam, a 20,000–40,000 strong militia, who used guerrilla tactics during the war. There were an estimated thirteen infantry divisions, ten mechanized and armored divisions, as well as some special forces units. The Iraqi Air Force and Navy played a negligible role in the conflict.
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Prelude
Since the end of the Gulf War of 1991, Iraq 's relations with the UN, the US, and the UK remained poor. In the absence of a Security Council consensus that Iraq had fully complied with the terms of the Persian Gulf War ceasefire, both the UN and the US enforced numerous economic sanctions against Iraq throughout the Clinton administration, and patrolled Iraqi airspace to enforce Iraqi no-fly zones. The United States Congress also passed the "Iraq Liberation Act" in October 1998, which provided $97 million for Iraqi "democratic opposition organizations" in order to "establish a program to support a transition to democracy in Iraq." This contrasted with the terms set out in U.N. Resolution 687 [7], all of which related to weapons and weapons programs, not to what regime was in place. Weapons inspectors had also been used to gather intelligence on Iraq 's WMD program, information that was then used in targeting decisions during Operation Desert Fox [8], [9]. At the same time Tony Blair 's Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, could not guarantee that an invasion in the circumstances would not be challenged on legal grounds[10].
The United States Republican Party 's campaign platform in the U.S. presidential election, 2000 called for "full implementation" of the Iraq Liberation Act and removal of Saddam Hussein with a focus on rebuilding a coalition, tougher sanctions, reinstating inspections, and support for the pro-democracy, opposition exile group, Iraqi National Congress then headed by Ahmed Chalabi.
In September 2000, in the Rebuilding America 's Defenses (pg. 17) report, Project for the New American Century, a right-wing think tank, suggested that the United States shift to more ground-based air forces to help contain the forces of Saddam Hussein so that "the demand for carrier presence in the region can be relaxed." Upon the election of George W. Bush as president, many advocates of such a policy (including some of those who wrote the 2000 report) were included in the new administration 's foreign policy circle. According to former treasury secretary Paul O 'Neill, as widely reported by the mainstream press, an attack was planned since the inauguration, and the first security council meeting discussed plans on invasion of the country. O 'Neill later clarified that these discussions were part of a continuation of foreign policy first put into place by the Clinton Administration.[11]
Notes from aides who were with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center one year later, on the day of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, reflect that he wanted, "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only [Osama bin Laden]." The notes also quote him as saying, "Go massive," and "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."[12] Shortly thereafter, the George W. Bush administration announced a War on Terrorism, accompanied by the doctrine of 'preemptive ' military action dubbed the Bush doctrine. A preemptive war requires that the declared purpose be to respond to an imminent threat of war by the other power, whereas wars instituted against a hypothetical future threat are more properly called preventive war and generally considered a war of aggression. The September 11 commission in June, 2004 released a staff report that said it found 'no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States. '"[13]
In 2002 the Iraq disarmament crisis arose primarily as a diplomatic situation. In October 2002, with the "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq" (Adopted 296-133 by the House of Representatives and 77-23 by the Senate), the United States Congress granted President Bush the authority to wage war against Iraq. The Joint Resolution was worded so as to encourage, but not require, UN Security Council approval for military action, although as a matter of international law the US required explicit Security Council approval for an invasion unless an attack by Iraq had been imminent — the US administration argued that there was a "growing" or "gathering," rather than imminent, threat. The joint resolution allowed the President of the United States to, "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq."
In November 2002, United Nations actions regarding Iraq culminated in the unanimous passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 and the resumption of weapons inspections. However, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan later stated that the subsequent invasion was a violation of the UN Charter. Force was not authorized by resolution 1441 itself, as the language of the resolution mentioned "serious consequences," which is generally not understood by Security Council members to include the use of force to depose the government; however the threat of force, as cultivated by the Bush administration, was prominent at the time of the vote. Both the U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, and the UK ambassador Jeremy Greenstock, in promoting Resolution 1441 on 8 November 2002, had given assurances that it provided no "automaticity," no "hidden triggers," no step to invasion without consultation of the Security Council; in the event such consultation was forestalled by the US and UK 's abandonment of the Security Council procedure and their invasion of Iraq. Richard Perle, a senior member of the administration 's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, has expressed an opinion in November, 2003, that the invasion was against international law, but argued that it was justified. There is still much disagreement among international lawyers on whether prior resolutions, relating to the 1991 war and later inspections, permitted the invasion.
The United States also began preparations for an invasion of Iraq, with a host of diplomatic, public relations, and military preparations.
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Rationale
See The UN Security Council and the Iraq war and Public relations preparations for 2003 invasion of Iraq for more details
In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the relative success of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration felt that it had sufficient military justification and public support in the United States for further operations against perceived threats in the Middle East. The relations between some coalition members and Iraq had never improved since 1991, and the nations remained in a state of low-level conflict marked by American and British air-strikes, sanctions, and threats against Iraq. Iraqi radar had also locked onto and anti-aircraft guns and missiles were fired upon coalition airplanes enforcing the northern and southern no-fly zones, which had been implemented after the Gulf War in 1991.
Throughout 2002, the U.S. administration made it clear that removing Saddam Hussein from power was a major goal, although it offered to accept major changes in Iraqi military and foreign policy in lieu of this. Specifically, the stated justification for the invasion included Iraqi production and use of weapons of mass destruction, links with terrorist organizations and human rights violations in Iraq under the Saddam Hussein government, issues that are detailed below.
To that end, the stated goals of the invasion, according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were:
• Self-defense o find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, weapons programs, and terrorists o collect intelligence on networks of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists
• Humanitarian o end sanctions and to deliver humanitarian support (According to Madeline Albright, half a million Iraqi children had died because of sanctions.)
• UNSC Resolution o Resolution 1205, made in 1999.
• Regime Change o end the Saddam Hussein government o help Iraq 's transition to democratic self-rule
• Other o secure Iraq 's oil fields and other resources
Many staff and supporters within the Bush administration had other, more ambitious goals for the war as well. Many propagated the claim that the war could act as a catalyst for democracy and peace in the Middle East, and that once Iraq became democratic and prosperous other nations would quickly follow suit due to this demonstration effect, and thus the social environment that allowed terrorism to flourish would be eliminated. However, for diplomatic, bureaucratic reasons these goals were played down in favor of justifications that Iraq represented a specific threat to the United States and to international law. Little evidence was presented actually linking the government of Iraq to al-Qaeda (see below).
Opponents of the Iraq war disagreed with many of the arguments presented by the administration, attacking them variously as being untrue, inadequate to justify a preemptive war, or likely to have results different from the administration 's intentions. Further, they asserted various alternate reasons for the invasion. Different groups asserted that the war was fought primarily for:
• Energy economics o to gain control over Iraq 's hydrocarbon reserves and in doing so maintain the U.S. dollar as the monopoly currency for the critical international oil market (since 2000, Iraq had used the Euro as its oil export currency) o to ensure the US had military control over the region 's hydrocarbon reserves as a lever to control other countries that depend on it o to assure that the revenue from Iraqi oil would go primarily to American interests o to lower the price of oil for American consumers
• Defense and construction special interests o to channel money to defense and construction interests
• Public perception o to maintain the wartime popularity that the President enjoyed due to his response to the 11 September attacks, and thus distract attention from other domestic political issues on which he was politically vulnerable (in contrast to his father whose wartime popularity quickly faded when the electorate began to focus on the economy)
• Ideological, emotional reasons o in pursuance of the PNAC 's stated strategic goal of "unquestionable [American] geopolitical preeminence" o a chance for George W. Bush to get revenge against Saddam Hussein for allegedly attempting to have his father, President George H. W. Bush, assassinated during a visit to Kuwait in 1993. o to satisfy and create closure for President George H.W. Bush, Cheney, and other members of the first Bush administration who had been humilated by the end of the first Gulf War and wanted an opportunity to finally "get" Saddam, after previously failing to do so.
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Weapons of Mass Destruction
See Iraq disarmament crisis for more details.
Computer-generated image of an alleged mobile production facility for biological weapons, presented by Colin Powell at the UN Security Council. Absence of more substantial proofs undermined the credibility of the speech on the international scene. Russian experts questioned the likelihood of such mobile facilities, which are extremely dangerous and difficult to manage.
Ultimately, the Iraq war was presented as largely being a case of removing banned weapons from Iraq. Administration officials, especially with the United States Department of State led by Colin Powell were eager to make the cause for war as universally acceptable to as many nations as possible. Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense stated in an interview on 28 May 2003 in Vanity Fair that 'For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction '. [14]
Before the attack, the head UN weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix, clearly stated that his teams had been unable to find any evidence of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons in Iraq. However, the discovery of illegal missiles discovered by United Nations weapons inspectors which were ultimately deemed in violation of United Nations Resolution 687 (1991), called the Al-Samoud IIs, raised serious questions: these rockets could possibly narrowly pass the allowed range of 150 km (93 miles), though without carrying any load. Ultimately though, they were determined to be in violation of the terms of which Saddam Hussein agreed to in order to cease the hostilities of the Persian Gulf War and thus, deemed prohibited and ordered destroyed by the United Nations Security Council. Retrospectively, some time after the attack, Hans Blix expressed doubts that the nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons had existed [15], [16], but never speculated whether the discovery of the illegal Al-Samoud IIs could be a trigger for justifying war or not. Former top American weapons inspector to Iraq, Scott Ritter, a longtime advocate of more thorough weapons inspections previously and considered an anti-Iraq hardliner, said that he was now absolutely convinced Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction [17] which contradicts earlier 1998 statements by Scott Ritter regarding this issue.
On August 26, 1998, approximately two months prior to United Nations inspectors ' ejection from Iraq, Scott Ritter resigned from his position rather than participate in what he called the "illusion of arms control." In his resignation letter to Amb. Butler, [18] Ritter wrote: "The Special Commission was created for the purpose of disarming Iraq. As part of the Special Commission team, I have worked to achieve a simple end: the removal, destruction or rendering harmless of Iraq 's proscribed weapons. The sad truth is that Iraq today is not disarmed ... UNSCOM has good reason to believe that there are significant numbers of proscribed weapons and related components and the means to manufacture such weapons unaccounted for in Iraq today ... Iraq has lied to the Special Commission and the world since day one concerning the true scope and nature of its proscribed programs and weapons systems. This lie has been perpetuated over the years through systematic acts of concealment. It was for the purpose of uncovering Iraq 's mechanism of concealment, and in doing so gaining access to hidden weapons components and weapons programs, that you created a dedicated capability to investigate Iraq 's concealment activities, which I have had the privilege to head."
Furthermore, on September 7, 1998, approximately one month prior to United Nations weapons inspectors ' ejection from Iraq, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee, [19] Scott Ritter was asked by John McCain (R, AZ) whether UNSCOM had intelligence suggesting that Iraq had assembled the components for three nuclear weapons and all that it lacked was the fissile material. Ritter replied: "The Special Commission has intelligence information, which suggests that components necessary for three nuclear weapons exists, lacking the fissile material. Yes, sir." Ritter did not address the question of what if Iraq managed to acquire fissile materials on the Black Market. But, the implication seemed pretty clear. As Paul Leventhal, head of the Nuclear Control Institute remarked in response to Ritter 's statement,[20] "Iraq could be only days or weeks away from having nuclear weapons if it acquires the needed plutonium or bomb-grade uranium on the black market or by other means." Ritter also said that, absent UNSCOM, Iraq could reconstruct its chemical and biological weapons programs in six months, as well as its missile program. He said that Iraq had a plan for achieving a missile breakout within six months of receiving the signal from Saddam Hussein.
It is unclear what Scott Ritter believes happened to that capability he insinuated Saddam Hussein had in 1998 as compared to that capability he believes Saddam Hussein had after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom considering United Nations weapons inspectors were absent from Iraq, from 1998 to 2002.
President Bush and members of his cabinet and staff relied heavily on intelligence reports, of which the C.I.A. 's 2002 report [21] on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was one of the more prominent.
No weapons of mass destruction were found by the Iraq Survey Group, headed by inspector David Kay. Kay, who resigned as the Bush administration 's top weapons inspector in Iraq, said U.S. intelligence services owed President Bush an explanation for having concluded that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. [22] However, the team claims to have found evidence of low-level WMD programs — a claim hotly disputed by many, with the Biosecurity Journal referring to the Biological Warfare (BW) claims as a "worst case analysis" [23].
On 29 May 2003, Pres. Bush said during an interview with Polish network TVP that "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." [24]
The Iraq Survey Group under Bush-appointed inspector David Kay reported in the 'Interim Progress Report ' on 2003 October 3 the following key points: "We have not yet found stocks of weapons," difficulty in explaining why, clandestine laboratories suitable for "preserving BW expertise" which contained equipment subject to UN monitoring, a prison laboratory complex which Kay describes as "possibly used in human testing of BW agents," strains of bacteria kept in one scientists home (including a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B), twelve-year-old documents and small parts concerning uranium enrichment kept found in a scientist 's home [25], partially declared UAVs, capability to produce a type of fuel useful for Scud missiles, a scientist who had drawn plans for how to make longer-range missiles [26], and attempts to acquire missile technology from North Korea, and destroyed documents of unknown significance. [27]. The report categorized most biological agents as "BW-applicable" or "BW-capable"; the report mentions nothing that was being used in such a context. Chemical weapons are referred to in a similar fashion. The nuclear program, according to the report, had not done any work since 1991, but had attempted to retain scientists and documentation from it in case sanctions were ever dropped.
However, Kay himself has since stated (concerning Iraqi WMDs): "We were almost all wrong - and I certainly include myself here." He has stated that many intelligence analysts have come to him "in apology that the world we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed" [28]. He has also directly contradicted since then much of the October report. Before Kay made these revelations, many of the scientists on his staff had already come out with similar statements. [29].
Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his oral report the following, though: "Based on the intelligence that existed, I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat. Now that you know reality on the ground as opposed to what you estimated before, you may reach a different conclusion — although I must say I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than, in fact, we thought it was even before the war."
Dr. Kay 's team concluded that Iraq had the production capacity and know-how to produce a great deal more chemical and biological weaponry when international economic sanctions were lifted, a policy change which was actively being sought by France, Germany and Russia. Kay also believes that a large but undetermined amount of the former Iraqi government 's WMD program had been moved to Syria shortly before the 2003 invasion. [30] However, in April 2005, the Iraq Survey Group 's final report "found no senior policy, program, or intelligence officials who admitted any direct knowledge of such movement of WMD," and ruled out any government-sanctioned movement of banned weapons to Syria. [31]
The current consensus view of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction seems similar to that portrayed by Hussein Kamel in 1995 and that of Imad Khadduri [32]: that Iraq had almost completely destroyed its programs, but sought to retain as much knowledge and information as it could so that, should sanctions ever end, the programs could start over quickly.
As of May 2005, small quantities of chemically degraded mustard gas had been found in old munitions. However, these are generally regarded as left-overs from the pre-sanction era before the 1991 Gulf War, and in November 2005 David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group charged with finding Saddam Hussein 's WMDs stated that there probably were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the invasion and that the likelihood of any WMDs having been sent to neighboring nations like Syria was so small that it was not a viable explanation for what happened to the weapons, which contradicts the earlier statement which says: "Kay also believes that a large but undetermined amount of the former Iraqi government 's WMD program had been moved to Syria shortly before the 2003 invasion." The general consensus is that the intelligence community, including the CIA and other foreign services, failed to provide an accurate picture of the WMD program in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The U.S. government and the Bush administration have not yet taken official stances on the intelligence failures, but Congressional investigations, primarily under Democratic leadership, were either underway or forming in the spring of 2005.
The United Nations announced a report on March 2, 2004 from the weapons inspection teams stating that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction of any significance after 1994. [33]
On August 2, 2004 Pres. Bush stated "Knowing what I know today we still would have gone on into Iraq. He had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction. He had terrorists ties … the decision I made is the right decision. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power."[34]
On October 6, 2004 Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, appearing before the United States Senate Armed Services Committee announced that the group found no evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had produced any weapons of mass destruction since 1991, when UN sanctions were imposed and, furthermore, were incapable of doing so. The report noted that Saddam had made it his primary goal to have sanctions lifted by whatever means necessary and that whether or not Saddam Hussein was, indeed, "contained" was questionable considering dozens of instances in which prohibited material had entered Iraq through several nefarious means such as front companies and other questionable means. From the report: "[Saddam] wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted."[35] Also, from the report: "Throughout sanctions, Saddam continually directed his advisors to forumulate and implement strategies, policies, and methods to terminate the UN 's sanctions regime established by UNSCR 661. The Regime devised an effective diplomatic and economic strategy of generating revenue and procuring illicit goods utilizing the Iraqi intelligence, banking, industrial, and military apparatus that eroded United Nation 's member states and other international players ' resolve to enforce compliance, while capitalizing politically on its humanitarian crisis." The report concluded in its Key Findings that: "The former Regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead, his lieutenants understood WMD revival was his goal from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but firm, verbal comments and directions to them." [36]
Furthermore, in the Addendums to the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq 's WMD [37] Charles Duelfer made the statement that "Whether Syria received military items from Iraq for safekeeping or other reasons has yet to be determined. There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to warrant further investigation. ... ISG was unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war. It should be noted that no information from debriefing of Iraqis in custody supports this possibility. ... Based on the evidence available at present, ISG judged that it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place. However, ISG was unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials."
On January 12, 2005, US military forces, having located no weapons of mass destruction, formally abandoned the search.
On June 8, 2005, retired 4-star general and former Secretary of State in the Bush administration Colin Powell, appeared on The Daily Show and stated regarding Weapons of Mass Destructions in Iraq that; "Now where we got the intelligence wrong, dead wrong, is that we thought he also had existing stockpiles, and now we know that those are not there." [38] [39]
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Sanctions
However effective, UN sanctions fostered a growing humanitarian crisis in Iraq. International popular opinion seemed to shift in favour of lifting the sanctions and finding diplomatic alternatives such as targeted sanctions that might be as effective, but which would not inadvertently affect the Iraqi populace. Temporary solutions, such as the Oil for Food program, an easing of the sanctions on a controlled basis, had limited success in the face of corruption in the Iraqi government and UN officials involved in the program [40]. Essentially, harsh sanctions originally intended to be temporary could not be kept in place indefinitely. In addition, Saddam 's persistent efforts to sway certain UN Security Council members with money diverted from the Oil for Food program meant that sanctions may have reached the limit of their usefulness.[41][42]
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Human Rights
Another key rationale for the war was ending Saddam Hussein 's nearly 40-year track record of murder, torture, and other major human rights abuses (see Human rights in Saddam 's Iraq). Some critics called this justification self-serving, since the US government did not do much to prevent or to punish those crimes while they were happening. Although the use of chemical weapons against Kurds in 1983 was known by US intelligence, Donald Rumsfeld, at the time presidential envoy of Ronald Reagan, nevertheless spoke of his "close relationship" with Saddam Hussein and even visited him. After the Persian Gulf War the US government encouraged rebellions by the Shiites but did not intervene when Saddam crushed the rebels. [43] [44]
Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch has argued that the justification of "human rights" for the war in Iraq does not meet appropriate standards for the level of suffering that it causes.[45]
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Libyan disarmament
Also included in the list of postwar justifications is Libya 's agreement to abandon its WMD programs in December of 2003. Those who argue that this action was directly inspired by the invasion of Iraq point to a phone call Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi says he had with Libya 's leader, Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi in April of 2003, in which he quotes Qadaffi as saying "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid." [46] Negotiations between Libya and the United States and Britain on disarmament began almost immediately thereafter. [47] On the other hand, Flynt Leverett (former senior director for Middle Eastern Affairs at the NSC) and Martin S. Indyk (former Clinton administration official) argue that the agreement was instead a result of good-faith negotiations. Libya had in principle agreed to surrender its programs in 1999.
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Purported links between the government of Iraq and terrorist organizations
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Al-Qaeda
See Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda for more details.
An alleged link between al Qaeda and Iraq was often mentioned in the run-up to war. Before the invasion, journalists were generally skeptical; for example, one January 2003 article in the San Jose Mercury News said the claim "stretches the analysis of U.S. intelligence agencies to, and perhaps beyond, the limit." [48] After the invasion, in January of 2004, Secretary Powell stated "I have not seen [a] smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."
Some of the evidence for a connection between the two turns out to have been misinformation coming from several sources, most notably an associate of Ahmed Chalabi who was given the code name "Curveball" and captured al Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The Chalabi source has been thoroughly discredited, and the al Qaeda source has since recanted his story. Other al Qaeda leaders have claimed that there was no operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and indeed that Osama bin Laden had forbidden such a relationship with the Iraqi leader, whom he considered an infidel.
There are, however, some who have bolstered the current US administration 's claims of collaboration between al Qaeda and the now deposed Iraqi government, as well as charges of cooperation made by the Clinton administration. Weapons smuggler Mohamed Mansour Shahab said in an interview in the New Yorker magazine that he had been directed by the Iraqi intelligence community to organize, plan, and carry out up to nine terrorist attacks against American targets in the Middle East, including an attack similar to the one carried out on the USS Cole. [49]. His story is not considered credible, however. Reporter Guy Dinmore wrote in the London Financial Times of Sahab: "it is apparent that the man is deranged. He claims to have killed 422 people, including two of his wives, and says he would drink the blood of his victims. He also has no explanation for why, although he was arrested two years ago, he only revealed his alleged links to al-Qaeda and Baghdad after the September 11 attacks." (22 May 2002 p. 13) And Al Qaeda expert Jason Burke wrote after interviewing Shahab, "Shahab is a liar. He may well be a smuggler, and probably a murderer too, but substantial chunks of his story simply are not true."[50].
The only member of the original plot to destroy the World Trade Center to escape US law enforcement officials, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Baghdad shortly after the attacks in 1993. Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only alleged member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large after the investigation into the bombing where he fled to Iraq. After major fighting ceased U.S. forces discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, that purport to show that the Iraqi government gave Yasin a house and monthly salary. [51]
FBI and CIA investigations in 1995 and 1996, however, determined "that the Iraqi government was in no way involved in the attack"; then-U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke has since testified, "the fact that one of the 12 people involved in the attack was Iraqi hardly seems to me as evidence that the Iraqi government was involved in the attack. The attack was Al Qaida; not Iraq.... [T]he allegation that has been made that the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center was done by the Iraqi government I think is absolutely without foundation." (911 Commission Hearing, 24 March 2004)[52]
Abbas al-Janabi, who served for fifteen years as personal assistant to Uday Hussein before defecting to United Kingdom, has often claimed that he knew of collaboration between the former Iraqi government and al Qaeda. Al-Janabi said that he had learnt that Iraqi officials had visited Afghanistan and Sudan to strengthen ties with Al-Qaeda and he also claimed he knew of a facility near Baghdad where foreign fighters were trained and instructed by members of the Republican Guard and Mukhabarat. [53]. Salman Pak, a facility matching al-Janabi’s description, was captured by US Marines in Mid April of 2003 [54], but no evidence of al Qaeda presence at the camp has been found. Some claim that the camp was actually a counterterrorism facility built by the British in the mid 1980 's but UN weapons inspectors, including Charled Duelfer beleived it had been converted from its original purpose and was being used to train militiants. [55]
In April of 2001, the Czech Security Information Service reported a meeting between Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, an Iraqi Intelligence Service officer operating out of the Iraqi embassy in Prague, and a man they believed to be Mohamed Atta. The Czech report was based on a single eyewitness from Prague who is now generally considered unreliable. Nevertheless, this was seen as a crucial link between Iraq and al Qaeda by proponents of collaboration between Iraq and al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission examined this evidence, saying that circumstantial evidence appeared to place Atta in Florida at the time, and that "The available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta-Ani meeting." The report concluded, "Based on the evidence available including investigation by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainee reporting we do not believe that such a meeting occurred." It also says that Czech intelligence indicates that al-Ani "was about 70 miles away from Prague" at the time that the meeting supposedly took place. [56], [57]
It was eventually shown that, while representatives of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had indeed met, an operational relationship was never realized and there was a deep sense of mistrust and dislike of one another. Osama Bin Laden was shown to view Iraq 's ruling Ba 'ath party as running contrary to his religion, calling it an "apostate regime." A British intelligence report [58] went so far as to say of Bin Laden "His aims are in ideological conflict with present day Iraq."
In 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, concluded that there was no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had assisted al-Qaeda in preparing for or carrying out the 9/11 attacks.
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Other Terrorist Organizations
Aside from the contentious allegations of Iraq 's relationship with al Qaeda, the former government did have relationships with other militant organizations in the Middle East including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It is known that some $10–15M total was paid to the families of suicide bombers, presented as compensation for the demolition of their homes in Israeli collective punishment operations. Abu Abbas (associate with the PLO and the Achille Lauro hijacking) was found in Iraq, and had been wanted for quite some time. In August 2002, Abu Nidal (attacks in Italy and elsewhere) died in Baghdad from gunshot wounds while facing treason charges under Saddam 's government.
In 1998, Iraq plotted to blow up Radio Free Europe in Prague, for broadcasting opposition communications into Iraq. According to Jabir Salim, the consul and second secretary at the Iraq embassy in Prague, Saddam Hussein had allocated $150,000 to recruit and train individuals who would not be traceable back to Iraq. This plot was aborted in December 1998 when Salim defected in Prague, revealing details of the plot to the CIA, British MI-6 and Czech intelligence.
The now deposed Iraqi regime has also been accused of an assassination plot on former President George Bush. On April 14, 1993, it is charged that Iraq plotted to assassinate former President George Bush while he was visiting Kuwait. The assassins were Ra 'ad al-Asadi and Wali al-Ghazali, two Iraqi nationals, who had been supplied with a car bomb. The plot was foiled when the two were captured in Kuwait City. The FBI learned that the two had been recruited by the Iraqi intelligence Service in Basra, Iraq, who also gave them the explosive devices shortly before Bush arrived in Kuwait.
Some documents indicate that the leadership was attempting to distance itself from Islamist militants instead of working with them [59], and that any connection between al Qaeda and Iraq is new. This was in relation to the rising insurgency in Iraq: Saddam was fearful that the foreign fighters might use this as an opportunity for themselves, rather than fight for Saddam to take control again. Many international jihadists have in fact begun operating in Iraq since the U.S. occupation began. (See Iraqi insurgency for further details).
The Bush Administration also has claimed that there are links between Saddam Hussein 's government and Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose organization Jama 'at al-Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War) has taken credit for kidnappings and beheadings directed against the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Zarqawi is rumored to have been treated in an Iraqi hospital after being wounded in Afghanistan during the U.S. invasion. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi had settled in Kurdish northern Iraq (an area not controlled by Saddam Hussein 's government) where he joined the terrorist organization Ansar al-Islam, which was an enemy of the Ba 'athist government. Nevertheless, U.S. officials continued to assert that Zarqawi constitutes an important link between Saddam 's government and al Qaeda. A CIA report in early October 2004 "found no clear evidence of Iraq harbouring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." [60] Also, Zarqawi does not seem to have ever been, as some have asserted, an al Qaeda leader, and only pledged his allegiance to the al Qaeda organization in October 2004.[61] This pledge came two days after his insurgent organization in Iraq was officially declared a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.
On October 19, 2004, the International Institute for Strategic Studies published its annual report stating that the war in Iraq had actually increased the risk of terrorism against westerners in Arab countries[62].
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Opinion and legality
See Support and opposition for the 2003 invasion of Iraq for the full article.
Global Protests around the World against the Iraq War
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Countries supporting and opposing the war
Support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq included 49 nations, a group that was frequently referred to as the "coalition of the willing." These nations provided combat troops, support troops, and logistical support for the invasion. The nations contributing combat forces were, roughly: United States (250,000), United Kingdom (45,000), South Korea (3,500), Australia (2,000), Denmark (200), and Poland (184). Ten other countries offered small numbers of non-combat forces, mostly either medical teams and specialists in decontamination. In several of these countries a majority of the public was opposed to the war. For example, in Spain polls reported at one time a 90% opposition to the war. In most other countries less than 10% of the populace supported an invasion of Iraq without UN sanction [63]. Even in the US only approximately 33% of the population said they were in favor of a unilateral invasion [64].
Popular opposition to war on Iraq led to global protests. In many Middle Eastern and Islamic countries, many protesters supported Saddam Hussein, but protesters in the United States and Europe generally did not. On the government level, the war was criticized by Canada, Belgium, Russia, France, The People 's Republic of China, Germany, Switzerland, The Vatican, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico, the Arab League, the African Union and others. Though many nations opposed the war, no foreign government openly supported Saddam Hussein, and none volunteered any assistance to the Iraqi side.
Map showing government positions on the Iraq war around the world.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud said U.S. military could not use Saudi Arabia 's soil in any way to attack Iraq. [65] After ten years of U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, cited among reasons by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden for his al-Qaeda attacks on America on September 11, 2001, most of U.S. forces were withdrawn in 2003. [66] According to the New York Times, the invasion secretly received support from Saudi Arabia. [67]
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Legality of the invasion
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U.S. Law
Under the United States Constitution, Presidents do not have authority to declare war. This power is granted exclusively to Congress, and there is no provision in the Constitution for its delegation. As the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, it cannot be superseded except by amendment to itself. On October 3, 2002, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) submitted to the House International Relations committee a proposed declaration which read, "A state of war is declared to exist between the United States and the government of Iraq." It was rejected.[68] Citing several factors, including unresolved issues from the 1991 Gulf War, the Bush administration claimed intrinsic authority to engage Iraq militarily[69], and Congress delegated its war powers to the President[70]; from this point of view, the invasion of Iraq, while a war, may therefore be considered a police action commenced by the executive, like the Korean war.
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International Law
Resolution 1441, drafted and accepted unanimously the year before the invasion, threatened "serious consequences" to Iraq in case Iraq did not comply with all conditions. Russia, the People 's Republic of China, and France made clear in a joint statement that this did not authorize the use of force but a further resolution was needed. This was also the position of the UK and the US at the time the resolution was decided. On the day of the vote the US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, said a 2nd UN resolution was required to authorise war. Until a few days before the war, it was the position of the UK, the main US ally in the war, that a further resolution would be desirable before the UK would go to war.
Some have said that the US and other coalition governments ' invasion of Iraq was an unprovoked assault on an independent country which breached international law. Under Article 2, Number 4 of the UN Charter, "All Members shall refrain... from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state..." This is known as the "Prohibition of Aggression." For the use of force other than in self defence, it is absolute without the positive sanction of the security council under Article 42. Resolution 1441 was not intended by China, Russia and France to authorise war. The coalition formed around the USA argued that another understanding of the resolution is possible, although Kofi Annan, speaking on behalf of the UN charter, declared: "I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal." [71]
The Bush administration argued that the UN Security Council Resolutions authorizing the 1991 invasion, in addition to Resolution 1441, gave legal authority to use "all necessary means," which is diplomatic code for going to war. This war ended with a cease fire instead of a permanent peace treaty. Their view was that Iraq had violated the terms of the cease-fire by breaching two key conditions and thus made the invasion of Iraq a legal continuation of the earlier war. If a war can be reactivated ten years after the fact, it would imply that any nation that has ever been at war that ended in a cease-fire (such as Korea) could face war for failing to meet the conditions of the cease-fire. Such is the purpose of using a cease-fire agreement in place of a peace treaty; the resumption of war is the penalty for, and thus deterrent of, engaging in the prohibited action(s). For instance, in WWII, the state of war with Germany did not end until 19 October 1951) and with Japan, not until 28 April 1952[72].
Since the majority of the United Nations security council members (both permanent and rotating) did not support the attack, it appears that they viewed the attack as invalid under any resolution still in effect in March, 2003. Both Kofi Annan, current Secretary-General of the United Nations, and former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, as well as several nations, say that the attack violated international law as a war of aggression since it lacked the validity of a U.N. Security Council resolution to authorize military force, and was not an act of defence, and so violated the UN charter. However, none have called for the security council to consider sanctions against the United States or the other nations involved, both because of an effort to restore warmer relationships with the US, and because the attempt would be futile since the US has a veto in the Security Council.
The United States and United Kingdom claimed, and continue to claim, that it was a legal action which they were within international law to undertake. Some in the media have called the good faith of the Security Council into question on this matter. [73] [74] One argument is that the United Nations itself, along with the three opponents of the Iraq War on the Security Council, France, Russia, and China, all benefited financially (in some cases, perhaps illegally) from transactions with the Saddam Hussein regime under the Oil for Food program; [75] and that the leaders of these three countries, along with Kofi Annan, fought against a second UN resolution not out of higher principle but in order to keep these contracts. Additionally, the resistance of the Security Council and the UN as a whole to the invasion of Iraq has been attributed to Anti-Americanism and a resentment of the cultural and economic dominance of the USA. In the case of France, it has also been attributed an attempt to court the Arab world and its local Muslim population. [76]
On 28 April 2005, the UK government published the full advice given by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith on 7 March 2003 on the legality of the war. The publication of this document followed the leaking of the summary to the press the day before. In a Labour press conference, Tony Blair responded to a question from journalist Jon Snow asking whether the full report could be published by saying 'we may as well, you 've seen most of it already '. In the document, Lord Goldsmith weighs the different arguments on whether military action against Iraq would be legal without a second UN Resolution. Saying that "regime change cannot be the objective of military action," it clearly stated that invasion for the purpose of regime change was illegal. [77]
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Downing Street Memo
On 1 May 2005, a related UK document known as the Downing Street memo, detailing the minutes of a meeting on 26 July 2002, was apparently leaked to The Times. British officials did not dispute the document 's authenticity, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair 's spokesman has called the document "nothing new." The document corroborates the information in the full advice of Lord Goldsmith: "The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult.," and states furthermore that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime 's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." and that "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.." On 5 May, John Conyers and 89 members of congress asked George W. Bush, in a formal letter, to answer some questions about the document, including whether he or anyone in his administration disputes its accuracy. [78] The Bush Administration has stated that they will not answer the questions.
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Call for British investigation into legality
On 22 May 2005, the British government declined a request from the families of soldiers killed in Iraq for an investigation into the legality of the war. The families are now seeking a judicial review of the request. [79] [80]
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Opposition view of the invasion
Those who opposed the war in Iraq did not regard Iraq 's violation of UN resolutions to be a valid case for the war, since no single nation has the authority, under the UN Charter, to judge Iraq 's compliance to UN resolutions and to enforce them. Furthermore, critics argued that the US was applying double standards of justice, noting that other nations such as Israel are also in breach of UN resolutions and have nuclear weapons; this argument is not a black and white matter, [81], as some claim that Iraq 's history of actually using chemical weapons (against Iran and the Kurdish population in Iraq) suggested at the time that Iraq was a far greater threat. Others claim, also, that this contradicts previous U.S. policy, since the US was one of many nations that supplied chemical weapon precursors, even when well aware of what it was being used for.
Although Iraq was known to have pursued an active nuclear weapons development program previously, as well as to have tried to procure materials and equipment for their manufacture, these weapons and material have yet to be discovered. President Bush 's reference to Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium in Africa in his 2003 State of the Union address are by now commonly considered as having been based on forged documents (see Yellowcake forgery).
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Invasion
See 2003–2004 occupation of Iraq timeline for the White House statements and 2003 Iraq war timeline for a more detailed account of the invasion.
Prior to invasion, the United States and other coalition forces involved in the 1991 Persian Gulf War had been engaged in a low-level conflict with Iraq, enforcing Iraqi no-fly zones. Iraqi air-defense installations were engaged on a fairly regular basis after repeatedly targeting American and British air patrols. In mid-2002, the U.S. began to change its response strategy, more carefully selecting targets in the southern part of the country in order to disrupt the military command structure in Iraq. A change in enforcement tactics was acknowledged at the time, but it was not made public that this was part of a plan known as Operation Southern Focus.
The tonnage of bombs dropped increased from 0 in March 2002 and 0.3 in April 2002 to between 7 and 14 tons per month in May-August, reaching a pre-war peak of 54.6 tons in September - prior to Congress ' 11 October authorisation of the invasion. The September attacks included a 5 September 100-aircraft attack on the main air defence site in western Iraq. According to The New Statesman this was "Located at the furthest extreme of the southern no-fly zone, far away from the areas that needed to be patrolled to prevent attacks on the Shias, it was destroyed not because it was a threat to the patrols, but to allow allied special forces operating from Jordan to enter Iraq undetected."[82]
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Opening attack
At approximately 02:30 UTC or about 90 minutes after the lapse of the 48-hour deadline, at 05:30 local time, explosions were heard in Baghdad; coinciding with Australian Special Air Service Regiment personnel crossing the border into southern Iraq. At 03:15 UTC, or 10:15 pm EST, U.S. President George W. Bush announced that he had ordered the coalition to launch an "attack of opportunity" against targets in Iraq.
Before the invasion, many observers had expected a lengthy campaign of aerial bombing in advance of any ground action, taking as examples the Persian Gulf War or the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. In practice, U.S. plans envisioned simultaneous air and ground assaults to decapitate the Iraqi forces as fast as possible (see Shock and Awe), attempting to bypass Iraqi military units and cities in most cases. The assumption was that superior U.S. mobility and coordination would allow the U.S. to attack the heart of the Iraqi command structure and destroy it in a short time, and that this would minimize civilian deaths and damage to infrastructure. It was expected that the elimination of the leadership would lead to the collapse of the army and the government, and that much of the population would support the invaders once the government had been weakened. Occupation of cities and attacks on peripheral military units were viewed as undesirable distractions.
Following Turkey 's decision to deny any official use of its territory, the U.S. was forced to abandon a planned simultaneous attack from north and south, so the primary bases for the invasion were in Kuwait and other Persian Gulf nations. One result of this was that one of the divisions intended for the invasion was forced to relocate and was unable to take part in the invasion until well into the war. Many observers felt that the U.S. devoted insufficient troops to the invasion, and that this (combined with the failure to occupy cities) put them at a major disadvantage in achieving security and order throughout the country when local support failed to meet expectations.
NASA Landsat 7 image of Baghdad, April 2, 2003.
The invasion was swift, with the collapse of the Iraq government and the military of Iraq in about three weeks. The oil infrastructure of Iraq was rapidly secured with limited damage in that time. Securing the oil infrastructure was considered important. In the first Persian Gulf War, while retreating from Kuwait, the Iraqi army had set many oil wells on fire, in an attempt to disguise troop movements and to distract Coalition forces--a side effect of these actions were many environmental problems. Presumably, oil infrastructure was secured for financial reasons as well as strategic. The British Royal Marines 3 Commando Brigade launched an air and amphibious assault on the Al-Faw peninsula during the closing hours of 20 March to secure the oil fields there; the amphibious assault was supported by frigates of the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy. The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, attached to 3 Commando Brigade, attacked the port of Umm Qasr. The British 16 Air Assault Brigade also secured the oilfields in southern Iraq in places like Rumaila.
In keeping with the rapid advance plan, the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division moved westward and then northward through the desert toward Baghdad, while the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and 1 (UK) Armoured Division moved northward through marshland. All forces avoided major cities except when necessary to capture river crossings over the Tigris and Euphrates. The British 7 Armoured Brigade ( 'The Desert Rats ') fought their way into Iraq 's second-largest city, Basra, on 6 April, coming under constant attack by regulars and Fedayeen, while the 3rd Parachute Regiment cleared the 'old quarter ' of the city that was inaccessible to vehicles. The entering of Basra had only been achieved after two weeks of conflict, which included the biggest tank battle by British forces since World War II when the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards destroyed 14 Iraqi tanks on 27 March. The UK 's control of the city was, however, limited. Element 's of 1 (UK) Armoured Division began to advance north towards U.S. positions around Al Amarah on 9 April. Pre-existing electrical and water shortages continued through the conflict and looting began as Iraqi forces collapsed. While British forces began working with local Iraqi Police to enforce order, humanitarian aid began to arrive from ships landing in the port city of Umm Qasr and trucks entering the country through Kuwait.
After a rapid initial advance, the first major pause occurred in the vicinity of Hillah and Karbala, where U.S. leading elements, hampered by dust storms, met resistance from Iraqi troops and paused for some days for re-supply before continuing toward Baghdad.
The 2nd Battalion of the U.S. 5th Special Forces Group (part of the Green Berets) conducted reconnaissance in the cities of Basra, Karbala and various other locations. In the North 10th SFG had the mission of aiding the Kurdish factions such as the Union of Kurdistan and the Democratic Party of Kurdistan. Turkey had officially forbidden any US troops from using their bases, so lead elements of the 10th had to make certain detours; their journey was supposed to take four hours but instead it took ten. However, Turkey did allow the use of its air space and so the rest of the 10th flew in. The mission was to destroy Ansar al-Islam and a Kurdish faction. The target was Sargat and after heavy fighting with both groups the special forces finally took Sargat and pushed the remaining units out of Northern Iraq. After Sargat was taken, Bravo Company along with their Kurdish Allies pushed south towards Tikrit and the surrounding towns of Northern Iraq. During the Battle of the Green Line, Bravo Company with their Kurdish allies pushed back, destroyed, or routed 13th Iraqi Armoured and Infantry Division. Bravo took Tikrit. The 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted into H3, an Iraqi Airfield, and secured it for future use. Iraq was the largest deployment of Special Forces since Vietnam.
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Fall of Baghdad (April 2003)
Three weeks into the invasion, U.S. forces moved into Baghdad. Initial plans were for armor units to surround the city and a street-to-street battle to commence using Airborne units. However, within days a "Thunder Run" of US tanks was launched to test Iraqi defenses, with about 30 tanks rushing from a staging base to the Baghdad airport. They met heavy resistance, including many suicide attacks, but launched another run two days later into the Palaces of Saddam Hussein, where they established a base. Within hours of the palace seizure, and television coverage of this spreading through Iraq, Iraqi resistance crumbled around the city. Iraqi government officials had either disappeared or had conceded defeat. On April 9, 2003, Baghdad was formally secured by US forces and the power of Saddam Hussein was declared ended. Saddam had vanished, and his whereabouts were unknown. Many Iraqis celebrated the downfall of Saddam by vandalizing the many portraits and statues of him together with other pieces of his personality cult. One widely publicized event was the dramatic toppling of a large statue of Saddam in central Baghdad by a US tank, while a crowd of Iraqis apparently cheered the Marines on. The spontaneity of this event has been disputed, with evidence that it was staged by US forces. More detail is available under media coverage.
General Tommy Franks assumed control of Iraq as the supreme commander of occupation forces. Shortly after the sudden collapse of the defense of Baghdad, rumors were circulating in Iraq and elsewhere that there had been a deal struck (a "safqua") wherein the US had bribed key members of the Iraqi military elite and/or the Ba 'ath party itself to stand down. In May 2003, General Franks retired, and confirmed in an interview with Defense Week that the U.S. had paid Iraqi military leaders to defect. The extent of the defections and their effect on the war are unclear.
Coalition troops promptly began searching for the key members of Saddam Hussein 's government. These individuals were identified by a variety of means, most famously through sets of most-wanted Iraqi playing cards.
Saddam Hussein shortly after his capture
On 22 July 2003 during a raid by the U.S. 101st Airborne Division and men from Task Force 20, Saddam Hussein 's sons Uday and Qusay, and one of his grandsons were killed.
Saddam Hussein was captured on December 13, 2003 by the U.S. Army 's 4th Infantry Division and members of Task Force 121 during Operation Red Dawn.
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Other areas
In the north, Kurdish forces opposed to Saddam Hussein had already occupied for years an autonomous area in northern Iraq. With the assistance of U.S. Special Forces and airstrikes, they were able to rout the Iraqi units near them and to occupy oil-rich Kirkuk on 10 April.
U.S. special forces had also been involved in the extreme west of Iraq, attempting to occupy key roads to Syria and airbases. In one case two armored platoons were used to convince Iraqi leadership that an entire armored battalion was entrenched in the west of Iraq.
On 15 April, U.S. forces mostly took control of Tikrit, the last major outpost in central Iraq, with an attack led by the Marines ' Task Force Tarawa (comprised of units from 1st Marine Expeditionary Force) and followed by elements of the Army 's 4th Infantry Division.
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Summary of the invasion
Coalition forces managed to topple the government and capture the key cities of a large nation in only 28 days, taking minimal losses while also trying to avoid large civilian deaths and even high numbers of dead Iraqi military forces. The invasion was, in a military context, a complete success, and did not require the huge army built up for the 1991 Gulf War, which numbered half a million Allied troops. This did prove short-sighted, however, due to requirement for a much larger force to combat the irregular Iraqi forces in the aftermath of the war.
The Saddam-built army had no weapons that could stand up to Coalition forces, and managed only to stage a few ambushes that gained a great deal of media attention but in reality did nothing to slow the Coalition advance. The Iraqi T-72 tanks, the heaviest armored vehicles in the Iraqi Army, were both outdated and ill-maintained, and when they did stand up to Coalition forces were destroyed quickly, thanks in part due to the Coalition 's control of the air. The U.S. Air Force and British Royal Air Force operated with impunity throughout the country, pinpointing heavily defended enemy targets and destroying them before ground troops arrived.
The main battle tanks (MBT) of the Coalition forces, the U.S. M1 Abrams and British Challenger 2, proved their worth in the rapid advance across the country. Even with the large number of RPG attacks by irregular Iraqi forces, few Coalition tanks were lost and no tank crewmen was killed by hostile fire. All three British tank crew fatalities were a result of friendly fire. The only tank loss sustained by the British Army was a Challenger 2 of the Queen 's Royal Lancers that was hit by another Challenger 2, killing two crewmen.
The Iraqi Army suffered from poor morale, even amongst the supposedly elite Republican Guard, and entire units simply melted away into the crowds upon the approach of Coalition troops. Other Iraqi Army officers were bribed by the CIA or coerced into surrendering to coalition forces. Worse, the Iraqi Army had incompetent leadership - reports state that Qusay Hussein, charged with the defense of Baghdad, dramatically shifted the positions of the two main divisions protecting Baghdad several times in the days before the arrival of U.S. forces, and as a result the units within were both confused and further demoralized when the U.S. Army attacked. By no means did the Coalition invasion force see the entire Iraqi military thrown against it, and it is assumed that most units disintegrated to either join the growing Iraqi insurgency or return to their homes.
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Security, Looting and War Damage
Looting took place in the days following. It was reported that the National Museum of Iraq was among the looted sites. The assertion that US forces did not guard the museum because they were guarding the Ministry of Oil and Ministry of Interior is apparently true. According to U.S. officials the "reality of the situation on the ground" was that hospitals, water plants, and ministries with vital intelligence needed security more than other sites. There were only enough US troops on the ground to guard a certain number of the many sites that ideally needed protection, and so, apparently, some "hard choices" were made. Also, it was reported that many trucks of purported Iraqi Gold were seized by US forces before they left the country.
U.S. troops topple a giant statue of Saddam in Baghdad, following the capture of the city in April.
The FBI was soon called into Iraq to track down the stolen items. It was found that the initial claims of looting of substantial portions of the collection were somewhat exaggerated and for months people have been returning objects to the museum. Yet, as some of the dust has settled, thousands of antiquities are still missing, including dozens from the main collection.
There has been speculation that some objects still missing were not taken by looters after the war, but were taken by Saddam Hussein or his entourage before or during the fighting. There have also been reports that early looters had keys to vaults that held rarer pieces, and some have speculated as to the pre-meditated systematic removal of key artifacts.
The National Museum of Iraq was only one of many museums and sites of cultural significance that were affected by the war. Many in the arts and antiquities communities briefed policy makers in advance of the need to secure Iraqi museums. Despite the looting being lighter than initially feared, the cultural loss of items from ancient Sumeria is significant.
Zainab Bahrani, professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, reports that a helicopter landing pad was constructed in the heart of the ancient city of Babylon, and "removed layers of archeological earth from the site. The daily flights of the helicopters rattle the ancient walls and the winds created by their rotors blast sand against the fragile bricks. When my colleague at the site, Maryam Moussa, and I asked military personnel in charge that the helipad be shut down, the response was that it had to remain open for security reasons, for the safety of the troops." [83]
Bahrani also reports that this summer "the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both sixth century BC, collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters."
Electrical power is scarce in post-war Iraq, Bahrani reports, and some fragile artifacts, including the Ottoman Archive, will not survive the loss of refrigeration.
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"End of major combat operations" (May 2003)
The USS Abraham Lincoln returning to port carrying its Mission Accomplished banner
President George W. Bush on the Abraham Lincoln wearing a flight suit after landing on the aircraft carrier in a military jet.
On 1 May 2003 George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, in a Lockheed S-3 Viking, where he gave a speech announcing the end of major combat operations in the Iraq war. Bush 's landing was criticized by opponents as an overly theatrical and expensive stunt. Clearly visible in the background was a banner stating "Mission Accomplished." The banner, made by White House staff[84]) and hung by the U.S. Navy, was criticized as premature - especially later as the guerrilla war dragged on. The White House subsequently released a statement alleging that the sign and Bush 's visit referred to the initial invasion of Iraq and disputing the claim of theatrics. The speech itself noted: "We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous." ([85])
"Major combat" concluding did not mean that peace had returned to Iraq. Iraq was subsequently marked by violent conflict between U.S.-led occupation of Iraq soldiers and forces described by the occupiers as insurgents. Some critics of the invasion (such as former CIA analyst Bill Christison (writing in Counterpunch)) argue that there are parallels between the current situation in Iraq and the Vietnam War ([86], or film-maker George Lucas [87]). Many supporters of the invasion disagree, for example U.S. Senator John McCain, a Vietnam veteran, who said in a speech given to the U.S. Senate on April 7, 2004: "I know we do not face another Vietnam." [88]
The ongoing resistance in Iraq was concentrated in, but not limited to, an area referred to by Western media and the occupying forces as the Sunni triangle and Baghdad [89]. Critics point out that the regions where violence is most common are also the most populated regions. This resistance may be described as guerrilla warfare. The tactics in use were to include mortars, suicide bombers, roadside bombs, small arms fire, and RPGs, as well as sabotage against the oil infrastructure. There are also accusations, questioned by some, about attacks toward the power and water infrastructure.
There is evidence that some of the resistance was organized, perhaps by the fedayeen and other Saddam Hussein or Ba 'ath loyalists, religious radicals, Iraqis angered by the occupation, and foreign fighters. [90] The insurgents are generally known to the Coalition forces as Ali Baba, after a character in the Arabian Nights .
After the war, information began to emerge about several failed Iraqi peace initiatives, including offers as extensive as allowing 5,000 FBI agents in to search the country for weapons of mass destruction, support for the US-backed Roadmap For Peace, and the abdication of Saddam Hussein to be replaced under UN elections.
On May 24, 2005 the International Institute for Strategic Studies stated that Washington 's policies of promoting democracy in Iraq and elsewhere looked "increasingly effective".
In June of 2005 a new service medal, known as the Iraq Campaign Medal, was authorized by the United States Department of Defense for service performed during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The decoration repalced the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, which had previously been issued by Iraq service. This gave indication that the 2003 invasion of Iraq is seen as a separate conflict from the war on terrorism as a whole.
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Deaths
See Casualties in the conflict in Iraq for details.
Possible estimates on the total number of people killed in the invasion and occupation of Iraq vary widely. All estimates below are as of August 3, 2005, and include both the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the following Post-invasion Iraq, 2003-2005.
Iraqis Counts of civilian deaths specifically documented range from
23,209 to 26,264 1. A study in the Lancet estimated 100,000 deaths2 from all causes as of October, 2004, with roughly three times as many injured. This has been disputed 3. [91][92] (Lancet report [pdf]) [93] [94]
U.S. armed forces 1821 deaths, 13,657 combat wounded (6,568 evacuated) + unknown non-combat injuries [95][96]
Armed forces of other coalition countries 194 [97]
Non-Iraqi civilians from 254 to 434 [98]source
1 These only refer to deaths reported by two or more news organizations, and include "all deaths which the Occupying Authority has a binding responsibility to prevent under the Geneva Conventions and Hague Regulations. This includes civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation."
2 The study 's estimate of total deaths ranges from 8,000 to 194,000 at a 95% confidence interval. This estimate was made in October of 2004.
3 For instance a written Ministerial Statement (17 November 2004) by the UK government [99]
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Related phrases
This campaign featured a variety of new terminology, much of it initially coined by the U.S. government or military; many of the phrases carried an implicit bias. The name "Operation Iraqi Freedom," for example, expresses one viewpoint of the purpose of the invasion, and is almost never used outside the United States. Also notable was the usage "death squads" to refer to fedayeen paramilitary forces. Members of the Saddam Hussein government were called by disparaging nicknames - e.g., "Chemical Ali" (Ali Hassan al-Majid), "Baghdad Bob" or "Comical Ali" (Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf), and "Mrs. Anthrax" or "Chemical Sally" (Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash). Saddam Hussein was systematically referred to as "Saddam," which some Westerners mistakenly believed to be disparaging. (Although there is no consensus about how to refer to him in English, "Saddam" is acceptable usage, and is how people in Iraq and the Middle East generally refer to him. [100])
Terminology introduced or popularized during the war include:
• "Axis of Evil," originally used by President Bush during a State of the Union address on January 29, 2002 to describe the countries of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. [101]
• "Coalition of the willing," a term that originated in the Clinton era (eg: interview, President Clinton, ABC, June 8, 1994), and used by the Bush Administration to describe the countries contributing troops in the invasion, of which the U.S. and U.K. were the primary members.
• "Decapitating the regime," a euphemism for either overthrowing the government or killing Saddam Hussein.
• "Embedding," United States practice of assigning civilian journalists to U.S. military units.
• "Minder," an Iraqi government official assigned to watch over a foreign correspondent
• "Old Europe," Rumsfeld 's term used to describe the divisions between European governments: "You 're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don 't. I think that 's old Europe."
• "Regime change," a euphemism for overthrowing a government.
• "Shock and Awe," the strategy of reducing an enemy 's will to fight through displays of overwhelming force.
Many slogans and terms coined came to be used by President Bush 's political opponents, or those opposed to the war. For example, in April of 2003 John Kerry, the Democratic candidate in the presidential election, said at a campaign rally: "What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States." [102]
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Media coverage
Main article: 2003 invasion of Iraq media coverage
Media coverage of this war was different in certain ways from that of the Persian Gulf War. Victoria Clarke, the Assistant Defense Secretary (formerly with Hill and Knowlton, the PR firm infamous for promoting the false baby-incubator story during the first Persian Gulf War)[103] devised the Pentagon 's policy of "embedding" reporters with military units. Viewers in the United States were able to watch U.S. tanks rolling into Baghdad live on television, with a split screen image of the Iraqi Minister of Information claiming that U.S. forces were not in the city. Many foreign observers of the media and especially the television coverage in the USA felt that it was excessively partisan and in some cases "gung-ho."
Critics of the war, especially those on the political left argued that media organizations should be neutral, and not be "expected" to support the military of their country. In Europe in particular such critics have long argued that the American press and news media are unquestioningly pro-Bush. The fact that American news programs accepted the administration 's war terminology like "Operation Iraqi Freedom" uncritically, and that many American reporters wore US flags in their lapels, were seen as inappropriate behavior.
European coverage was more critical of the invasion, and tended to put a greater emphasis on coalition setbacks and losses and civilian deaths than the US media [104] [105]. Supporters of the war, especially American conservatives often characterized European media coverage as anti-American and "left-wing."
Arab media coverage of the conflict was criticized as biased towards the old Iraqi regime. For example, the Chicago Tribune on April 10, 2003 reported that the defeat sent a shockwave of incredulity across the Middle East, and quoted a Damascus housewife who believed that jubilant Iraqis were being paid to act that way in front of the cameras [106].
Another difference was the wide and independent coverage on the World Wide Web, demonstrating that for web-surfers in rich countries and the elites in poorer countries, the Internet had become mature as a medium, giving about half a billion people access to different versions of events.
First-hand reports by Iraqis, however, were spotty during the war itself, since internet penetration in Iraq was already very weak (with an estimate of 12,000 users in Iraq in 2002). The deliberate destruction of Iraqi telecommunication facilities by US forces made Internet communication even more difficult. The web did offer some first-hand reports from bloggers such as Salam Pax, and additional information was available on soldier blogs.
Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based news network, which was formed in 1996, gained worldwide attention for its coverage of the war. Their broadcasts were popular in much of the Arab world, but also to some degree in Western nations, with major American networks such as CNN and MSNBC re-broadcasting some of their coverage. Al-Jazeera was well-known for their graphic footage of civilian deaths, which American news media branded as overly sensationalistic. The English website of Al-Jazeera was brought down during the middle of the Iraq war by Internet vandals.
In August of 2004, Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi had al-Jazeera 's Baghdad offices closed, and temporarily banned the station from broadcasting in Iraq. A couple of weeks later, the ban was made indefinite, and Iraqi security officers raided the station, sealing it off. Al-Jazeera called the raid "reminiscent of the way certain other regimes have behaved."[107]
Military leaders shut off the BBC connection to HMS Ark Royal after grumbling among sailors that it was biased in favor of Iraqi reports. [108] By contrast, a study by Justin Lewis at Cardiff University found that the BBC reports had been somewhat sanitized, and did not question pro-war assumptions.
Belgian journalist Alain Hertoghe published a book accusing the French press in particular and the European press in general of not being objective in its coverage of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Hertoghe 's book, La Guerre à Outrances (The War of Outrages), criticizes French press coverage of the war as being pessimistic of the US led Coalition 's chance of success and continually focusing on challenges faced during the invasion. Hertoghe also claims in his book that the European media became so wrapped up in its own particular biases against the United States that they fed disinformation to their readers and viewers and misled them as to the unfolding events. His selection of press articles to illustrate his point has been criticised as somewhat selective. The European coverage 's concerns about the military becoming bogged down in Iraq and the war ending badly seem to have come true, as late as eighteen months after the declaration of the end of "major hostilities." Since being published, Hertoghe has been fired from his position at French newspaper La Croix. It was claimed that only one major French newspaper had published a review of his book.
International initiatives [109] protested against the U.S. media for downplaying and misinterpreting protests as anti-Americanism and accused them of foul language such as calling Chirac "A balding Joan of Arc in drag", the French "weasels" (New York Post) or stating that "Chirac and his poodle Putin have severely damaged the United Nations". Questions have also been raised about U.S. media coverage, given that in the U.S. a pre-war Washington Post poll showed that 69% of the population thought it "likely" or "very likely" that Iraq was involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, although no evidence of an Iraqi connection to the attack is known. [110]
Journalist Peter Arnett was fired by MSNBC and National Geographic after he declared in an interview with the Iraqi information ministry that he believed the U.S. strategy of "shock and awe" had failed. He also went on to tell Iraqi State TV that he had told "Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces, the determination of the government, and the willingness to fight for their country," and that reports from Baghdad about civilian deaths had helped antiwar protesters undermine the Bush administration 's strategy. The interview was given 10 days before the fall of Baghdad.
On 2 April 2003, in a speech given by British Home Secretary David Blunkett while in New York City, Blunkett also commented on what he believed to be sympathetic and corrupt reporting of Iraq by Arab news sources. He told the audience that "It 's hard to get the true facts if the reporters of Al Jazeera are actually linked into, and are only there because they are provided with facilities and support from, the régime." Ironically, his speech came only hours before Al Jazeera was ejected from Baghdad by the Iraqi government.
U.S. media coverage of other wars has included photographs of the flag-draped coffins of American military personnel killed in action. During the invasion and occupation of Iraq, however, the Bush administration prohibited release of such photographs, and, according to Senator Patrick Leahy, scheduled the return of wounded soldiers for after midnight so that the press would not see them. [111] A number of Dover photographs were eventually released in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by blogger Russ Kick. The practice of transporting wounded soldiers to the US at night was documented by both Matt Drudge [112] as well as Salon Magazine. [113] This ban was instituted in 2000 by the Clinton administration, and mirrors a similar ban put in place during the Gulf War [114], though it appears not to have been enforced as tightly during previous military operations.
CAUSES OF CONFLICT:
There are three basic causes to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. First, Iraq had long considered Kuwait to be a part of Iraq. This claim led to several confrontations over the years (see below), and continued hostility. Also, it can be argued that with Saddam Hussein 's attempted invasion of Iran defeated, he sought easier conquests against his weak southern neighbors.
Second, rich deposits of oil straddled the ill-defined border and Iraq constantly claimed that Kuwaiti oil rigs were illegally tapping into Iraqi oil fields. Middle Eastern deserts make border delineation difficult and this has caused many conflicts in the region.
Finally, the fallout from the First Persian Gulf War between Iraq and Iran strained relations between Baghdad and Kuwait. This war began with an Iraqi invasion of Iran and degenerated into a bloody form of trench warfare as the Iranians slowly drove Saddam Hussein 's armies back into Iraq. Kuwait and many other Arab nations supported Iraq against the Islamic Revolutionary government of Iran, fearful that Saddam 's defeat could herald a wave of Iranian-inspired revolution throughout the Arab world. Following the end of the war, relations between Iraq and Kuwait deteriorated; with a lack of gratitude from the Baghdad government for help in the war and the reawakening of old issues regarding the border and Kuwaiti sovereignty. Iraq-Kuwait Relations Prior to the 1990 Invasion.
1961- Iraq (President Qasim) threatens Kuwait, invoking old Ottoman claims. Britain supports Kuwait and Iraq backs down.
1973, March- Iraq occupies as-Samitah, a border post on Kuwait-Iraq border. Dispute began when Iraq demanded the right to occupy the Kuwaiti islands of Bubiyan and Warbah. Saudi Arabia and the Arab League convinced Iraq to withdraw.
1980-1988- Kuwait supports Iraq in the First Persian Gulf War with Iran.
DESCRIPTION OF CONFLICT:
Amid growing tension between the two Persian Gulf neighbors, Saddam Hussein concluded that the United States and the rest of the outside world would not interfere to defend Kuwait. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait and quickly seized control of the small nation. Within days, the United States, along with the United Nations, demanded Iraq 's immediate withdrawal. U.S. and other UN member nations began deploying troops in Saudi Arabia within the week, and the world-wide coalition began to form under UN authority.
By January of 1991, over half a million allied troops were deployed in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Gulf region. Intense diplomacy between U.S. and Iraqi officials failed to bring an Iraqi withdrawal, so, on January 16, 1991, Allied forces began the devastating bombing of Iraq and her forces in Kuwait. The Allied bombing sought to damage Iraq 's infrastructure so as to hinder her ability to make war while also hurting both civilian and military morale. To counter the air attack, Saddam ordered the launching of his feared SCUD missiles at both Israel and Saudi Arabia. He hoped to provoke the Israelis into striking back at Iraq, which he theorized would split the Arab nations from the anti-Iraq coalition due to the ongoing hostility between Israel and the Arab world. Israel came very close to retaliating, but held back due to President George Bush 's pledge to protect Israeli cities from the SCUDs. As a result of this promise, U.S. Patriot missile batteries found themselves deployed in Israel to shoot down the SCUDs. Another result of the SCUD launches was to divert Allied air power from hitting the Iraqi army to hunting for the elusive mobile missile launchers. Even so, the Allied air strikes and cruise missile attacks against Iraq proved more devastating than expected.
When the Allied armies launched the ground war on February 23, the Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait were already beaten. Cut off from their supply bases and headquarters by the intense air campaign, thousands of Iraqi soldiers simply gave up rather than fight, as the Allies pushed through Iraq 's defenses with relative ease. In the few cases where the more elite Iraqi forces, such as the Republican Guard, stood and fought, superior American, British and French equipment and training proved the undoing of the Soviet-equipped Iraqis.
By February 26, U.S. and Allied Arab forces, along with the underground Kuwaiti Resistance, controlled Kuwait City and Allied air forces pounded the retreating Iraqi occupation army. In southern Iraq, Allied armored forces stood at the Euphrates River near Basra, and internal rebellions began to break out against Saddam 's regime. On February 27, President Bush ordered a cease-fire and the surviving Iraqi troops were allowed to escape back into southern Iraq. On March 3, 1991, Iraq accepted the terms of the cease-fire and the fighting ended.
CONSEQUENCES OF CONFLICT:
1. Saddam 's second war of foreign conquest ended even worse than the first one. Iraq again stood defeated with the liberation of Kuwait.
2. Despite the crushing defeat and subsequent Shiite and Kurdish rebellions, Saddam 's government retained a strong grip on power in Iraq.
3. As a result of the cease-fire terms, Iraq had to accept the imposition of "no-fly zones" over her territory and United Nations weapons inspection teams sifting through her nuclear and other weapons programs.
4. The economic and trade sanctions begun during the war continue to the present day, contributing to severe economic hardship in Iraq. Some reports say hundreds of thousands of children have died due to the sanctions. There are no indications that the government or military suffer undo hardships.
5. While the world (and the United States and Europe), concentrated on Iraq, Syria moved to crush the last resistance to her de facto control of Lebanon, thus ending that country 's long civil war. It is believed that Syria 's President Assad was given a free hand to deal with Lebanon in return for joining the war in Kuwait.
6. When Yemen declared sympathy for Iraq, Saudi Arabia expelled upwards of a million Yemeni guest workers, causing economic hardship in Yemen and increased tension between the two neighbors. See Saudi-Yemen Border Conflict page.
The Gulf War
By Mitchell Bard
________________________________________
Since coming to power, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had been a leader of the rejectionist Arab states and one of the most belligerent foes of Israel. On April 2, 1990, Saddam 's rhetoric became more threatening: "I swear to God we will let our fire eat half of Israel if it tries to wage anything against Iraq." Saddam said his nation 's chemical weapons capability was matched only by that of the United States and the Soviet Union, and that he would annihilate anyone who threatened Iraq with an atomic bomb by the "double chemical" (Reuters, April 2, 1990).
Several days later, Saddam said that war with Israel would not end until all Israeli-held territory was restored to Arab hands. He added that Iraq could launch chemical weapons at Israel from several different sites (Reuters, April 18, 1990). The Iraqi leader also made the alarming disclosure that his commanders had the freedom to launch attacks against Israel without consulting the high command if Israel attacked Iraq. The head of the Iraqi Air Force subsequently said he had orders to strike Israel if the Jewish State launched a raid against Iraq or any other Arab country (UPI, April 22, 1990).
On June 18, 1990, Saddam told an Islamic Conference meeting in Baghdad: "We will strike at [the Israelis] with all the arms in our possession if they attack Iraq or the Arabs." He declared "Palestine has been stolen," and exhorted the Arab world to "recover the usurped rights in Palestine and free Jerusalem from Zionist captivity" (Baghdad Domestic Service, June 18, 1990).
Saddam 's threat came in the wake of revelations that Britain and the United States foiled an attempt to smuggle American-made "krytron" nuclear triggers to Iraq (Washington Post, March 29, 1990). Britain 's MI6 intelligence service prepared a secret assessment three years earlier that Hussein had ordered an all-out effort to develop nuclear weapons (Washington Times, April 3, 1990). After Saddam used chemical weapons against his own Kurdish population in Halabja in 1988, few people doubted his willingness to use nuclear weapons against Jews in Israel if he had the opportunity.
Israeli fears were further raised by reports in the Arabic press, beginning in January 1990, that Jordan and Iraq had formed "joint military battalions" drawn from the various ground, air and naval units. "These battalions will serve as emergency forces to confront any foreign challenge or threat to either of the two countries," one newspaper said (Al¬Ittihad, January 26, 1990). In addition, the two countries were said to have formed a joint air squadron (Radio Monte Carlo, February 17, 1990). This was to be the first step toward a unified Arab corps, Jordanian columnist Mu 'nis al-Razzaz disclosed. "If we do not hurry up and start forming a unified military Arab force, we will not be able to confront the Zionist ambitions supported by U.S. aid," he said (Al-Dustur, February, 18, 1990). Given the history of Arab alliances forming as a prelude to planning an attack, Israel found these developments worrisome.
In April 1990, British customs officers found tubes about to be loaded onto an Iraqi-chartered ship that were believed to be part of a giant cannon that would enable Baghdad to lob nuclear or chemical missiles into Israel or Iran (Reuters, April 17, 1990). Iraq denied it was building a "supergun," but, after the war, it was learned that Iraq had built such a weapon (Washington Post, August 14, 1991).
Iraq emerged from its war with Iran with one of the largest and best-equipped military forces in the world. In fact, Iraq had one million battle¬tested troops, more than 700 combat aircraft, 6,000 tanks, ballistic missiles and chemical weapons. Although the U.S. and its allies won a quick victory, the magnitude of Hussein 's arsenal only became clear after the war when UN investigators found evidence of a vast program to build chemical and nuclear weapons (Washington Post, August 8, 1991).
Iraq also served as a base for several terrorist groups that menaced Israel, including the PLO and Abu Nidal 's Fatah Revolutionary Council.
After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein consistently threatened to strike Israel if his country was attacked. If the U.S. moves against Iraq, he said in December 1990, "then Tel Aviv will receive the next attack, whether or not Israel takes part" (Reuters, December 26, 1990). At a press conference, following his January 9, 1991, meeting with Secretary of State James Baker, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz was asked if the war starts, would Iraq attack Israel. He replied bluntly: "Yes. Absolutely, yes."
Ultimately, Saddam carried out his threat.
The Nuclear Danger
In 1981, Israel became convinced Iraq was approaching the capability to produce a nuclear weapon. To preempt the building of a weapon that would undoubtedly be directed against them, the Israelis launched their surprise attack destroying the Osirak nuclear complex. At the time, Israel was widely criticized. On June 19, the UN Security Council unanimously condemned the raid. Critics minimized the importance of Iraq 's nuclear program, claiming that because Baghdad had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and permitted its facilities to be inspected, Israeli fears were baseless.
It was not until after Iraq invaded Kuwait that U.S. officials began to acknowledge publicly that Baghdad was developing nuclear weapons and that it was far closer to reaching its goal than previously thought. Again, many critics argued the Administration was only seeking a justification for a war with Iraq.
Months later, after allied forces had announced the destruction of Iraq 's nuclear facilities, UN inspectors found Saddam 's program to develop weapons was far more extensive than even the Israelis believed. Analysts had thought Iraq was incapable of enriching uranium for bombs, but Saddam 's researchers used several methods (including one thought to be obsolete) that were believed to have made it possible for Iraq to have built at least one bomb.
American Interests Are Threatened
Prior to President George Bush 's announcement of Operation Desert Storm, critics of Israel were claiming the Jewish State and its supporters were pushing Washington to start a war with Iraq to eliminate it as a military threat. President Bush made the U.S. position clear, however, in his speech on August 2, 1990, saying that the United States has "long¬standing vital interests" in the Persian Gulf. Moreover, Iraq 's "naked aggression" violated the UN charter. The President expressed concern for other small nations in the area as well as American citizens living or working in the region. "I view a fundamental responsibility of my Presidency [as being] to protect American citizens" (Washington Post, August 3, 1990).
A U.S. Patriot missile seeks out an incoming SCUD
Over the course of the Gulf crisis, the President and other top Administration officials made clear the view that U.S. interests-primarily oil supplies-were threatened by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Most Americans agreed with the President 's decision to go to war. For example, the Washington Post/ABC News Poll on January 16, 1991, found that 76% of Americans approved of the U.S. going to war with Iraq and 22% disapproved (Washington Post, January 17, 1991).
It is true that Israel viewed Iraq as a serious threat to its security given its leadership of the rejectionist camp. Israeli concerns proved justified after the war began and Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles at its civilian population centers. The Bush Administration had promised to prevent Iraq from attacking Israel, but the U.S. troops assigned to scour the desert for Scud missiles had poor intelligence and failed to destroy a single real missile (they did destroy several decoys) in nearly 2,500 missions (Jerusalem Post, January 30, 2003).
Israel has never asked American troops to fight its battles. Although Israeli forces were prepared to participate in the Gulf War, they did not because the United States asked them not to. Even after the provocation of the Scud missile attacks, Israel assented to U.S. appeals not to respond.
Israel Aids Allied War Effort
Israel was never expected to play a major role in hostilities in the Gulf. American officials knew the Arabs would not allow Israel to help defend them; they also knew U.S. troops would have to intervene because the Gulf states could not protect themselves.
Israel 's posture reflected a deliberate political decision in response to American requests. Nevertheless, it did aid the United States ' successful campaign to roll back Iraq 's aggression. For example:
• The IDF was the sole military force in the region that could successfully challenge the Iraqi army. That fact, which Saddam Hussein understood, was a deterrent to further Iraqi aggression.
• By warning that it would take military measures if any Iraqi troops entered Jordan, Israel, in effect, guaranteed its neighbor 's territorial integrity against Iraqi aggression.
• The United States benefited from the use of Israeli-made Have Nap air-launched missiles on its B¬52 bombers. The Navy, meanwhile, used Israeli Pioneer pilotless drones for reconnaissance in the Gulf.
• Israel provided mine plows that were used to clear paths for allied forces through Iraqi minefields.
• Mobile bridges flown directly from Israel to Saudi Arabia were employed by the U.S. Marine Corps.
• Israeli recommendations, based upon system performance observations, led to several software changes that made the Patriot a more capable missile defense system.
• Israel Aircraft Industries developed conformal fuel tanks that enhanced the range of F¬15 aircraft. These were used in the Gulf.
• General Dynamics has implemented a variety of Israeli modifications to improve the worldwide F¬16 aircraft fleet, including structural enhancements, software changes, increased capability landing gear, radio improvements and avionic modifications.
• An Israeli-produced targeting system was used to increase the Cobra helicopter 's night-fighting capabilities.
• Israel manufactured the canister for the highly successful Tomahawk missile.
• Night-vision goggles used by U.S. forces were supplied by Israel.
• A low-altitude warning system produced and developed in Israel was utilized on Blackhawk helicopters.
• Other Israeli equipment provided to U.S. forces included flack vests, gas masks and sandbags.
• Israel offered the United States the use of military and hospital facilities. U.S. ships utilized Haifa port shipyard maintenance and support on their way to the Gulf.
• Israel destroyed Iraq 's nuclear reactor in 1981. Consequently, U.S. troops did not face a nuclear-armed Iraq.
• Even in its low-profile mode, Israeli cooperation was extremely valuable: Israel 's military intelligence had focused on Iraq much more carefully over the years than had the U.S. intelligence community. Thus, the Israelis were able to provide Washington with detailed tactical intelligence on Iraqi military activities. Defense Secretary Richard Cheney said, for example, that the U.S. utilized Israeli information about western Iraq in its search for Scud missile launchers (UPI, March 8, 1991).
The Cost of War
Israel benefited from the destruction of Iraq 's military capability by the United States-led coalition, but the cost was enormous. Even before hostilities broke out, Israel had to revise its defense budget to maintain its forces at a heightened state of alert. The Iraqi missile attacks justified Israel 's prudence in keeping its air force flying round the clock. The war required the defense budget to be increased by more than $500 million. Another $100 million boost was needed for civil defense.
The damage caused by the 39 Iraqi Scud missiles that landed in Tel Aviv and Haifa was extensive. Approximately 3,300 apartments and other buildings were affected in the greater Tel Aviv area. Some 1,150 people who were evacuated had to be housed at a dozen hotels at a cost of $20,000 per night. Beyond the direct costs of military preparedness and damage to property, the Israeli economy was also hurt by the inability of many Israelis to work under the emergency conditions. The economy functioned at no more than 75 percent of normal capacity during the war, resulting in a net loss to the country of $3.2 billion.
The biggest cost was in human lives. A total of 74 people died as a consequence of Scud attacks. Two died in direct hits, four from suffocation in gas masks and the rest from heart attacks (Jerusalem Post, January 17, 1992).
A U.N. committee dealing with reparation claims against Iraq dating to the 1991 Gulf War approved more than $31 million to be paid to Israeli businesses and individuals. The 1999 decision stemmed from a 1992 Security Council decision calling on Iraq to compensate victims of the Gulf War (JTA, 4/14/99). In 2001, the United Nations Compensation Commission awarded $74 million to Israel for the costs it incurred from Iraqi Scud missile attacks during the Gulf War. The Commission rejected most of the $1 billion that Israel had requested (JTA, 6/21/01).
The PLO Backs Saddam
The PLO, Libya and Iraq were the only members who opposed an Arab League resolution calling for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. The intifada leadership sent a cable of congratulations to Saddam Hussein, describing the invasion of Kuwait as the first step toward the "liberation of Palestine" (Mideast Mirror, August 6, 1990).
PLO leader Yasir Arafat played a critical role in sabotaging an Arab summit meeting that was to have been convened in Saudi Arabia to deal with the invasion. Arafat, the New York Times observed (August 5, 1990), "diverted attention from the planned summit and helped capsize it" by showing up in Egypt with a "peace plan" devised by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
According to an eyewitness account by Al-Ahram editor Ibrahim Nafei, Arafat worked hard to "water down" any anti-Iraq resolution at the August 1990 Arab League meeting in Cairo. Arafat "moved from delegation to delegation, hand in hand with Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, who was openly threatening some Gulf and other Arab delegates that Iraq would turn them upside down," Nafei wrote (Al-Ahram, August 12, 1990).
In Amman, Jordan, a PLO official warned that Palestinian fighters had arrived in Yemen. "We expect them to take suicidal operations against the American troops in Saudi Arabia if the Americans move against Iraq," he declared. "There are more than 50,000 Palestinian fighters" in both Kuwait and Iraq, he said, who "will defend the interests of Iraq" (UPI, August 10, 1990). Abul Abbas, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, threatened that "any American target will become vulnerable" should the United States attack Iraq (Reuters, September 4, 1990).
In Jenin, August 12, 1,000 Palestinians marched, shouting: "Saddam, you hero, attack Israel with chemical weapons" (Associated Press, August 12, 1990).
According to some sources, the PLO played an active role in facilitating Iraq 's conquest of Kuwait. The logistical planning for the Iraqi invasion was at least partially based on intelligence supplied by PLO officials and supporters based in Kuwait. One Arab diplomat was quoted in the London Independent as saying that on arrival in Kuwait, Iraqi officials "went straight to their homes, picked them up and ordered them to go to work." The Iraqi Embassy had compiled its own list of key Kuwaiti personnel, said the diplomat, "but who helped them? Who were the skilled technicians who worked alongside the Kuwaitis and knew all this information?" he asked. "The Palestinians" (Jerusalem Post, August 8, 1990).
When the U.S. began massing troops in Saudi Arabia, Arafat called this a "new crusade" that "forebodes the gravest dangers and disasters for our Arab and Islamic nation." He also made clear his position on the conflict: "We can only be in the trench hostile to Zionism and its imperialist allies who are today mobilizing their tanks, planes, and all their advanced and sophisticated war machine against our Arab nation" (Sawt al-Sha 'b, September 4, 1990).
Once the war began, the PLO Executive Committee reaffirmed its support for Iraq: "The Palestinian people stand firmly by Iraq 's side." The following day, Arafat sent a message to Saddam hailing Iraq 's struggle against "American dictatorship" and describing Iraq as "the defender of the Arab nation, of Muslims and of free men everywhere" (Agence France-Presse, February 26, 1991).
Arafat 's enthusiasm for Hussein was undaunted by the outcome of the war. "I would like to take this opportunity to renew to your excellency the great pride that we take in the ties of fraternity and common destiny binding us," he said in November 1991. "Let us work together until we achieve victory and regain liberated Jerusalem" (Baghdad Republic of Iraq Radio Network, November 16, 1991).
U.S. Arms Couldn 't Save Gulf States
Iraq had one of the largest and most powerful armies in the world prior to its invasion of Kuwait. None of the Gulf states could have challenged the Iraqis without direct U.S. intervention. Kuwait is a tiny nation, which had received $5 billion worth of arms and yet never had any chance to stop Iraq.
Similarly, the United States has sold Saudi Arabia more than $40 billion worth of arms and military services in the last decade, yet, it too, could not have prevented an Iraqi invasion. It was this realization that ultimately led King Fahd to allow U.S. troops to be based in his country. No amount of military hardware could compensate for the small size of the standing armies in these states.
Moreover, the rapidity with which Iraq overran Kuwait was a reminder that U.S. weapons could easily fall into hostile hands. For example, Iraq captured 150 U.S.-made HAWK anti¬aircraft missiles and some armored vehicles from Kuwait.
Israel 's Contribution to the Gulf War by Mitchell Bard
________________________________________
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait dramatically illustrated the potential of regional states to threaten vital U.S. interests. Israel again demonstrated its reliability as it maintained a low profile and absorbed the Scuds.
Israel 's posture reflected a deliberate political decision in response to American requests. Nevertheless, Israel did aid the United States ' successful campaign to roll back Iraq 's aggression.
- The IDF was the sole military force in the region that could successfully challenge the Iraqi army. That fact, which Saddam Hussein understood, was a deterrent to further Iraqi aggression.
- By warning that it would take military measures if any Iraqi troops enter Jordan, Israel, in effect, guaranteed Jordan 's territorial integrity against Iraqi aggression. Jordan 's continued existence as a buffer state between Iraq and Israel is indispensable for the maintenance of regional stability.
- The United States benefitted from the use of Israeli-made Have Nap air-launched missiles on its B-52 bombers. The Navy, meanwhile, used Israeli Pioneer pilotless drones for reconnaissance in the Gulf.
- Israel provided mine plows that were used to clear paths for allied forces through Iraqi mine fields.
- Mobile bridges provided by Israel were employed by the U.S. Marine Corps.
- Israel Aircraft Industries developed conformal fuel tanks that enhance the range of F-15 aircraft. These were used in the Gulf.
- Israeli recommendations, based upon system performance observations led to several software changes that make the Patriot a more capable missile defense system.
- General Dynamics has implemented a variety of Israeli modifications to improve the worldwide F-16 aircraft fleet including structural enhancements, software changes, increased capability landing gear, radio improvements and avionic modifications.
- An Israeli-produced helicopter night-targeting system was used to increase the Cobra helicopter 's night-fighting capabilities.
- Israel also produced the canister for the highly successful Tomahawk missile.
- Night-vision goggles used by U.S. forces were supplied by Israel.
- A low altitude warning system produced and developed in Israel was utilized on Blackhawk helicopters.
- Other Israeli equipment provided to U.S. forces included flack vests, gas masks and sand bags.
- Israel offered the United States the use of military and hospital facilities. U.S. ships utilized Haifa port shipyard maintenance and support on their way to the Gulf.
- Even in its low-profile mode, Israeli cooperation was extremely valuable: Israel 's military intelligence has focused on Iraq much more carefully over the years than has the U.S. intelligence community. Thus, the Israelis were able to provide Washington with detailed tactical intelligence on Iraqi military activities. Defense Secretary Cheney said, for example that the U.S. utilized Israeli information about western Iraq in its search for Scud missile launchers.
During a visit to Israel May 30, 1991, Defense Secretary Cheney said: "We think that the cooperation that we were able to engage in during the war in the Gulf...emphasizes how important the [U.S.-Israel] relationship is and how well it works when put to the test."
Critics have argued that the U.S. desire for Israel to maintain a low profile to facilitate holding the coalition of Arab states opposing Iraq together reflects a diminution of Israel 's strategic value; however, Israel was never expected to play a major role in hostilities in the Gulf. American officials knew the Arabs would have to be prepared to defend themselves. Moreover, the fact that it was possible to build this U.S.-Arab coalition at the same time U.S.-Israel strategic relations are closer than ever, illustrates the two are not contradictory. The United States can continue to strengthen its ties with Israel without worrying about jeopardizing ties with the Arab states.
Israel Compensated By Iraq for Gulf War Damage
________________________________________
The United Nations Compensation Commission awarded $74 million to Israel for the costs it incurred from Iraqi Scud missile attacks during the Gulf War. The Commission rejected most of the $1 billion that Israel had requested. The first $5 million, transferred by the United Nations from Arab oil purchases from Iraq, was sent on August 16, 2001.
________________________________________
Israel Reveals Planned Strike on Iraq During Gulf War
(January 2001)
________________________________________
After a decade of silence, Israel marked the 10th anniversary of the Gulf War, revealing that although it did not invade Iraq, it had planes airborne and ready to perform a military strike. The January 2001 Air Force Magazine reported that Israeli radar and supply planes, which take longer than fighter planes to mobilize, were flying and ready to attack Iraqi Scud missile launching sites. "Since the retaliation operation demanded serious preparation, I immediately gave the order to start moving," Maj.-Gen. Avihu Bin-Num said in the report. "We had to start preparing the forces, briefing the teams and arming the aircraft."
During the war, 39 Scud missiles reached Israel. "In my opinion," Bin-Num said, "our operation would have reduced the number of Scud firings significantly. It would not have eliminated the attacks. It would not have altered the essence of the war. But it certainly would have contributed to the reduction in the number of missile strikes."
________________________________________
Source: Jerusalem Post, (December 26, 2000)
Gulf War
C O N T E N T 1. Background for the war
2. Cost of the war
3. Consequences of the war
4. History
War fought between Iraq and allies of Kuwait, from January 16 to February 28, 1991, lasting 44 days altogether. The war had 3 main phases: 1) Iraq 's occupation of Kuwait, 2) The diplomatic game and sanctions against Iraq, 3) The allied war against Iraq.
The war was more than any war before fought on two very different fronts: in addition to the war field, it was fought in the medias.
The media war was at first staged by Iraq and Kuwait. While Kuwait hired the best media advisors to present their case, in order to secure the support of the international audience, both the common man and the politicians, Iraq relied on its own outdated media personnel. Iraq 's presentations of Saddam Hussein patting intimidated Iraqi infants, will forever remain among the more comic moments in the history of international politics.
Kuwait 's way of dealing with the truth has been much criticized after the war — some of the worst stories have proven to be fabricated. Yet, Kuwait did win this war, which was part of the process leading to the real war.
Iraqi troops October 1990
Allied ground campaign January 24- 28, 1991: Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4
The real war, fought in the two first months of 1991, did also use the media. Especially through the US-based satellite newscaster CNN, the world-wide public was allowed live coverage of the war.
On the battle ground, this war was one of the most uneven battles ever fought. While the allied could count their losses in a few hundreds, Iraq lost around 60,000 troops. The Iraqi military was one of the strongest on the Middle East, and would have done well in a war against most European countries. But against the USA and their allies, high-technology proved to have reached a level where conventional military forces, like Iraq 's, was totally dwarfed.
The war lasted fairly long (considering the unevenness in power), as much as 42 days (the Middle East has seen a handful of much shorter wars), but there is a link between the patience of the allied forces and their small losses: The first 5 weeks, they bombed every possible military and infrastructural goal of Iraq, paving the way for a swift ground campaign towards the end of February.
Towards the end of the war, the question on Saddam Hussein was one of the hottest: overthrow or not. It is believed that it was only military priorities and problems with international rights that saved him. But the usually extremely efficient foreign intelligence service of Israel, Mossad, did try to kill him, but were never able to get within reach. It is also believed that the USA were uncertain what would serve their and their allied interests best: a weak Saddam in charge of a weak Iraq. or a new regime that could quickly disintegrate into a division of the country into a Shi 'i, a Sunni and a Kurdish region, leaving the Islamist and anti-US state of Iran relatively far stronger than ever in the region.
BACKGROUND FOR THE WAR
For Iraq there were a number of reasons for attacking Kuwait. First and foremost, Iraq had never really accepted the state of Kuwait, which it considered to be a natural part of the lands of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Officially, Iraq had accepted Kuwait.
There were tensions over the rights of underground oil resources along the border, where Iraq claimed that Kuwait were depleting resources that territorially was on Iraqi side of the border.
Iraq claimed in the time before August 2, 1990 that Kuwait was responsible for reducing the oil prices, which lead to economical difficulties for Iraq, which had no other substantial export product and which already were producing close to the maximum of the capacity. Kuwait did not accept any of Iraq 's claims for compensation for Iraq 's economical losses. Iraq also claimed some of Kuwait 's territory, and wanted to lease some of the main Kuwaiti island, in order to create better transport possibilities from Iraq.
It is also good reason to believe that the attack on Kuwait was Saddam 's way of trying to win some lands after the bitter Iran-Iraq War which resulted in nothing but human and economical losses.
It is clear that Iraq did expect to keep Kuwait as their territory, and that they initially never expected an allied force to fight back.
The reason for attacking Iraq for occupying Kuwait must also be explained, since f.x. Israel 's occupation of Palestine has never resulted in any allied military response.
The most important single argument for war against Iraq was that neighbour oil producing countries feared that Saddam 's Iraq could advance on them in the next round, if Iraq wasn 't stopped in Kuwait.
The other main argument was far more emotional. Saddam and Iraq were presented as the evil dictatorship that had come to destroy a peaceful and militarily weak neighbour. This was much aided by the media campaigns, as explained above, and the war came to be defined as a war between good and evil.
COST OF THE WAR
The allies of Kuwait included personnel from 32 countries, but the dominating countries were USA, Britain, France, Egypt and Syria. Saudi Arabia was contributing with more funds than personnel, as it feared that Iraq could threaten its territory. On allied side, 700,000 soldiers participated, of which 540,000 were US troops.
There has never been issued any official figures for Iraqi troops, but it is estimated that around 500,000 were stationed in the region.
US estimates on Iraqi losses were set at around 100,000 dead, while Iraqi figures was put at around 60,000. On allied side, there were 376 dead.
The economical costs were set at US$82 billion. Split down on countries, this involved US$13 billion for Japan, US$22 for Kuwait, US$29 for Saudi Arabia and US$18 billion for USA. Iraqi officials claimed that rebuilding the infrastructure of the country would cost about US$200 billion.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR
The war also resulted in heavy environmental catastrophes in the Persian Gulf, and the start of internal independence fight in Iraq, as well as years of dwindling economical and humanitarian conditions inside Iraq.
The war almost toppled Saddam Hussein. During the war, Mossad agents tried to kill him, but without success. Following the ceasefire of February 28, 1991, popular uprisings against him were suppressed only with great difficulties.
The war came to leave Iraq divided into 3 to 4 zones. The area under Saddam 's direct control was central Iraq between 36 and 38 degree latitude. North of this, an autonomous Kurdish region emerged. This was divied into two rivalling areas, of which Masud Barzani 's with the help of Saddam became the strongest. In the south, there is official control by Baghdad, but this is badly exercised, and lawless conditions dominate in many areas.
For about 6- 8 years Iraq was consistently presented as an evil power in Western medias, but from the last years of the 1990 's this started to change. More focus was given to the fact that the international embargo on Iraq brought hard sufferings onto ordinary Iraqis and that Saddam 's position did not become weaker, rather stronger.
For Kuwait the war came to involve less damage to the economy and environment than first expected. The 640 oil wells on fire, were put out much faster than anticipated. And the rebirth of the economy was aided by the reparations paid by Iraq in the size of US$22 billion. The most important long-lasting change was through the expulsion of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers — many Palestinians had cooperated with the Iraqis.
Through 2002, a new media campaign against Saddam has been conducted with the president of USA and the prime minister of Britain in the front. Suspicions over whether Iraq had illegal weapons was a main argument, but no real argument in terms of aggression towards foreign countries or involvement in terror activities were presented.
HISTORY
1. BEFORE THE INVASION (mid-July- August 1, 1990)
1990 Mid-July: Iraq complains to the Arab League that the high oil production of Kuwait and United Arab Emirates had resulted in a heavy drop in oil prices (US$11-13/barrel instead of teh reference price of US$18).
Late July: About 100,000 Iraqi troops move towards the Kuwaiti border.
July 31: Iraqi and Kuwaiti officials meet in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. Iraq presented Kuwait with a short list of hard demands: Kuwait should write off US$12- 14 billion of loans; give up some lands along the border zone; lease the islands of Bubiyan and Warba to Iraq, in order to facilitate transshipment of Iraqi oil.
August 1: Negotiations breaks down.
2. IRAQI INVASION and OCCUPATION, UN and US DIPLOMACY
1990 August 2, 2 o 'clock: Iraq invades Kuwait. Shaykh Jaber 2 bni Ahmad as-Sabah and the royal family flee to Saudi Arabia the same day.
— The same day, the UN Security Council passes Resolution 660 with 14 votes to none, where the invasion is condemned and demands for immediate withdrawal.
— August 3: The Arab League condemns the Iraqi aggression with 14 votes to none, but with 5 abstentions and 1 walk-out.
— August 6: The UN Security Council passes Resolution 61 with 13 votes to none, starting the economical sanctions and an embargo on Iraq.
— US fighter aircrafts and troops leave for Saudi Arabia.
— August 8: Iraq officially annexes Kuwait, as the country 's 19th province.
— August 12: Saddam Hussein offers a peace arrangement where Iraq promises to withdraw from Kuwait if Israel withdraws from the occupied lands of Lebanon, Syria and Palestine — both in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions.
— October 2: Amnesty International publishes reports on widespread arrests, torture and summary executions by Iraqi forces against the Kuwaiti population.
— November 8: USA starts increasing its presence in the Persian Gulf from the usual 200,000 to 400,000 troops.
— November 19: Iraq sends 100,000 more troops to Kuwait.
— November 29: UN Security Council sets a time limit for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait to January 15, 1991.
1991 January 9: Talks between foreign minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, and the foreign minister of USA leads to no results.
1991 January 15: The time limit for unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, set by the UN, runs out. Iraq is still fully stationed in Kuwait.
3a. ALLIED ATTACK: Air campaign
— January 16, 0.30 o 'clock: Operation Desert Storm starts: Allied air attack on Iraqi positions in Kuwait, involving laser-guided bombing and firing of cruise missiles from US warships.
— January 18: Iraq fires 12 Scud ground-to-ground missiles at Tel Aviv and Haifa in Israel.
— January 22: 3 more Scud missiles are fired at Tel Aviv.
— February 7: The allied forces start a campaign for destroying the the transport infrastructure of Iraq.
— Februar 15: Iraq says that it will agree with the resolutions of the UN Security Council if Israel withdraws from the occupied territories and Iraq will have a say on who should govern Kuwait (Kuwait had then, and still have a mock democracy leaving most of the power in the hands of the emir). This is rejected by the Arab countries involved.
— February 23: Iraq declares that it will withdraw from Kuwait without conditions, but according to a Russian peace plan. The USA had put forth more conditions than included in this plan.
— Iraqi troops start setting Kuwaiti oil wells on fire, and would over the next days put 640 wells on fire.
3b. ALLIED ATTACK: Ground campaign
— February 24: The Allied ground campaing starts, with troops moving along 2 axes.
— February 25: Baghdad declares that it will withdraw according to UN Security Council resolution 660.
— February 26: Iraqi troops leave Kuwait City, whereas US stopped all troops returning for Iraq.
— February 27: All Iraqi troops are out of Kuwait.
— February 28, 7.40 o 'clock: After that Iraq has stopped all their fighting, the allied forces end their fighting, and a ceasefire takes place.
4. AFTER THE WAR
— March 3: Provisional truce is accepted by Iraqi representatives.
— April 6: Permanent cease fire — Iraq agrees to pay for damages in Kuwait, to destroy its chemical and biological weapons, as well as weapons of mass destruction. In the coming years, UN observers faces great difficulties in monitoring Iraqi compliance to this agreement.
1996 August 5: USA issues a report concluding that soldiers, principally US, fighting in the Gulf War may had been exposed to chemical weapons. US troops had, after returning to USA, been complaining over unexplainable symptoms and ailments. Czech and French military had reported chemical finds during the first 2 weeks of the war, reports that the US defence have questioned.
— May 20: Iraq is allowed limited sales of oil, equalling 4 billion US$ per year, of which most will go to cover war indemnities. The revenues that are allocated to Iraq will be used on food and medicine.
Myth and Facts By Mitchell G. Bard
MYTH
"The PLO was neutral in the Gulf War."
FACT
The PLO, Libya and Iraq were the only members who opposed an Arab League resolution calling for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. The intifada leadership sent a cable of congratulations to Saddam Hussein, describing the invasion of Kuwait as the first step toward the "liberation of Palestine."
PLO leader Yasir Arafat played a critical role in sabotaging an Arab summit meeting that was to have been convened in Saudi Arabia to deal with the invasion. Arafat, the New York Times observed,"diverted attention from the planned summit and helped capsize it" by showing up in Egypt with a "peace plan" devised by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
According to an eyewitness account by Al-Ahram editor Ibrahim Nafei, Arafat worked hard to "water down" any anti-Iraq resolution at the August 1990 Arab League meeting in Cairo. Arafat "moved from delegation to delegation, hand in hand with Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, who was openly threatening some Gulf and other Arab delegates that Iraq would turn them upside down," Nafei wrote (Al-Ahram, (August 12, 1990).
In Amman, Jordan, a PLO official warned that Palestinian fighters had arrived in Yemen. "We expect them to take suicidal operations against the American troops in Saudi Arabia if the Americans move against Iraq," he declared. "There are more than 50,000 Palestinian fighters" in both Kuwait and Iraq, he said, who "will defend the interests of Iraq" (UPI, August 10, 1990). Abul Abbas, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, threatened that "any American target will become vulnerable" should the United States attack Iraq (Reuters, September 4, 1990).
In Jenin, August 12, 1,000 Palestinians marched, shouting: "Saddam, you hero, attack Israel with chemical weapons" (AP, August 12, 1990).
According to some sources, the PLO played an active role in facilitating Iraq 's conquest of Kuwait. The logistical planning for the Iraqi invasion was at least partially based on intelligence supplied by PLO officials and supporters based in Kuwait. One Arab diplomat was quoted in the London Independent as saying that on arrival in Kuwait, Iraqi officials "went straight to their homes, picked them up and ordered them to go to work." The Iraqi Embassy had compiled its own list of key Kuwaiti personnel, said the diplomat, "but who helped them? Who were the skilled technicians who worked alongside the Kuwaitis and knew all this information?" he asked. "The Palestinians" (Jerusalem Post, August 8, 1990).
When the U.S. began massing troops in Saudi Arabia, Arafat called this a "new crusade" that "forebodes the gravest dangers and disasters for our Arab and Islamic nation." He also made clear his position on the conflict: "We can only be in the trench hostile to Zionism and its imperialist allies who are today mobilizing their tanks, planes, and all their advanced and sophisticated war machine against our Arab nation" (Sawt al-Sha 'b, September 4, 1990).
Once the war began, the PLO Executive Committee reaffirmed its support for Iraq: "The Palestinian people stand firmly by Iraq 's side." The following day, Arafat sent a message to Saddam hailing Iraq 's struggle against "American dictatorship" and describing Iraq as "the defender of the Arab nation, of Muslims and of free men everywhere" (Agence France-Presse, February 26, 1991).
Arafat 's enthusiasm for Hussein was undaunted by the outcome of the war. "I would like to take this opportunity to renew to your excellency the great pride that we take in the ties of fraternity and common destiny binding us," he said in November 1991. "Let us work together until we achieve victory and regain liberated Jerusalem" (Baghdad Republic of Iraq Radio Network, November 16, 1991).
Leaders of Israel 's peace movement expressed their disgust for the PLO 's actions. One would need a gas mask to overcome the "toxic, repulsive stench" of the PLO 's attitude toward Saddam Hussein, Yossi Sarid said (Ha 'aretz, August 17, 1990). Another activist, Yaron London, wrote in an open letter to the Palestinians in the territories: "This week you proved to me for many years I was a great fool. When you ask once again for my support for your ‘legitimate rights, ' you will discover that your shouts of encouragement to Saddam have clogged my ears" (Yediot Aharonot, August 1990).
Persian Gulf War
The Persian Gulf War was a conflict between new world order and Iraq over Kuwait. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, shocked the world by ordered his army to invade Kuwait. Kuwait is part of the Middle East and produces over ten percent of the world 's oil. President George Bush, of the United States, reacted by creating Operation Desert Storm, the largest land operation since World War II. Led by Norman Swarzkopf, the coalition forces land operation made its way through Iraqi forces and liberated Kuwait in 100 hours.
When the cold war ended the United States emerged as the only world superpower. They soon formed the New World Order. This order was soon tested by the conflicts in Somolia and the Middle East. With the use of these new ideas the impact was great. The UN security council and the International Coalition both made preparation to stop the invasion of Kuwait.
There were many significant individuals in the Gulf War. George Bush, the president of the United States, was a very significant individual during the Gulf War. President Bush would not allow any nation to dominate the Persian Gulf and control most of the World 's oil supply. He reacted by creating Operation Desert Storm, the largest land operation since World War II. Another significant individual was Norman Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf was a general who led Operation Desert Storm. He also met with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and persuaded him with pictures of Iraqi tanks on Saudi Arabia soil to come to his final decision: bring in the troops. Schwarzkopf led the troops through Iraqi forces and liberated Kuwait in 100 hours. Opposing Schwarzkopf and the coalition was another important person who started the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was the president of Iraq who ordered the takeover of Kuwait. Hussein believed it to be his destiny to fight in the Gulf War. He still remains in power of Iraq today after a devasting defeat in the Persian Gulf.
Operation Desert Storm took place in the Middle East. The Middle East is a harsh desert land where water is as precious as gold. Most of the countries in the Middle East have have plentiful amounts of oil. The desert created some problems for our military. Our tanks were not equipped to fight in the desert. Most people here speak Arabic, and the main religion is Islam.
Technology effected both sides in the Gulf War in many ways. Iraq 's most powerful weapons were SCUD missiles. The coalitions defense against SCUD missiles were Patriot missiles. Patriot missiles or launchers are configured with four canisters. These canisters are configured with one missile each. Today there are more advanced missiles that have sixteen missiles instead of four. The Patriot missiles used in the Gulf War will now only be employed against fixed-wing aircraft, to attack helicopters, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Another helpful technology involved in the Gulf War was huge deposits of oil discovered in the Middle East around the Persian Gulf after World War II. The Gulf states where oil deposits were found are Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Iran and Iraq nationalized their countries oil industries overnight. All these states formed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). This group worked to monitor the production and ensure that oil-producing nations would receive fair prices for their highly sought product. The world has become so technologically dependant on the Middle East oil reserves that Saddam Hussein knew the great power he would have if he took over Kuwait and gained control of almost twenty percent of the world 's oil reserves.
The Strategic importance of the Iraqi and Kuwait oil fields was great. Thirty percent of the worlds oil is in these three countries: Iraqi, Kuwait, and Saudia Arabia. A lot of the products made in the world are either made or fueled by this oil. If Iraqi had taken over this area they would have been able to up the price of oil therefore making Iraqi extremely wealthy. With all of this money the Iraqis could have developed better weapons for there plan of world takeover. If we hadn 't taken action the way we did the world would have been much worse off. The war would not have been so short and would have been much harder to win.
Two areas of geography that aided the United States in the war was the desert and the Persian Gulf. The desert was great for the tanks, because they could move across the desert with the greatest of ease. Some of the tanks parts had to be remodified, like the airfilter, and seals. The desert is a very hot and dry place. Water is very scarce in the desert because there aren 't very many lakes or rivers. The Persian Gulf was another plus for our army. Iraq did not have very good access to the gulf, so this kept American ships safe from harm. The gulf has lots of oil deposits scattered around in different areas.
After the Persian Gulf war there were changes and there were continuences. After invading Kuwait and causing a disaster of countries in the Middle East, Saddam Hussein still remained the president of Iraq. Also all of Iraq 's chemical, biological, alnd nuclear weapon facilities were inspected and stopped. The UN set up no-fly zones, banning Iraq military flights over Kurdish and Shi 'ite territories
The Persian Gulf War was said to be the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation 's history. Two armies fighting for two different dreams: freedom and a new way of life.
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Lessons of the Gulf War by Murray N. Rothbard by Murray N. Rothbard This essay originally appeared in the April 1991 issue of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
Every war supplies us with lessons we must learn. There were the lessons of Munich and the lessons of Vietnam. It is not too early for us to learn the lessons of the Gulf War, lest we lose the peace.
l. War is Wonderful. We have learned at last that war is glorious, war is wonderful. As they said about the Spanish-American war, this was a "splendid little war." Our war effort from now on can be so high-tech that no American need die in one ever again. Three times as many American soldiers died in accidents in the Gulf before the war began than during the actual fighting. Deaths among enemy soldiers and civilians are solely the fault of the Evil Enemy.
From now on, the only opponents of an American war will be traitors, yellow-bellies, Commies, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites.
War is also a great unifier. Petty domestic problems, such as taxes, deficits, banking crises are forgotten in the great uplifting current that brings back to America a sense of unity, of belonging, of common national purpose. Those who grumble at that unity are traitors and yellow-bellies.
2. Don 't Let Them Surrender. Too many times Americans have won a splendid war only to lose the peace. One problem is the end game, the whole problem of surrender, who we accept surrender from, on what terms, etc. During the Gulf War we approached perfection by not letting them surrender. First, we set the goal of "unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait." When Iraq accepted these terms, we complained that they didn 't accept reparations, they weren 't clear about coming out with their hands up, and besides, we wanted to hear it from Saddam himself. When Saddam himself complied, we raised all the above objections, and we kept bombing, or "pounding." (Hey guys, how about coming up with a synonym for "pound"? If I had a dime for every time the media used "pound," I 'd be a very rich man.)
And then, when they obviously began to withdraw, we said: "That 's not 'withdrawal ' (good); that 's 'retreat ' (bad)."
Demanding "unconditional surrender," as we did in World War II, was great, but again we got bogged down in end-game problems. Clearly, the best strategy for the end game is never to accept any surrender at all. Let 's just keep "pounding" the enemy till nobody moves. Let 's keep it simple and clear-cut. Or to use the common American slogan of divine impatience: "Let 's get it over with," or "let 's finish the job." If we pound until we kill them all, until nobody moves, then we won 't have to worry anymore about "losing the peace." The peace will be ours forever, the job will be finished forever.
To put a more rigorous twist on the old song:
We 'll be over, We 're comin ' over, And we won 't be back Till there 's nothin ' over there.
3. Take Over the Media. We did a great job, in the Gulf War, in censoring, curbing, and confining the media. The media lost us the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The media are a bunch of traitors, yellow-bellies, etc. The media injure American morale. The media prattle about "gathering the news," and "giving us the truth." What they don 't understand is that only the president deserves the truth. All public truth helps the Enemy.
The American people, thank goodness, now hate the media, with their subversion and their prying questions. The media are a bunch of individualists who won 't go along with the program. Now we must finish the job. The federal government must take over the media. Issue licenses, certificates of convenience and necessity, to all media people. And if they don 't knuckle under and show proper respect to the president and his officers, just pull their licenses.
What, you say this would violate the First Amendment? Rubbish. We do it now with radio and TV; the FCC can pull their licenses at any time. All we 'd have to do is have the FCC show some spine. And the much-reviled Alien and Sedition Acts were never declared unconstitutional. The Supreme Court will follow the election returns.
The objective should be for all the media to be, in effect, agit-prop arms of the president and the federal government. They 're mostly at that point already. Let 's finish the job.
4. Abolish Congress. Congress is a pain in the neck, a bunch of quibblers and fusspots who accomplish nothing, who only obstruct and delay (sometimes) the plans of the president. As neoconservative theorists have instructed us, the president embodies in his person the entire national and public interest. The president represents each and every one of us. But Congressmen are only bogged down in petty, narrow concerns of each district or state. So let 's get rid of Congress; let 's finish it off.
Or rather, let 's have a constitutional amendment that abolishes elections, which are at best an expensive drain on the taxpayers, and replaces them with the best and wisest men and women appointed by the president and replaceable at his will. Then he could get the best counsel for the national interest, free of partisan, political considerations.
5. Let 's Get Rid of Political Parties. We keep praising the "two-party system" without realizing that there is nothing in the Constitution that mandates parties, two or whatever. The Founding Fathers hated parties, which they called "factions." Parties are divisive, they cripple American unity, and they cost the taxpayer money by requiring elections. Besides, the Republican Party will never again lose a presidential election, and since we will get rid of Congress anyway, why not face reality? Let 's combine both parties into one glorious party, call it the Democrat-Republicans, as under Jefferson, or maybe Republican-Democrats to reflect current realities. Then we 'd all be united, and any disagreements could be ironed out within a one-party framework.
If anyone suspects that there 's something dictatorial or un-American about a one-party system, think nothing of it. There is ample precedent; America had a one-party system (Democrat-Republican) from about 1815 to 1827. No one suffered; in fact, it is called by historians the Era of Good Feelings. No problem.
6. Let 's Make George Bush President for Life. Everyone knows that elections are too darn frequent, forcing our leaders to turn away from their great leadership at the helm of state to worry about our petty concerns. And besides, it 's expensive for the taxpayer. So we can simply make George Bush president for life, and then, when he dies or retires, we can have a glorious Democratic-Republican convention, to select his successor. What could be more truly democratic?
7. Free Up the President. If Lessons 1 to 6 were put in place, our president would then at last be free, free of the crippling restraints of Congress, of elections, and of the yellow-bellied, traitorous, etc. media. With Congress and the media united in service to the president, he would be free to unify the nation, he could write laws in the form of his own executive decrees, he could set his budget and levy his taxes (and cut the capital gains tax, by God). He would also be free to run his New World Order abroad, to obliterate the Enemy for, say, $100 billion, and then spend another $100 billion to rebuild the enemy lands. War and reconstruction contractors will be happy and prosperous, and this will provide plenty of jobs and keep America prosperous as well. The president will get 98-percent approval rating in the polls, which can serve as a scientific substitute for messy and grubby elections.
Some carping critics (the 2 percent yellow-bellies, etc. above – and there are always a few rotten apples in every glorious barrel) might claim that we would lose our freedom and that the president would be a dictator.
But that would be the biggest lie of them all. For we must always remember that the president represents us, that in the deepest sense the president is us and that we are the president, and that therefore when the president is set free and is unrestrained, we are all free.
Vietnam and Desert Storm:
Learning the Right Lessons from Vietnam for the Post-Cold War Era by Col. Joseph P. Martino, USAF (Ret)
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Abstract
It has been widely proclaimed that the success of U.S. arms in the Gulf War ended the “Vietnam Syndrome.” According to this view, the United States has at last recovered from the psychological trauma of Vietnam and is again willing to consider the use of force in pursuit of national objectives. However, this will be true only if the proper lessons are learned from both Vietnam and the Gulf War. Post-Cold-War applications of military force, such as Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti, may turn out to have more in common with Vietnam than with the Gulf War. This paper will examine the differences between Vietnam and the Gulf War, and compare the two with the types of wars the U.S. may find itself involved in now that the Cold War is over. Introduction
It is often said that military leaders want to fight the last war over again, instead of adapting to new conditions. That is, the assertion is made that they learn the lessons of the previous war all too well. However, the opposite also happens: military leaders fail to learn the lessons of a war, repeating what failed the last time (“We practice our mistakes until they become doctrine.”). Clearly there is no hard and fast rule about learning lessons.
In fact, leaders should be careful about learning the wrong lessons. One of the clear lessons of World War I, from the fiasco in the Dardanelles, was that it was impossible to project power over the beach; that amphibious operations were no longer possible. Fortunately that “lesson” was ignored in World War II, not to mention Korea.
Learning the right lessons from past wars is thus very important. The problem, of course, is that you may not be sure whether the lessons you have learned are the right lessons until after the subsequent war is over. Despite that, I will try to abstract some lessons from the experience of Vietnam, the Gulf War, and even from the Bosnian operation.
Comparisons: Vietnam and the Gulf War The following table provides a brief comparison of the two wars on some significant factors:
Terrain Jungle/Delta Desert Population Heavily Populated Sparse Enemy forces Hard to identify Clearly defined Base area security Insecure (SVN) Secure (Saudi Arabia) Logistic support Nearby (Japan, Philippines) Distant (Europe, East Coast of U.S.) Buildup time Adequate Adequate (early units vulnerable) Threat to supply lines None external to country Mines in Gulf Allied government legitimacy Dubious at best High (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) U.S. Popular support Initially high, declining as war dragged on High, never had time to decline
(“Baghdad Air Show”, 100-hrs war) Enemy propaganda directed at U.S. support for war High level, highly effective Little effort, virtually no effect Enemy “Center of Gravity” Off limits (Hanoi government,
Haiphong Harbor) Directly attacked (C&C, air defenses, government) Enemy economic infrastructure Avoided (no bombing of dikes) Directly attacked Strategy for use of force “Signaling,” bombing halts, graduated escalation Overwhelming force from outset Civilian casualties High, and politically important Small, but politically important U.S. POWS Many, highly emotional issue Few, highly emotional issue Political objectives of the war Vague Clearly stated (Iraqis out of Kuwait) Publicly perceived success of American arms Perceived as failure, despite battlefield victories Perceived as spectacular success: “Nintendo War” U.S. troops Mostly draftees Volunteer force
From this table, it’s clear that many features were the same for both wars. There were some significant differences, however. It would be erroneous to attribute the differing outcome to such things as the differences in terrain. However, some of the differences, such as degree of domestic support, and the perceived legitimacy of the allied governments, clearly had a positive effect on the outcome. However, many of these differences represent things not under the control of the U.S. We can’t decide to fight only in the desert, despite the fact that we’d probably do better there than in a jungle. Hence we need to look at those things which are to some degree under our control. Where are the wars We need to look at where the wars are, if we are to decide where our focus should be in drawing lessons. Here are some of the places currently in the headlines:
Bosnia Burma Golan Heights Haiti North Korea Somalia Sri Lanka Sudan Taiwan Yemen
None of these sites involve large conventional armies, with the exception of North Korea and Taiwan. If the U.S. is involved in fighting, then, it will most likely be the kind of fighting exemplified by these headline spots. Thus it is particularly important to draw lessons pertinent to the likely kinds of fighting the U.S. might be involved in.
In what follows, I will try to assess lessons we seem to have learned, lessons we haven’t learned, some questionable lessons, some lessons others have learned, and some unresolved issues. Lessons learned These are lessons which we definitely seem to have learned, based on changed equipment, doctrine, or tactics since either or both of Vietnam and the Gulf War. Here is my estimate of the lessons we seem to have learned, not in any order of importance. Aerial Refueling The Air Force pioneered mid-air refueling in the 1920s, but it wasn’t perfected until after World War II. It was developed by Strategic Air Command as a means of achieving intercontinental range for its bombers. It is effective in that role, as evidenced by the B-52 strike in the Gulf War which originated at Barksdale AFB in Lousiana, flew to the war zone with the aid of aerial refueling, and returned to base after 35 hours in the air.
One of the surprises of the Vietnam war, however, was the utility of aerial refueling in tactical air operations, not so much to extend range as to achieve greater time on station. One KC-135 tanker crew received the Mackay Trophy in 1967 for saving 8 aircraft in a single flight, including two F-104s, two Navy KA-3s, two Navy F-8s, and two Navy F-4s.( ) Now tankers are routinely included in tactical air planning, as was demonstrated during the Gulf War. Collateral damage from air operations World War II saw bombers used in direct attacks on cities as such, that is, the attacks were directed at destroying the cities, not just at destroying specific targets within the cities. The obliteration bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the most extreme examples. Not only was this choice of targets arguably immoral, it was not effective. Destroying civilian housing and non-military targets had little or no positive effect on the outcome of the war.
By the time of the Gulf War, the Air Force carried out the kind of precision bombing that was merely a hope during World War II. Of course advances in technology had much to do with this, but it must be recognized that the technology was developed because there was a demand for it. The Air Force wanted to be able to do precision bombing. The Air Force is now properly sensitive to the detrimental effects that indiscriminate bombing will have on public support, and has the technology to conduct discriminating attacks.( ) For instance, in Baghdad, bombing successfully knocked out the Ministry of Defense, the communications center, and the secret police headquarters, without extensive damage to surrounding areas.( ) Graduated Escalation
This phrase is apparently out of the American military vocabulary for good, and good riddance. We tried this in Vietnam and it didn’t work. Bui Tin, a former North Vietnamese colonel who served on the North Vietnamese general staff, and who received the surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975, was interviewed on how our actions looked from the other side. Here is an excerpt from that interview:( )
Q. What of the American bombing of North Vietnam. A. If all the bombing had been concentrated at one time, it would have hurt our efforts. But the bombing was expanded in slow stages under Johnson and it didn’t worry us. We had plenty of time to prepare alternative routes and facilities. We always had stockpiles of rice ready to feed the people for months if a harvest were damaged. The Soviets bought rice from Thailand for us. If the Gulf War demonstrated anything, it was that we had learned the lesson that graduated escalation, with bombing halts and other attempts to “bring the other side to the peace table,” doesn’t work. The other side must be bombed to the peace table, or his forces overrun and defeated in the field.
In this sense, Somalia was an aberration. Whatever the initial intentions, it was another attempt to achieve a diplomatic solution to a military problem. In Bosnia, we seem to have learned that even in a so-called peace-keeping operation, we must enter in force. One hopes this lesson has been learned for good. Snipers Prior to World War II the Army emphasized marksmanship for the infantry, and even provided sniper rifles for a limited number of troops. Nevertheless, the art of sniping had to be rebuilt during the Vietnam war. Initially there were no snipers among the troops sent to Vietnam. Moreover, even when troops were designated as snipers, commanders failed to make proper use of them.
Ultimately, however, the situation was reversed. As Senich notes:
Of all the armed conflicts U.S. combat forces have been involved with in this century, the war in South Vietnam marked the first time in American military history that trained snipers, special rifles, telescopic sights, ammunition, and noise suppression were brought together and employed successfully in a combat environment.( ) This lesson has emphatically been learned. Today, snipers are deployed routinely with both the Army and the Marines. As one commander on the ground has put it, “In recent years, all the conflicts we’ve been in, the lesson learned is that snipers are worth their weight in gold.”( ) Intelligence Information It appears that we have finally learned that intelligence information must be provided to the war-fighter promptly, if it is to be of any value. Current claims are that at the time Capt. Scott O’Grady was shot down, the lag from acquiring information to providing it to the troops was of the order of 12 minutes,(i) but by now has been reduced even further.( ) Maps, text, photos, and videos are made instantly available even to small units in Bosnia. Breaking the intelligence community’s stranglehold on information represents a big step forward, and a lesson well learned.
(i)This doesn’t seem to have been fast enough, but was already much better than the hours of the Gulf War and the days of Vietnam
Lessons Not Yet Learned Under this category I put things which we should have learned, in the sense that the lessons are obvious, but which we demonstrate we haven’t yet learned. Psychiatric Casualties In World War II, no more than 800,000 U.S. ground forces saw direct combat. However, 1,3l93,000 men suffered psychiatric symptoms serious enough to keep them out of action for some period of time. In the Army alone, 504,000 men were permanently lost to fighting for psychiatric reasons. Of these, 330,000 eventually received discharges for psychiatric reasons. A total of 596,000 received treatment for weeks or months at medical facilities for psychiatric problems.
A total of 1,587,000 soldiers served in Korea. Of those who saw combat, 17% were killed. Over 24%, however, became psychiatric casualties serious enough to require treatment of some duration.
A total of 2.8 million men saw service in Vietnam, but only 280,000 of these are considered to have engaged in actual combat. Of those combat forces, 16% were killed by enemy action (about 10,000 died from non-combat causes). Psychiatric casualties were 12.6% of the troops.
In every war fought by American forces during this century, the chances of being a psychiatric casualty were at least as great (Vietnam) or greater (WWII, Korea) than the chances of being killed by the enemy.( ) This situation is not unique to U.S. forces. During the 1973 Yom Kippur war, 30% of the casualties suffered by the Israeli Defense Forces were psychiatric casualties.
By now we should know this is going to happen, and be prepared for it; prepared not only in the military, but in society at large. We needn’t indulge in stereotypes of the crazed veteran to recognize that some significant percentage of the people we send into battle are going to come home with psychological damage. Rain and Bad Weather The U.S. armed forces have a long history of being unprepared for bad weather. In the post-World War II era, we have encountered bad weather in every military engagement, and the troops have suffered for it. A typhoon swept over Okinawa right after World War II, leaving many of the occupation troops without shelter. In Korea, right after troops were rushed in, another typhoon collapsed the tents the troops were living in.( ) In Vietnam, it was not unusual for troops to have to wade through high water after a rain, simply to get into their quarters.
Despite this experience, we saw a repetition of the problem in Bosnia, when a levee broke and flooded a camp area. Other troops were wallowing in mud.
Obviously we cannot control the weather. Surely, however, we can learn that bad weather will come, and prepare for it ahead of time. This is a lesson which has yet to be learned. Cold Weather Equipment During World War II, cold injuries ( especially frostbite) were the second leading cause of American casualties in Europe. During the battles to retake Attu island in the Aleutians, cold caused more deaths than battle wounds. In Korea, by contrast, the development of insulated boots allowed Marines fighting in mountainous areas to survive sub-zero temperatures with few or no frostbite injuries.
Unfortunately, this lesson seems to have been lost. Troops sent from Germany to Bosnia were not initially equipped with cold-weather boots. They wore the standard leather boots, in which they had to walk through snow and slush. Only by March of this year were proper cold-weather boots being issued to the troops. Even then, the boots were in short supply. Unit commanders decide which troops will get the boots, depending on mission and terrain. It shouldn’t be necessary to relearn this lesson every time troops are sent into cold-weather areas. After all, our experience with the effects of inadequate cold-weather equipment goes all the way back to Valley Forge.
Incidentally, those “Mickey Mouse” boots used in Korea provided moderately effective protection against land mines as well as the cold. One more lesson that shouldn’t have to be relearned in every war.
Questionable Lessons Here I discuss some “lessons” which the military services claim to have learned, but about which I have doubts. Information War The new buzz phrase seems to be “information war” (March 1993, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Memorandum of Policy Number 30 ). This is defined as controlling an adversary’s access to information while protecting one’s own information – and capitalizing on the difference. The idea is that dominating the information spectrum will become as important as occupying land or controlling air. It is asserted that if you can analyze information, act on it, and assess results faster than your adversary, you will win.
Along with this use of information goes precision attack: precise target acquisition, munitions, and weapons delivery. Andrew W. Marshall, Director of Net Assessment Office, has stated: “[L]ong-range precision strike weapons coupled to very effective sensors and command-and-control systems will come to dominate much of warfare. Rather than closing with an opponent, the major mode will be destroying him at a distance.”(ii)
(ii) Tell this to the Bosnians
The elements of information war are purported to be: infiltration (gathering information from enemy systems), attacking (making enemy systems unusable), and defending (against enemy infiltration and attack).
In one sense, one can hardly argue with this notion. Outwitting the enemy through good intelligence has been a staple of good generalship at least since the time of Sun Tzu. Unfortunately, the idea that by clever maneuver one can minimize fighting and casualties is at least as old as Jomini. Elevating the idea of using good intelligence and speedy action to the level of a new kind of war may owe more to Jomini than to Sun Tzu. Whether “information war” amounts to something real, or is simply another fad, remains to be seen. As Clausewitz argued, however, it is a bad idea to think that clever maneuver can eliminate the need for fighting. Mobility For years the Army has talked about mobility, about “shoot, move, and communicate,” about artillery employing “shoot and scoot” tactics Yet in Vietnam we ended up with stationary firebases, and in Bosnia we apparently are doing the same thing. Despite all the talk of mobility during peacetime, “When the guns begin to shoot,” as Kipling put it, there seem to be good reasons for holding fixed positions. This will probably always be the case. Lessons Others Have Learned We are not the only ones learning from our experiences. Other people are observing us, and learning things we might just as soon they didn’t learn. Here are some lessons other people appear to be learning. Don’t Go Head-to-Head with the Americans Prior to the Gulf War, we were told about Saddam Hussein’s “fourth largest army in the world,” and about his “battle-hardened troops,” and how they would be a tough nut to crack. I don’t wish to denigrate the excellent performance of the ground troops in the Gulf War by downgrading the Iraqi troops. They indeed were there in large numbers, many did have combat experience (probably a higher proportion than in the U.S. Army), and they occupied well-dug-in defensive positions. However, the technology and training of U.S. joint forces wrapped them up in short order, especially after prolonged bombing had crippled their communications and logistics.
The lesson which will be drawn by other international miscreants is, don’t try that again. Either gain your objective before the U.S. can get on the ground, or use some other method of gaining your objective. Potential enemies will not contest us on our strengths. Instead, they will attempt to exploit our weaknesses.
Terrorism is clearly one of the possible alternatives. The recent Chinese observation that we won’t defend Taiwan because we don’t want to lose San Francisco is yet another harbinger of things to come. Our potential opponents will be looking for ways to get around our proven capabilities. They won’t be contesting them directly. Technology as Force Multiplier The U.S. is not the only nation which can use technology as a force multiplier. Although China can outnumber any army in the world, if it chooses, it has come a long way from the days of Korea and “human wave” attacks. The Chinese are buying amphibious capability, and are developing heliborne tactics. The sheer size of its forces may soon be multiplied by the kind of air-land operations U.S. forces have heretofore thought of as their own specialty.
Moreover, U.S. forces may in the future face technology at least as advanced as our own, bought from arms exporters. For instance, the French IR-guided Mica has range longer than any IR air-to-air missile in the U.S. inventory. Two thousand of these have already been ordered by forces in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. They will be in service by 1997.
Of the 267 nations in the world, only 30 now lack SAMs. There is expected to be a five-fold increase in the number of countries having AIM-120 class air-to-air missiles by 2005.
The problem is not only new vehicles. Older airframes with updated avionics -- look-down, shoot-down capability – are becoming widely available. Seven countries are currently marketing upgrade kits for F-5s. Up to 700 Mig-21s could be upgraded by 2000. While these airframes are inferior to the best U.S. vehicles in dogfighting capability, their avionics upgrades can make them the equal of U.S. aircraft for beyond-visual-range combat. They would be well suited for the types of tactics used by the North Vietnamese Air Force during the Vietnam War, and would be ideal for knocking down JOINT STARS aircraft.
Other technological aids are also readily available to other nations. Satellite imagery and use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) are available to everyone. They can no longer convey an advantage to our forces. Moreover, other nations can obtain these aids directly instead of going through us (as the British during the Falklands war against Argentina). Sophistication at using these aids may be the only edge we can muster. Unresolved issues Here are some issues which presented problems in either or both of Vietnam and the Gulf War, which clearly haven’t been resolved. They represent potential lessons, but it’s not yet clear what we need to learn from them. Objectives One of the major problems throughout the Vietnam War was the lack of well-defined objectives. Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has admitted that in 1964 the Joint Chiefs of Staff had told him the US had not defined a “militarily valid objective for Vietnam.”
Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger defined a set of criteria for U.S. entry into a war:
• Is a vital US interest at stake? • Will we commit sufficient resources to win? • Will we sustain the commitment? (he notes the initial Cold War consensus among academics, journalists, Congress, and the public) • Are the objectives clearly defined? • Is there reasonable expectation that the public and Congress will support the operation? • Have we exhausted our other options?
It is interesting to note that these criteria are essentially identical with the Just War criteria for Jus ad Bellam. However, they may be very difficult to meet (which is the intention of the Just War criteria). Will we enter a war without meeting all of them, then find ourselves unable either to get out honorably or to pursue it to a satisfactory conclusion? Setting objectives for a war, including an exit strategy if we find the original objectives are too expensive to meet, is an issue which we must resolve. Casualties Given America’s concern with casualties, an enemy need not defeat us; he need only stay on the battlefield until we give up. To a large extent, this is what happened in Vietnam. The idea is not a new one. Sun Tzu put it well:
Victory is the main object in war. If it is long delayed, troops become demoralized and their strength exhausted. When this happens, your enemy will take advantage of our state. So, though there may be blundering swiftness in war, there is no clever operation that was protracted. If we are to defeat an enemy whose primary strength is staying power, we need to find ways of doing it quickly. A long war for limited objectives, with its steady stream of body bags, will not be supported by the American people. Prisoners of War I don’t wish to get involved in debating whether we “left men behind.” I do wish to point out that this is a politically sensitive issue. There is some evidence that American troops captured by the Red forces in Siberia in the 1920s were never returned. There is also some evidence that men known to have been in German POW camps, subsequently captured by the Russians, were never returned. There are lingering questions about whether all the POWs from Korea were returned. I hardly need mention the controversy over Vietnam POWs.
My point here is that this is an issue which is going to come back to haunt us again and again, unless we come to some resolution of it. Unless we outright win a war and occupy all the enemy homeland, we are dependent upon the willingness of the enemy to release all POWs at the conclusion of the fighting. Moreover, as the WWII experience shows, even that might not be good enough if part of the enemy homeland is occupied by a dubious ally. We need to figure out what we are going to do about POWs in any future wars. Ballistic Missiles The loss of several hundred Americans to a single SCUD missile should have brought home the need for some means of dealing with this threat. There are now 26 countries which have short or medium range ballistic missiles, and a few which have missiles capable of reaching the United States.
This issue has become so involved in domestic politics that it is hard to see a way out. Nevertheless, it is an issue which is not resolved, and which must be addressed. Small Wars Guerrilla fighting is not something new to the United States. Rogers’ Rangers in the Revolutionary War, and Mosby’s Raiders in the Civil War, gave us plenty of experience on the partisan side. We also had considerable small wars experience on the counter-insurgency side, including the experience of the Marines in Nicaragua. We also should have been able to draw on the experience of the British in Malaya and the French in Indochina. Unfortunately, we ignored all this experience when we went into Vietnam.
We seem to have learned at least part of the lesson. Applying the lessons of Vietnam worked in El Salvador:
• deploy small units, with restrictions on firepower; • economic, political, psychological operations must be used to enhance the legitimacy of the local government; • the U.S. must not assume control of the conflict.
These lessons worked, but at a cost of over $1 million per resident of El Salvador. It’s not clear we can afford many more victories of that kind.
Will these lessons apply in future counterinsurgency operations? In Vietnam, and in El Salvador, we ware faced with opponents trying to take over the government. Separatist groups may be common in the future, as opposed to groups trying to take over the country. We may also face commercial insurgency, i.e., quasi-political, quasi-bandit groups (Robin Hood is the classical example). The current alliances between anti-government insurgents and narcotics traffickers in South American may be a harbinger of more to come. We may also be faced with camouflaged insurgency, with hidden links between “legitimate” groups with apparently genuine grievances and armed rebels. In this scenario, the underground group destabilizes government, then the above-ground group takes power, possibly by election, or possibly by threat of a coup such as brought Mussolini to power.
We need to take the issue of small wars seriously. The Air Force’s First Special Operations Wing has seen more combat in the past ten years than any other Air Force unit. This is already a problem which is not getting the attention it deserves. Chemical & Biological Warfare
Under the proper circumstances, biological and chemical weapons can be very deadly. Moreover, as John Holum, of the Arms Control & Disarmament Agency has put it, “They are not that difficult to make, so I think we have to anticipate a very high risk of these things being more widely available.( ) In effect, they may well be the “poor man’s atomic bomb,” as they have been called.
However, while these weapons may be cheap to manufacture, they are not necessarily cheap to deliver. SCUDs are not exactly things you build in a garage. Nevertheless, these weapons do present a threat we have yet to figure out how to combat. Protective clothing hampers the wearer’s performance, which may well be part of the enemy’s goal anyway. Moreover, once you’re inside a contaminated protective suit, you may have a tough time getting out of it in a combat situation.
The problems for civilians are even greater. Recall the pictures of Israeli civilians huddling in their apartments, with gas masks on their faces and duct tape around the doors and windows. Use of chemical or biological warfare agents against a society which isn’t as well prepared as Israel could have horrendous results. The “lesson learned” here is that we don’t yet know how to deal with this issue. The Press Quite frankly, it did my heart good to see the pressies and their stupid questions skewered by the intelligent, articulate Public Affairs Officers during Desert Storm. As far as I was concerned, it was payback time.
The exact role of the press in the American defeat in Vietnam is still being debated. What cannot be debated, however, is the fact that the press stopped being reporters and became participants in the “story” as early as 1963, with various reporters’ decision that Diem had to go.
The news media also served as a conduit for enemy propaganda. In Vietnam, this started with Harrison Salisbury’s guided tour of Hanoi. The news media also gave credence to the reports of Wilfred Burchett, whose collaboration with communist forces goes back to Korea. It didn’t end with Vietnam, either. Recall the “baby milk factory” in Baghdad.
I was a student at the Armed Forces Staff College during the siege of Khe Sanh. What I and my fellow students knew about the battle was only what the news media reported. One day our guest speaker was the Army Chief of Staff. During the question period, a student asked about the battle, and the dismal prospects of our forces, as described by the media. The General’s reply was, “You are all military professionals. You can read a map. What do you think?” That was the problem. We could read a map, and we knew that as long as the airstrip remained operable and U.S. forces had control of the air, Khe Sanh could hold out indefinitely. What we couldn’t understand was why the press reported just the opposite.
The misreporting of the Tet Offensive, especially the failure to report Viet Cong atrocities in Hue, still sticks in the craw of many Vietnam veterans. Today the media have reported fully on the atrocities committed by the Serbs. Yet nothing the Serbs have done wasn’t also done by the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army. The media at that time kept silence on VC/NVA atrocities.
The failure to report the true nature of the enemy, and the misreporting of U.S. victories, all contributed to the public’s sense of the war’s futility. Even if it is argued that the news media’s failure to report the war properly had no effect on the outcome, that doesn’t change the fact that the media failed in their job
Despite the failings of the news media in Vietnam, and whatever the reasons for the behavior of the reporters, however, there is a serious problem here. The American people are entitled to know what is happening when their family members, friends, and neighbors are sent to do battle in some distant land. Clamping down on the press to prevent misreporting doesn’t guarantee accurate reporting. It may result only in a news blackout, or in the reporting of trivia. The Desert Shield reporting came awfully close to trivia, because the access of the media was limited and controlled. Lack of reporting, especially during a long war, may lead the people at home to suspect that disasters are being hidden from them. This may lead to loss of support for the war effort.
In Bosnia, it is impossible to control access by the media. Instead, the Army is trying to control what the troops say. They are provided with a Media Reference Card which gives the following instructions:
• “Don’t make ‘off the record’ statements to reporters. • “Never lie to the media.” • “Don’t allow yourself to be badgered by the media. If necessary, politely end the interview and contact your commander or the PAO.” • “If [an unescorted] reporter comes to your unit, refer them to the Joint Information Bureau.”
They are also provided with the following canned “nonresponses” which they can give a reporter:
• “We are trained, ready and fully prepared to conduct peace enforcement operations.” • “We are a disciplined and trained force. We understand our mission and the rules of engagement.” • Our forces are confident in our trained and competent leaders. We have pride in our leadership, from the president on down, and full trust in their decisions.”( )
Clearly these nonresponses aren’t the solution either. Dealing with the news media, in anything less than an all-out war situation similar to World War II, is a problem we haven’t yet resolved. Domestic Dissent Dissent from the war didn’t begin with Vietnam. The Copperheads in the North opposed the Civil War. Several New England states threatened to secede from the Union during what they called Mr. Madison’s War, otherwise known as the War of 1812. And the Revolutionary War was as much a civil war as it was a war of independence. Some estimates go as high as a third of the population opposed the war for independence.
Nevertheless, domestic opposition to the Vietnam war is something that sticks in everyone’s mind. We now have a view from the other side, in that same interview with Bui Tin quoted earlier
Q. Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi’s victory? A. It was essential to our strategy. Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us. Q. [Why] did the Politburo pay attention to these visits? A. These people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize the will to win. While we need not attribute North Vietnam’s victory solely to domestic dissent in the U.S., we need to recognize that such dissent poses some unresolved issues. Clearly in a democracy, the government shouldn’t be able to mold public opinion. Dissent against an unwise or immoral war is a necessary part of democratic society. In some way, however, it must be possible to counter dissent which involves collaboration with the enemy. We must not allow the enemy to intervene in our domestic politics, even under the guise of dissent. However, this issue has yet to be satisfactorily resolved.
Summary We have clearly learned some lessons from Vietnam and the Gulf War, as demonstrated by our use of force in Bosnia. However, it is clear we still have some lessons to learn. Moreover, others have learned lessons as well, and will be attempting to find ways around our capabilities.
Officially, we are currently maintaining a Two-regional-war strategy. However, it is not clear that this strategy can actually be carried out. Can we really deal with both North Korea and China/Taiwan while bogged down in Bosnia? If we have to intervene in Korea, can we expect other nations, such as China or Iran, to take advantage of our preoccupation by creating mischief elsewhere?
Simply increasing the resources devoted to defense is not necessarily the only answer. It is worth recalling that during the lean years between World War I and World War II, our military forces made some excellent preparations:
• The U.S. Navy invented dive bombing; • The Marine Corps perfected CAS; • The Army Air Corps invented strategic bombing; • The Army Signal Corps invented radar.
These accomplishments were carried out in a time of tight budgets, through construction of prototypes and war gaming. True, we were still unprepared in terms of adequacy of forces at the outbreak of war. Nevertheless, we knew what kinds of forces were needed, and had the ability to muster and equip them quickly.
The trick now is to combine the lessons learned from Vietnam and the Gulf War with our demonstrated ability to be very innovative even in a time of tight budgets, and do this while maintaining sufficient ready forces that potential enemies will be hesitant to test our will. Notes
About the Author: Dr. Joseph P. Martino is a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Dayton Research Institute. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1953 through 1975, retiring in the grade of Colonel. His assignments included the Air Force Armament Laboratory, Air Force Avionics Laboratory, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Air Force Office of Research Analyses, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency R&D Field Unit in Bangkok, Thailand. He served for several years as chairman of the Special Warfare Working Group of the Military Operations Research Society.
ENDNOTES
1. Frisbee, John L., "Tribute to Tankers," Air Force Magazine, January 1966, p. 49.
2. Crane, Conrad C., Bombs, Cities & Civilians, University Press of Kansas, 1993, p. 158 ff.
3. Hallion, Richard (Air Force Historian), interview in Air Force Magazine, April 1996, p. 15.
4. Young, Stephen, "How North Vietnam Won the War," Wall Street Journal, Thursday, August 3, 1995, p. A10.
5. Senich, Peter R., The Long-Range War, Paladin Press, 1994, p. v.
6. Lt. Col. Mike Scaparotti, U.S. Army, quoted in Wall Street Journal, October 25, 1995
7. Asker, James R., "Washington Outlook," Aviation Week & Space Technology, January 22, 1996, p. 19.
8. Gabriel, Richard, No More Heroes, Collins Publishers, 1987.
9. Biteman, Lt. Col. Duane E., USAF (Ret.), "Unsung Heroes of the Korean War," Military, February 1996, p. 6.
10. Holum, John, director, U.S. Arms Control & Disarmament Agency, quoted in Bill Gertz, "Horror Weapons," Air Force Magazine, January 1966, p. 44.
11. Soldier of Fortune, May 1996, p. 8
After Iraq: Learning the War 's Lessons by James Jay Carafano, Ph.D.
Backgrounder #1664
July 3, 2003 | Executive Summary | |
In a three-week campaign, the United States and its coalition allies deposed the regime of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. In the wake of the war, the Bush Administration and Congress are trying to learn what lessons this victory holds for preparing for future conflicts.
It is not clear, however, that they are getting it right. There is an expectation that in short order they can digest the war 's complex operations and determine sound policy insights. That is not likely to happen. A thorough review will need some historical perspective.
Rather, in the near term, they would do well to focus on a few key strategic issuesrefining national military strategy, restructuring U.S. alliances, reordering defense research and development priorities, rebalancing aviation acquisition programs, improving post-conflict planning, and enhancing the role of the U.S. Department of Defense in homeland security. These are obvious and pressing problems that can be addressed right now--helping to ensure that the nation maintains its competitive advantages, brings overseas military campaigns to successful conclusions, and protects the homeland.
Lessons Learned About Learning Lessons
Success can be the handmaiden of future military defeats--if it breeds intellectual complacency. Learning the right lessons from past wars, especially for the winners, is always problematic. What often passes for insights are more often code words for advancing particular agendas, avoiding tough issues, or ignoring the ambiguities, arguments, and evidence that do not fit the "right answer."
America 's recent track record is not good. Official lessons-learned efforts after Operation Desert Storm were a failure. Service parochialisms dominated the Defense Department report, and Congress failed to ask the hard questions.1 In addition, post-Desert Storm reviews focused largely on war-fighting issues and ignored the larger strategic, diplomatic, operational, and post-conflict challenges that ought to be reexamined in the wake of war.
There are only a few signs that this Administration and Congress will do better. The Pentagon tasked its Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, to prepare the official "lessons learned" report. Preliminary results are due to be briefed shortly. The command has yet to prove it is up to the task of providing sophisticated and insightful analysis or challenging service preconceptions.
Joint Forces Command has been collecting data since the onset of military operations. So far, a team of 35 military and civilian analysts has interviewed over 400 key leaders and collected about 4,000 files of various materials that will have to be evaluated.2 The fact that they plan on assimilating this mass of information so quickly almost guarantees that the results will be fairly superficial and mostly laudatory.3 Equally disappointing, the lessons-learned process has not been an interagency effort, which would include the participation of other organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Departments of State and Homeland Security. Other aspects of the war, including the broader strategic issues and the homeland security mission, are not being considered.
Meanwhile, even before the release of the Pentagon 's report, the House mark-up of the Defense Authorization Bill claims already to have captured the lessons learned.4 This mark-up, however, reflects little new thinking, seemingly content to add a few extra dollars to existing programs, upping the Pentagon 's allowance for a job well done.
Divining a war 's lessons is neither easy nor quick. Probably the single most successful project was the German Reichswehr appreciation of World War I combat gained after a half-decade of analysis, testing, experimentation, and debate.5 Now computers and simulations make it easier to process information much faster, but the intellectual investment and the real-world experimentation with real troops and systems that is needed to validate lessons learned still take time. It requires much effort to properly digest the lessons of even a short war and turn those insights into effective programs and meaningful initiatives.
The Administration and Congress should be more cautious. They need to take a measured pace that lets the analysis drive the agenda, rather than rush to claim that the next budget captures the lessons of the last war.
In addition, the military achievements in Iraq have to be placed in context. U.S. combat experiences after the Cold War have been incredibly diverse. Desert Storm, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Operation Iraqi Freedom all required different combinations of military forces for different objectives. No one conflict will likely offer a cookie-cutter solution for how to fight future wars; therefore, the core strategic lessons from this latest battle need to be weighed against the experience of other operations to derive the common themes and trends that are important.
The Administration and Congress, however, do not have to stand passively by while Joint Forces Command struggles along. There are first-order questions on the use of military force to which the Iraq conflict offers some very clear insights. These can guide efforts while waiting for more detailed, and hopefully thoughtful and unbiased, analysis on the performance of individual units, tactics, and weapons.
Whether future conflicts involve fighting a global war on terrorism, dealing with rogue states, or meeting the challenges of a rising competitor, the United States will want to retain freedom of action and the unfettered ability to project military power. Lessons learned should focus on the key enablers that allow the United States to exploit its great-power status. The critical issues that need to be addressed include issues of strategy, alliance relationships, research and development priorities, aviation acquisition, post-conflict planning, and homeland security.
Refining Military Strategy
The Iraq conflict had a key attribute in common with other successful major U.S. military operations since World War II. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Desert Storm, and Panama, the enemy was denied sanctuary and support. In each case, an isolated foe was exposed to the brunt of American power. In contrast, in Korea and Vietnam (and in the Russian experience in Afghanistan), the enemy had sanctuaries where it could go to rest and resupply, as well as sources of support that could not be touched. Great states should fight wars where they can use their preponderance of power to their advantage and control the scope and pace of conflict.
In the most recent operation, the success of U.S. efforts needs be approached with some caution. Little is publicly known about the Iraqis ' preparation for war.6 In the end, their rapid defeat may be attributed as much to Saddam 's strategic misjudgments as to the prowess of the American military. Still, the point should not be lost: Keeping the bad guys in a very small box both before and during a war is a very big deal.
This Administration has yet to publish a national military strategy.7 When it does, recognition of the benefit of boxing the enemy should have a prominent place in the Pentagon 's thinking. Strategic isolation ought to be a priority in any confrontation.
In turn, the importance of strategic isolation should drive the Pentagon to augment capabilities that help constrain an enemy 's options, like robust and persistent intelligence and reconnaissance assets that allow for monitoring cross-border activities. In this respect, the Pentagon 's increasing emphasis on enhancing space-borne assets, converting Ohio-class submarines to improve their recon-strike means, fielding more long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, and robust special operations forces makes sense. A sharper strategy would place even more emphasis on such needs and push the armed forces toward developing the right set of capabilities for the future.
Rethinking America 's Alliances
During Operation Iraqi Freedom, alliances and international organizations that served well enough during the Cold War were largely irrelevant to the success in Iraq. The United States needed allies to win the war, but they were different in kind and character from those relied on in the past. Key allies (in particular, Qatar and Kuwait) offered staging grounds for U.S. forces. Meanwhile, European nations, outside the framework of NATO, provided facilities that made possible the transit of most of the material and troops that fought in the war.
Today, U.S. strategic needs, as operations in Iraq clearly reflect, are far more diverse. America requires partners that can help us dissuade, preempt, and defeat as well as deter threats--and it may not always be clear long beforehand which countries will be needed and when they will be needed.
In addition, as diplomatic wrangling before the war demonstrated, the United States appears increasingly at odds with many of its traditional allies regarding the seriousness of emerging security threats. Unlike the Cold War, there is no universal consensus on the nature of global dangers, particularly with respect to international terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Everyone agrees these are bad things, but the agreement ends on how to handle these problems, as illustrated by U.N. Security Council debates over inspections in Iraq.
Disagreements between strategic partners are nothing new. Many forget, for example, the intense strains that the decision to deploy U.S. ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles placed on the NATO alliance in the late 1970s.8 Differences between allies are a fact of life. Indeed, absent a clear common threat like the Soviet Union, and given the diminishing defense contribution of many the United States ' traditional European allies,9 it is likely that there will be even less collective decision-making and more frequent disagreements in the future.
What is more important to note is that the basic purpose of America 's military alliances has changed. During the Cold War, forward-deployed military forces and multinational coalitions were a tripwire against Soviet expansionism. Now they serve a different role. In fact, in the future, the best military alliances may primarily be a wide range of bilateral arrangements that ensure options for U.S. access to different parts of the world. Multinational and international organizations might best serve primarily for diplomatic functionsfocused more on ensuring the appropriate behavior of allies (such as supporting nonproliferation regimes, anti-terrorism measures, and humanitarian assistance) than on providing military forces for going after enemies.
The implications of these changes are significant. Maintaining forward-deployed forces and extensive overseas infrastructure has always been among the Pentagon 's highest priorities. In contrast, Special Operations Forces training missions, National Guard state-to-state partnership programs, and other military-to-military activities, which are the real backbone of building trust and confidence between future allies, often get short shrift. That has to change, as does the notion that reducing overseas presence automatically equates to eliminating combat force structure.
Today, unlike the period of the Cold War, what forces do rather than where they are determines their strategic utility. Operations in Iraq, for example, drew on units from virtually every combat command.10 In addition to regular forces, reservists and the National Guard played a major role as well. At the time of the war, there were 222,000 on active duty, many either serving in Iraq or performing homeland security duties. The increasingly frequent use of military forces for operational missions is straining the force. The U.S. needs to realign its forces to meet new alliance needs, not reduce capacity.
There are some signs that on this subject, Congress and the Pentagon understand the requirements. House proposals, for example, to increase active-duty and full-time reserve component end strength for some critical military specialties are sound.11 Of even more long-term consequence is the Defense Department 's decision to reposition forces in Korea and realign Pacific commands.12
The Pentagon is also considering restructuring the U.S. military footprint in Europe. Here they should be very bold. There is a lot that can be done.13 Simply eliminating unnecessary commands and moving to the joint basing of Army, Navy, Marine, and Navy forces where it makes sense should reduce overseas troop requirements by 10-20 percent. Much can be gained from moving quickly and decisively in restructuring the U.S. global military presence.
Resetting Research and Development Priorities
In modern conventional combat operations, as was seen again during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military 's main task has not been to overwhelm an enemy with manpower, but to outperform them with superior combat systems. The real challenge has become getting these forces into theater when they are needed. Today, issues of how much can be moved, in what way, and at what speed have become the key limiting factors in how and when the United States brings the preponderance of its military power to bear. It still takes a lot to move the military. The United States shipped over 81,000 tons of cargo to the Gulf. It took 2,000 rail cars and 1,000 trucks just to get the 4th Infantry Division, the Army 's most modernized force, to port.
In the past, warfighting needs largely drove the decisions that prescribed how much and what kinds of forces generals need. In the future, as combat forces become more capable and lethal, how quickly troops can get "there from anywhere" may be the more important determinant of their value.
Right now, to move faster, the armed forces try to take less and increase the effectiveness of what they send by enhancing interoperability and efficiency. For instance, the Marines that fought in Iraq had too much equipment to be airlifted into theater, and it would not all fit in the Navy 's amphibious warfare ships. Without the 11 Maritime Prepositioning Force ships in the Mediterranean, Diego Garcia, and Guam, which were stocked with most of the heavy equipment and supplies the Marines needed, they would have never gotten to the fight at all.
Efforts like prepositioning equipment will take us only so far--but at present, there are few more attractive options. Buying new means of transport or slightly lighter equipment may only marginally improve deployability at a high cost. The only way to forge ahead is to develop the breakthrough technologies and new manufacturing methods that will dramatically reduce the weight of the force while retaining its lethality and survivability.
Currently, however, the biggest research and development (R&D) budget increases go to system development and demonstration, applying proven technologies.14 While some of the development and demonstration effort will help provide critical new capabilities, such as missile defense, much of the future spending in this area is programmed to go to follow-on replacements for traditional platforms such as helicopters and fighter aircraft.
In contrast, funds for the basic scientific exploration needed to develop the innovations15 that might challenge the tyranny of gravity are in sharp decline. In the Administration 's FY 2004 budget request, basic research would fall 7.7 percent to $1.3 billion while applied research would decline 14.4 percent to $3.7 billion. Science and Technology programs overall, which also include early technology development, will drop 8.3 percent to $10.3 billion.16
This trend should be reversed. If the United States is serious about maintaining its overwhelming competitive advantages over the long term, it needs to invest for the long term. Funding should match the levels recommended in the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, which called for spending 3 percent of the defense budget on basic science and technology.17
Rebalancing Aviation Acquisition Priorities
While the battles in the Iraqi desert and among crowded city streets may have implications for the future of many military platforms, no subject should receive more attention than armed forces ' aviation needs. The United States military is on the cusp of a wave of acquisition that by mid-decade could account for a quarter or more of defense spending. The lion 's share of this procurement will be in modernizing the air fleet of combat, transport, and support craft.18 This is an enormous investment that the Pentagon can ill-afford to get wrong.
Perhaps the most cogent observation of the war in Iraq is that only 56 years after the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 that corralled the services under a single federal department, the armed forces fought its closest approximation to a truly "joint" campaign that united their capabilities into one integrated military operation. The military discovered that the quest for the "Holy Grail" was worth it. Jointness really worksthe whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
What matters most in joint warfare is overall systems performance, not individual platforms. In fact, given the right system, even old weapons can provide dramatic new capabilities. As Naval War College Professor Mackubin Owens points out, creating new ways of warfare is not an "all-or-nothing proposition"19 that requires scrapping all the old weapons for new ones. The Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), which turns a bomb built in the 1950s into a precision-guided 21st century weapon with the addition of a guidance kit that costs about $20,000, is a case in point.
That said, even in "systems-centric" warfare, platforms (e.g., tanks, ships, and planes) still matter. In war, systems do not always perform as expected. Sometimes they fail, leaving the military dependent on platforms. For example, it is unclear whether or not the military can yet achieve sufficient "situational awareness" of the battlefield to avoid all threats and completely give up the lethality and protection that some platforms provide in exchange for significantly lighter weight and greater speed. In close combat, robust platforms still matter: They are a hedge against the inevitable friction of battle that drags against any system in wartime.20
As a result, while thinking about future war should be driven by systems, platforms still must be considered. The lives of U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen may depend on them. In addition, buying platforms consumes most of the defense acquisition budget. In no other area is learning the right lessons from the war more important.
In the months ahead, the future requirements for short-range tactical aircraft has to top the list of subjects for discussion for the simple reason that it comprises such an enormous wedge of Defense acquisition spending, as well as spending on operations and maintenance.
Clearly, combat in Iraq reinforced the results of other recent campaigns by demonstrating that responsive airpower and effective close air support is now a question of range, loiter time over the battle area, and payload. Bombers, naval strike forces, unmanned vehicles, helicopters, missiles, and artillery, as well as short-range aircraft, can provide much of this capability.
It is too soon to draw detailed lessons on the performance of any one weapon. For example, some pundits have been quick to consign U.S. Army attack helicopters to history 's junk pile after an AH-64 Apache assault near Karbala that left one aircraft shot down and many damaged. But all this attack showed is that helicopters are vulnerable to very low-level air defense and small-arms fire. That is not news. Whether the battlefield role of rotary-wing attack aircraft is a technological dead end or just the victim of bad tactics deserves a closer look.
On the other hand, the real limitations of short-range tactical aircraft seem apparent. They cannot linger as long over the battlefield, nor can they carry as large a payload as a bomber. Unlike missiles, artillery, and unmanned aerial vehicles, they put a pilot at risk every time they fly over a target.
In addition, theater access, particularly for aircraft that could launch only from existing airfields or improved airstrips, was a problem. During the Iraq war, although military threats did not restrict access to airfields, political sensibilities did. According to one analysis, of the 58 regional airbases within optimal range of the battlefield, only three were available to bomb-dropping aircraft.21 To increase the sortie rate, the Air Force made extensive use of older airframes such as the A-10 Thunderbolt, AV-8B Harrier, and AC-130 gunship that could operate from austere airfields. In future conflicts, restricted basing, as a result of either enemy action or diplomatic wrangling, could be a serious obstacle to the use of tactical fighter craft.22
Given the limitations of tactical aircraft and the menu of means available to the services, massive planned investments in the Defense Department 's three major tactical aircraft modernization programs (the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, the F/A-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter)23 seem out of balance. Buying all these aircraft in the numbers planned by the Pentagon will expand U.S. capabilities in an area where the American military already enjoys an enormous competitive advantage. At the same time, these efforts risk shortchanging bomber modernization and other defense requirements.
The House Armed Services Committee should be commended for recommending $100 million for the research and development of a next-generation bomber.24 But this is only a small step in the right direction of looking at credible alternatives for the future.
Improving the Planning for Peace
In Iraq, initial post-conflict activities should have focused on providing a safe and secure environment, searching for weapons of mass destruction programs and the infrastructure that supports terrorism, and securing Iraq 's oil resources for the future reconstruction of the country.25 With the exception of gaining quick control of the oil fields, in many respects, U.S. operations seem to have missed their mark. Of particular concern is that the coalition did not seem to have forces properly tailored to accomplish the main objective of the campaign: tracking down and rooting out the hidden elements of Iraq 's illegal weapons programs.
Although occupation duties are never easy and it would be unrealistic to expect normalcy to return quickly to a country that has been mercilessly exploited by a ruthless dictator for decades, it does seem that preparations for the post-conflict period were inadequate. In part, this can be attributed to a lack of understanding over the military 's appropriate role. Historically, the armed forces concentrate on warfighting and eschew the challenges of dealing with the battlefield after the battle.26 That is a problem.
The military 's role in post-conflict activities is limited but vital. Nation-building is a task for which military forces are neither well-suited nor appropriate. In addition, prolonged occupation ties up valuable military manpower that might be needed elsewhere. Yet, in any post-conflict operation, the United States will have moral and legal obligations to restore order, provide a safe and secure environment for the population, ensure that people are being fed, and prevent the spread of infectious disease. During World War II, they called it, appropriately, "the disease and unrest formula."
Implementing the formula is never easy. In the initial stages of any occupation, post-conflict activities have to be a primarily military-led effort. Only the occupation forces have the security and logistics needed to get the job done, and they can provide a focal point for the unity of effort required to make the troubled transition from war to peace.
Although the military should be in charge at the outset, even before the end of the conflict, they should work closely with allies, federal agencies, and nongovernmental agencies. Ensuring that the military does the right things after the war and works with the right people are skills that are not easily learned and quickly forgotten.
The U.S. needs to prepare more effectively for the post-conflict period. Someone must have clear responsibility for the doctrine, detailed coordination, force requirements, and technologies required to conduct these operations.27 Today, in the halls of the Pentagon and the staff rooms at the combatant commands, roles and missions are dispersed too diffusely and only intermittently gain the attention of senior leaders. One of the services (the Army is probably the best candidate) needs to be tasked to develop a core competency in post-conflict operations, and there needs to be a standing joint and interagency structure for properly managing these missions.
Protecting the Homefront
Operation Liberty Shield was a notable but fledgling effort by the new Department of Homeland Security to address attacks on the home front during the war in Iraq. This operation deserves as much scrutiny from the Administration and the Congress as Operation Iraqi Freedom. It would not be surprising to find that on close inspection, there is less there than meets the eye.
The lack of a strong homeland defense could be a problem in the future. Terrorism might not be the only threat to U.S. territory. Any regional conflict could result in threats to the homeland. An enemy unable to match American conventional military power might instead attack vulnerable targets on U.S. territory as an alternative means to coerce, deter, or defeat the United States.
There are important reasons for addressing these potential threats. A secure homeland not only protects U.S. citizens and properties, but also is a vital strategic enabler in allowing the United States greater freedom of action in applying its offensive power.
While there were some concerns about terrorism during the war, America 's defenses were not greatly tested. That is probably fortunate. Key vulnerabilities remain, including maritime security and emergency response for catastrophic attacks. The military has an important role to play in addressing these and other vulnerabilities. In that light, the scope of cooperation between the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security should be subject of particular attention.
More specifically, it is not clear that the newly established U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), which is responsible for the defense of the continental United States, is adequately organized or resourced to meet the nation 's homeland security needs. NORTHCOM was created under the Pentagon 's Unified Command Plan, which lays out the geographic boundaries and functions of the various U.S. commands worldwide.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Joint Chiefs of Staff rushed out a new version of the Unified Command Plan; but since then, headquarters has done little more than set up shop. If the threats to the homeland were far more significant than those actually posed during Operation Iraqi Freedom, it is not clear what real value the command would have added to the security of the nation. NORTHCOM could be made much more effective.28
A National Action Plan
The war in Iraq underscored the core strategic issues that demand the immediate attention of the Administration and Congress. They can and should act now to refine the national military strategy, restructure U.S. alliances, reprioritize defense research and development efforts, rebalance aviation acquisition programs, improve post-conflict planning, and provide additional support to NORTHCOM.
The following actions should be high on their list of priorities in the months ahead.
• The Pentagon should publish a military strategy that establishes isolating potential enemies as a first principle. Keeping enemies in a small box--undercutting their alliances, sources of support, and the means to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction or advanced technologies--ought to be job one.
• As the purpose and utility of alliances change, the U.S. military force structure needs to keep pace. The Administration must align military forward presence and engagement to meet new strategic requirements. Getting the realignment of forces in Europe right should be a high priority. Congress should give strong and unqualified support to these efforts.
• Congress should increase annual funding for the basic science and technology that might provide the leap-ahead capabilities needed for military transformation by at least 10 percent.
• The Administration and Congress should fundamentally rethink short-range aircraft procurement. A less ambitious program would still allow the United States to maintain its competitive edge while turning its attention to other critical defense needs, particularly bomber modernization and transformation programs.
• The Department of Defense should assign the Army the mission of post-conflict operations (not peacekeeping or nation-building) as a core competency and build a supporting joint and interagency structure that is prepared to execute these missions rather than relying on an ad hoc structure.
• The Pentagon must rethink the organization, tasks, and forces assigned to NORTHCOM to ensure that they are adequate to support the security of the homeland against the threat of catastrophic terrorist attacks, particularly during periods when U.S. forces are engaged in overseas conflicts.
Conclusion
Americans can be justifiably proud of the U.S. military 's performance during the war in Iraq, but victory is little more than a page in the history book once the war is over. What matters is securing an enduring peace and preparing for the next challenge. Learning the right lessons to prepare for the future is a difficult task that deserves serious effort.
Congress and the Administration should take the time to get it right. At the same time, they should not lose sight of the top strategic issues underscored by the conduct of the war. National military strategy, the structure of U.S. alliances, the order of precedence for defense research and development priorities, defense acquisition priorities, post-conflict planning, and the role of the Department of Defense in homeland security require prompt and sustained attention.
James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
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LESSONS FROM THE GULF WARS
“Gulf lesson one is the value of air power… (it) was right on target from day one… Our air strikes were the most effective, yet humane, in the history of warfare.”
President George Bush, 29 May 1991
The most important lesson of the second Gulf war is that a small group of guerrillas, armed with the right strategy, can keep a nation in perpetual failure.
John Robb
Iraq’s Baathists did learn lessons from the first Gulf war that altered their strategy for the second -- this is another demonstration that war is a contest of minds and to a lesser extent merely a clash of weaponry and formations on the field of battle.
1991’s Gulf War taught the Iraqi leadership that its military wasn’t a match for the US war machine. It would lose quickly and badly. Secondly, and less obviously, the first Gulf War taught the Iraqi leadership the power of systems disruption. The US air campaign during the first Gulf War was the first of its kind -- it completely shut down the functions of a semi-modern nation-state. For example:
• Oil and gasoline. 500 sorties and 1,200 tons of bombs were used to shut down Iraq’s oil and refining system. 80% of its refining capacity was directly impacted. The remaining 20% was preventatively closed to avoid damage. Iraq was left only with those fuel reserves produced before the war.
• Electricity. Attacks against Iraqi power production and switching facilities first shut down its effective use and then collapsed the entire system. This shutdown cascaded throughout the country as systems reliant on the national grid were forced to depend on unreliable ad hoc power generation.
• Telecommunications. The national telephone system was attacked on an ongoing basis. The ability to rapidly repair the network, its built-in redundancy, and numerous difficult to destroy wireless nodes forced the campaign’s planners into a series of repeated attacks to cause the needed disruption.
• Transportation. Numerous bridges, railroads, and roadways were interdicted to prevent the transportation of supplies and the normal functioning of the economy. Transportation connections from Baghdad to southeastern sections Iraq were successfully severed.
At the point when the first coalition ground forces entered Iraq (and Kuwait), Iraq was the hollow husk of a nation-state. All of its vital systems, necessary to support its status as a state let alone a state at war, were broken. As President Bush (see quote) and the entire world noted, the air campaign was devastatingly effective. However, this analysis misses the point. It wasn’t the air power that was so effective; it was systems disruption that accomplished the task. The devastation of Iraq’s infrastructure won the war before the ground invasion confirmed the process. The important thing to understand is that method of accomplishing this systemic collapse, air power, was coincidental to the outcome.
Lessons From The Struggle Against The Gulf War (1991)
A new cycle of working class struggle is tentatively emerging in continental Europe over austerity measures required by the Maastricht Treaty. But here in Britain any optimistic anticipation of the prospect of struggles is tempered by the shadow of a recent defeat. For since the historic and inspirational turning point of the poll tax rebellion, the resurrection of autonomous and uncompromised class hatred in Trafalgar Square and the mass refusal of austerity, has come the defeat of the anti-war movement. The Gulf War may not have had an effect on the working class 's ability to wage defensive struggles in response to coming offensives, but the revolutionary Left have still to come to terms with our failure to prevent the successful slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi proletarians. It is as if the blood of those thousands of Iraqi mutineers and deserters carpet-bombed on the road to Basra is somehow on our hands; the anti-war resistance in Iraq was so successful it rendered the Iraqi state incapable of defending its gains in Kuwait at all, while the impotence of the anti-war movement in the US and Britain virtually gave the murderous representatives of US/UK capital carte blanche to have Iraq bombed back into the Middle Ages.
In order to exorcise the ghost of this defeat we have to undertake a critical reappraisal of where the anti-war movement went wrong. Moreover, we have to reassess our own attempts to prevent the war and how we influenced the strategy pursued by the anti-war movement as a whole. It is not enough to say, as many who confined their opposition to grumbling over their pints must have done, that the outcome was inevitable, that the war couldn 't be prevented, that we could never defeat the forces of war, backed by the UN, the police forces and the media. The Vietnam war is a recent enough reminder of how a seemingly omnipotent war-machine can be rendered impotent by concerted opposition amongst soldiers and the class from which they are drawn. And right up until the commencement of Operation Desert Storm, despite the propaganda which accompanied Operation Desert Shield and the lack of any effective redress to it by the anti-war movement, opinion polls suggested that around 50% of the population were opposed to military intervention. Not a bad foundation from which to build an active and effective opposition.
Our failure was not inevitable. Nor can it be solely blamed on the left-liberal leadership of the anti-war movement, for their success in controlling the movement reflected our inability to mount a successful challenge to the leadership, their positions, and most of all, their strategy. So, we have to look at our own role in resisting the war, what we did right and wrong, the strengths and weaknesses of our strategy.
Anti-war Strategy
The experience of our class has shown us how capitalist wars can be effectively opposed. For the sake of analytical clarity this opposition may be divided into three separate strategies which are in reality particular yet inter-related aspects of the overall struggle. These may be roughly defined as:
i) undermining support for the war by stressing the class antagonisms involved; ii) actively sabotaging the state 's ability to conduct a war and; iii) precipitating a crisis 'at home '.
Let us consider these in turn.
i) Undermining the notion of a national interest.
The war in the Gulf has served to decimate a once combative oil producing proletariat, to reassert the role of the US as global policeman in the wake of the Soviet Union 's collapse, and also to stimulate another round of capital accumulation based on military procurement. These results may well have been considered during the build up to the war, and could have been factors in deciding to pursue the aims of the Allies by military means rather than through sanctions. But the primary aim of the Allies was to resecure the flow of Kuwaiti oil revenue into the US and UK banking systems, essential for the financing of the US deficit. In other words, the war was fought for the interests of US and UK capital, for their need of injections of finance capital from Kuwait, which have amounted to $60 billion invested in the US alone.
On the other hand, it was to be the working class who would be made to pay the price for the war. The refusal of Iraqi troops to fight was not anticipated, so casualties amongst British as well as Iraqi troops were expected. On top of the despair of the families from whom they would have been taken, the working class as a whole was expected to suffer as NHS wards were to be denied to us in order to treat the troops. As it was, patients had operations cancelled in preparation for this eventuality.
Although the financial costs of the war have been largely recovered through reluctant contributions from Japan and Germany and other oil states such as Dubai, UAE etc, and the massive profits from subsequent arms sales to the region, the costs were always liable to be foisted onto the shoulders of the working class through higher taxes, cuts in public services, and price rises. The government also hoped for another 'Falklands ' Factor ', rallying a nation divided over the poll tax behind the flag of the bourgeoisie.
In order to successfully oppose the war it was crucial that the anti-war movement stress that the war was to be fought for the interests of the capitalist class alone, and to decisively situate itself in opposition to those interests. This could be done through the usual means of propaganda such as leaflets, banners, graffiti, fly-posting, public meetings, and through high profile actions.
Not only is this essential for building an opposition at home that knows why it opposes the war and can thus formulate tactics such as strikes and civil disorder which reflect the class basis of that opposition, but it is also essential to encourage 'disloyalty ' amongst those troops expected to fight. Historical examples abound of desertions and mutinies making it impossible for rival capitalist interests to compete by means of war, not least in Vietnam where US troops were often more inclined to kill their officers than the supposed enemy. And there is evidence to indicate that a concerted refusal to fight in the Gulf War was not an impossibility. Even without the social unrest 'back home ' that formed the backdrop to resistance in Vietnam, many troops refused to go to the Gulf, including at least 23 of the US 's elite force, The Marines, who are currently in jail for desertion. There were also cases of warships en route to the Gulf being sabotaged . And Bush showed that he did not have absolute confidence in the loyalty of the US army when ammunition was taken away from all enlisted men and women on bases he visited during 'morale raising ' trips to Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Shield.
Examples of this strategy were seen in Germany, both during the build-up to war and once it had started. In August of 1990 a live TV show debating the Gulf crisis was disrupted by anti-war protesters with a banner reading: "There 's always German money in weapons when there 's any slaughter in the world." And on January 21st 1991, anti-war protesters attempted to make clear in whose interest the war was being fought by blockading the entrance to the Frankfurt stock exchange and pelting the dealers with eggs and paint bombs. ii) Sabotaging the war machine.
Fighting a war is huge logistical exercise requiring the coordinated movemen ts of troops, weapons, ammunition, and supplies from wherever they are stationed to wherever they are required. The ability of military commands to perform this operation is clearly dependent on a number of factors, including the reliability of those workers not required to fight but who are nonetheless essential for this logistical exercise, and if cooperative themselves, on their ability to function without interference. This presents many opportunities for sabotaging the war effort, and indeed there were a number of instances of such sabotage against the Gulf War. For example in August 1990, 4000 maintenance workers on US bases in Turkey went on strike for higher pay, thus deliberately hampering the war effort. And in France in September 1990, workers held up a ferry carrying troops to the Gulf, albeit for only 12 hours. In Italy there were attempts to blockade Malpanese airport near Milan in order to prevent it from being used to refuel USAF B-52 's en route between bombing raids in Iraq and British bases.
In Germany frequent attempts were made to blockade military depots and barracks in order to disrupt the mobilisation for the war. Transport command supplies were also blocked, holding up the movement of the raw materials for the military bases of the British and American troops stationed in Munster, Bremerhaven, Frankfurt, Berlin and elsewhere. The tactic of disrupting the transportation of military supplies was also used in France on several occasions, and in Holland, where trains supplying troops in Germany were persistently sabotaged, derailed, and blockaded. iii)Fermenting Crisis at Home.
The backdrop to the end of the Vietnam War, a result of the refusal of American conscripts to fight for their state, was a severe social crisis in the United States and Western Europe. One of the ways in which that crisis manifested itself was through civil disorder in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Footage of the riot in Grosvenor Square may look like a Keystone Cops movie compared with what Britain has seen in the last decade or so, but it was nevertheless an important moment in the international crisis which led the US State to pull out of Vietnam and confront the crisis it was suffering in its factories, streets, campuses and ghettoes.
Again, examples of this strategy were seen in opposition to the Gulf War. General strikes occurred in Pakistan, Italy, Turkey and Spain, although they seem to have been successfully restricted to one day only by union bureaucracies. A token 1/2 hour stoppage against the war occurred on January 18th 1991 at a firm in Bremen, Germany, and later that month, also in Germany, draft resisters forced to work as hospital orderlies went on a 3-day strike in opposition to the war.
Demonstrations against the war occurred virtually everywhere imaginable. And some of these, although not enough, spilled over into direct confrontations with the forces of the state. For example, in Bangladesh, police were forced to use batons to contain demonstrators on September 3rd 1990.
Waging Class War against the Bosses War...................
It can be seen from the above outline that there were a number of attempts, using various strategies, to wage the class war in continental Europe against the inter-capitalist war in the Gulf. One could no doubt find many other instances of anti-war resistance abroad if one was determined to search beyond these few examples which, despite a virtual media blackout on such activity, were available to the anti-war movement thanks to War Report, Counter Information , and a leaflet by B.M. Combustion .
One could criticize many of the actions which occurred as tokenistic, such as the one day strikes. But the point is that these actions, whether limited or exemplary, could never succeed in stopping the war unless they spread beyond those countries whose involvement in the war was relatively minor. Stopping the war meant that the class war against the Gulf war had to be taken up in those countries central to the UN backed coalition: the US and the UK.
...............Or not as the case may be
Early signs from the US were encouraging. On the 20th October 1990, 15,000 marched in New York and there were demonstrations in 15 other major cities. And US activists appeared willing and able to take direct action. A San Francisco TV station was disrupted, a cop car set alight on a demo, and the Golden Gate Bridge was blockaded on several occasions. These actions were not generalised however, and it appears that anti-war activity soon became dominated by left-liberal campaigners, of whom someone wrote in Echanges 66/67:
"They have brought their experiences with a vengeance into the new movement by demanding compromise with the status quo ideology and calling for protest within the context of peaceful obedience to the authorities so as to gain their respect. Many urge 'working through the system '. They tell us we must put pressure on elected representatives.....we must elect better representatives.....They urge that we 'support our troops ', not hurt their feelings by criticising the job they do, and that we should express patriotism while criticising government policy. We must prove that we deserve to be listened to by obeying the rule of law and order, and by respecting the police".
This strategy of constitutional protest was an absolute failure. The attempt to base the opposition to the war on an alternative interpretation of the interests of US capital, and thus exploit the divisions which emerged within the US capitalist class, meant that Bush was given a free hand once Congress had voted in favour of military action and the bourgeoisie buried its differences and rallied to his support. The failure of the anti-war movement to root itself in a class opposition to the interests for which the war was to be fought can be measured by the overwhelming support for the war registered in opinion polls, even allowing for their notorious unreliability.
Here in Britain the anti-war movement registered its disapproval of the government 's policy towards the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and, as in the US, sought to do so peacefully and constitutionally. Of course the anti-war movement was not a homogeneous mass, and contained within it many different perspectives united in their opposition to the war, many of which were fiercely critical of the CND/Tony Benn leadership. But the anti-war movement remained within the parameters set out by this leadership. These parameters derived from their political perspectives. They accepted the pre-supposition of a national interest. They accepted the legitimacy of the United Nations. They accepted the 'need ' to re-establish the Kuwaiti regime 's control over Kuwaiti oil. Their opposition to the war was thus based on a difference of opinion on how to achieve the goals of US/UK capital; they even advocated the pursuit of these goals by starving the Iraqi working class through sanctions.
As a result the anti-war leadership would never have countenanced the actions required for an effective opposition to the war. They wanted no repeats of the 1956 street battles in Whitehall against British intervention in Suez, a possibility they were only too aware of following the momentous re-emergence of class violence in Trafalgar Square only a few months before the Gulf crisis. The grip that the leadership maintained on the anti-war movement meant that it amounted to nothing more than a few peaceful marches to Hyde Park where any anger could be safely dissipated. No action was taken which challenged the authority of the state or undermined its ability to wage the war. The movement was confined to peaceful protest while the state was engaged in the mass slaughter of Iraqis.
We have not yet answered the question, however, as to how it was that the forces of pacifism and social democracy were able to contain the anti-war movement. It is not within the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive answer to this question, comprising as it would not only a critiqueof Trotskyism and anarchism, but also discussions of the psyche of the British working class and its experiences of wars. But we can start to answer the question by undertaking a critique of one group that should have mounted a challenge to the leadership of the anti-war movement: No War But the Class War.
No War But The Class War
NWBTCW was a loose collection of revolutionaries who came together in opposition to the Gulf War. As they clearly pointed out in their leaflets, their opposition to the war was firmly rooted in a class-analysis rather than some form of moralistic liberalism."We won 't pay for the bosses war" was the headline on a leaflet distributed during the prelude to the war. "As in all bosses ' wars, it 's us who will be told to kill each other and die in the battlefields while those with most to gain from the war sit at home and count their profits " it continued. As well as providing the cannon fodder, "those of us not in the front line will have to pay in other ways..........it 's us who will be told to tighten our belts and put up with cuts in jobs and wages."
NWBTCW also seemed to know what would be required for an effective opposition to the war: "Only escalating the class war can prevent the massacres of both war and peace. Strikes such as those by oil workers can not only make working conditions safer but can sabotage the national economy, making it harder to wage war. Struggles like that against the poll tax can also undermine national mobilisation towards war. Others can sabotage the war machine directly".
For various reasons however, NWBTCW limited itself to positing the class war ideally. Few, if any, steps were made towards actually realising it in practice. As Workers Scud pointed out, "a call for general class struggle opposition to the war became an emotional cushion". How and why this came to be will hopefully become clearer as we follow the evolution of NWBTCW through the unfolding of the Gulf War.
Resisting the build-up to War:
Following the commencement of Operation Desert Shield in August 1990 NWBTCW was formed at a meeting in London to discuss ways of mounting an effective opposition to the war. Amongst those present were representatives from Hackney Solidarity Group, Anarchist Communist Federation, Class War, Anarchist Workers Group, Wildcat and assorted individuals including one of us from Brighton.
A proposal on the agenda was that we begin to organise a demonstration outside one of the major oil company offices in London. But rather than discussing this and other suitable actions the meeting soon became focussed on the fact that the AWG had adopted the Trotskyist line of supporting an Iraqi victory in the war. Their argument that they supported the Iraqi state militarily but not politically cut no ice with the rest of those present who pointed out that an Iraqi military success, in itself a virtual impossibility, could only be pursued by the imposition of military discipline on the Iraqi working class: suppressing the class struggle, shooting deserters and communists, torturing those who actively opposed the war etc.
The AWG were quite rightly expelled from the group. Had they not been there would have been endless problems over basic positions to be conveyed in the group 's propaganda. With the rest of those present in agreement over the need to escalate the class struggle against the war in solidarity with the working class of Iraq, rather than implying that they should forsake their own struggle, the expulsion of the AWG should have allowed NWBTCW to press ahead with organising effective actions to sabotage the war effort. But as time went on it became clear that the meeting, and the argument with the AWG, had a different effect on those present. NWBTCW in many respects came to see its role as one of defending a class position on the war, rather than having a class position as a necessary but (in itself) insufficient prerequisite for taking practical steps to stop the war. Its concern with defining itself primarily against the position adopted by the various Trotskyist sects seemed to be at the expense of a practical challenge to the boundaries of peaceful constitutional protest imposed by the Benn/CND leadership.
Let us examine exactly how it was that this failure became manifested. Following the meeting the various groups and individuals involved threw themselves into the task of escalating the class struggle in order to undermine the mobilisation towards war. But rather than attempt this squarely on the terrain of anti-war resistance, as had been originally proposed, efforts were directed almost exclusively towards the on-going struggle against the poll tax.
Those of us in Brighton also directed our attention towards the struggle against the poll tax, and the important associated work of supporting poll tax prisoners. But the neglect of anti-war activity itself in the hope that confrontation with the state over the poll tax would be sufficient to counter the movement towards war must now be seen to have been a major mistake. It is obvious now, and indeed was clear at the time with the ditching of Thatcher, that the state was attempting to conduct a tactical retreat over the poll tax. Our attempt to turn their tactical retreat into a rout, and thus create a political climate in which the state would find it increasingly difficult to pursue the war was well intentioned, but there turned out to be no real practical way of pressing home our advantage and seeking out large-scale confrontations.
Only when the war actually began in January did the enormity of this tactical error become obvious. Not only had the rest ofNWBTCW also devoted their practical energies towards other struggles like the poll tax, but any sort of organisational work in preparation for the outbreak of the war had been entirely neglected. No plans had been laid for an immediate response to the start of the war such as a demo or an occupation. No efforts seem to have been made to make contacts with other groups, such as those who had been involved in Cruisewatch and the like, who would be prepared to take some form of direct action against the war. There was not even a decent network for communication between and throughout the various organisations and individuals who had been involved in the initial meeting. This haphazard approach to organisation continued through the duration of the war and served to compound the earlier mistakes.
The War Begins.
As the pictures came through of the bombing of Baghdad, following the passing of the UN deadline for withdrawal, many people were filled with horror and suddenly became aware of the urgency of the situation. In Brighton there were spontaneous demonstrations, and in London anti-war protesters converged on Trafalgar Square. But it soon became blindingly obvious that the neglect of planning of any sort of autonomous direct action had proved costly. The CND network had already established itself as the focus for opposition to the war. The fact that we could not immediately provide any alternative focus for opposition to the war, a focus that would have been capable of developing increasingly effective tactics and drawing in ever-larger numbers, as the town hall riots had done with the poll tax struggle, meant that we had to start from scratch and begin by operating within the movement as it had become constituted under the guise of Tony Benn and CND. We had to find ways of starting from within the movement and carrying people beyond the boundaries set out by the leadership.
Not only had organisational matters been so neglected that we found ourselves in this position, but it soon transpired that NWBTCW was in a worse state than it had been in at the start. Meetings began but the venue was apparently switched a number of times without keeping people informed, and so it seems that many of the original participants were thereby excluded. Sectarianism or stupidity? Worse still, the person who had the contact list disappeared for most of the duration of the war, making coordinating and communication matters even more difficult. Indeed, we in Brighton did not receive any mailouts whatsoever from NWBTCW, despite providing a contact address at the inaugural meeting and making subsequent requests to be kept in touch.
This haphazard approach to organisation may now, however, be seen as symptomatic of the shift in the group 's raison d 'etre: The narrowed base was even less adequate for putting practical proposals into action, but was perfectly capable of putting together leaflets outlining the group 's position and calling for escalated class struggle.
Here in Brighton we belatedly began to take action to sabotage the war effort. The local Committee to Stop the War in the Gulf, dominated by pacifists and supported by the SWP, had reduced anti-war resistance to "peace vigils", standing peacefully and if possible silently around a statue in the middle of town. Not surprisingly this inspired no one and went unnoticed by everyone. But a blockade/picket of the Territorial Army HQ was organised and attended by the NVDA elements in the peace movement, by hunt saboteurs, squatters and the members of Sussex Poll Tax Resisters. This was far more inspiring for those involved, spilling over into scuffles and forcing the TA to ring for the police, a van-load of whom arrived as we were leaving. A shame it had not been got together earlier as this type of action contained the seeds which could have grown into mass civil disorder.
There were various other low-key autonomous direct actions around the country, ranging from putting in the windows of Army Recruitment offices to occupying the toll booths of the Severn Bridge. But a national focus was needed, by neccessity in London, and all that was happening were the peaceful marches to Hyde Park, largely ignored by the media.
NWBTCW distributed a leaflet on the demonstration following the outbreak of the war entitled "Sabotage the War Effort!" Following a brief outline of mutinies in WW1, Vietnam and the Iran-Iraq war, it continued: "The war can and must be opposed on the home front as well as in the armed forces", and cited the attacks on munitions trains in Europe and the burning of a cop car and blocking of the bridge in San Francisco. Then it urged that "We can also refuse to pay for the war in any way by resisting attacks on our living standards- by carrying on refusing to pay the poll tax and other bills, by striking for more pay, by opposing cuts." NWBTCW wanted to keep the home fires burning, but evidently this was to take place away from the demos and over issues only indirectly related to the war. They had made no plans to try to make the demonstrations we were on anything other than peaceful and inconsequential.
On discovering a few days before the next national demonstration that NWBTCW had not worked out any practical initiatives for it, we desperately tried to figure out a way of stirring up some serious disorder on it. But attempts to find out the route of the march were fruitless, so we were unable to work out any potential targets for a lightning occupation, impromptu picket or well placed brick. So on the day before the demonstration we were forced to settle for producing a leaflet which we hoped might fire the imaginations of the demonstrators, particularly those grouped around NWBTCW. Under the heading "Class War Against The Oil War" and an introduction it declared:
"Already nearly 50% of the population opposes the war, but so far this massive opposition has remained largely passive. It will only succeed when it actively confronts the forces for war and once it goes beyond the boundaries, set out by CND and its friends, of peaceful constitutional 'protest '.......With much of the opposition to this war being censored by the mass media it is vital that we make our presence felt. It was a glimpse of our anger on the 31st of March last year that contributed to the downfall of Thatcher. Today we must show that anger again. We must refuse the state 's right to define the nature of this demonstration. While they ask us to march peacefully between police lines they are murdering men, women and children."
Fighting talk is never enough, of course, so the reverse of the leaflet showed a suggestive map of central London locating the following buildings: the American Embassy, Shell Mex House, Esso House, Texaco HQ, Mobil Oil HQ, Vickers HQ, The Admiralty and the MOD. As it turned out the demonstration avoided all of these potential targets, only passing near to the American Embassy which was so heavily protected by police that it would have been the least desirable of them all. Still, we hoped that the leaflet might force NWBTCW to work something out for the next time. Just in case, however, we decided that we should formulate a concrete proposal of our own and attend the next NWBTCW meeting, to take place a week before the next national demonstration.
Just before the next meeting the Allied forces finally launched their ground offensive to retake Kuwait. The bombing campaign had continued for weeks, destroying residential areas, sewage plants, hospitals and other civilian as well as military targets, and now they were going to move in for the kill. We were all expecting to see the body bags donated by DuPont bringing the corpses back for burial. Once again we were filled with anger and a renewed sense of urgency. But at the NWBTCW meeting the discussion was primarily concerned with the necessary, but still insufficient, organisation of public meetings against the war and how to deal with Trotskyist hecklers. Then we put forward our proposal, and to the credit of those present, the urgency of the situation and the need to respond decisively was accepted.
We were to:
i) Mobilise our forces as best as possible. All NWBTCWcontacts and virtually every anarchist group in the country were to be informed of a meeting point near the main demo at which they were to converge at a specified time. It was to be made clear that we would move off immediately to take some unspecified form of direct action. ii) Conduct a lightning occupation of Shell Mex House, only a few hundred yards from the main assembly point and with no visible means to prevent our access. iii) Send others off to inform the gathering demonstrators of the occupation and pursuade many as possible to join us or help defend the occupation with a mass picket in The Strand. iv) See how the situation evolved and respond accordingly.
We shall never know whether the plan would have worked in practice. It may have failed , or it may have been the moment at which the anti-war movement launched itself beyond its previous limits never to return. But we did not find out, for between the notification of contacts and the day of the demonstration the war was ended by the mass desertion of the Iraqi conscript army. The demonstration itself was small and dejected. But worse still, virtually no-one turned up at the secret assembly point aside from ourselves. It was a missed opportunity, for the first reports were already coming through of the heroic uprisings in southern Iraq; we could have at least discussed possible solidarity actions had there been enough of us. As it was those present were simply demoralised by the failure of others, and the rest of NWBTCW in particular, to turn up.
Conclusions
We made some serious tactical errors during our campaign against the Gulf War. We pinned our hopes on the anti-poll tax struggle, and left too much of the responsibility of organising autonomous resistance to the war to comrades in London. We have acknowledged our mistakes however, believing that self-criticism is an essential moment of revolutionary praxis. In print ing this article we hope to contribute to a similar process of self-criticism amongst others involved in NWBTCW, who will know much more about what actually happened within the group than us. This article should also help others who were not directly involved to learn from our mistakes.
To be fair to NWBTCW, no-one anticipated that the war would be over so quickly; we all underestimated the potential for revolt of the Iraqi army. Had the war continued and the corpses and wounded started arriving in Britain then NWBTCW may well have been in the front line of agitation against the closure of NHS wards for the war effort. And the anti-war movement may well have been galvanised by the deaths of British troops in a way it wasn 't by the slaughter of Iraqi civilians. But NWBTCW must acknowledge that it failed consistently over a period of six months to do what was so desperately required. Various practical suggestions were made by various members, but were not put into practice. Not, it would seem, because other proposals were deemed to be more effective, but because the group was ultimately content to defend the right position, the historic class position in all its purity.
In other words, the NWBTCW group seems to have seen its role as a predominantly ideological one. The truly internationalist position had to be broadcast to the movement and the Trots had to be denounced or attacked, leaving the grip of social democracy and pacifism intact. Even when the CND/Benn leadership were threatening the RCP with the police because they refused to toe the patriotic line, NWBTCW were more concerned with getting into fisticuffs with the RCP than challenging CND 's complicity with the state. For many years positions regarding the nature of the Soviet Union have served as the 'litmus test ' for determining the 'authenticity ' of groups within the British left that have claimed to be revolutionary. Was it the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declining relevance of these arguments that led to members of NWBTCW becoming preoccupied with distinguishing themselves from the rest of the ( 'always counter-revolutionary ') Left?
We cannot do anything to change what happened during the Gulf War but we can learn from our mistakes. And with it looking increasingly likely that the British state will be involved in a joint attempt to intervene militarily in Yugoslavia, to ensure that the carve-up goes along the lines desired by German capital, we must be ready to make sure that they cannot get away with their bloody crusades so easily again
K.E.
________________________________________ index - organisation - attack - defence - other Lesson Number One
By James W. Canan, Senior Editor
On the eve of the Persian Gulf War, President Bush summoned the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Camp David to hear their views on how it would go. The Air Force 's Gen. Merrill A. McPeak "told me exactly what to expect from airpower" and was so upbeat about it that the President suspected him of overstating his case, Mr. Bush recalled later.
As it turned out, "General McPeak, like the rest of the Air Force, was right on target. . . . Lesson number one from the Gulf War is the value of airpower," the President declared.
Airpower was a big winner in that war for all the world to see. Operation Desert Storm left no doubt that airpower can dominate modern war and can even prove decisive if there is no need to take and hold terrain.
There are caveats. Conditions around the Gulf were more conducive to the deployment, coordination, and application of airpower than they likely would be in many other parts of the world. The weather was bad for the region but very good by the standards of more northern climes. Modern air bases and support infrastructures were available to US and allied air units in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Ground targets stuck out in the treeless, featureless terrain.
One thing is certain: The war did wonders for the Air Force 's image. Never again will blue-suiters have to bear up under the hoary barb that the US has never won a major war since the Air Force became an independent service.
"We 've heard that kind of kidding over and over through the years from our friends in the Army, Navy, and Marines, but we won 't hear it any more," says Lt. Gen. Michael A. Nelson, Air Force deputy chief of staff for Plans and Operations (XO). "There can no longer be any serious question--if there ever was--about the validity of the Air Force as an independent service with a huge array of capabilities to bring to national requirements. To think of the Air Force in any other way is just nonsense."
Air Force leaders take great pride in the accomplishments of airpower in the Gulf War and in USAF 's star role. As General Nelson says, "The record speaks for itself." They also emphasize, however, that airpower wasn 't everything and that the Air Force had lots of help both in the air and on the ground.
A Favorable Environment for Airpower
Lt. Gen. Charles A. Homer, Jr., who orchestrated the allied air campaign as commander of the Central Air Forces (CENTAF) component of US Central Command, claims that Operation Desert Storm "emphasized the role of airpower because of the strategy and the environment-- the nature of the war. It did not make airpower the only element or the supreme element, but it did emphasize the contribution of airpower."
The Air Force came out of the Gulf War with high marks for far-sightedness as well as firepower. The war was a proving ground for the doctrine, tactics, training, and systems that USAF had developed. For example, it underscored the importance of stealth, precision guided munitions (PGMs), integrated electronic combat, and centralized direction and coordination of air campaigns-something sadly lacking in the Vietnam War. Now the Air Force can continue to emphasize all these things with the high confidence that springs from success in battle.
In the Gulf War, USAF did what it was born to do.
The Air Force was formed as a separate service after World War II chiefly for the strategic mission, a mission with enormous influence on the outcome of that war and one uniquely and demonstrably suited to airpower. The Gulf War gave Air Force strategists a sense of deja vu. They claim that USAF 's aerial campaign against military targets in and around Baghdad and elsewhere deep inside Iraq was a classic example of the strategic mission. It was also eye-catching evidence that strategic airpower need not be synonymous with the use of nuclear weapons, they point out.
Through the years following World War II, as it deployed its bombers and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force under the banner of nuclear deterrence, the Air Force 's strategic mission came to be defined as strictly nuclear, even though its leaders kept insisting--and sometimes demonstrated, as with strategic bombing in Vietnam--that the mission had a distinctly nonnuclear side as well.
In Desert Storm, the Air Force showed that side to a fare-thee-well, and its leaders are emphasizing the nonnuclear side in claiming that the B-2 Stealth bomber has a legitimate place in their plans to deter or wage conventional war. They are careful not to slight the nuclear side of the equation, though. They insist that nuclear deterrence is every bit as important as ever, notwithstanding recent progress in US-Soviet bilateral accords in cutting strategic arsenals.
The Air Force 's Key Role
General Nelson, for example, notes that "the first order of business of the US Department of Defense is to deliver a credible nuclear deterrent," because "the Soviet nuclear capability remains the one thing in the world that could bring terrifying physical harm to our country and call into question our survival." He also notes that Air Force bombers and ICBMs constitute two-thirds of the US triad of strategic weapons designed to deter such a nuclear attack and that "we continue to take that mission very seriously.
"But the Air Force has now demonstrated beyond doubt that it has a key role in the national strategy as a deliverer of conventional weapons," General Nelson declares. Given their precision and lethality, those conventional weapons are gaining on their nuclear cousins in terms of military effectiveness--destruction of key targets. Their prowess was one of Desert Storm 's most dramatic revelations. Another was stealth.
Air Force F-117s took advantage of stealth and precision guided munitions in their surprise attack on a Baghdad military telecommunications facility that touched off the strategic side of the allied air campaign.
For the record, the first attack in that campaign, tactical in nature, was carried out by a team of Army AH-64 Apache helicopters and Air Force Special Operations Forces MH-53J Pave Low electronic warfare helicopters against Iraqi frontline air defense radars. [See "Apache Attack,"] But the F-117s had already penetrated Iraqi airspace, having escaped detection by Iraqi radars, and were bearing down on Baghdad as the helicopters opened fire.
The stunning success of the F-117 mission to downtown Baghdad, followed in bang-bang fashion by the Navy 's Tomahawk land-attack missile (TLAM) strikes in the same vicinity, may well have been the beginning of the end for Iraq. Some airpower enthusiasts now insist that the war was over, for all practical purposes, as soon as the "black jets" and the TLAMs had their way and showed that Iraqi air defenses could do little or nothing about them.
With Air Force fighters in the forefront, allied air forces quickly gained control of the air and hit critical radar installations, airfields, war plants, and command-and-control nodes on land, leaving Iraq unable to defend against air attack or to produce offensive weapons. Those air forces fractured the enemy 's military infrastructure, paralyzed its strategic communications, and strangled its logistical system.
By Air Force calculations, it took only one one-hundredth the number of bombs used against Vietnam through eleven years of war to shut down Iraq 's gasoline production, cut off its electricity, and severely disrupt its transportation in the first few days of the air campaign.
General Horner points out that airpower played a pivotal role in strategic defense as well as on the attack. Deployed quickly, if thinly at first, Air Force airpower may well have prevented an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia. With Iraqi forces poised for such a thrust, "it meant an awful lot to me" to have American and Saudi F-15s and Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft immediately available for patrolling and defending Saudi air-space, General Horner recalls. "Then we got the F-16s and the A-10s and the Navy carriers over there, and that also meant a lot in terms of slowing down an invasion. It didn 't mean we could defend Saudi Arabia if we were attacked, but it meant that we could sure make it painful [for attackers] ."
War on Allied Terms
General Homer credits Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in chief of US Central Command and of coalition forces, with having been "right on target in using airpower to maintain the initiative and fight the war on our terms rather than on Saddam Hussein 's terms." This was pivotal, the allied coalition 's air boss maintains.
Why? Because, he says, Saddam Hussein wanted to attack us. He didn 't care if he lost a quarter of a million men so long as he could inflict seven to ten thousand casualties on us and say he defeated the Americans. His whole strategic point was to inflict casualties, and we were able to withhold that from him by using airpower to maintain the initiative."
Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice sees the job of "reaching out and blocking aggressors" as one of airpower 's prime functions nowadays. In his view, the Gulf War was "a snapshot of global reach and global power" and "proof that airpower-- from all the services--has emerged as a dominant form of military might ."
Dr. Rice and General Homer are among the Air Force 's most emphatic exponents of the B-2 bomb as a leading agent of US nuclear and conventional airpower in the years ahead.
General Horner says he feels compelled "to make sure that people who go to war in the next one have the same kind of tools that I had," and "this is why I . . . talk about the need for the B-2."
Declares Dr. Rice, "We saw the value of heavy bombers in the war and the value of stealth. A long-range, high-payload, highly survivable bomber would have been very useful." In his view, "the B-2 captures the essence of airpower" and is needed for "the mission of deterrence of all conflict, nuclear and conventional."
Some airpower champions see the B-2 as the key to establishing airpower as the prime instrument of national security. They take the position that the US, now planning to withdraw from many overseas bases, will have to rely more and more on strategic attacks by stealth bombers from Stateside bases to keep enemies at bay around the globe. They also believe that strategic airpower has the potential for making land wars things of the past. As a result of the Gulf War, some have concluded, for example, that battle tanks are already obsolete in the new heyday of airpower.
After the war, General McPeak said at a Pentagon briefing that allied air strikes had destroyed or decommissioned forty percent of Iraq 's tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, and artillery pieces in the Kuwaiti theater of operations. It turned out that his figures, based on the best available bomb-damage assessments at the time, were quite conservative.
At Least Sixty Percent
Air Force sources now claim that airpower accounted for at least sixty percent of all kinds of Iraqi military vehicles along and behind the battlefront. This prompts some airpower enthusiasts to conclude that the Iraqi army would have surrendered the field sooner or later without having been attacked by allied ground forces--and, thus, that airpower could have won the war sooner or later all by itself.
The Air Force 's uniformed leaders claim no such thing. They extol airpower but stop short of depicting it as the end-all of the Gulf War or of modern warfare in general. They tip their caps to ground forces and are quick to share credit with the air arms of coalition allies and the Army, Navy, and Marines.
For example, General McPeak expressed his "private conviction that this is the first time in history that a field army has been defeated by airpower--a remarkable performance by coalition air forces." He went on to say, "There are some things that airpower can do and some things that it cannot do, and that we should never expect it to do very well: move in on the terrain and dictate terms to the enemy. Our ground forces did that."
Air Force leaders appear to agree that airpower can win wars outright only "when the President decides there is no need to occupy territory and we can go ahead and use air until we achieve the national objective," as General Nelson says. The Air Force DCS/XO emphasizes that all the services and all their air assets would likely be involved in such circumstances. He points out, for instance, that the application of US airpower in the Gulf War had as much to do with the "absolutely indispensable" airlifters and tankers ("not enough has been said about the role of the tankers") as it did with the fighters and bombers.
The war gave "the whole picture of what airpower is all about: space assets, intelligence gathering and reconnaissance, command and control, electronic combat, the shooters, the SEAD [suppression of enemy air defenses] campaign," General Nelson says. It was a textbook example of "the totality" of US airpower" Air Force air and space, Navy air, Marine air, and Army air with helicopters," he says. "It is virtually impossible for me to imagine a military operation at this point in history that does not employ airpower in some way, whether to drop bombs or get troops and materiel to the scene, or provide intelligence, or whatever," General Nelson says.
Airpower experts note that strategic air campaigns like the one in the Gulf War have enormous impact on ground and sea forces, because they influence decisions as to when, where, and how to employ those forces. By the same token, actions on land and at sea influence how airpower is employed.
Highly Integrated Airpower
General Nelson declares that the Gulf War "confirmed what we 've known since 1942: that airpower must be highly integrated and used very efficiently and that the only way to do that is to have an airpower expert running the show with all the air assets in his grasp. Chuck Horner proved that that is indeed the way to do business."
To General Nelson, the Vietnam War, in its loosely knit interservice air operations and absence of overall strategic purpose, was "a perfect example of how not to use airpower." Even so, airpower proved persuasive in the end. The Air Force 's Linebacker II strategic air campaign against North Vietnam had a great deal--maybe everything-- to do with Hanoi 's decision to talk peace.
In Linebacker II, long-range B-52 bombers and shorter-range tactical attack aircraft worked together in strategic attack. "So the Vietnam War also gave us, in that one instance, a glimpse of what could be done with integrated airpower in a strategic air campaign for national purpose," General Nelson explains. "Since then, we learned an awful lot about how to do it, and when the time came [in the Gulf War] for us to do it, it worked."
That war, he declares, "only underscored the doctrinal thinking that had been virtually consistent throughout the history of the Air Force--for example, that air superiority has to come first or you 're lost, that it 's important to have a single air component commander empowered to do everything that needs to be done in the air campaign."
The Air Force was much better prepared and far more confident entering the Gulf War than it was throughout the Vietnam War, General Nelson claims. He points out that USAF, in colored-flag exercises at Nellis AFB, Nev., and elsewhere, had had "ten to Fifteen years of good hard practice in conducting a combined campaign in an electronic environment. We knew what we had to do with the various aircraft and how to work strike packages together in coordinating complex operations."
Technology Catches Up
There appears to be a consensus among air warfare experts that airpower triumphed in the Gulf War largely because technology had caught up with doctrine, strategy, and tactics.
Desert Storm left no doubt that "there has been a revolution in technology with regard to airpower" and that stealth and precision guided munitions rank high among its main elements, General Horner says. He claims that "PGMs give great efficiency to air warfare; we learned that toward the end of the Vietnam War."
As to stealth, "we have to realize that stealth is revolutionizing air warfare. I was as amazed by the performance of the stealth fighters as anyone. That first night [of the air campaign], I thought, boy, this is going to be tough, because Baghdad was a tough target. But those guys came back."
The Air Force sees stealth as part of its electronic combat skein and EC as a prime example of technology teaming with doctrine and tactics to put more pizazz in airpower.
General Homer, who flew Wild Weasel aircraft on many a SEAD mission in southeast Asia, describes the Air Force 's EC in the Vietnam War as "kind of a string-along, learn-as-you-go affair. We were ill-equipped for electronic combat. The [electronic counter-measures] pods we had on the airplanes were pretty primitive. Many were R&D kinds of stuff. We never really had the EF-111 [standoff area-jammer aircraft] there. We never had a chance to integrate a whole [EC] package."
The Gulf War was a much different story. "We had a well-trained and well-equipped [EC] force and we were able to bring EC together, and it did a superb job, as our [extremely low] loss rate showed," the allied air boss asserts.
The war also revealed weaknesses that the Air Force is taking into consideration, along with the changing global military environment, in pondering future weapons and force structures. "It became obvious that we don 't have good all-weather PGMs and that we need to make some changes in the way we 're organized," General Nelson says.
What lies ahead? "We will have a smaller, highly mobile Air Force capable of arriving unannounced, delivering weapons very precisely, and keeping casualties to the absolute minimum. We will have to emphasize stealth because--among other reasons--we won 't be able to afford all the combat support elements necessary to get a nonstealth force to work."
Major changes appear to be in store for all the armed services in response to tight budgets, new challenges, and the lessons of the Gulf War, most notably its show of the importance of airpower.
Air Force Col. Dennis Drew, professor of military strategy and doctrine at Air University, Maxwell AFB, Ala., and author of books on airpower, is among those who have long believed that "airpower has come to dominate modern warfare." This does not mean, he says, that land power and seapower have lost importance or are now relegated to support status. "Rather, it means new modes of operation, new forms of combat teamwork, new ways of thinking about the operational art, and revised force structures" all across the services.
________________________________________
Lessons From Baghdad
The military has much to teach CEOs about supply chains and RFID.
BY PETER GALUSZKA
Large plasma screens line a wall at the Joint Intelligence Operations Center (JIOC) at the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., which oversees military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unmanned spy drones, firefights in progress or shipping containers on their way to remote spots can all be monitored in this hush-hush nerve center. But when a visitor enters, a crew-cut Marine colonel anxiously waves his hand. Screens showing top secret maps of Baghdad flip to CNN.
A room like this might be the dream of any information-obsessed CEO. In fact, top executives have plenty to learn both from the U.S. military’s successes and failures in seizing Afghanistan and Iraq, occupying them and hunting for the elusive Osama bin Laden and other terrorist operatives.
Besides fighting the war and chasing terrorists, Centcom generals must also be supply chain experts; they must ship enough food, fuel and ammunition to sustain 300,000 troops in 27 nations halfway around the world in climates ranging from hot deserts to frigid mountains. Supplying water “can be a huge challenge when it’s 135 degrees outside,” says Maj. Gen. William Mortensen, Centcom’s logistics chief.
Centcom generals must come up with speedy solutions to poor planning decisions, such as one bad call to limit supplies of protective armor at the outset of the Iraqi invasion. Besides dealing with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s controversial and fast-changing military doctrines, they have to be diplomats and handle attachés from 65 coalition and other nations who occupy rows of mobile home-like structures next to the beige headquarters building in a concertina wire-enclosed part of Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base.
Inside Centcom’s HQ, the buzzwords of the hour are “sense and respond” and “oodaloop,” which means constantly reassessing tactics. Lessons learned include basics such as stating mission visions clearly and giving bright young officers room to make decisions on their own. The military is engaging in the first combat tests of radio frequency identification, or RFID, systems that, in the civilian world, are starting to replace ubiquitous bar coding and revolutionizing supply chains for companies such as Wal-Mart.
RFID
Lessons
In its first real combat test of the technology, the U.S. Department of Defense made wide use of radio frequency identification in supplying troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the process, the Pentagon, which is now requiring all of its vendors to use RFID, learned some key lessons. Among them:
1 Have your system ramped up fully before you use it. In Iraq, troops literally had to shoot their way into areas before they could set up RFID sensors to track supplies, leading to glitches.
2 Confirm compatibility. Make sure that sensors, software and network architecture can talk to each other.
3 Don’t sweat the small stuff. There’s no point checking the location of routine shipments every five minutes.
4 Minimize the amount of data you have to absorb. It’s easy to generate so much information that your systems will be deluged.
5 Have backup plans ready. When the military couldn’t track critical supplies via land-based sensors, they used satellites.
Thronged with intense troops armed with automatic pistols, Centcom doesn’t seem like the headquarters of a multi-national corporation. But it might as well be. Top commanders constantly jet back and forth to the forward HQ in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, to various Iraqi and Afghan cities, and to the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. While Centcom doesn’t have its own combat force, it coordinates efforts of the other armed services assigned to it. Centcom officers don’t get down to the tactical level managing battles, but they stay in regular, personal touch with the troops, trying to anticipate nasty surprises.
And there have been plenty of nasty surprises. Officers and troops have had to react quickly to unanticipated challenges with body armor shortages and the skill with which Iraqi, Syrian and other insurgents have deployed lethal “IEDs,” or improvised electronic devices, also known in layman’s terms as bombs. When the invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003, logistical snafus and shortages made ammunition scarce, forcing troops to resort to using captured Iraqi lubricants and explosives. “Theater stocks of food barely met demand,” according to a report last year by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, a military think tank at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Such problems beg a Centcom buzz-phrase. “If you cannot be an early adopter, then be a rapid adapter,” says Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, Centcom’s planning chief. A 1984 Harvard Business School graduate, the tightly wired West Pointer appreciates how managerial issues resonate for both the business and military worlds. He also knows the differences between them. When CEOs err, they lose money. Generals can lose lives.
The body armor issue is a case in point. During the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, the Department of Defense amassed mountains of supplies in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar before starting operations to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Critics later complained that many supplies were never used. In any event, there never seemed to be shortages of body armor.
When the second Iraq War loomed in early 2003, Pentagon planners, following Rumsfeld’s more fluid, faster-moving approach, decided that body armor would be distributed mostly to assault troops. But insurgents attacked others. Vehicles, especially Hummers and larger trucks used for supplies, were short of armor as well. The problem was compounded because some of the armor sets include ceramic plates that can be put in front and back vest pockets for added protection. When the war started, however, “there was a decision that only certain sets of our military would have that because of the combat role they’d be playing. [Then] we found that the counter-insurgency caused that decision to change,” says logistics czar Mortensen.
The solution? The Pentagon got suppliers to ramp up production from about 1,200 armor sets a month to over 25,000 per month. Plating vehicles with armor protection likewise has gone up. Only a few hundred vehicles were armored, but now about 7,000 Hummers have plates. “It’s not an issue of logistics,” insists Mortensen, “It’s, what is the requirement? But I think our system has responded marvelously, [if] not as fast as some would like.”
Centcom had other issues on its learning curve. Before Iraq was invaded, the military had high hopes to deploy logistics systems that relied on RFID and could offer much greater accuracy and speed in resupplying troops in the field. The military had a sense of ownership with RFID since it began with military-related experiments with radar in the 1930s. The logistics arm of the Pentagon has spent about $100 million so far to implement it. Starting this year, all 46,000 Pentagon vendors must use RFID.
As it undertook the massive ramp-up to RFID, the military consulted with major civilian users such as Wal-Mart, UPS and Federal Express, Mortensen says. The military also has contracted with SAP and other firms to help with systems architecture, software and hardware. Unisys provides field service engineer support for current RFID in Iraq. Most of the RFID gear comes from SAVI Technology of Sunnyvale, Calif. Soldiers use handheld interrogators made by Symbol Technologies of Holtsville, Ky.
When the invasion of Iraq came, however, glitches popped up. Units outran their supply “tails.” When they tried to get their RFID systems to work, they found there were software bugs, or they had not been supplied with enough satellite dishes to tap into the system. Older, legacy computers couldn’t interconnect. As troops fought their way to Baghdad, they literally had to build networks able to read RFID signals broadcast from shipment pallets along supply routes.
There were tense moments as troops combined fighting with getting the RFID system up. Surpassing their objectives faster than expected, some U.S. units used up their ammunition and had to “borrow” more from sister units, according to last year’s report by The Center for Army Lessons Learned.
Mortensen says that RFID use has been smoothed out. All standard shipping containers must have RF tags to reveal in considerable detail what’s inside. All air pallets flown in by either military or civilian carriers likewise must have an RF tag. The tags allow Centcom to “ping in” to the system that can use satellites to see where the containers are within a six- to 12-hour lag time. That way, Centcom can keep track of shipments by sea, air or even by rail from Europe, across Russia and Central Asia to Afghanistan.
The war also has shown the importance of how RF scanners, or interrogators, are placed so they can read signals as the containers pass by. Many supplies move by truck from Kuwait north to Baghdad and the military can’t afford to guard each sensor along the way. Currently, the military has more than 120 sites in Iraq where it collects data from passing shipments. To fill in gaps, Mortensen says Centcom relies on satellite coverage.
The lesson for CEOs: Don’t worry so much about where your shipments are, but take care where you place RFID interrogators. A more important lesson is to have the RFID system fully ramped up before you try to use it. Meanwhile, Mortensen says, don’t sweat the small stuff. Executives shouldn’t worry every minute while the shipment is in transit. “How many points along the continuum do I really need to know where it is?” he asks. There are exceptions, of course, notably with precision munitions, which are tracked constantly by satellite.
“[In general], I have to know what it is that I’m moving,” says Mortensen, “and I have to be able to ascribe in detail how much data I really need. In some cases, there’s more data out there than you may need. So the smaller amount of data in that environment, the less cost or the less effort you spend because you don’t have to filter out the nonrequired data.”
Another lesson from the Iraq War is for CEOs to try to take “just-in-time” supply chain management to the next level, which the military calls “sense and respond.” That means basically doing the same thing as just-in-time techniques do, but doing it faster, more intuitively and under much more dangerous conditions.
Mortensen likens the concept to having only a couple of hundred dollars in your checkbook but you can’t wait for the next deposit. “Sense and respond” is like getting a fast loan nearly automatically. In theory, it also allows troops to leave things behind and thus move faster on a mission. “Logistically, I think we’re adept enough now and agile enough in our military systems we don’t have to carry everything with us,” he says. Centcom now can get just about any supply once it is requested to the “customer” in 12 days, and sometimes within 24 hours depending on its importance, Mortensen says. That’s not as fast as some civilian companies can respond in the U.S., but it’s remarkably speedy in view of difficult conditions in which the military is operating.
Of course, General Motors and Target don’t have C-17 cargo jets to parachute needed supplies on a moment’s notice. But “sense and respond” can teach civilian firms about how to come up with shorter wait times. What’s needed is an extensive and sophisticated system that can be understood easily and is more flexible than ever.
Another Centcom buzzword with civilian applications is “oodaloop.” The term originated with jet fighter pilots who try to predict their opponent’s intentions in the middle of aerial dogfights. “You’re trying to think quicker than he is and react quicker than he can,” says Kimmitt. “You want to get inside his decision loop so before you know it, you’re behind him and you’re firing a missile up his pipes.”
The current application in Iraq uses “oodaloop” to outthink insurgents. Lacking the technology and hardware to take on the U.S. directly, the insurgents instead hit soft targets, such as truck convoys. In response, U.S. commanders interrupt usual delivery patterns by airlifting some of the cargo to surprise locations and then trucking it in.
Kimmitt says there are applications in the civilian sector, too. “It’s the same thing in a business model,” says Kimmitt, one eye glued to a Fox News broadcast on political developments in Syria. “It’s about who can observe a change in the environment or in the technology, decide to do something about it, act on it and then be the first one to the market.”
If you can’t be first, try to switch gears quickly, which Kimmitt describes as being “an earlier adopter or a rapid adapter.” One example is cell phones. Kimmitt says when he was on peacekeeping duty in Kosovo, he noted that the Europeans were late developing appropriate architecture. But they caught up fast. “I could get three bars in Belgrade on my cell phone,” he says.
Developing human capital is just as important in the military these days as it is in companies. The key is educating junior executives, and a lot has changed since the Vietnam War. Back then, the hierarchy was very much top down, with ground commanders constantly being second-guessed. One famous scene has President Lyndon B. Johnson padding around in his pajamas choosing North Vietnamese bombing targets.
But the enemy in Iraq is not the one the Army expected to fight, and it keeps morphing into new shapes. That means lieutenants and captains in the field have to assume much more decision-making responsibility, even though the communications capabilities are light years ahead of LBJ’s day. Communications bandwidth has gone up 80 times what it was in the first Gulf War, says Brig. Gen. Jeffrey W. F. Foley, head of communications for Centcom.
To get young commanders to think on their feet, the Army has a formal mentoring process where senior officers, typically in their posts a few years, try to make significant, positive leadership impressions on their juniors. In this case, says Kimmitt, the Army turned to Corporate America for guidance. “The key about Jack Welch,” says Kimmitt, “was not what he did for GE. It’s the subordinates he created who thought like him, looked like him, talked like him. Welch believed that the organizational paradigm he used to teach could be used anywhere.”
In this regard, compared to the Vietnam era, the military is an entirely new world, Centcom commanders say. The basic reason is the quality of men and women, says Lt. Gen. Lance L. Smith, Centcom’s deputy commander who was an Air Force pilot in Vietnam. Today’s young soldiers are more used to taking initiative. “You come up with a product,” he says, “and they’ll figure out 10 ways to use it that you never even envisioned. That’s important for us to know and for CEOs to know.”
What’s next on Centcom’s list, among other items, are improvements with RFID technology and communications. Up until now, the military has relied on “active” RFID transmitters that emit signals that can be read by interrogators up to 300 feet away. That distance can be critical in combat, but the civilian industry uses much cheaper “passive” tags that send signals that can be picked up only 10 feet away.
The big plus for the civilian sector is that passive tags are much cheaper than active ones, costing about a dollar apiece. Active transmitters run a whopping $70 per tag. Now, however, to get more in sync with its civilian suppliers, the Pentagon is pushing the use of passive tags as well.
Communications is another area headed for change. Gen. Foley says the next war will demand additions on the order of 20 times what it is now.
The fight against highly secretive and sophisticated Al-Qaeda and other fanatics—plus any potential new threats, perhaps from Iran or North Korea—will only put more stress on communications systems. If the troops move in, there will be a new evolution of supply chain issues. “How do we prepare for it?” asks Foley. For the Pentagon and the civilian business world alike, Centcom’s lessons learned are a place to start
Military Lessons from Gulf War II Successes as well as failures Richard A. Muller mirrored from
Technology Review Online
Technology for Presidents
March 12, 2004 War is inherently unpredictable, and often won by the side that adapts most quickly to the unexpected. For this reason, our military is already deeply engaged in evaluating what went right and what went wrong in the current war in Iraq. Last month I had the opportunity to hear a presentation by them on “lessons learned” – so far. Here is my take on several of their more salient observations. Too much too soon. Execution of the war and the speed of advance outstripped planning. The military expected to take seven weeks to reach Baghdad, but took only two. The rapid sweep left a vacuum in its wake, and politics abhors a vacuum. Backfill put people into power who were sometimes no better than those deposed.
Yet no one would argue that we should have purposely gone slower. The surprising speed was a great help in many ways, but we hadn’t adequately prepared for it. It is not sufficient to be prepared for the worst case scenario. Unexpected success brings unique problems, as well as easily missed opportunities. We were not sufficiently prepared to transition so early into a peacekeeping mode. Reality TV. Before the war, many military leaders opposed wartime teleconferencing. They feared it would encourage premature decisions and their promulgation before careful review. But now most have changed their minds. Face-to-face discussions convey information that can get lost in carefully composed memos. Remote commanders get a better sense of the battlefield, and troops get a better sense of what the commanders want and expect. So far, teleconferencing has led not only to quicker decisions, but to better ones. Cities are jungles. Iraq is mostly desert, but that proved mostly irrelevant. Virtually all fighting took place in or near cities, where visibility is low, and the greatest dangers are ambush, snipers, and booby traps – more akin to the Vietnam experience than to Iraq War I. Over the past two decades, about 70% of U.S. military engagements have been urban, so we should have been better prepared. But we have grossly inadequate facilities for urban training, and our soldiers spend little time doing it. That must change.
The city environment also neutralizes much of our high tech advantage. GPS doesn’t work indoors, and often fails outdoors in narrow alleys. Our high tech communications also have problems. Some of our radios use frequency hopping (rapid changes in frequency) to avoid detection and location, but they work only when there is good propagation at all frequencies, a condition often not met in cities. So after a few weeks urban fighting, some soldiers (and officers) had their families send them citizen band walkie-talkies from Radio Shack. When you are under fire, it may be more important to be able to call for help immediately rather than maintain covert communications. This experience is reminiscent of Gulf War I, when families sent soldiers cheap GPS receivers. Problems of precision. On D-Day in World War II, we dropped leaflets warning all French citizen who lived within 50 km of the coast to evacuate. Our bombers and artillery demolished entire towns because it was the quickest way to eliminate a handful of entrenched Nazis. Our concern for noncombatants has changed. Civilians now count for much more than they did in World War II, perhaps because we are better at counting them. Minimizing “collateral damage” has become a major constraint in modern war fighting. Our precision weapons are still not perfect, but they are getting much better; they reduced the number of noncombatant deaths to a much lower level than many predicted. As a result, most Iraqi civilians chose not to evacuate cities, and the massive refugee problem that many feared never materialized. But an unfortunate consequence of precision is that U.S. troops had to fight battles in the midst of innocents – the people they were there to save.
The military describes the current situation as “a three block war.” In block one we are feeding and giving medical care to the Iraqi people. In block two we are patrolling, acting as peacekeepers and policemen. In block three we are engaged in full combat. In Iraq all three blocks are sometimes adjacent and coincident in time. Follow a suspected sniper, but be careful; if you throw a hand grenade into his room of hiding, you may kill innocent civilians. You can’t even throw a “flash bang” stun grenade, because that could hurt a baby. This kind of fighting is so new that abstract planning is of little help; we are learning as we go along.
Insufficient psyops. Psyops, for “psychological operations,” is the modern version of propaganda war. The important aspects of current doctrine include: talk the local language, know the local culture, and speak the truth. This last requirement surprises some people, but the military wisely makes the assumption that truth is our ally and the enemy of our enemies. If you never lie, you have hope of winning the trust of the civilians. Psyops worked remarkably well in Afghanistan. Our Special Operations Forces could speak local languages, and they could leverage the help of local people. The remarkable result: Afghanistanis saw themselves liberated by fellow Muslims.
But skill at psyops is largely a specialty of the Army Special Operation Forces. With the much larger force in Iraq, psyops failed. The average Army soldier has virtually no knowledge of Arabic, and only superficial understanding of local culture. The Marines and the other forces have even less preparation in psyops.
Knowledge of culture goes well beyond not shaking with your left hand, or not showing the bottoms of your feet. For example, if you chase a terrorist into a building, you must knock before entering. Our soldiers now do this. It sounds ludicrous, but if you don’t knock, and as a result you see a woman uncovered (maybe just her face) you could capture your terrorist but create several new ones. A husband or brother or both may feel obliged to take revenge for the insult, to restore family honor, regardless of their political beliefs.
Decentralized intelligence. In the continuing conflict, a surprise success is “Dragon Eyes,” a remotely piloted vehicle that can be carried in a backpack. It looks like a model airplane, with a wingspan of only 1.2 meters and weight of 2.5 kg,. It can be launched with a toss, or with a bungee cord. Dragon Eyes is guided by GPS. It flies quietly at an altitude of 150 meters using a zinc-air battery for power, and can transmit 18 frames per second of visible or infrared video from a range up to 10 km. If spotted by the enemy, it is easily mistaken for a bird.
What makes Dragon Eyes so valuable is that it is easy to use (training takes less than a week), and it provides “actionable” intelligence – information needed immediately. Soldiers deploy it when they need to know what lies behind that building, or near that bridge. It’s cost is so low (soon to come down to $50k) that it can be “owned” at the platoon level. (Generals don’t waste time with things that cheap.) In the next two years, the marines will get 342 of these little marvels.
Despite the rise of the dragon, the most important source of actionable intelligence remains Humint, short for human intelligence. Humint exploitation teams (HETs) get reports from sympathetic Iraqis, not only for big news items (where is Saddam Hussein?), but more frequently for key but less newsworthy information such as the location of a roadside bomb. We now find a large number of these before they are set off.
Good news. It is important to learn from success too. I mentioned teleconferencing, Dragon Eyes, and the positive aspects of precision, but there are other things that went right. The oil fields were saved, even though Saddam had loaded them with explosives. His troops arrived at the huge Mosul dam to blow it up – but our military (with decisive help from local Iraqis) prevented them from doing so. A great sandstorm, the kind that had foiled President Carter’s hostage rescue in Iran, was endured without major problem. Most of the Iraqi infrastructure was preserved, so the post war recovery could proceed at a slow but measurable pace. These successes were due, in part, to the speed of the invasion. Despite the problems of the rapid pace, I know nobody who thinks we should have gone slower on purpose, as did McClellan in the Civil War.
Some say the military is always fighting the last war. That is not my impression. Our armed services do a better job of learning from their mistakes than any other large organization I know. I wish that the rest of government, and scientific establishments, could learn with similar speed. We are far from mastering the new kind of urban war in which we do battle in the midst of innocents and demand extremely low collateral damage. We are learning as we go. Our strength is enormous -- but, just as in biological evolution, it is often more important to be adaptable than to be strong.
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Richard A. Muller, a 1982 MacArthur Fellow, is a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches a course called “Physics for Future Presidents.” Since 1972, he has been a Jason consultant on U.S. national security. Avoiding Bogus Lessons from the Iraq War by Ted Galen Carpenter
Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and is the author or editor of 15 books on international affairs including "Peace & Freedom: Foreign Policy for a Constitutional Republic."
Bush administration leaders already seem to be drawing several lessons from the Iraq conflict. Unfortunately, many of those lessons are erroneous. If the United States bases its foreign policy on those bogus lessons, the outcome could be extremely unpleasant.
Bogus lesson 1: The relatively easy military victory means that the occupation of Iraq should go equally well.
The administration and its supporters place great stock in the scenes of Iraqis in Baghdad and elsewhere welcoming U.S. troops as liberators. But that initial reaction does not solve the numerous underlying religious, ethnic, and ideological tensions in that society that could make the occupation a frustrating and dangerous enterprise.
Iraq is an inherently fragile, artificial entity that the British cobbled together after World War I from three very different provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire. Washington has pledged to preserve the unity of the country, but that could prove extremely challenging. The Kurds in the north clearly want so much political autonomy that they would have a de facto independent state -- a development that could fragment the country and deeply alarm neighboring Turkey. The Shia Muslims in the south may also want a state of their own and may gravitate toward radical Islam to implement their political agenda.
Given the potential for turbulence, the U.S.-British occupation of Iraq is likely to resemble the U.S. experience in Lebanon in the early 1980s, the British experience in Northern Ireland from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, or the current Israeli experience on the West Bank. The emergence of suicide bombers during the war is not a reassuring development. At the very least, the occupation is likely to prove more difficult than the military conquest.
Bogus lesson 2: Given the ease of the military triumph in Iraq, the United States should consider applying the same treatment to Syria, Iran, North Korea, and other rogue states.
The hawks need to put their "triumphalism" on a leash. Just because the Iraqis exhibited tactical incompetence by deploying many of their forces in the open desert where they could be devastated by U.S. air power instead of forcing the coalition troops into engaging in extensive urban warfare, does not mean that a future adversary will make the same blunder. Moreover, Iran and North Korea are far more formidable adversaries than Iraq could ever hope to be. Indeed, U.S. intelligence sources believe that North Korea already has a small number of nuclear weapons, and Iran is likely to have some in the near future.
There is no doubt that the United States would ultimately prevail in such struggles. But the question is at what cost? Engaging in a series of wars against unfriendly countries may be emotionally appealing to hawkish elements, but it is the foreign policy equivalent of Russian roulette. It is possible to win at that game a number of times. But sooner or later the hammer will come down on a live round.
Bogus lesson 3: The angry "Arab street" is a myth.
That assumption misconstrues the nature of the problem. The danger is not so much that angry Muslim mobs will instantly sweep friendly governments from power. The principal danger is that the United States has so alienated Muslim populations that thousands of new recruits will gravitate to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, thus expanding the threat to the United States. Another danger is that public anger at the United States will reach the point that even those governments that might want to have close relations with Washington will find it politically impossible to do so.
One should also keep in mind the possible time lag. The U.S. victory in the first Persian Gulf War did not immediately translate into terrorist retaliation. It was more than two years before the World Trade Center bombing, more than seven years before the bombings of the embassies in East Africa, and more than a decade before 9-11. The retaliation was slow in coming, but come it did.
Bogus lesson 4: The United States is now so powerful that it does not need to care what other powers say or do.
Some hawks even want to engage in diplomatic and economic retaliation against France, Germany, and Russia for daring to oppose U.S. policy toward Iraq. That would be a profound mistake. America needs the cooperation of those and other countries for a multitude of enterprises. For example, we want them to devote great energy to eradicating Al Qaeda cells and starving the organization of funds. We want Russia to cut off nuclear technology exports to Iran and to help resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis.
Those countries are far less likely to be cooperative if the United States tries to bully them. Americans need to understand just how unpopular the Iraq war was in the rest of the world. If Washington does not change its behavior, the United States could end up being an isolated and hated country with other major states conspiring to undermine its power. That might not matter a great deal in the short run, but over the coming decades such a development would be disastrous.
It is imperative that the administration and the American public learn lessons from the Iraq war. But it is equally imperative that they are not the wrong lessons. FEATURES ARCHIVE
Allied Force: Lessons Learnt
At the end of October 2000, the Commons Defence Select Committee in the United Kingdom published the "14th Report: Lessons from Kosovo". The report analysed Operation Allied Force and made conclusions on what lessons NATO, Europe and the UK should learn from the operation. European Defence discusses some of the issues raised in the report.
Last year 's Operation Allied Force was hailed a complete success by NATO. In just over two months, NATO air power forced the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to back down over Kosovo, allowing NATO to deploy the multi-national Kosovo Force (KFOR). From guarding Western Europe to enforcing peace on rogue states, NATO was no longer a relic of the Cold War. Indeed, like Operation Determined Force in Bosnia during 1995, it appeared to be a clear demonstration of a successful transition by NATO to a completely new European security environment. It was promoted as the first humanitarian war fought by the West. It was also the first conflict completely fought from the air. Over 78 days, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 sorties - 14,000 of these hitting targets in Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo.
While Milosevic did back down over Kosovo and allow KFOR to deploy, the operation was not as clear-cut as it appeared at the time. With hindsight, the United Kingdom House of Commons Defence Select Committee has been able to publish an indepth examination of the airstrikes and the military strategy adopted by NATO.
The Commons Defence Committee 's 14th Report on Kosovo was published on the 23rd October 2000. This has followed reports from NATO and the US Department of Defense. Cross-party MPs, supported by leading academics from UK universities specialising in warfare and UK military personnel, were able to gather evidence from UK and NATO commanders, Ministry of Defence (MoD) personnel and journalists who reported the conflict. The aim of the study was to look at what lessons could be learnt from the conflict should NATO, Europe and the UK conduct similar operations in the future. Sometimes highly critical of the operation, the report discussed some of the major problems in its execution, focusing on the political and military constraints.
Political and Military Constraints
Overall, the report criticised NATO and Western politicians for some uncertainty in the coercive military strategy conducted during the conflict. NATO never made it clear what their overall objectives were until later on into the conflict. The operation was based more around major political than military considerations. Indeed, NATO planned the operation to remain popular among the public and to minimise casualties. Aircraft were only allowed to operate at 15,000ft - although some airstrikes were conducted at a much lower height. Nonetheless, this provided major constraints on some of the aircraft types used. The Royal Air Force, for example, deployed Tornado GR1s and Harrier GR7s. These were responsible for just under 10% of the total airstrikes but failed to hit many of the targets. The height limit was not suitable for these types which had been originally designed to hit targets at much lower levels. However, the report also pointed out that the weather, lack of suitable weapons in the UK 's inventory and the avoidance of collateral damage meaning that targets had to be seen properly by a pilot before being hit, equally restricted the RAF.
Politicians and military planners seriously thought that the use of airpower would force Milosevic to stop his actions against the Albanian population in Kosovo. The report stated that this humanitarian objective did not succeed in the short-term. Several days into the airstrikes, the Yugoslav security forces in Kosovo executed Operation Horseshoe, forcing over 300,000 of the Albanian population in Kosovo out into neighbouring countries. NATO was completely caught off-guard by Milosevic 's tactic. While NATO troops managed to help the refugees in hastily-erected camps and through humanitarian aid, this was not a scenario which NATO had been prepared for when drawing up plans for Allied Force months before. The report concluded that in future, planners should be prepared for all eventualities when implementing military operations of this kind.
The use of ground troops was also ruled out from the start of the operation - although the threat was made later. While this would of been a risky option given the terrain and a well-armed enemy, the report concluded that this sent out mixed signals to Milosevic. Ruling out of the ground option could of implied that NATO lacked the resolve in achieving its objectives. It restricted NATO 's options implementing the operation. It also provided Milosevic with the opportunity to redeploy his forces elsewhere, saving them from annihilation from the air.
European Lessons
Although the US provided over 60% of the aircraft and resources for the operation, France, Italy, the UK and Germany were the other main contributors to Allied Force. However, the report identified serious shortcomings in Western Europe 's military capability. For example, Europe does not possess similar levels of aircraft specialising in Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD) that the US possesses. At the present, only the United Kingdom and Germany have the Tornado GR1/4 and the Tornado ECR in this role. This is something that Western Europe will have to address if it is to mount an EU or WEU operation without the US ' help in the future. The report also raised an important question on defence procurement in the new international environment. Given the Gulf War in 1991 and the Kosovo conflict saw very little air-to-air combat, the report suggested that modern air forces should re-consider purchasing large numbers of air supremacy aircraft, instead opting for more multi-role or ground attack-biased aircraft. Smaller air forces are approaching these problems with aircraft such as the Eurofighter Typhoon coming into service over the next few years.
While there is no doubting that Operation Allied Force achieved its long-term aim of getting Milosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo - although, and as the report points out, this was as much down to Russia stating that it would not help Serbia - there were some flaws in the whole campaign which many other reports will also discuss over the coming years. For an organisation which was based on fighting the Warsaw Pact in mainland Western Europe, NATO 's transition to conflict management will be a learning process that will take time to develop. This is particularly true of an organisation led by the United States which is relatively inexperienced at peacekeeping and enforcement operations, and has many political constraints on overseas military deployments because of past experiences in Vietnam and Somalia. Nonetheless, NATO is already building on the experience of Allied Force. Europe will also have to embrace the lessons from the conflict especially if it is going to continue developing a security and defence identity over the coming years.
Useful websites:
THE BBC
THE WAR ON IRAQ
AN ANALYSIS
JUNE 2003
TREVOR ASSERSON
and
LEE KERN
Biographies
Trevor Asserson is a UK solicitor based in London. He is a partner in an international law firm. He was called to the Israeli Bar in 1992.
Lee Kern graduated from Cambridge University in 2001 where he took a BA in English Literature.
This report expresses the personal views of the authors.
Address
Copies of this report can be found on www.bbcwatch.com
www.bbcwatch.com
1. SUMMARY.................................................................................................................. 1
2. THE BBC – AN APPROPRIATE SUBJECT FOR ANALYSIS................................ 2
3. PROCEDURES ADOPTED IN THIS REPORT......................................................... 3
(i) Time Period Monitored......................................................................... 3
(ii) External Material................................................................................... 3
(iii) Broadcasts Monitored........................................................................... 3
4. BBC RESPONSE TO EARLIER REPORTS............................................................... 3
5. OMISSION OF CULPABILITY.................................................................................. 4
6. MITIGATION.............................................................................................................. 6
(i) MOSUL KILLINGS............................................................................. 6
(ii) TWO CHILDREN KILLED AT CHECKPOINT............................... 7
(iii) THE PALESTINE HOTEL.................................................................. 8
(iv) FRIENDLY FIRE................................................................................ 10
(v) CLUSTER BOMBS............................................................................ 11
(vi) DISPLACEMENT OF BLAME........................................................ 12
7. SUICIDE ATTACKS................................................................................................. 14
8. MILITARY NECESSITY OF CHECKPOINTS........................................................ 17
9. TARGETED STRIKES.............................................................................................. 19
(i) STRIKE ON BASAM IBRAHIM HASSAN AL-TIKRITI.............. 19
(ii) STRIKE ON SADDAM HUSSEIN................................................... 19
(iii) STRIKE ON CHEMICAL ALI.......................................................... 21
10. DEHUMANISATION OF IRAQIS........................................................................... 22
11. DEMONISATION OF IRAQIS: “DIEHARD FANATICS”................................... 23
12. HUMANISING THE COALITION ARMY............................................................. 25
(i) A DELICATE ARMY........................................................................ 26
(ii) AN ARMY WITH A HUMAN FACE.............................................. 28
13. THE BBC AND TERRORISM.................................................................................. 31
SCHEDULE I – Programmes Monitored
SCHEDULE II – BBC correspondence
THE BBC
THE WAR ON IRAQ
AN ANALYSIS
“…these things happen if you are fighting a war. Mistakes happen.”
John Simpson - Online, 07/04/03
1. SUMMARY
The recent Iraq War provided a unique opportunity to examine the BBC’s ability to report news in an accurate and impartial manner.
The coalition forces in Iraq were widely accused of invading Iraq in breach of international law. They faced opposition from the local defending forces who frequently fought from or hid within densely populated urban areas. As part of their defence the Iraqi army employed suicide bombers.
The Israeli army faces some similar problems. It too is widely criticised for alleged breaches of international law. It faces an enemy which fights from densely populated urban areas and employs suicide bombers.
The coalition forces, although claiming to be defending the security of their own countries, singularly failed to convince popular opinion that Iraq posed a real threat. By contrast popular opinion clearly accepts that the Israeli army is defending its civilian population from a very real threat which does constantly claim Israeli lives[1]. This difference between the two conflicts, if it affected an impartial news provider at all, would logically tend to result in Israel receiving a more sympathetic coverage than did the coalition forces. The opposite is in fact the case.
The BBC has a legal obligation to report news in an accurate and impartial way[2]. A comparison between the way in which coalition troops and Israeli troops are treated when dealing with such similar military problems provided a rare opportunity to compare like with like in a more direct way than our earlier studies have allowed.
What emerges from this study is the marked contrast between the way the BBC reports the two conflicts. Coalition troops are described in warm and glowing terms, with sympathy being evoked both for them as individuals and also for their military predicament. By contrast Israeli troops are painted as faceless ruthless and brutal killers with no or little understanding shown for their actions.
The BBC goes to considerable lengths to explain, excuse and mitigate any civilian deaths at the hands of coalition troops. Israeli troops receive totally different treatment; little sympathy is shown for their situation, and mitigating arguments are brushed aside or scorned if voiced at all. At times the reporting of events in Israel amounts to distortion and at times to what appears to be discrimination against Israel.
We are aware that, during the Iraq conflict, the BBC was heavily criticised in the UK for being too harsh in its treatment of coalition motives and tactics. This report does not seek to comment on that criticism. However the fact that the criticism was widely voiced only serves to emphasise the correctness of the argument at the centre of this report. Had the BBC responded to public pressure to report coalition actions more favourably than it did, then the contrast between its reporting of coalition and Israel’s forces would have been even more stark than it actually was.
We consider that this report shows conclusively that the BBC’s claim to provide impartial news coverage is unsustainable. Our two earlier reports[3] showed that the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East was infected by an apparent widespread antipathy towards Israel. However those reports were based almost exclusively upon a comparison of the media treatment of the Israelis and Palestinians. This current study, which compares treatment of Israelis with that of coalition forces, suggests that the partiality of the BBC’s reporting quite possibly infects its coverage of all politically sensitive issues.
The British public continues to pay for this partial and inaccurate news service through the licence fee. We wonder whether it is healthy for Britain’s democracy that such huge public funds should be provided to what is an essentially monopolistic and unaccountable body. The BBC cannot provide impartial news coverage. It has no legitimate call on public funds when they are used simply to promote the BBC’s own prejudices.
2. THE BBC – AN APPROPRIATE SUBJECT FOR ANALYSIS
We have chosen to study the BBC’s coverage both because of its considerable influence on public opinion and because it has a legal obligation to provide accurate and impartial news coverage. Readers are referred to a more detailed explanation of the reason for studying the BBC and of the legal duties of the BBC which is set out in the earlier two reports which we have written.
Most crucially we are concerned at the possible effect of BBC partiality on the events on which it reports. As stated in the Second Report, the reputation and the coverage of the BBC guarantee it immense influence. Where its output is inaccurate or partial the BBC should not rely on the opinions which it has formed as evidence of the acceptability of its output. The cycle of opinion forming constitutes a particularly dangerous abuse of position by the BBC where it has the effect of isolating Israel and Israelis and thus making the peace process itself more difficult.
3. PROCEDURES ADOPTED IN THIS REPORT
(i) Time Period Monitored
We commenced recording BBC news output on 3 April 2003, and continued until 18 April 2003. When we commenced recording the coalition forces were already advancing on Baghdad and the war was a few days old. We stopped recording shortly after the war had effectively ended.
(ii) External Material
The principal aim of this study was to compare treatment of the coalition forces with the treatment of Israeli forces in comparable situations. In our previous reports we attempted to compare what the BBC reported with the events that actually occurred. This necessarily involved considering external material to establish the relevant facts.
The present study is based almost exclusively on BBC material. Where possible we have limited sources to the ten day period monitored. However, given the small number of incidents covered in Israel during this period, we have had to consider material from outside the period to illustrate certain points. We assume that our readers will have some familiarity with background facts in the region and we do not attempt to provide a historical context.
(iii) Broadcasts Monitored
Given the quantity of BBC news output, it was not feasible to monitor all of it. We chose to monitor what we considered to be a representative sample of the most significant news programmes. The programmes selected are set out at Schedule I. All programmes monitored were transcribed and the original tapes have been retained.
4. BBC RESPONSE TO EARLIER REPORTS
Both of our earlier reports were sent to Richard Sambrook, head of BBC news.
The first report was met with a two page letter in which Mr Sambrook stated “I am sorry you feel that [the BBC] has not adhered to its Producers Guidelines. I think it has.”
The second report was treated with somewhat more respect. In a short letter Mr Sambrook admitted that the BBC “do sometimes make mistakes.” However he was unable to agree that any of the mistakes which we had identified were in fact examples of the mistakes which the BBC makes. His letter attached a 21 page detailed refutation of every allegation.
Many of the arguments and defences raised by the BBC were unconvincing or evasive. A few good points were made. We reproduce here at Schedule II the BBC’s reply on the question of its use of the word terrorism. That single page of the BBC’s reply is an example of the quality of its response generally. It is enclosed because we analyse it in this report. We assume that the BBC will provide people with its full response, on request.
Notwithstanding the huge effort to which the BBC went to deal with the complaints raised, it refused to meet with us to discuss its response. Legitimate and well founded complaints continue to be brushed aside by a BBC which appears incapable of admitting error, at least on this subject.
In view of the sterile response from the BBC we welcome the recent proposal by the Governors of the BBC to set up an independent monitoring body. Self regulation is a difficult task at the best of times. For an unaccountable, incumbent, establishment institution such as the BBC, it is probably impossible.
5. OMISSION OF CULPABILITY
The US and UK military were responsible for many civilian deaths and injuries in Iraq. However, we find that the BBC operates a subtle omission of culpability when reporting on these civilian casualties. A good example of this technique is seen in the reporting of Ali Abbas, a twelve year old Iraqi boy who lost both his arms and his family as a result of the coalition bombing of Baghdad. The BBC’s coverage of the Ali Abbas story lacks much of the punch that would normally accompany their coverage of an equivalent story arising in the disputed territories. The BBC spares the coalition the shame of its own actions.
The BBC consistently omits any direct and explicit expression of coalition culpability for Ali 's injuries saying merely, “…[the] Iraqi boy who had both arms blown off…when a missile hit his Baghdad home…”. By failing explicitly to state that it was a US or UK bomb that maimed Ali and destroyed his family, the BBC glosses over coalition guilt and spares it negative publicity. This contrasts with the way in which the BBC will report of an “Israeli tank” or “an Israeli soldier”, repeating the word Israel so consistently that it becomes inextricably intertwined with the scene of destruction that is being witnessed.
Gulf war…
“…he’s had both his arms blown off…his whole family were killed…his mother was pregnant and they were killed by a bomb…” [Today, 09/04/03]
Israel…
“…he lies in a coma with a bullet in his brain after being shot at by Israeli troops…” [BBC1, 6pm, 14/04/03]
Gulf War…
“…Nine civilians killed in Baghdad blast…” [Online, 08/04/03]
Israel…
“…Six killed in Israeli raids…” [Online, 04/04/03]
Gulf War…
“…At least nine civilians are reported to have died when a bomb hit a residential neighbourhood in central Baghdad…” [Online, 08/04/03]
Israel…
“…At least five Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli air raid on Gaza City…” [Online, 09/04/03]
Gulf war…
“…warplanes…pounded Saddam Hussein’s hometown…” [R4, 6pm, 11/04/03]
Israel…
“Israeli warplanes appeared to be targeting a car,” [Online, 09/04/03]
Gulf War…
“…bombing raids by F-15 and F-16 jets…” [Online, 08/04/03]
Israel…
“…an Israeli F-16 warplane fired two missiles…” [4] [10/04/03]
Gulf war…
“…there 's a new sound in the city - rotor blades from attack helicopters…” [Online, 08/04/03]
Israel…
“…Israeli attack helicopters fired missiles into the town…” [Online, 11/04/03]
Gulf war…
“The Ministry does look pretty battered, but then it has been attacked in an earlier phase of this conflict by air strikes.” [BBC1, 6pm, 08/04/03]
Israel…
“…Israeli planes strike Gaza…” [Online, 09/04/03]
Gulf War…
“…Pleas for help – Ali the orphan begs to be treated in London…” [BBC1, 6pm, 14/04/03]
“…an Iraqi orphan injured in the bombing of Baghdad has pleaded to be allowed to come to Britain for treatment. [BBC1, 6pm, 14/04/03][5].
“…Meet little Farrah, just four years old…the bomb that shredded the muscles in both her arms also killed her parents...” [BBC1, 6pm, 14/04/03]
“…two journalists were killed by a tank shell, a third died in a strike on Al-Jazeera’s headquarters…” [R4, 6pm, 08/04/03]
Israel…
“…A Palestinian was killed and two others injured when they were fired at by an Israeli helicopter gunship in Gaza city…” [R4, 6pm, 10/04/03]
“…Israeli F-16 planes flew low over the city…” [Online, 09/04/03]
“…crushed under sand pushed up by an Israeli army bulldozer…” [R4, 6pm, 11/04/03]
6. MITIGATION
Where coalition culpability is conceded efforts are made to excuse, explain and even justify the loss of civilian life. The BBC shows a persistent drive to convey deep empathy and understanding of the problems, difficulties and fears faced by the British and American soldiers as they wage battle in Iraq. As well as serving to mitigate individual incidents as they occur, this ongoing process of mitigation has a cumulative effect, which seems to offer the coalition the freedom to pursue its military objectives free of the heavy criticism which one might expect from a genuinely impartial news provider.
The existence of fear is used by the BBC to explain away the killing of unarmed civilians. We even find that the BBC displaces responsibility onto the victims themselves – children are apparently blamed for their own deaths, having failed to stop the vehicle they were travelling in.
The military engagements faced by the coalition army in Iraq are similar to those faced by the Israeli army in its battle against Palestinian terrorists who, like Iraqis, hide down alleyways in built up areas, set boobytraps, place snipers and use civilians as shields. The principle distinction lies in the fact that the coalition faced a minimal amount of such tactics compared with the amount faced by Israeli troops.
Yet when an Israeli weapon causes civilian death the BBC is quick to criticise and slow to explain, excuse or indeed to show any significant level of understanding of the military difficulties Israel faces.
This chapter looks at the BBC’s mitigation of Iraqi civilians killed in Mosul, Iraqi children killed at a US checkpoint, journalists killed at the Palestine Hotel and journalists killed in “friendly fire” incidents. It also looks at the BBC’s mitigation of the coalition’s use of cluster-bombs – a highly controversial and highly destructive weapon.
(i) MOSUL KILLINGS
“…Brigadier-General Vince Brooks said US marines and special forces soldiers fired at demonstrators on Tuesday after they came under attack from people shooting guns and throwing rocks…” [Online, 16/04/03]
“…A US spokesman said troops were returning fire from a nearby building and did not aim into the crowd…” [Online, 16/04/03]
“…The incident underlines the difficulties US forces face in trying to keep the peace in a country now confronting an uncertain future…” [Online, 16/04/03]
(ii) TWO CHILDREN KILLED AT CHECKPOINT
“…In southern Iraq US marines shot dead two children when they opened fire on two cars at a checkpoint. Soldiers had feared a suicide bomb attack…” [BBC1, Ten Special, 11/04/03]
“…a very unfortunate incident at one checkpoint this morning where two young children were shot when marines that were on duty at the checkpoint suspected that a suicide car-bomb attack was taking place…” [BBC1, Ten Special, 11/04/03]
“…there’s no doubt at all that it was simply a dreadful error and the US marines have said so…” [BBC1, Ten Special, 11/04/03]
“…It was only when they really felt under threat of a possible suicide attack that they opened fire…” [Today, 11/04/03]
“…US marines have opened fire on two vehicles as they approached a checkpoint killing two Iraqi children and wounding a number of adults. The soldiers at Nasiriya feared a suicide bomb attack…” [Midday, 11/04/03]
“…Two children have been shot dead by American marines reacting to what they thought was an attempted suicide attack…” [R4 6pm, 11/04/03]
American marines in Nasiriya opened fire on a vehicle as it approached them, killing two Iraqi children and wounding a number of adults. As the BBC’s Adam Mynot says, the marines still fear suicide attacks”. [Midday, 11/04/03]
“…after a similar incident a week or so ago there were strenuous efforts to put up signs in arabic and so on, warning civilians that they would be required to stop because of the fear of suicide bombings and so on…” [Today, 11/04/03]
Contrast this intense mitigation of a coalition checkpoint error with the BBC’s coverage of an incident at an Israeli checkpoint in November 2001:
“…Today Israeli soldiers opened fire on a Palestinian car…it was reported that the car had approached a checkpoint at speed and two Palestinians were killed in that attack…” [World Service, Newshour, 29/11/01]
Note how the single reference to an Israeli mitigating factor is undermined by the prefix which declares, “it was reported”. This contrasts with how coalition mitigating circumstances are conveyed. The BBC has no hesitation in declaring in no uncertain terms that, “Soldiers had feared a suicide bomb attack”, and they do so repeatedly. They even go further and provide us with a helpful and authoritative account on what was actually going on ‘inside the minds’ of the soldiers that fired upon two Iraqi children: “…It was only when they really felt under threat of a possible suicide attack that they opened fire…”. How this scoop was obtained is not elaborated on.
The most disconcerting aspect of the BBC’s coverage can be found when cross-referencing their account of the Israeli checkpoint deaths with accounts taken from other news sources. The following is taken from Haaretz, a left-wing daily, quick to criticise Israel.
“…Two Palestinians were shot and killed yesterday…According to military sources, a suspicious-looking Palestinian vehicle approached the IDF checkpoint, and was asked to stop. The driver was ordered to leave the car. Inspecting the vehicle, IDF soldiers spotted trademarks of a stolen car…The driver then re-entered the car, claiming he needed a cellphone; he sped away…The IDF sources said the soldiers first fired at the car’s tires, and then at the vehicle itself. The shots killed the driver…The IDF shooting also unintentionally killed a Palestinian taxi driver, who was waiting near the checkpoint, and had no connection with the first driver. A car bomb exploded at the same IDF roadblock a few months ago, the military sources explained, and the soldiers there yesterday were ‘on alert and tense’ on account of intelligence warnings about possible attacks in the region.” [Ha’aretz Website, 30/11/01]
The BBC has omitted certain important facts that would have presented a more comprehensive account of mitigating circumstances surrounding the Israeli checkpoint deaths. Firstly there is the fact that the car was asked to, and indeed did, stop. Then there is the fact that IDF soldiers spotted trademarks of a stolen car – stolen cars having been used repeatedly in previous terrorist operations. Then there is the fact that the driver got back into his suspected stolen vehicle and tried to speed away. At this point one would imagine that the IDF felt that something was amiss.
If the BBC did not feel that these were sufficiently mitigating circumstances to mention, then maybe they could have made use of the factors they do consider to mitigate accidental killings at checkpoints. If the fear of potential suicide attacks is a mitigating factor for the coalition army when embroiled in a checkpoint fracas, then maybe the BBC would have liked to have noted that the Israeli checkpoint in question had experienced its own previous bomb attack - a lesson in fear compounded upon by the warnings of possible future attacks.
The BBC is seen to omit important facts that could mitigate Israeli actions. By doing so we are effectively presented with a distorted BBC version of reality.
(iii) THE PALESTINE HOTEL
On the 7th April 2003 an American tank fired at the Palestine Hotel – a Baghdad hotel where Western journalists were staying. A number of journalists were killed in this incident. We often find that the BBC correspondents work hard to mitigate this coalition action which killed a number of innocent people. Again, it is a case study in military empathy and mitigation, and it raises the question over whether such efforts are made to understand and humanise the actions of the Israeli army.
“…as I was saying, this is a microcosm for what has been happening and the kind of security challenges faced by the coalition forces in the centre of Baghdad…” [Ten Special, 07/04/03]
“…and cameras can be mistaken for rocket-propelled grenades…in this kind of situation it’s difficult for a tank commander or any kind of infantry vehicle to distinguish between a camera and an RPG…” [Ten Special, 07/04/03]
“…can you give any indication as to whether there could be any confusion within the building in terms of who’s in the Palestine hotel, as to who’s a journalist, who’s a member of the press and who might be representing other interests within that building?…” [Ten Special, 07/04/03]
“…clearly there is a possibility I suppose that somebody could be operating, could be sniping from the top floor of the hotel…” [Ten Special, 07/04/03]
“…Could it be that journalists who are watching the action could be mistaken for snipers, particularly if they’re using binoculars?…” [Ten Special, 07/04/03]
“…it is entirely possible, I mean we are formally not supposed to film from the hotel, we’re only supposed to film from our live positions on the first floor roof…”[6] [Ten Special, 07/04/03]
The above incident contrasts sharply with the BBC’s treatment of a similar incident involving the death of an HBO cameraman on April 3rd 2003 – just a few days prior to the Palestine Hotel incident.
“…an award-winning British journalist has been shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he filmed a documentary in a refugee area in Gaza… cameraman James Miller suffered fatal injuries after an Israeli armoured vehicle opened fire, wounding him in the neck, according to reports…
…Mr Miller had been filming…in Palestinian areas while working on a documentary for the American HBO network…” [Online, 03/04/03]
The strenuous effort to mitigate an accidental death, which is seen for coalition forces, is suddenly absent here. The BBC have cast aside all mitigating reflection. No longer do we hear that “…in this kind of situation it’s difficult for a tank commander or any kind of infantry vehicle to distinguish between a camera and an RPG…”. Gone is the mitigating insistence that “cameras can be mistaken for rocket-propelled grenades”. Also absent is the fact that James Miller was filming in a designated combat zone in the dark at night – a mitigating factor that contrasts with the Palestine Hotel incident which occurred during the daytime. Furthermore, no consideration is given to the fact that whereas the Palestine hotel was a known place of Western journalists, the IDF had no prior warning that a cameraman would be filming in that battle zone, at that time. In conclusion, one must question the BBC’s strong propensity to mitigate coalition actions whilst vilifying comparable Israeli actions – even when greater mitigating circumstances exist on the Israeli side.
[7]
“…cameras can be mistaken for rocket-propelled grenades…”
[Ten Special, 07/04/03]
(iv) FRIENDLY FIRE
“Friendly fire” relates to the incident of an army mistakenly attacking its own troops. During the Iraq conflict the term was also applied to instances where journalists were the inadvertent targets of coalition strikes. BBC presenter John Simpson was involved in one such incident on April 6, 2003. According to the BBC’s own reports at least 15 people were killed and 45 injured in this attack. As with the Mosul killings, the two checkpoint deaths and the Palestine Hotel deaths, the BBC goes to great lengths to explain, absolve, excuse and mitigate such uncontrolled displays of lethal force. This contrasts starkly with the lack of sympathy approaching vilification that accompanies “collateral damage” arising out of Israeli actions.
“…I think what probably happened was that there was a burned out Iraqi tank at the crossroads and I suspect that either the pilots got the navigational details wrong, which is possible, but I think it is probably more likely one of them saw the burned out Iraqi tank, assumed that was what was to be hit - and dropped the bomb…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…It was a mistake. They were so apologetic afterwards, as you can imagine…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…these things happen if you are fighting a war. Mistakes happen…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…The American and British forces pride themselves on hitting military targets and sparing civilian lives. But the bombs don 't always fall where they 're meant to…”[8] [BBC Online, 07/04/03].
“…There is no doubt that when you deploy air power close to your own troops, incidents like this will happen…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…A pilot can have real difficulty, especially in the midst of battle, spotting the correct target from their aerial vantage point, and may have to differentiate between several potential targets on the ground to identify the correct one…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…It 's more risky not to use air power in this situation. For example, Iraqi tanks could have disrupted more supply convoys if coalition air power hadn 't been targeting them…” [Online, 07/04/03]
The tone of the reports suggests a BBC ready to forgive the occasional, or even frequent, accident. This stems from its understanding of the military difficulties which the coalition forces face and the need to fire under stressful circumstances, often with civilians in the vicinity. No such indulgence is given to Israeli errors.
(v) CLUSTER BOMBS
The use of cluster bombs has been very controversial. There is little doubt that they significantly increase the risks to civilians and particularly to children. The BBC does enter this debate. But it also goes to considerable lengths to justify the use of cluster bombs by coalition troops. Explanations by military personnel are barely questioned and are often repeated. The use of cluster bombs is mitigated by the authoritative information that the weapons were used only against Republican Guards and Iraqi soldiers away from civilian centres. And where civilians are killed this is blamed on Iraqi soldiers for hiding in civilian areas, and in any event “All war results in civilian casualties...” [Today, 04.04.03]
“…these are being fired, we are told by the military, only into open areas on the outskirts of Basra - not into the city centre…” [BBC Online, 04/04/03]
“…the British say they are using them to destroy large numbers of Iraqi troops only when they move into open ground…” [BBC Online, 04/04/03]
“…the British military have been very careful to point out that they are not being used in the city centre…” [BBC Online, 04/04/03]
“…a British military spokesman said the rounds are used only in open areas where they’ve identified large numbers of Iraqi troops…” [Today, 03/04/03]
“…Air Chief Marshall Sir Peter Squire told reporters that British pilots had dropped about fifty cluster bombs in Iraq during the conflict but only against Republican Guards…” [R4, 04/04/03]
“…British troops have used a form of cluster bomb on targets[9] outside Basra…” [Today 030404]
“…British forces have been using cluster bombs on areas around the southern city of Basra where large number of Iraqi troops are reported to have been gathering…” [Midday, 03/04/04]
“…Ministry of Defence Officials then further clarified that the weapons had so far been used in open spaces away from built up areas…”[10] [Newsnight, 03/04/03]
“…let’s deal with this, impossible in many ways, question of civilian casualties. All war results in civilian casualties...” [Today, 04.04.03]
“…and haven’t we in the end, Richard Lloyd, haven’t we in the end got to say, well if that’s what the military planners really believe, and they wouldn’t argue for them otherwise, then that’s it?…” [Today, 04.04.03]
We are left in no doubt that the British military mean well, and any harm caused is the fault of the Iraqi troops. By contrast it is extremely rare for the BBC even to express, let alone to repeat, the military reasons given by Israelis for taking the steps they do to protect Israeli citizens. It is inconceivable that they would justify the means by reference to the end as they do for coalition forces. Equally inconceivable is the show of insouciant disregard for a few Palestinian deaths as an inevitable consequence of war.
(vi) DISPLACEMENT OF BLAME
The most frequent technique employed in the mitigation of coalition culpability is the displacement of responsibility onto the Iraqis themselves. There is a suggestion that were it not for Iraqi tactics, their trickery, and their persistence in not letting the coalition kill them, risks to civilians would never occur. The Iraqis initiate violence; they invite reciprocation; they “draw” the military into using their biggest weapons. US and UK actions are always seen as a response to an Iraqi action. A pattern of cause and effect is established in which coalition actions are always seen as a response. Coalition forces are cast as trying to play a gentle role and being pulled reluctantly into confrontations. It is hard to extract from this narrative the reality of the largest concentration of sophisticated weaponry ever seen, being used to invade a country defended by a demoralised, poorly armed and even worse led rag tag militia.
“…the main reason for these [friendly fire] incidents is the fact that air power is being used in an environment where Iraqi targets are mobile and operating close to mobile coalition forces…” [ Online, 07/04/03]
“…But British troops have been drawn into urban fighting…” [ BBC Online, 04/04/03]
“…but clearly it is really difficult fighting terrain because the British have been drawn into urban warfare…” [BBC Online, 04/04/03]
“…The Iraqis are taking shelter in-between civilian houses and using those houses as places to fire from. This means civilians could be in the line of fire that comes back from the coalition forces…” [BBC Online, 04/04/03]
“…So no matter how well intended the British troops might be, the civilians are trapped in the fighting and they are under severe pressure….” [BBC Online, 04/04/03]
“…Vital to the allied forces is confronting the Republican Guard before they withdraw into the city. Otherwise the British and American forces risk being lured into a highly undesirable urban conflict involving street to street fighting in Baghdad…” [Today, 03/04/04]
“…Gavin Hewitt is with the troops and described the Iraqi fighters tactics.
GAVIN: They jump out of the alleyways, try and fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the Americans, and then leap back in the houses again. And of course dealing with those people is not only difficult, but quite often puts civilians at risk as well, because when you then respond with heavy machine gun fire or tank fire, that’s pretty devastating in these neighbourhoods…” [Today, 10/04/03]
“…This is Noah…he’s twelve and he’s fighting for his life in hospital since a bomb targeting Iraqi fighters hiding in his neighborhood hit his house…”[11] [BBC1, 6pm, 09/04/03]
“…there is no doubt…that civilians of Basra are in danger of being hurt by many of the weapons being fired towards Iraqi troops taking shelter in the city…” [Today, 03/04/04]
“…Americans are hesitant in their response, suspicious of the faces which are not smiling in the crowd, behind the man wielding nothing more than a garland of faded plastic flowers…” [Newsnight, 11/04/03]
“…The Americans are unsure about who they’re talking to, who to trust…” [Newsnight, 11/04/03]
“…They’re very, very jumpy at the moment, simply because, for example, cell phones are being used to orchestrate attacks on American forces…” [Today, 11/04/03]
BBC reporting of Israeli troops, far from seeking to displace blame, goes out of its way to ensure that blame is ascribed. Where genuine mitigating circumstances exist, the BBC hides or omits them when reporting on Israel (see Section 5 “Omission of Culpability” and Section 6(ii) “Two Children Killed at Checkpoint” above.)
7. SUICIDE ATTACKS
The occurrence of suicide attacks in Iraq strikes instant parallels with the Palestinian suicide attacks against Israel. It is important to note that Palestinian suicide attacks are almost always directed against non-military targets. Iraqi suicide attacks were targeted against the US and UK military - an invading army of contested international legitimacy. Yet – a suicide attack against US marines in Iraq is described by the BBC as an act of terrorism[12]. In Israel it is the work of a “militant”.
Gulf war…
“…there have been reminders too of the dangers posed by Iraqis resorting to terrorism. Last night a car packed with explosives was driven into an American checkpoint and blown up, killing three soldiers…” [R4, 6pm, 04/04/03]
Israel…
“…The BBC 's Jeremy Cooke in Jerusalem says that the use of a moving car bomb against a bus is a new kind of attack for Palestinian militants…” [Online, 5/6/02]
In fact the BBC has a practice of describing suicide attacks as terrorism in almost every situation in the world except where the victim is an Israeli. This discriminatory practice is analysed at Section 13 of this report.
The BBC expresses strong empathy for the coalition as the potential target of ‘terrorism’, trying to understand the psychological pressures which this threat brings to bear. The pernicious nature of suicide bombing is expounded upon, and is used to mitigate the killing of civilians, such as those of the two Iraqi children shot dead at a checkpoint.[13] The fact that the coalition presence in Iraq could be the actual cause and impetus behind such attacks is ignored. Instead, the suicide bombers themselves are pinpointed and blamed as the architects of fear and suspicion.
Gulf war…
“…the Americans are wary at checkpoints now and who can blame them? Suicide bombers in the early days changed the tone of the whole relationship…every Iraqi is treated as a potential threat…” [Newsnight, 11/04/03]
“…that of course is what the Americans fear most isn’t it? We know from a previous suicide attack that is what they dread because if civilians, or people who look like civilians, and this was a woman, are going to carry out these attacks, where do they feel safe?…” [Midday, 04.04.03]
“… after that first attack they are obviously very nervous, very edgy about how they deal with civilians in the area in which they operating…but in the circumstances, obviously the coalition forces are very, very aware of this danger…” [Midday, 04.04.03]
“…Coalition troops were put on heightened alert after the first attack and there have since been incidents of soldiers firing on civilian vehicles that have approached checkpoints…Eleven members of the same family were killed when troops fired on their vehicle near Najaf this week.” [Online, 04/04/03]
“…obviously, yet another frightening moment for the marines…” [BBC1, 6pm, 10/04/03]
“…If that’s correct and it was a suicide attack, it points to the difficulties the US soldiers face as they try to bring peace and security to Baghdad. The thought that suicide bombers may be lurking among the people they’re here to liberate can only distance them from ordinary Iraqis...” [R4, 6pm, 10/04/03]
“…It was at a checkpoint like this that the suicide attack took place. The problem for these troops, they came here as a fighting army, they’re being sucked into police work…” [Newsnight, 10/04/03]
“…the Americans have their own worries. This was the scene in Baghdad tonight, marines taking up positions, wary that the next Iraqi to greet them, could be a walking bomb…” [Newsnight, 10/04/03]
“…These pictures from our sister network ABC shows what happened when a suspicious vehicle gets too close…” [Newsnight, 10/04/03]
The essence of these quotations is to drip feed a message that suicide bombers create a constant fear which justifies an edgy and over cautious response to the slightest threat.
Suicide bombers are presented as the architects of fear and suspicion. “Suicide bombers…changed the tone of the whole relationship” in Iraq.
By contrast, in Israel we find that suicide bombers are not bestowed with the same capacity for generating fear, chaos and “changes in tone” through their own volition. The BBC presents Palestinian suicide attacks as a reaction and response to Israeli provocations. The fact that a suicide bombing campaign has derailed the peace process time and again is ignored. Responsibility for Palestinian suicide attacks is constantly displaced onto the Israelis.
Israel…
“…An Israeli woman has died of injuries sustained in a suicide bomb attack at a bus stop near Tel Aviv…The attack follows an Israeli army incursion into the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip…” [Online, 10/10/02]
“…The bomber blew himself up near a train station in the town of Binyamina on Monday evening, killing two Israelis…and injuring at least eight others…The explosion followed a day of heavy clashes in the West Bank city of Hebron on Monday, in which several people were injured and Palestinian police posts were destroyed when Israeli tanks moved into the Palestinian controlled area of the city…” [Online, 17/07/01]
“…A suicide bomb attack has killed 15 people in a crowded restaurant in the Israeli port city of Haifa. Up to 30 people were injured - several of them critically - in the explosion…the blast coincided with an intensification of the Israeli siege of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat…” [Online, 31/03/02]
“…The latest suicide bombing followed the attempted killing of Hamas ' political leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi by Israel in Gaza on Tuesday…” [Online, 18/06/03]
“…Israel was braced for such an attack after Hamas vowed revenge for the attempted
killing of its political leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi by Israel in Gaza on Tuesday…”
In pursuance of this narrative, we see a number of omissions which effectively rewrite history. In reporting the Israeli missile strike which targeted Abdel-Azsis at Rantissi, Israel is seen as the original architect of violence. The fact that the Hamas charter is implacably opposed to peace talks is not mentioned. The fact that Hamas publicly declared that it would not participate in the Aqaba peace initiative is ignored. The fact that this attack on Rantissi occurred only after Hamas had attacked and killed five Israeli soldiers - after the Aqaba peace declaration - is also ignored by the BBC[14]. The BBC seeks to present Israel as the ‘first mover’ in the oft quoted, ‘cycle of violence’, and therefore the prime opponent and obstacle to peace.
The BBC’s unwillingness to engage in the reality of Hamas’ agenda is a consistent feature of BBC coverage of suicide attacks in Israel. Indeed the BBC appears to consider Hamas suicide bombers as laudable. It refers to such people as martyrs, without putting the word in inverted commas.
“…At the offices of the radical Palestinian group Hamas…in Damascus…
the walls are covered with Palestinian flags and pictures of Palestinian
martyrs, but the cause today is not Palestine - it is Iraq…” [Online, 14/04/03]
“…Halate Hishul 's eldest son Hassam died 10 days ago on the road to
Baghdad, but she does not want anyone to offer any condolences. She wants
to be congratulated for the new "shaheed", or martyr, in the family…” [Online, 14/04/03]
As we show in the section on Terrorism at the end of this report, the BBC appears to consider Hamas’ policy of suicide bombing of Israeli civilians as “politically legitimate”. Armed with these underlying attitudes it is no surprise that the BBC treats suicide attacks on Israelis with far less sympathy than it treats similar attacks on coalition forces.
8. MILITARY NECESSITY OF CHECKPOINTS
As well as garnering approval for coalition checkpoints by energetically highlighting the fears and dangers faced by the coalition army, the BBC also explains the advisability of using checkpoints. No aspersions are cast over their use. They are presented as a logical and a reasonable response to the threat of suicide-bombers and unconventional attacks. The BBC understands the military necessity of checkpoints and conveys this to the audience.
“…Screening… all the major access points to Baghdad will be controlled…there will be checkpoints. Civilians who are just conducting their normal business will be allowed to move in and out. Others, young men of military age, will definitely be the subject of scrutiny by the American forces who will be on those checkpoints…” [Online, 04/0403]
“…Route protection…in southern Iraq British forces have launched a crackdown on guerrilla attacks by Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes…the tighter checks on civilian vehicles follow guerrilla-style attacks by Iraqi fighters on coalition supply lines in areas supposedly already under the control of British and American control…BBC correspondent Jonathan Charles said…"The routes need to be protected otherwise frontline units could find themselves short of food, fuel and ammunition.” [Online, 03/04/04]
These checkpoints are presented as the result of Iraqi actions. Their “guerrilla-style attacks” are concretely defined as the cause, the impetus and the logical progenitor of checkpoints.
The extracts below are taken from two articles on BBC online. They are titled: “Analysis: Palestinians’ disrupted journeys” and “Eyewitness: West Bank Commuter Odyssey.” Whereas the BBC seeks to garner support for checkpoints in Iraq by vividly highlighting the fears and dangers faced by the military, the BBC seeks to garner antipathy for Israeli checkpoints by stressing the inconvenience caused to civilians.
This imbalance is hard to understand. There were only two suicide attacks in Iraq during the Iraq war. Israel has suffered hundreds of suicide attacks and attempted attacks in the past two years. Those attacks have killed and maimed some 6,000 Israelis. Checkpoints have been instrumental in preventing many of the unsuccessful suicide missions Logically you would expect the BBC to show more understanding for Israeli checkpoints than for Iraqi ones. The opposite is in fact the case.
“…Israel has imposed severe restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank…the vast majority of Palestinians just trying to go about their business see the restrictions as a humiliating collective punishment that fuels their frustration and anger…travel restrictions mean most Palestinian journeys have become increasingly complicated, time-consuming and costly, and often quite dangerous as well…the journey times are extended by sometimes lengthy waits to walk through checkpoints, as soldiers check everyone 's papers,…the checkpoints have posed a particular danger to people with medical conditions or women in labour who are being rushed to hospital…for most Palestinians, the blockade is just an intimidating and oppressive part of everyday life…the 45 minutes it once took to travel between Ramallah and Nablus has now increased to 3 or 4 hours…” [Online, “Analysis: Palestinians ' disrupted journeys”, 06/0402]
“…Before Israel 's latest military campaign, which has brought Palestinian travel to a standstill, BBC News Online 's correspondent Martin Asser sampled the life of a Palestinian commuter, from the West Bank 's administrative capital, Ramallah, to its biggest town, Nablus. Without Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks, the 45-kilometre journey takes 45 minutes. On 21 March 2002 it took more than three hours…”
“…Israeli troops patrol through the throng - a jeep with soldiers on foot front and rear. The rearguard points his weapon menacingly at the Palestinian drivers and passengers, who avert their eyes nervously…”
“…a stiff, muddy climb against a head wind takes us to the brow of the hill…”
“…Israeli soldiers are guarding a dozen-or-so Palestinian men on a piece of flat ground. Two of the men are kneeling with their arms behind their heads…”
“…several people fall on the slippery, mud-covered stones…”
“…our shoes are caked in sticky brown mud…”
“…our joint exertion makes the vehicle 's windows immediately steam up with perspiration and hot breath…”
[Online, “Eyewitness: West Bank commuter odyssey”, 6 April, 2002]
A tremendous amount of energy goes into humanising coalition checkpoints. Israeli checkpoints by contrast are demonised by unsympathetic appraisals which adopt a narrative perspective that appears to be partial in its relationship to Israel – that is, adopting the perspective of the “other side”. Almost no attempt is made to indicate the very real and important military purpose these checkpoints serve.
9. TARGETED STRIKES
Israel has often used targeted strikes pre-emptively to nullify Palestinian terrorists intent on planning or carrying out attacks on Israeli civilians. Israel is often criticised for her use of targeted strikes and is vilified for any collateral damage that arises.
The British and Americans used targeted strikes against supposed Iraqi leadership targets. These strikes are explained, justified and mitigated by the BBC although they cause damage only to civilians and property and consistently miss their targets[15]. The danger posed to civilians is rarely mentioned. The attacks are reported in strong, confident language that justifies the action and casts no suspicions or questions over the event. The attacks are reported as being against “targets” suggesting a legitimate attack against a legitimate subject. Newsnight (8/4/03) cites the fact that nine Iraqi civilians were killed in a targeted strike. This fact is rarely mentioned in the days that followed. One would think that such a fact should feature prominently in any following coverage.
(i) STRIKE ON BASAM IBRAHIM HASSAN AL-TIKRITI
Basam Ibrahim Hassan Al-Tikriti is Saddam’s half-brother. A targeted strike on April 10 2003 was believed to have killed him. No consideration was given as to whether any civilians were killed. The attack is described in favourable terms, without questions being raised about the legitimacy of using such strikes in built up, residential areas.
“…the coalition remains concerned that some elements of the regime are still functioning. That appears to be the reasoning behind a particularly violent air-raid on the building occupied by Saddam Hussein’s favourite half-brother – Basam Ibrahim Hassan Al-Tikriti – which doubled as a headquarters for Iraqi intelligence…” [Online, 11/04/03]
Tikriti turned up a few days later, alive and well.
(ii) STRIKE ON SADDAM HUSSEIN
On April 8, 2003 coalition forces attacked a restaurant where Saddam Hussein was believed to be hiding. We recorded forty-two occasions in which a reference to the attempted strike on Saddam Hussein was made. He was not killed in the bombing. Nine civilians were. Only four times was reference made to the nine civilians killed in the bombing. The first reference to these civilian deaths was made on April 8, 2003 on The Today Program (8-9am). One would have expected a reference to these deaths to have been made in every following reference to the incident. It was not. Compounding this omission is the absence of any significant appraisal of the risks posed to civilians by such targeted strikes employed in residential areas. This is in stark contrast to the BBC’s coverage of Israeli targeted strikes.
Furthermore, we find that a tone of victory is woven out of a failure to hit targets – something we are unlikely to see in the BBC’s coverage of Israeli strikes. In pursuit of this drive for a positive spin on coalition targeted strikes, we find that the instances in which civilians are killed are knocked aside by a greater emphasis placed by the BBC upon the alleged benefits of such strikes.
“American forces have bombed a house in the city after being told that Saddam Hussein might have been there.” [Today, 08/04/03]
“CHRIS: Well yesterday’s strike on Saddam was the second time coalition forces have targeted the Iraqi leader himself.” [Ten special, 08/04/03]
“GEORGE: At six o’clock these are tonight’s top stories. Honing in on Saddam himself – attacks on regime strongholds.” [BBC1, 6pm, 08/04/03]
“Aircraft tanks and artillery have hit buildings linked to the regime[16]. Saddam Hussein himself was a target of one air raid.” [BBC1, 6pm, 08/04/03]
“Eye witnesses say two houses were flattened and nine Iraqis were killed…There’s no authoritative word on whether Saddam Hussein was injured, killed, or indeed in the building at the time. Even if he has lived on to fight another day the Americans will be hoping that the reporting of this strike contributes to the mounting pressure, both militarily and psychologically, that they are exerting on his leadership.”[17] [Today, 08/04/03]
“We do not yet know who was killed in that first strike on 19 March by US F-117 fighters on an Iraqi command bunker…But it set the scene for the whole campaign. Iraqi command and control was knocked off balance at the very start of the war and never recovered.” [Online, 14/04/03]
“This was testimony to the ability of US air power to precisely target command and communications at all levels. The nervous system binding the Iraqi military together simply fell apart”. [Online, 14/04/03]
“American bombers target Saddam Hussein. It’s not known if they were successful.” [18] [Ten special, 08/04/03]
“Intelligence said he was in this suburb, al-Mansour, yesterday. A B1 bomber was ordered to attack and bombs hit a building where Saddam was apparently at a meeting. The coalition isn’t sure.” [BBC1, 6pm, 08/04/03]
“Now in the last few minutes British security services have told the BBC that they believe Saddam escaped the attack by a matter of minutes. But they also claim he’s lost effective control over most of his forces. One thing’s for sure tonight – the focus is still on Saddam.[19]” [BBC1, 6pm, 08/04/03]
“British security sources have said tonight that they do not believe Saddam Hussein is dead. The Iraqi leader was targeted by four two thousand pound American bombs…None the less it has been another day on which the Americans have extended their control across the city.” [Newsnight, 08/04/03]
“…it is thought that for safety the Iraqi leader often hides out in residential areas…” [Online, 08/04/03]
“…even if Saddam Hussein has lived on to fight another day, the Americans will be hoping that this strike adds to the pressure they are exerting on his leadership, says the BBC 's Peter Hunt in Qatar…” [20] [Online, 08/04/03]
“…the Americans certainly targeted Saddam in the last 24 hours. They bombed the residential district of Mansour yesterday afternoon. That 's exactly the kind of place where you would expect to find Saddam. He doesn 't go to his bunkers. He knows the Allies know where they are. He hides out in ordinary neighbourhoods…” [Online, 08/04/03]
(iii) STRIKE ON CHEMICAL ALI
Ali Hassan Al-Mujeed was the Iraqi general labelled “Chemical Ali” by the BBC. He was reported to be the target of a particularly violent coalition air strike. It is doubtful whether this strike was successful. What is certain is that this air-strike resulted in the deaths of a substantial number of civilians. We counted twenty references to the alleged strike on Ali Hassan Al-Mujeed. Only twice was reference made to the civilian casualties incurred. The BBC twins its coverage of such strikes with a concerted effort to depict Ali’s terrible past as a war criminal and murderer. This has the effect of justifying the use of such air attacks even when they prove tragically unsuccessful.
“…The army says a body found in Basra is believed to be that of the Iraqi commander known as “Chemical Ali”. He ordered poison gas attacks on the Kurds in 1988…” [R5, 07/04/03]
“…A British army spokesman said it’s almost certain that the body of the Iraqi commander Chemical Ali has been found in a building in Basra. He ordered a poison gas attack which killed thousands of Kurds in 1988…” [R5, 07/04/03]
“Up to my left is the house of the Hamoudi family where ten people died. On the other side another eight civilians were killed. In between them there’s just a tangle of bricks and steel and concrete. It’s a place where the coalition believe they killed Ali Hassan Majid, the man known as Chemical Ali, Saddam Hussein’s military commander in the south, and a man with a great deal of blood on his hands.”[21] [Today, 18/04/03]
“…the murderous Ali Hassan Al-Majid…” [Today, 18/04/03]
“…Chris Vernon, spokesman for the British army in Iraq says the attack on Ali Hassan Al-Majid was a turning point in the war…”[22] [Today, 18/04/03]
10. DEHUMANISATION OF IRAQIS
There are certain moments when the BBC incorporates the language of the coalition military into their narratives. This is frequently military jargon that dehumanises the Iraqi enemy, making it more palatable and less disagreeable for extreme measures to be taken against them. It glosses over the full nature of what the coalition were doing in Iraq. The BBC plays a role in harnessing the public’s support for the death and destruction taking place. They legitimise coalition actions and dehumanise the Iraqi army. They talk of “mopping up”, of “tidying up” of “business” being “tied up.” The human life behind these expressions is glossed over by abstractions. In the case of “mopping up” one thinks of dirt, mess and disease. We have not found the BBC using such quaint expressions to describe the activities of Israeli soldiers.
“…business has according to the British military commanders been tied up[23] now…” [Newsnight, 07/04/03]
“…There may still…be pockets of resistance. Complete celebration may be premature, there may be quite a lot of resistance to mop up…” [09/04/03]
“…These mopping up operations could take days or weeks longer…” [Newsnight, 10/04/03]
“…in parts of the city now there’s a little bit of mopping up going on. But nothing significant…[24]” [BBC1, 6pm, 14/04/03]
“…is it your sense that the war is effectively over and it is just a matter now of tidying up?..” [Today, 08/04/03]
All this mopping up, tidying up, and tying up of business is the BBC’s account of the final destruction by the world’s mightiest army of the struggling remains of a defeated and invaded regime. It is the description of the death agony of human beings. Unless the Iraqis who are being tidied/killed agree with the BBC’s conclusion that their death is “nothing significant” then it is hard to see how this coverage can even begin to be seen as impartial or accurate. The fact that we have not found such language to describe the acts of the Israeli army merely demonstrates that BBC coverage is partial.
11. DEMONISATION OF IRAQIS: “DIEHARD FANATICS”
Saddam’s Republican Guard unit is consistently described by the BBC as “fanatic” or “fanatically loyal” or “diehard fanatics”. To the unaligned observer these are rather demeaning, two-dimensional terms which have the effect of alienating the audience from the Republican Guard and viewing their subsequent behaviour as the mad, volatile actions of an irrational element diseased by their own fanaticism. As a result BBC viewers will be less inclined to lament their liquidation - they are after all fanatics. BBC terminology appears designed to create the aura of something alien and unwelcome, suggesting that the world is a better place without them.
A Palestinian group such as Hamas is actually more deserving than the Iraqi army of the label “fanatic.” The core goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the middle east.[25] Its method is terror. Its motivation is an extreme interpretation of Islam.[26]
Yet the BBC studiously avoids describing the acts of Hamas as “terrorist[27],” let alone “fundamentalist” or “fanatical.” This double standard is hard to understand.
“…the airport…might serve almost as a magnet for militia men and diehards…” [Newsnight, 04/04/03]
“…the Special Republican Guard…is a hard-core protecting the Iraqi leadership…” [Online, 040403 am]
“…the Iraqi leader 's feared loyalist Fedayeen…” [Online, 040403]
“…diehard elements of Saddam Hussein’s regime…” [R4, 6pm, 07/04/03]
“…there’s a real air of menace as aggressive and angry Saddam Fedayeen patrol streets and bridges…” [R4, 6pm, 07/04/03]
“…these small militia forces are the true believers, the most loyal of the loyal…” [Newsnight, 07/04/03]
“…In a chilling statement an Iraqi government minister said American troops…will face what he called martyrdom operations…” [BBC1, 6pm, 04.04.03]
“…they’re now battling the true believers, the most loyal of the loyal…” [Newsnight, 08/04/03]
“…the diehards, the true believers, the most loyal of the loyal…” [Ten special, 09/04/03]
“…his with him to the death supporters…” [Today, 09/04/03]
“…those who were fanatically loyal to him…” [Today, 10/04/03]
“…his…henchmen and diehard loyalists…” [Ten special, 10/04/03]
“…these bullies…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…his lackeys…” [Today, 11/04/03]
“…henchmen …” [BBC1, 6pm, 14/04/03]
Unchecked, the BBC language demonises these fighters in an almost unthinking way. They take on the two dimensional character of the cartoon villain whose only role is to be vanquished by the forces of good. We found no attempt to understand why any of these people, leaderless and hopelessly outgunned, should be risking their lives to fight the coalition forces in what the BBC accepts were almost suicidal engagements.[28] Serious journalism would have sought to investigate why these Iraqis were prepared to engage in such evidently hopeless endeavours. Instead we find that the BBC adopts the far easier option of just tainting them with fanaticism. Whilst we do not pretend any sympathy for Saddam’s regime we find the BBC’s abandonment of any attempt to approach this narrative with impartiality quite extraordinary.
Another method used to demonise and dehumanise the Iraqis was the imposition of labels. This helps to legitimise any military action which follows - even if resulting in the deaths of civilians.
Ali Hassan Al-Mujeed was the Iraqi general referred to by the BBC as “Chemical Ali”. He was reported to be the target of a number of coalition air strikes. It is still unknown if any of these strikes were successful. What is certain is that these air-strikes resulted in the deaths of a substantial number of civilians.
“…The Iraqi commander known as Chemical Ali is said to have been killed…” [R5, 07/04/03]
“…the army says a body found in Basra is believed to be that of the Iraqi commander known as Chemical Ali…” [R5, 07/04/03]
“…Chemical Ali is reported to have been killed…” [R5, 07/04/03]
“…There are persistent reports that Saddam’s commander in the south, nicknamed Chemical Ali, was killed by an aerial attack on his villa there…[29]” [Newsnight, 07/04/03]
We do not here suggest that there is any direct comparison to be drawn between this and the coverage of Israel. We merely comment that the extensive use of this labelling, dehumanising and demonising of individuals in entirely inconsistent with a duty to provide an impartial account of events.
12. HUMANISING THE COALITION ARMY
The BBC treats the coalition military with sympathy and empathy. It is sensitive to the problems and struggles the soldiers face, always keen to highlight the fears and dangers by which they are confronted. The coalition military are presented in a reasonable, rational and sophisticated light, even when engaging in acts of extreme violence. They are presented as peacemakers; people trying to win hearts and minds; the caring military; the army with a human face. The BBC finds benign euphemisms to describe actions designed to kill and destroy human life, rendering those actions more palatable.
The BBC also broadcasts countless human interest stories designed to humanise the British army. We know them personally. We know their names and their families. We mourn for them when they die. During these moments the BBC’s idiom takes on a more elevated tone, even slipping into poeticisms, eulogising individuals.
By contrast the Israeli Defence Forces are usually presented as an alien force without an ion of humanity. They are faceless automatons, robotic killers only characterised by the tanks and bulldozers that they drive. They lack the human face, and apparently gentle touch, of the coalition army.
(i) A DELICATE ARMY
“…The one thing the Americans are not going to do is to storm into the capital in a full-frontal military assault, which would have catastrophic effects for the population of Baghdad. It will be a very delicate strategy of mixed elements….” [Online, 04/04/03]
“…the American’s have been able to destroy very significant amounts of military equipment possessed by the Republican Guards. Just up the road from where I’m talking to you there are two or three burning vehicles, and I think in the past thirty six hours I must have seen, oh, twenty to thirty burning tanks or armoured personnel carriers. And in terms of total destroyed equipment it could well be seventy or eighty pieces…”[30] [R5, 07/04/03]
“…As the American military spokesman said, Baghdad is being squeezed…” [R4, 6pm 08/04/03]
“…now what we’ve seen in the last few days is nibbling away at some of these suburbs and fighting patrols further in…” [Newsnight, 04/04/03]
“…Operations in Baghdad will be similar to those in the southern city of Basra, where the British continue to nibble away at the defences there” [Online, 04/04/03]
“…the other two worked for the Reuters agency and a Spanish channel. They lost their lives in the attack on the Palestine hotel, where most of the international media are staying”[31]. [R4, 6pm, 08/04/03]
“…business has according to the British military commanders been tied up now…” [Newsnight, 07/04/03]
“…these mopping up operations could take days or weeks longer…” [Newsnight, 10/04/03]
“…in parts of the city now there’s a little bit of mopping up going on. But nothing significant…” [BBC1, 6pm, 14/04/03].
“…is it your sense that the war is effectively over and it is just a matter now of tidying up?..” [Today, 08/04/03]
“…They are working with their army colleagues combining, what they have dubbed 'the giving hand of war '[32], with policing duties in towns which at times have been on the edge of anarchy…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…winning hearts and minds with food and water is something they are struggling with, although they admit in the long term it appears the only way to gain some trust…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…General Myers has denied targeting the power grid and coalition forces have repeatedly stressed they do not want to damage civilian infrastructure…” [BBC online, 040403 am]
“…The troops on the ground have been told by senior commanders that they must not hit civilians if they can possibly avoid it…” [BBC Online, 04/04/03]
“…US commanders are anxious to avoid having to fight in Baghdad 's streets, where civilian casualties could be high and where Iraqi soldiers would have the advantage of local knowledge…” [Online, 03/04/04]
“…The UK troops are keen to defeat the 1,000 or so Iraqi fighters believed to be holed up in Basra, so food and water can be given to ordinary Iraqis there.” [04/04/03]
The coalition use of tanks and military hardware is humanised. Military equipment is described in the appropriate dual context of human beings actually using them. We don’t just have the faceless imagery of tanks and helicopters inexplicably wreaking havoc. We have the imagery of human beings inside them applying thought and reason in their application. We are informed by the BBC of their motives, why they are employing such equipment. Empathy is aroused for their feelings.
The Coalition
“…They’re hunkered in their armoured vehicles. Their tank guns swivel and scan. They’re trying to pick out today’s Iraqi mortar positions, knowing that overnight those positions will have changed. It’s the most dangerous time of day for these British soldiers who in turn are the closest to Iraq’s second city….” [Today, 03/04/04]
The very human army of the coalition contrasts with the picture of the Israelis as robotic ruthless killing machines.
Israel
“…Israeli planes strike Gaza…at least five Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli air raid on Gaza City…this is the first Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war in Iraq…witnesses say Israeli aircraft fired missiles in an apparent attack on a car…there were scenes of pandemonium as ambulances rushed casualties to hospital…the remaining dead and wounded were civilians, said doctors, including children hit by shrapnel from the second missile, which exploded after people had run into the street to see what had happened…residents said two Israeli F-16 planes flew low over the city just before the air strike. A few minutes later, helicopter gunships went into action…the Israeli warplanes appeared to be targeting a car…” [Online, 09/04/03]
“…the army launched a raid with tanks, bulldozers and helicopters on the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza… About 30 Israeli tanks accompanied by armoured bulldozers and helicopter gunships exchanged fire with Palestinian gunmen after moving into the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza overnight… Troops backed by armour and helicopters swept into Tulkarm on Wednesday morning and imposed a curfew, ordering males aged between 14 and 30 to assemble in a school courtyard or face punishment…” [Online, 04/04/03]
The Israeli military is completely faceless, as opposed to the intensely humanised tanks, weapons and soldiers of the British and American military. No mention is made of the reasoning or motivations behind these Israeli actions. There is certainly no mention of any human Israelis – only mechanised Israeli equipment. Also note how the BBC adopts the perspective of the military when reporting on the coalition in Iraq. This is in stark contrast to a narrative perspective that is always ensconced firmly outside the military when reporting on Israeli actions. Compounding this depiction of an inhumane, unfeeling entity, note how aggressive, bullying language is used for Israel. Both armies have much in common, they are both tackling security threats. However it would seem that, in the eyes of the BBC, the Israelis are less reasonable and less humane for doing so.
(ii) AN ARMY WITH A HUMAN FACE
“…I have eaten with them, shared their chores and their fears when in the dead of night (and up to five times on some nights) the Orwellian tannoy call of 'Red Red Red ' saw us leap from our beds, don our gas masks and stumble through the sand into air raid shelters…” [Online 07/04/03]
“…many of the crews, that we 've grown to know and who trust us, have displayed a genuine sense of humanity - intelligent regular guys, pondering privately, as much as anyone else, on what the outcome of war will bring and no doubt what their individual contribution has been…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…The US marines I have spent weeks with now are an extra-ordinary bunch of young men and I emphasise young. Some are still in their teens. They have never been through conflict before. After yesterday their commanding officer described them as heroes. It is an awesome ordeal for young men…” [BBC Online 1/04/03]
“…this has been a very long and tough journey for the marines, no question about that. They’ve endured all sorts of deprivations, not least sleep. They’ve gone without proper meals on many occasions, and of course they’ve had to endure sandstorms and come under enemy fire. Now, some of the men that I was with haven’t come through that ordeal …” [BBC1, 6pm, 11/04/03]
“…It is incredibly hot, it is incredibly tough, and most of the troops will be happy to finish their job and get out…” [Online, 15/04/03]
“…My two newspaper colleagues and I have had privileged access to briefings here from an impressive and very open detachment commander…” [Online, 07/04/03]
“…four weeks ago Scott Williams wondered what the war would bring. The youngest Harrier pilot, no battle experience, he told the six o clock news he was nervous…” [BBC1, 6pm, 03/04/04]
“…Have you changed as a pilot, and maybe as a person after what you’ve been through?…” [BBC1, 6pm, 03/04/04]
“…a lot has changed in a few short days, and there are many like Scott getting used to the risk and to the pressure of war…” [BBC1, 6pm, 03/04/04]
“…well those wives are among thousands who can do little now but sit at home and wait for news of their loved ones. But Denise Mahoney has been to meet three women with family members serving in the Gulf. They’ve come up with their own ways of coping with the anxiety…” [BBC1, 6pm, 03/04/04]
“…though they’re trying to cope in different ways, each family shares the same hope that their loved ones return home safely and soon…” [BBC1, 6pm, 03/04/04]
“…As we go on air tonight, the first of the navy’s submarine’s to return from the gulf is arriving home in Plymouth. Some of them haven’t seen their families for ten months. We’re live with the families on the dockside. [BBC1, 6pm, 16/04/03]
“…there’s going to be some emotional scenes there today I can imagine, some of them haven’t seen their families for months!…” [BBC1, 6pm, 16/04/03]
“…that’s right Sophie, a few of the crew haven’t actually been back for about ten and a half months. This is the longest ever deployment for one of the navy’s nuclear subs. I’ve seen a lot of returns but few have had the sense of anticipation that this one has. A lot of people here. A lot of children here. Their fathers haven’t seen them in the early stages of their growing up. A lot of excitement, a lot of reunions in a few minutes time…” [BBC1, 6pm, 16/04/03]
“…Out of the skies to the east, three specks are appearing at speed. Three tornado aircraft on a victory fly past before banking sharply to starboard and coming into land. And in the control tower behind them, the wives and children of the six crewmen waving. Together these tornadoes from 111 squadron have defended coalition bombers over Iraq, they’ve been shot at, and between them have notched up more than five hundred hostile flying hours since they first went to the gulf back in March. Now they’re home. British soil bathed in spring sunshine has probably never looked so inviting…” [BBC1, 6pm, 16/04/03]
“…Happy family groups standing around chatting on the tarmac…” [BBC1, 6pm, 16/04/03]
“…Tell us what it was like coming down that runway when you first spotted your family?…” [BBC1, 6pm, 16/04/03]
“…Good to see your daughter isn’t it?…” [BBC1, 6pm, 16/04/03]
“…Have you done one of these homecomings before?…” [BBC1, 6pm, 16/04/03]
“…It’s a lump in the throat. Always emotional isn’t it?…” [BBC1, 6pm, 16/04/03]
It is inconceivable that the BBC would write in these gushing tones about Israeli troops. It would also be undesirable. We do not wish to diminish the trauma which these young British Servicemen and women experienced. We understand that the BBC, being a ‘British’ broadcasting corporation, will tend to empathise with ‘British’ troops. That is quite appropriate and as it should be. The troops doubtless deserve this treatment.
However, these British troops have returned from a very one-sided and politically controversial war, where the majority of coalition casualties were caused by “friendly fire,” not by the enemy. These facts would produce a more critical coverage from the broadcasters of many other countries. The coverage which the BBC understandably gives these returning troops demonstrates how impossible it is for the BBC to remain impartial under these circumstances, notwithstanding its legal obligation to be so.
Whilst coverage of a British war emphasises this inherent contradiction in the clearest terms, we consider that the aim of impartiality is in fact equally unattainable in other conflicts around the world. The Middle East conflict, which tends to polarise views, is no exception. We remain convinced that the BBC consistently fails in its duty to report in a fair, accurate and impartial manner.
13. THE BBC AND TERRORISM
The BBC frequently demonstrates partiality in its choice of language. Nowhere is this more stark than in the way in which it deploys the word ‘terrorism.’
Prior to writing the First Report we approached Richard Sambrook, head of news at the BBC, on this specific subject. Mr Sambrook also addressed it in his reply to the Second Report. His two replies, which we are intended to take as the official BBC view, are set out at Schedule II. Quotations here are from those two replies.
It emerges that “the BBC seeks neutral precision in its language” and indeed that “The BBC values precision.” This is laudable. Terrorism has been defined both in dictionaries, by various international bodies and most importantly has recently been defined by Statute.
“The use or threat of …serious violence against a person…where the use or threat is designed to influence the Government or to intimidate the public… and is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause” [Terrorism Act 2000 S.1 (1) and (2)]
In light of this clear definition, which is instituted by the same parliament which gave and continues to give the BBC its corporate identity, one might think that an institution valuing precision must use the word in appropriate instances.
For example Hamas’ motives are political, religious and ideological. This is clear from its website. It threatens and inflicts serious violence against Israelis in order to influence the Israeli government and to intimidate the Israeli public[33]. Any doubt over whether Hamas is a terrorist organisation should be dispelled, as far as the BBC is concerned, by the fact that the Foreign Office has classified Hamas as a terrorist organisation[34]. If the British Government department with responsibility for deciding on such issues, interpreting its own laws, can reach a conclusion on the subject, the BBC would need a good argument to differ.
Notwithstanding this, the BBC refused for example to refer to the bombing on 11 June 2003 of a Jerusalem bus killing 16 and injuring 100 as terrorist act, even though carried out by Hamas, a terrorist organisation, for terrorist motives.
Initially Sambrook tries to defend his position by stating that the BBC “…does not believe that there is any agreed international definition of what constitutes a terrorist group.” This argument is nonsense. There is almost no word which enjoys an ‘agreed international definition.’ Short of abandoning the use of language altogether, the BBC must select its terms of reference. Absent other compelling argument, the correct reference point for the BBC must be the legal and linguistic environment which gives it birth and sustains it. Thus the BBC need look no further than definitions of words in the English language and as defined by English legislation.
Presented with this argument Sambrook makes a stunningly arrogant statement:
“We have to decide on our own use of language according to our own principles. It would be wrong for us to allow the terminology we use to be determined by the legal definitions adopted by some states.”
This is an astonishing statement. The ‘some states’ to which he refers is the UK, whose citizens pay for the BBC and whose legislature grants it life and sets its rules. Sambrook however considers the BBC to be above the law and the dictionary.
Sambrook then goes on to state what are the BBC’s ‘own principles’ by which it does in fact operate. Firstly there is a reluctance to use the word terrorism at all. “We are sparing in our use of the word (terrorist)” he explains. The BBC prefers to use “neutral language” which does not carry “emotional weight.”
This is perhaps a worthy idea. However as a statement of BBC practice it is simply untrue. In the course of the present study we recorded a report of the capture of some members of the Provisional IRA. The words ‘terror’ or ‘terrorist’ were used to describe them or their organisation 19 times in a single day.
When the Bali bombing occurred the BBC referred to it as a terrorist act before it had been established who did it or why.[35] Without knowledge of who committed the attack or their motives, it is quite wrong to define it as being a terrorist attack. At most it can be described as “a suspected terrorist attack.” The more recent bombing attack in Saudi Arabia was described as a terrorist attack,[36] as were the almost simultaneous attacks on various targets in Morocco[37]. The attacks on the World Trade Centre are habitually referred to as terrorist attacks and the BBC has no difficulty in describing UK foreign policy as a war against terror. An extreme case was the US marine who threw grenades at his fellow soldiers just as the Gulf War commenced, an act which the BBC was quick to adorn with the adjective “terrorist.” Even had it been an Iraqi attack (as was presumed) one cannot legitimately call an attack on an invading army by defending troops as “terrorist.” Yet that is precisely what the BBC did both for this event and for other such events throughout its coverage of the war.[38]
In fact, far from being sparing in their use of the word terrorist, the BBC is quick to use it in the event of almost any attack, sometimes even before the attackers or their motives can be identified. Yet Israel, where the attackers and their motives are often abundantly clear, is the exception. The act of singling out a particular group for special disfavour is known as discrimination[39]. But why is Israel discriminated against in this way. Sambrook provides an answer:
“We prefer to use neutral language where the political legitimacy of particular actions is hotly contested”
What Sambrook appears to suggest is that the blowing up of teenagers in a disco, of old age pensioners at a religious service, of school children on a school bus, or kids at a pizza bar – these are actions which could have “political legitimacy.” In other countries they are described as terrorist acts. In Israel, when perpetrated against Israelis, according to the BBC they could be politically legitimate, and are not described as terrorist acts. Why? Sambrook explains:
“We do not believe there is [a] definition of …terrorist group that gets round the pejorative charge the word carries which is what makes it so difficult a word for the BBC”
It is true the word terrorist does carry a pejorative charge. That is why it is important to use it when it is the precise and accurate word to describe a particular event. To refrain from so doing is to abandon both precision and accuracy. By protecting a group from this pejorative charge because of its “political legitimacy” the BBC also abandons any claim to treating news in an impartial way. In contradistinction to its own government, most international bodies, and common sense, the BBC wishes to protect organisations which blow up innocent civilians, provided that the civilians are Israelis.
We consider that the way in which the BBC refrains from labelling as ‘terrorist’ certain groups attacking Israelis is discriminatory, inaccurate and partial. Its explanation of its policy is incoherent. Its execution of that policy is an indefensible public disgrace.
Trevor Asserson
Lee Kern
©June 2003
SCHEDULE I
MEDIA OUTPUT RECORDED FOR THIS REPORT
TV/RADIO STATION PROGRAMME TIME
BBC RADIO FOUR The Today Programme 0800–0900 BBC ONE Iraq War: Ten O’Clock Special 1000- BBC RADIO FIVE The Midday News 1200-1300 BBC RADIO FOUR The Six O’Clock News 1800–1830 BBC ONE The Six O’Clock News 1800–1830 BBC TWO Newsnight 2230-2320
BBC ONLINE
BBC Online Reports were monitored at 1000 and 2100
SCHEDULE II
Extract from letter from Richard Sambrook, Director, News, BBC Room 5601 Television Centre Wood Lane London W 12 7RJ Telephone 020 8576 7178 Fax 020 8576
TO:
Trevor Asserson, Esq
LONDON.
27 August, 2002
Dear Mr. Asserson,
Thank you for your email of 20 August.
In it you refer to 'the BBC 's refusal ever to use the word "terrorist" in reference to Palestinians '. In fact, there is no such blanket ban on using the word "terrorist" in reference to Palestinians. Our stories this week for example about Abu Nidal frequently described him as a terrorist, and there are other occasions when we have used this word to describe actions by Palestinian groups.
However, what is true is that we are sparing in our use of the term. In our reporting we prefer to use neutral language where the political legitimacy of particular actions is hotly and widely contested, especially by large sections of populations across international borders. This applies in other parts of the world such as Kashmir just as it does in relation to the Middle East. It also applies to other contested terms. Thus, although conveniently for your own perspective you do not point this out, and despite the fact that it prompts complaints from pro-Palestinian sources, we equally prefer the more neutral term 'killing ' rather than 'assassination ' in relation to certain actions by the IDF.
But what we always do, whatever the incident, is describe as best we can what happened and the consequences for those affected. We always seek to make the factual character of an incident clear to our audiences.
Incidentally, just as you complain when we do not describe groups such as Hamas as terrorists, pro-Palestinian sources complain that to describe them (as we do) as 'militants ' is derogatory and evidence of anti-Palestinian bias.
In this complex and controversial area we have to decide on our use of language according to our own principles. It would be wrong for us to allow the terminology we use to be determined by the legal definitions adopted by some states or by how Yasser Arafat chooses to describe his political opponents. Our policy is entirely in line with our editorial guidelines (paragraph 18.2 of the Producers ' Guidelines).
……
Yours sincerely,
Signature
(Richard Sambrook)
EXTRACT FROM THE RESPONSE OF THE BBC TO BBCWATCH REPORT DECEMBER 2002
Use of language: terrorism. (Report pp13-15)
The charge here is that the BBC uses double standards: failing to use the word "terrorist" to describe those who attack Israeli civilians, while sometimes using the word to describe people who kill civilians from other countries. The Report claims that the BBC “puts itself above the law and the dictionary. "
As far as the claim that the BBC is putting itself above the law and-the dictionary goes, we are unaware of any law compelling journalists to describe particular sorts of people as terrorists; and we do not believe there is any agreed international definition of what constitutes a terrorist group - and certainly none that gets round the pejorative charge the word carries - which is what makes it so difficult a word for the BBC, which seeks neutral precision in its language.
As far as BBC editorial policy goes, the key text here comes from the BBC Producers ' Guidelines (18.2):
Reporting terrorist violence is an area that particularly tests our international services. Our credibility is severely undermined if international audiences detect a bias for or against any of those involved. Neutral language is the key: even the word "terrorist" can appear judgmental in parts of the world where there is no clear consensus about the legitimacy of militant political groups.
Policy in this area is in a constant state of development. Increasing amounts of our journalism - although primarily produced for a domestic audience - can now be readily accessed by international audiences through the Internet, or via BBC World. As a result of the BBC becoming a global broadcaster, a policy developed for our international journalism, is now increasingly applicable to our domestic journalism. This suggests that we should become less rather than more ready to label particular people as "terrorists."
And this, by and large, is what is happening. Partly this is a laudable desire to avoid cliche. BBC journalism values precision. The word "terrorist" has been bandied about so often, and sometimes without much thought, that there is a danger of it ceasing to mean very much, or any longer to be a usefully enlightening label. But partly it is also a recognition that the word carries emotional weight and thus runs the risk of partiality. We have to be alert to our many audiences who rely on us to stand back from what they would see as political engagement.
This, it has to be said, is sometimes easier to say than to do. We are not attempting to banish the word terrorist from the lexicon. We would never attempt to censor an interviewee who wished to describe a group who attacked civilians as "terrorists." But it seems right that, in our own lexicon, we should be less rather than more ready to.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Clearly there is lively debate about whether Israel’s tactics for dealing with the military threat are either wise or justifiable. No-one disagrees that the threat exists
[2] See The BBC and the Middle East An Analysis December 2002 – (“the Second Report”) – www.bbcwatch.com section 4 – Legal Duties of the BBC
[3] These can be found at www.bbcwatch.com and are referred to in this report as “The First Report” (March 2002) and “the Second Report” (December 2002)
[4] Note that an F-16 in Iraq is a “jet”. An F-16 in Israel is a “warplane”.
[5] NB These BBC reports fail to stress that Ali wasn’t an orphan until the coalition killed his family. A casual listener might think that Ali was born an orphan.
[6] Note the almost frantic efforts made by BBC journalists scrabbling about to find some form of excuse for the US tank which has just killed journalists who throughout the war have been reporting from this hotel whose position must surely have been well known to coalition forces.
[7] "British journalist James Miller (L) filming in Rafah several hours before he was shot and killed Friday. (AP)"
[8] Note how this comment so depersonalises the incident that one is almost invited to blame the bombs themselves for their errant behaviour, naughtily refusing to fall where they are meant to.
[9] The word “targets”, although extremely vague, mitigates the use of the weapon. It implies that the weapon is accurately deployed and on legitimate targets.
[10] Note how the MOD’s “clarification” is effectively accepted as true. Israeli statements are almost always attributed with less authority and with an air of suspicion. Israeli assertions are almost invariably “claims” and “allegations”.
[11] With almost breathtaking gall the BBC reporter appears to place the blame for this child’s injuries almost entirely on Iraqis for having the nerve to defend themselves from the coalition invasion. He does not even hint at coalition responsibility for firing the bomb which caused those injuries.
[12] This is an incorrect use of the term “terrorism”. See definition of “Terrorism” in Section 13 below.
[13] See Section b(ii) above.
[14] The Aqaba peace summit was held in 4th June 2003. On 6th June BBC online reports that,“The Palestinian militant group, Hamas, says it is breaking off talks with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen in protest at his promise to end violence against Israelis.” On 8th June five Israelis were killed in a Hamas gun attack. This was orchestrated jointly with Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Brigade. This illustrates a concrete chain of events that the BBC has omitted from its coverage of events following Aqaba.
[15] For example in a strike on a convoy on late June 2003, the US invaded Syrian territory in order to attack what they believed to be Sadam Hussein. In fact the convoy was carrying sheep.
[16] The link of this building, a restaurant frequented by civilians, was that Saddam Hussein is alleged to have visited it.
[17] Note how the death of nine civilians is virtually brushed aside and the BBC concentrates on the “psychological” pressure which he assumes the failed attack on Saddam Hussein has had. No evidence is supplied to support what appears to be mere speculation on behalf of the BBC journalist, trying to put a brave face on what should be castigated as an appalling error.
[18] Note that the death of the nine Iraqis, having been reported, is forgotten in most subsequent reports.
[19] The death of the nine Iraqis remains ignored. However an attempt is made to justify the attack by suggesting that it has somehow linked with the fact that he has “lost effective control over most of his forces.”
[20] The BBC suggests that an attack which missed Saddam Hussein is nevertheless somehow successful. This “success” appears to excuse and mitigate eleven civilian deaths.
[21] Note that when the deaths of innocent civilians are finally mentioned we are immediately also reminded of Chemical Ali’s criminal past, thus mitigating the legitimacy of the failed air strike.
[22] Why the killing of a number of civilians was “a turning point in the war” is not convincingly explained, but the comment again helps to mitigate the civilian deaths.
[23] The ‘business’ which has been ‘tied up’ is the killing of Iraqi soldiers.
[24] The destruction of a few lives and some property is “nothing significant.”
[25] Speaking on al-Jazeera television in June 2003, Dr Aziz Rantisi, Hamas leader, vowed, “not to leave one Jew in Palestine…We will fight them with all the strength we have…We will continue with our holy war…”. According to Hamas, Israel is “Palestine.”
[26] “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavours.” “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” - Hamas Covenant.
[27] See the section on “Terrorism” at the end of this report for a fuller discussion of this.
[28] “…I don’t think there is a plan for the defence of Baghdad. What I do think is that there are loyalists…who wish to fight, who have been prepared to take on the Americans and …have died. I mean, I saw yesterday and this morning, er, quite a few Iraqis who I mean, suicidally took on an American armoured column – and they were killed in the process….” [R5, 07/04/03]
[29] All of these reports proved to be false. An interview with Ali Hassan Al-Mujeed’s next door neighbour, who lost many family members in the attack on the General, later confirmed that he was not in the house when the attack took place.
[30] Note how the BBC gloss over the unsavoury reality of the coalition’s actions. We are given a wonderful description of the equipment burning – interestingly we are given no description of the people inside.
[31] Note how these two journalists simply “lost” their lives. They were not “killed”; their lives were “lost” or mislaid.
[32] The British military bombardment of Basra, with attack helicopters, laser-guided missiles and a ground-force of thousands, is described variously as “nibbling,” “squeezing,,” “mopping” and “tidying up.” The deaths caused by all this house keeping are “nothing significant.”
[33] “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavours.” “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” - Hamas Covenant.
[34] HM Treasury, in a press release from 2nd November 2001, named various organisations who are believed to have committed or pose a significant risk of committing or providing material support for acts of terrorism. See www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/Newsroom_and_Speeches/Press/2001/press_121_01.cfm. See also: http://www.hmso.gov.uk/egi-bin/htm hl3? URL = http://www.hmso.gov.uk/si/2001/20011261.htm
[35] Radio 4, 10 o clock news, Saturday 12 October 2002 – “There has been international condemnation of the terrorist attack on a night club in Bali”
[36] Wednesday 13 May 2003 Today programme – twice referred to the use of ‘terrorism.’ It also referred to “terrorist attack” several times later during the day.
[37] BBC online subsequently sought to mitigate this attack by referring to the Moroccan synagogue bombed as “a Western target” The synagogue is in fact the place of prayer of a religious group which has lived in Morocco for centuries. Suggesting that it is a “Western target” indicates that the BBC sees little or no distinction between Jews - wherever they may be- and Israelis.
[38] “…there have been reminders too of the dangers posed by Iraqis resorting to terrorism. Last night a car packed with explosives was driven into an American checkpoint and blown up, killing three soldiers…”(Radio 4, 6pm, 04.04.03)
[39] We have used a Collins dictionary definition but might also apply the various definitions within UK legislation e.g. where “…on racial grounds he treats the other less favourably than he treats or would treat other persons” (Race Relations Act 1975 S.1(i)(a)). We do not suggest that the BBC is motivated by issues of race. We do not pretend to know why it discriminates against Israelis.
News Analysis: Iraq War, a Tougher Task Than Gulf War for US
Oil-rich Iraq has been dragged into two wars within 12 years, but this time, the offensive by the US-led coalition forces is focusing on toppling President Saddam Hussein, a different yet much tougher job than the 1991 Gulf war for the United States.
In August 1990, the Iraqi military invaded neighboring Kuwait and briefly occupied the country, triggering fears of the threat to national security among Gulf countries. The Iraqi invasion into Kuwait came as a surprise to the United States and its Western allies too, who immediately felt the threat to their all-important oil supply from the Gulf region.
To end Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and ensure their national interests in this strategically important region, the United States spearheaded efforts to liberate Kuwait by forming a coalition force to root up Iraqi troops in Kuwait.
But the case for war was not so strong this time when US President George W. Bush decided to launch a military offensive against Iraq, citing Iraq 's intention to develop weapons of mass destruction and its support for terrorism.
However, only a fraction of the international community accepted Bush 's war rhetoric, and most of them voiced opposition to a war with Iraq. Most members of the UN Security Council insisted on continuing weapons inspections to achieve Iraq 's disarmament.
Following Iraq 's invasion into Kuwait, the UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions condemning the Iraqi aggressive move and accusing Iraq of violating the UN Charter and international laws. The coalition forces headed for the Gulf in 1991 with a UN mandate to drive out Iraqi troops and restore national sovereignty in Kuwait.
A UN resolution that would authorize the use of force was also desperately sought by the United States, Britain and Spain in a swirl of diplomacy earlier this month, but the saber-rattling trio had to give up efforts to secure the UN mandate after failing to recruit support from most members of the UN Security Council, notably Russia and France who vowed to veto it if presented for a vote.
And starting a war in Iraq without a UN mandate does not only mean a high price, literally, for the US but also few partners in action.
In 1991 , a total of 36 countries from Asia, Africa, Europe and America joined the coalition forces in liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Partners with the US in the Gulf war included Arab countries like Egypt, Syria and six countries in the Gulf region, and a few more countries aided the US-led operation in other ways.
For the current military operation, only Britain and Australia have contributed a sizable force to battlefront in Iraq. NATO allies like Germany, France and Belgium refused to offer military support for the US operation.
Tactical difficulties also stood in the way of US operations. Iraqi troops are scattered around the country, making them less vulnerable to intensive US air strikes.
Massive air strikes are also likely to cause considerable civilian casualties, which will invite stronger opposition to a war whose case is already weakened by the absence of a UN mandate.
Moreover, US and British troops are expected to meet much fiercer resistance from Iraqis than in the 1991 Gulf war, as the Bush administration is bent on ousting their leader.
(Xinhua News Agency March 23, 2003)
THE UNITED STATES’S TWO GULF WARS- A Comparative Analysis By Dr. Subhash Kapila
(Author’s Note: This paper may be read in conjunction with the author’s earlier two papers on the subject : (1) “United States War Plans Against Iraq”, SAAG Paper No. 496 dated 19-07-02 and (2) “United States Debates War Against Iraq”, SAAG Paper No. 524 dated 01-10-02).
War Against Iraq A Certainty: The United States war against Iraq is a certainty. Post 9/11 the United States is determined not to be permissive of any potential WMD threats which may threaten the United States or its national security interests.
Iraq, Iran and North Korea defined as “axis of evil” by President Bush have WMD potential and hence perceived as threats to the United States. Pakistan President, General Musharraf has publicly expressed his apprehensions that Pakistan too could be an American target in the future.
That Iraq has figured first in the line of fire in this context arises from its record of fighting Gulf War I in 1991 on its refusal to vacate its military occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Gulf War II is therefore an extension of Gulf War I in that what could not be resolved conclusively then is now going to be sought by the United States with renewed vigour.
Gulf War II would now once again witness the United States pitted against Iraq after nearly a decade plus. This paper attempts to carry out a comparative analysis of the major factors that come into play in Gulf War II with those that operated in Gulf War I.
The International Security Environment and United States Military Interventions: Gulf War I was fought against the backdrop of a changing international security environment. The Cold War had just ended and the countervailing power of the former Soviet Union had vanished.
Iraq’s military occupation had brought it into global focus as a critical flash-point in the absence of any other flash-points. Afghanistan’s brutalisation by Pakistan’s protégé-the Taliban, was yet to take hold. Iraq’s military occupation of Kuwait posed a direct challenge to United States vital strategic interests in the Gulf region. United States as the emerging unipolar superpower could not allow Iraq to prevail.
Gulf War II will be fought in an international security environment in which the United States enjoys unrivalled superiority with no countervailing challenges existent.
The interregnum between Gulf War I and Gulf War II has witnessed sharp military interventions by the United States in the Balkan region and more notably in Afghanistan. The United States has demonstrated its will to use military intervention in regions where its national security interests are at stake. Prior to Gulf War I, the United States had hesitated to do so in the aftermath of the Vietnam War debacle. That may have led to President Saddam 's miscalculations about American responses, then.
United States Core War Aims: In Gulf War I, the core war aim of the United States was to force Iraq’s vacation of its military occupation of Kuwait. Once that was achieved, the United States faltered in not carrying the war to its logical conclusion i.e. the dismantling of the Iraqi military machine and the ousting of President Saddam from power.
Retrospectively, it could be said that this arose from a combination of factors: (1)The US domestic public was sold the idea of expelling Iraq from Kuwait and no further (2) A military unwillingness to enlarge the war into the Iraqi heartland up to Baghdad requiring larger forces and sizeable causalities. (3) Arab members of the Coalition Forces were not in favour of extension of war.
Gulf War II seems to be focused on two core aims: (1) Regime change and (2) Total elimination of Iraq’s WMD potential. It needs to be noted, that analytically both of these could have been achieved politically and the United States has been at it for the last twelve years. It has not worked.
Gulf War II will now witness the United States resolved and prepared to carry the fight into the Iraqi heartland having already neutralized the Northern and Southern peripheries of Iraq by constant bombings in the last twelve years.
United States Strategic Preponderance and Supremacy Unquestioned: During Gulf War I, until the war ended in a cease-fire, there were still hopes that the former Soviet Union may bring in some countervailing pressures. It still possessed sizeable strategic assets despite on the verge of disintegration. It did not happen.
While embarking on Gulf War II, the United States today enjoys an unquestioned strategic preponderance and supremacy. Strategically, it also has gained enough experience in the use of her superior military technologies in its military interventions in Serbia and Afghanistan.
Iraq’s Military Effectiveness Doubtful: Iraq during Gulf War I possessed a formidable military machine armed with the latest Soviet inventories and also from China. At the beginning of the Gulf War I, military analysts rated its military effectiveness as credible. However, this sizeable military machine with the latest weaponry could not withstand the American technological assault and use of superior air power in the wide open featureless desert plains of Kuwait and Iraq.
As Iraq goes into Gulf War II, the Iraqi military machine is a weaker replica of its former self. No military hardware infusions seems to have taken place. However if Iraq has learnt the proper military lessons from its reverses in the Gulf War I and has brought in military innovations to its existing military machine and its operations, it could hamper United States military offensive but not deter it.
Arab and Muslim Countries Attitudes to United States War on Iraq: Gulf War I broke the myth of Arab unity and Islamic solidarity which was considered in the prior period as potent and monolithic. In fact in Gulf War I, Arab and Muslim countries provided military contingents to the US-led UN coalition forces. All Gulf countries and Egyptian and Syrian forces took part. Even Pakistan provided military forces stating that these were going to be used for the protection of the holy places of Islam, as if Saddam would ever threaten them.
Gulf War II does not seem to see Arab and Muslim forces fighting as part of the United States coalition. However, all of them will under pressure have no option but to host US and British forces at military and air bases located in their territories and specifically constructed and designed for Gulf military contingencies.
United States Strategies for Gulf War II- Coalition Partners Not an Imperative: In Gulf War I, it was imperative for the United States, both politically and strategically to have coalition partners to fight under the UN flag to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Also, since ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait involved sizeable ground forces operations, coalition ground forces to reinforce US ground forces strength was required.
In Gulf War II, the core military aims can be militarily achieved by not involving sizeable ground forces. These war aims can be achieved by a combination of offensive air operations, cruise missile attacks, electronic warfare operations and wider use of Special Forces operations.
Hence non-participation of France and Germany or ground forces from Arab countries is no longer an imperative for the United States. As mentioned in the conclusion of my SAAG Paper No. 524 of October 2002, “What now emerges in the military field is the attraction of resorting to an 'Inside-Out Strategy '. This implies that as opposed to an all out conventional war in which US troops could suffer heavy casualties, the first phase of US military operations should attempt liquidation of President Saddam by Iraqi opposition forces, a palace revolution, US Special Forces operations, or a combination of all these methods. Doing so, it is being hoped could lead to a crumbling of the Iraqi military machine. Follow-up US military operations could be less expensive in casualties."
Gulf War II would witness a widespread use of Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs) as part of US military strategy. US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfield in a speech at the US Air Force Academy on May 24, 2002, stated that the Unites States had used only 10% PGMs in Gulf War I whereas in Afghanistan it had used 60%. We can expect a much higher figure of PGMs usage in Gulf War II, both to limit collateral damage as well as the stupendous psychological effect on enemy forces, especially in the type of US strategy being debated.
The United Nation’s Role: Gulf War I was fought as a United Nations military operation under the UN flag. It was the second time in UN history that United Nations military operations were launched, the first one being Korea.
Gulf War II is going to be fought basically as a United States and Britain military operation with token support from European countries less France and Germany.
The United Nations role currently is limited to providing cover of UN resolutions for the use of military force against Iraq by the United States and Britain.
United States Domestic Public Support: For Gulf War I, President Bush Sr had an unprecedented support domestically. This arose from a sense of outrage in US domestic public opinion and perceptions of a small country like Kuwait having been militarily occupied by a regional bully.
Gulf War II presently seems to be enjoying far less support domestically. If President Bush Jr can come out with conclusive evidence of Iraqi links with the Al Qaeda, then the post 9/11 traumatic syndrome will operate and generate greater US public support.
Conclusion: The United States seems to be intent and determined to achieve militarily its core war aims against Iraq. America’s mobilization of its military assets in the Gulf Region is very nearly complete. The United States, unlike India, will not de-escalate, without achieving its core military objectives. It will carry them to their logical conclusion. Iraq could be spared military devastation, if somehow, President Saddam Hussein accepts exile with immunity as a feasible proposition. With the most significant core aim of regime change having been achieved, the United States could be expected to work on its second core military aim of destroying WMD potential with the co-operation of the follow-up Iraqi regime.
Even in the above scenario, the United States military build-up in the Gulf will have to be prolonged until such time Iraqi WMD potential is destroyed.
The United States post 9/11 seems determined to strike out from the roots the deadly combination of WMDs and Islamic fundamentalism/radicalism. Iraq seems to be the starting point with others to follow and that is what General Musharraf apprehends. If this be the logic of the United States for Gulf War II, then it can hardly be faulted for doing so.
UNITED STATES DEBATES WAR AGAINST IRAQ by Dr. Subhash Kapila
Author 's note: this paper needs to be read in continuation of and in the context of paper no. 496 dated 19 July 2002(UNITED STATES WAR PLANS AGAINST IRAQ: An Analysis) which analysed the strategic pros and cons of United States war plans against Iraq."
General Background: The United States today is consumed in an active and intense debate on the imperatives of launching a war against Iraq. In June 2002 there appeared a total bi-partisan support in favour of military action against Iraq based on the commonly held and officially projected perception that United States national security interests and those of the allies stood endangered as a result of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and suspected links with Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization i.e. the Al Qaeda.
The United States presents a changed picture today. The ongoing national debate on the necessity of military attack against Iraq seems to have divided USA not only on political lines but a division also has sprung up within the political parties and more notably in the ruling Republican Party of President Bush.
Significantly, a fair number of notable former Secretaries of State, Secretaries of Defence and National Security Advisors have come out vocally against any unilateral military action against Iraq without the backing of firm evidence.
That Iraq under President Saddam Hussein represents a danger to United States national security interests, is not under dispute. What is being contested are the modalities of addressing the Iraqi threat, the priorities and the timing. Major issues that are figuring in this debate are outlined below.
War Against Iraq Versus containment: Proponents of the containment strategy against Iraq argue that it would be strategically unsound for United States to go in for unilateral military action against Iraq, bereft of political and military support of European and Arab allies of the United States. It is argued by them that the existing containment strategy in forms of the political, economic and military embargoes have militarily enfeebled Iraq. Any fresh dangers from Iraq can be effectively dealt with by additional and more stringent embargoes.
Those in favour of military action, chiefly, the present US Administration argue that containment has not worked for the last ten years and as a result President Saddam Hussein continues in power.
Regime Change Versus Destruction of WMD Capabilities: The Bush Administration argues that the solution to this vexing question lies in a regime change in Iraq. President Saddam Hussein needs to be displaced /eliminated and that would facilitate destruction of Iraqi WMD capabilities. This it is hopefully expected would be made possible by the installation of a United States friendly Government from amongst the Iraqi political exiles patronized by US Intelligence agencies.
Both political and strategic analysts in USA argue that the Bush Doctrine of regime changes would set up a new and dangerous precedent in international affairs where regional lesser powers could be tempted in attempting regime changes in their neighborhoods where WMD or WMD potential exists. India figures prominently in their debate as the prime candidate for adopting the regime change doctrine against Pakistan.
Evidence Against Iraq on WMD and Al Qaeda connections: The two fore most charges leveled against President Saddam Hussein by the United States Administration are that Iraq has a WMD arsenal which President Saddam Hussein has the propensity to use regionally and in the context of the American war against terror, Al Qaeda terrorists are presently in Iraq. Both these aspects are under hot debate daily in the media by noted political and strategic experts. On the issue of Iraq’s WMD capabilities, it is being said that while Iraq has biological and chemical weapons, it only has the potential for making nuclear weapons. Scott Ritter who was the United Nations chief weapons inspector in Iraq till 1998 strongly maintains both in media and Congressional hearings that in 1998, Iraq’s capabilities for nuclear weapons production stood effectively neutralised and destroyed. From the time the UN weapon inspectors were made to leave Iraq in 1998 under United States pressure and not on Iraq insistence (Scott’s assertion) Iraq does not have the infrastructural and technological capability to re-constitute its nuclear weapons productions.
Regarding the presence of Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, the agreement being used in the ongoing debate is that while Al Qaeda terrorists may have slipped into Iraq, no evidence has been presented to prove that President Saddam Hussein and his regime have given safe havens to Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq or planning and plotting their moves against USA. United States Double Standards on WMDs and Terrorism: If possession of nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons potential by Islamic States and presence of Al Qaeda terrorists in a country were the criteria for military, intervention by the United States, then the US administration strategy gets flawed. By that token, then Pakistan should have invited United States, military actions . The noted and original American terrorism expert on Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda, Yossef Bodansky maintained on TV that Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda hierarchy have been constantly shuffling after October 2001 in Pakistan between the North West Frontier Province and Pakistan occupied Kashmir. When pressed to comment as to why the United States has not taken action against Pakistan for providing safe havens to Osama bin Laden, Bodansky stated that the reasons were political.
Many US analysts have spoken of the double standards of the Bush Administration on the lines above.
Respect for United Nations and International Law by the United States: The most vociferous supporters of this line of action and emphasizing strongly in the current debate are influential Senators and Congressmen of both the Republican Party and the Democrats. None of them doubt that the US President must initiate military actions against Iraq, if US national security stands endangered. They however do stress that such military actions against Iraq should be done through authorization and resolution of the United Nations. Some have questioned the legality under international law of proceeding unilaterally against Iraq when no firm evidence is forthcoming that Iraq is contemplating or preparing to attack the United States. They maintain that United States disregard of international law would set wrong precedents.
The United States foreign policy hawks however maintain that the United Nations has been an ineffectual body in maintaining international security. They also maintain that it is very difficult to provide evidence of President Saddam Hussein’s intentions and that the United States cannot afford to wait for President Saddam Hussein to strike and then American military action be initiated. They call strongly for US pre-emptive action to destroy Iraq’s WMD potential. Post Saddam Uncertainties in Iraq for the United States: Both the hawks and the doves in the United States debate on the war against Iraq have common concerns about uncertainties that would hover in the post Saddam phase i.e., after the Saddam regime replacement takes place as a result of US military intervention. Analytically, the following uncertainties prevail:
*Iraqi National Congress in-exile and patronized by the United States is a fractured umbrella organization. It does not inspire confidence about its effectiveness to provide a stable alternative government in Iraq.
* The sizeable minorities in Iraq, namely the Shias in the South and the Kurds in the North, may not elect to continue as a part of Iraq, in the post Saddam phase.
* While Saddam and his regime may stand displaced, the Baathist military forces in Iraq may not be amenable to control by a United States imposed Government in Iraq.
* United States War against Iraq could result in massive infra –structural damage arising from American bombings and a ‘scorched- earth’ policy by Iraq. Rebuilding Iraq in the post Saddam phase could bog down United States in Iraq, both militarily and financially.
Conclusion-War is a Certainty: Despite the national debate in which many political leaders and strategic analysts are advising any unilateral military action against Iraq, a United States War against Iraq is near certainty. President Bush in the end seems determined to seek a regime replacement in Iraq, as strongly advised by his Vice President and the Pentagon. Regime replacement in Iraq was a concurrent option sought by the Pentagon when US military operations were launched in Afghanistan in October 2001. It was shelved then under strong opposition by the US State Department. United States officials argue that once the United States initiates military action against Iraq, even unilaterally, its reluctant European and Arab allies can be expected to come aboard, to be on the winning side and also to partake in the economic opportunities that would follow in the post Saddam phase.
The strategic and military factors stand earlier analysed in a preceding paper by this author. What now emerges in the current debate in the military field is the attraction of resorting to an “Inside –out Strategy”. This implies that as opposed to an all out conventional war in which US troops could suffer heavy casualities, the first phase of US military operations should attempt liquidation of President Saddam by Iraqi opposition forces, a palace revolution, a US Special Forces operation or a combination of all these methods. Doing so, it is being hoped could lead to the crumbling of the Iraqi military machine. Follow-up US military operations could be less expensive in casualities. It is a possibility but cannot said to be a certainty. Analysts believe that the most appropriate timing for launching a war on Iraq by the United States would be in the winter months, like the Gulf War. It would also give time for more preparation and getting allies on board. The United States decision to go to war seems to be prompted not by the fear of Iraq but by the uncertainty it poses, especially when viewed in the context of events of September 11, 2001. This feeling is best exemplified by the words of William Langewiesch in an article in the Atlanta Monthly of September 2002: “The dread that Americans felt during the weeks following the September 11attacks stemmed less from the fear of death than from a collective loss of control –a sense of being dragged headlong into an apocalyptic future for which society seemed unprepared.” In American perceptions President Saddam Hussein represents an uncontrollable entity feared as capable of wreaking an apocalyptic threat against US national security interests. UNDERNEWS
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GULF WAR I ARCHIVES
Articles on the first Gulf war by Sam Smith unless otherwise noted from the Progressive Review
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Why sanctions aren 't the answer
Larry Everest
The argument that sanctions -- not war -- are the way to bring down bloody dictators has gained wide acceptance among peace activists. Yet far from being a weapon for peace, sanctions are a weapon for war, often less discriminating than bombing.
Before last year 's Gulf war, many in the anti-war movement endorsed sanctions as a "humane alternative" to military confrontation. Today an estimated one million Iraqi children are malnourished as a result of both sanctions and wartime destruction. Greenpeace estimates that 70,000 Iraqi civilians have died from starvation and disease since the fighting ended. That 's 10 times more non-combatants than lost their lives during the war itself, and more are dying daily.
Iraq isn 't the only country where US-sponsored sanctions are taking a human toll. Last October an embargo was imposed on Haiti following the anti-Aristide coup; now fuel is scarce, malnutrition is even more widespread than before, and thousands are desperately trying to flee. In the 1970s and 1980s sanctions against South Africa were widely supported by Western activists and the ANC. During the Gulf war many activists viewed sanctions as a reasonable middle ground between total war and non-intervention -- a way to get Iraq out of Kuwait without bloodshed. Today sanctions are the weapon of choice of President Bush 's New World Order to force compliance from upstart regimes. The UN may soon threaten both Libya and North Korea with sanctions, and the US is considering intensifying the economic boycott of Cuba.
The events of the past year highlight the problems with this approach. To begin with, sanctions aren 't humane. They are especially deadly for a semi-industrialized country like Iraq, which depends on imports for everything from food to medicines to essential machinery (a dependence deliberately heightened by the bombing of Iraq 's infrastructure).
Today many Third World countries are increasingly dependent upon imports for the basic necessities of life. Haiti imports 80 percent of its food. In 1960, for example, the Middle East was a net exporter of food; by 1981, it was buying nearly 40 percent of all Third World food imports. Today, Oman imports 90 percent of its food; Iraq and Libya import 70 percent of theirs, Egypt and Tunisia 50 percent. Sanctions can be a far less discriminating weapon than even bombs. Food and medicine may officially be exempted from an embargo (as is the case with Iraq), but without export earnings, sanctioned countries don 't have the money to buy them. The primary victims end up being civilians, while the impact on the ruling group is minimal.
Nor are sanctions ever an alternative to war. As Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell admitted in the case of Iraq, "sanctions and war were a seamless process." They served to soften up Iraq, buy time for the Allied military buildup and convince the world that the coalition had gone the last mile for peace (even after the decision to strike had secretly been made).
In the case of South Africa, peace activists saw sanctions as a means of waging non-violent warfare to bring down the apartheid regime. But the US government, when it finally came around to accepting sanctions, viewed them only as a way to push for certain reforms. And in the end, US sanctions (which cost the South African economy an estimated $30 to $40 billion during the 1980s) were never as airtight or comprehensive as those imposed on Iraq.
Many progressives, both Haitian and American, supported the embargo against Haiti. Yet according to Haitian activists, the embargo has been enforced selectively by the U.S. as a means to pressure not just the military junta but Aristide himself to moderate his demands. Haitians have expressed their readiness to sacrifice for liberation, but hardly to further U.S. goals.
The lesson is that it 's impossible to see sanctions as a non-violent means of warfare against abusive regimes. Even in cases where governments accede to peace activists ' demands to impose sanctions, they will use them only to further their own agendas. The legacy of the Gulf war is now clear: Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and bully, but U.S. intervention has proven to be a greater evil for the people. This is powerful testimony that peace activists should oppose any foreign intervention by the U.S. government, whether it 's direct military involvement or selective use of sanctions. A great place to start is demanding the immediate and complete lifting of sanctions on Iraq, and calling for an end to their use against other Third World countries. - Pacific News Service
Questions from a press briefing never held
When did George Bush and the Pentagon know the Iraqi military was so weak?
It was not just Saddam Hussein who claimed the war would be the Mother of Battles. The Pentagon, Bush and the American media all agreed. But the facts of the war, meagre as they are, suggest something quite different. Either US intelligence was awful, which is highly unlikely, or the administration deliberately misled Congress and the public as to the nature of the Iraqi threat, perpetrating a major propaganda hoax to justify military action and an easy victory.
From the start, the Iraqi response to the war was not that of a nation with an aggressive military plan and the force to back it up, but rather that of a weak country somewhat desperately attempting to jury rig a defense. Consider, for example:
• The near absence of any air engagement by the Iraqis. In fact, the major movement of the Iraqi air force was to the shelter of Iran.
• The lack of air defenses in Baghdad. Although the anti-aircraft batteries firing into the night looked impressive on television, they were largely of a primitive variety that didn 't even have the range to reach the allied planes. US intelligence undoubtedly knew this before the war began.
• The reliance on SCUDS, missiles so outdated that if they were automobiles they would almost qualify for antique license plates.
• The lack of any meaningful offensives by Iraqi troops with the exception of one minor foray into Khafji. Even military officials admit that the tank battle at the end of the war was only designed to protect retreating Iraqi soldiers.
Most significant, however, was the failure of Iraqi troops to respond to the US ground offensive. The propaganda from the Pentagon was that the Iraqis were surprised by the skill, speed and size of the American force. It is far more likely that the passive response was due to an uncertain combination of other factors including the death and demoralization caused by the American aerial massacre, a conscious effort by outgunned Iraqis to reduce casualties in what they knew would be a defeat and a physical presence on the battlefield that may have been less than the Pentagon claimed.
That the administration lied to the public and the Congress is not mere speculation or paranoia. The March 5 Washington Times quoted a Defense Department official as saying, "A lot of what was said from here was carefully orchestrated disinformation." The administration, it would seem, not only prevaricated, but is now bragging about it.
What did the U.S. really know about Iraq 's capabilities?
A great victory needs a enemy both willing and able to have prevented it. Otherwise the operation parallels not the annals of Patton, but such dismal excesses as the Italian bombardment of the hapless Ethiopians. There is now little doubt in which category the Iraqi war belongs.
In article written for Time magazine, Yevgeni Primakov, the Soviet negotiator, describes a remarkable exchange with Hussein on October 5. The Iraqi leader offered a long list of grievances against Kuwait, Israel and the west. Primakov then writes:
"Doesn 't it seem to you that just like the Israelis, you have a Masada complex?" I asked Saddam. He nodded his head.
"But then your actions will to a great extent be determined by the logic of a doomed man?" I asked.
It seemed to me that Saddam also agreed with this, but he said nothing in reply.
Had Saddam truly planned to challenge American power he would have, for starters, moved into Saudi Arabia when the coast was clear. As one Pentagon official put it: "Had Iraq occupied Saudi ports and airfields, the buildup as we know it would have been impossible." The burning of the oil fields before the ground offensive started was another indication of the Iraqi assessment of the future of its gambit.
It is reasonable to assume that the Iraqis knew all along that they could not defeat the Americans and were simply bluffing while they played whatever political cards remained. What is more important, however, is that Bush and his government also probably knew it, but pretended they didn 't.
The Iraqi army seems to have been like the children 's nursery rhyme:
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn 't there.
He wasn 't there again today,
I wish to heck he 'd go away.
The administration and the media created an image of a force of a half million trained and tough troops arrayed against this country and its limited partners. The Republican Guards were never mentioned without being called "elite." There were 500,000 land mines in Kuwait, trenches of fire to stop tanks, the threat of chemical warfare mentioned in every news update, huge underground fortifications and so forth.
On almost every point the reality was dramatically at odds with the picture the Pentagon had painted. The massive Iraqi army, for example, simply disappeared into the sands. Even subtracting estimated number of POWs, deaths and desertions, the numbers do not quite compute.
Was the American massacre even larger than the shocking projection of 85,000 of a Saudi official? Had enormous numbers of Iraqi soldiers slipped back into their homeland even before the ground war started? Or had they never been there in the first place in the numbers that the Pentagon claimed?
Certainly some pool reporters were hard pressed to find the Iraqis or their defenses. One reported on Feb. 26: "Iraq 's defenses seemed meager. Despite prewar descriptions of massive earthen berms, minefields and oil-filled trenches, Iraqi troops were found to be dug in largely around aging Soviet-made T-55 tanks surrounded by rudimentary trenchworks and bunkers that seemed designed primarily as defenses against bombing attacks... Other bunkers were dug deep into the desert pan and broadened into interconnecting rooms, but nowhere were they organized well enough to slow the Marine advance... At one point along the first Iraqi defense line, poorly laid anti-personnel mines could be seen sticking out of the sand in neat rows, making them easily disposable by US combat engineers. With no resistance to speak of at the first defense line and little at the second, the engineers swiftly cut lanes through all minefields in their path, allowing assault traffic to move smoothly from the moment the attack began."
Another pool reporter on the same guided tour wrote "The 24th [Infantry Division] began conducting reconnaissance missions across the border about a week ago to assess the strength of Iraqi troops deployed against them. What they found surprised them. There were few Iraqi tanks, troops or bunkers. And there were none of the mine fields, concertina wire or fire ditches that the Iraqis had put in place along Saudi border with Kuwait." The reporter quoted a helicopter pilot as saying, "Not only is there nothing there, there is absolutely nothing there."
NPR 's Scott Simon, on a lengthy helicopter tour, could find no bodies and only 19 Iraqi tanks. He suggested that the ordinary soldier with his M16 had essentially no role in this conflict. Air power had done the work for them.
Further, early in the war there was a report that a television network had received foreign satellite photos that showed a stunning absence of Iraqi troops where they were meant to be. The photos were so out of sync with the conventional wisdom that the network declined to use the photos.
Because of the extraordinary press censorship and official lying, there is much we don 't know about what was actually going on in the battlefield. We do know that arrayed against a minor military power -- the size of California with one-third less population and with no effective air force -- were 75% of America 's tactical aircraft, 42% of its modern battle tanks, over a third of its army and 46% of its marines and aircraft carriers, plus significant support from over a score of allies.
We launched this war to stop the "new Hitler." When it was all over one general described the conflict this way: "You had a high school team playing the Super Bowl against the New York Giants and they got their ass whipped."
There is a massive metaphorical inconsistency here that deserves examination. When one considers this "great military victory," it is well to keep in mind that it had everything except a comparable enemy, may never have been a real war, and that our government apparently knew it all along.
Why did George Bush refuse repeated offers for a negotiated settlement?
When Saddam Hussein offered to withdraw from Kuwait in February, George Bush called the proposal "a cruel hoax." William Beeman, an anthropologist and PNS columnist, notes that Bush 's claim that Hussein had put conditions on the withdrawal was simply not true. The post-war agenda that Hussein attached to his offer used terms drawing from the Arabic root rbt. Says Beeman: "This literally means tie but its more common use is relationship. In one form it can mean kinship tie. But in everyday parlance it is used to say things like `with regard to, ' `relevant to, ' and `pertaining to. ' In no sense does the word ever mean condition.
"In short, Saddam 's offer was genuinely different from earlier proposals. He was not establishing conditions for withdrawal from Kuwait, only listing issues which were `related ' to settling the Gulf issue."
Hussein 's February offer was only the last in a long string of peace feelers put out by Baghdad. As Beeman reported here last fall: "By late August, Iraq had sent three clear signals to the United States that they wanted to bargain. The first two signals were offers to withdraw from Kuwait, first if Israel would withdraw from the West Bank and second if the United States would withdraw entirely from the region. The third signal was given by Tariq Aziz... calling directly for negotiations. These were unmistakable opening gambits in the bargaining process."
But it goes back even further. On July 26, as Iraqi troops were moving towards Kuwait, Patrick Tyler wrote in the Washington Post:
"Iraqi President Saddam Hussein yesterday sent an urgent message to President Bush... expressing Iraq 's desire to end the crisis in the Persian Gulf peacefully and avoid a confrontation with the United States, according to administration officials...
"The Iraqi message was conveyed yesterday morning when Saddam Hussein summoned US Ambassador April Glaspie for a rare audience. During it, Saddam Hussein said he felt `betrayed ' that US warships in the Persian Gulf had been deployed for short-notice maneuvers intended, US officials said, to head off Iraq aggression toward its much smaller neighbor.
"Saddam Hussein told Glaspie that there was no need for a US military response and that he did not understand it..."
It was subsequently reported that Glaspie had dismissed the Kuwaiti dispute as a border matter in which the US had no interest. Glaspie herself was returned to the US and has been held incommunicado by the administration ever since.
From that time on, Bush assiduously rejected every diplomatic overture made by Iraq, although periodically claiming interest in a peaceful solution. According to the Primakov account, the Soviet Union made a number of efforts to settle the matter diplomatically, long before the last moments of peace.
Primakov and the Soviet government, as well as many Middle East specialists, understood that as bad as Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait had been, a peaceful resolution of the conflict required dealing with Hussein 's paranoia, his country 's need for a retreat with dignity, and respect for Iraq 's just grievances. Primakov notes, for example, that at his Oct. 5 meeting with Hussein, the Iraqi leader said that if he had to choose between falling on his knees and surrendering or fighting, he would choose the latter. These, from the start, were the only choices Bush gave him.
And Primakov quotes Hussein as saying:
"As a realist I understand the true state of affairs. Yet I cannot resolve the question of Kuwait if it is not tied up with the solution to other problems of the region... However, I want to make one thing clear. The time linkage and the process leading to a solution of the Palestinian problem are to be discussed at negotiations."
This represented an important modification of Hussein 's position in August when he declared that the two problems should be solved in tandem. Now he was apparently willing to settle for serial consideration. To a minimally competent negotiator this was a step forward.
About two weeks later, Primakov arrived in Washington to talk with an administration that had not even bothered to establish any direct contacts with the Baghdad government with which it was so obsessed. He didn 't receive encouragement. NSC head Brent Scowcroft, said Primakov, "was more interested in our perceptions of the situation in Iraq than in the proposals for getting out of the crisis." Bush seemed interested in another Soviet meeting with Hussein, but with the limited focus of informing the Iraqi "about the uncompromising position of the US."
Primakov moved on to London where he met with Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher commenced an hour-long monologue "in which she outlined in a most condensed way a position that was gaining greater momentum: not to limit things to a withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait but to inflict a devastating blow at Iraq, `to break the back ' of Saddam and destroy the entire military, and perhaps industrial, potential of that country."
There was this exchange, according to Primakov:
"So you see no other option but war?" I managed to get in with difficulty.
"No," Thatcher replied.
Thus by late October, Primakov suggests, the allies had apparently decided on war. Everything that followed, including the congressional debate, was simply for show. Primakov 's second meeting with Hussein (which produced further compromises) and subsequent Soviet efforts were, as far as the Bush administration was concerned, irrelevant.
Further light on this matter has been shed by an important article by Michael Emery in the March 5 Village Voice. During a four-month investigation of the war 's beginnings, including a two-hour interview with Jordan 's King Hussein, Emery developed a picture of the provenance of the war quite at odds with the public image. Just a few of his points:
The chief of Kuwait 's security forces met with CIA chief William Webster in November of 1989, subsequently writing in a memo: "We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country 's government to delineate our countries ' common border. [The CIA said] broad cooperation should be initiated between us... [and] coordinated at a high level." The CIA admits that the meeting took place but denounced the memo -- seized by the invading Iraqis -- as a hoax. When Emery read the letter to King Hussein he said "he felt it accurately describes US policy toward Iraq and Iran."
Besides the Glaspie conversation, the US had given several signals of support for Saddam Hussein and indifference about Kuwait, including a Saddam-stroking visit by a senatorial delegation in April, Secretary of State Baker 's congressional testimony that same month and statements by Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly. On July 31, for example, Kelly told a congressional subcommittee: "We have no defense treaty relationships with any of the [gulf] countries. We have historically avoided taking a position on border disputes..."
An important part of Saddam Hussein 's anger came from a feeling that other Arab states had reneged on promises to help pay the debt incurred in the war against Iran, which he saw as a war in the mutual interest of these states. Emery 's sources tell him that the Saudis and Kuwaitis had each promised $10 billion to Iraq.
On July 30, King Hussein, after a visit to Baghdad, flew to Kuwait to urge the ruling family to ease its attitude towards Iraq. Writes Emery: "According to both the king and another participant, despite Saddam 's army on their border the Kuwaitis were in no mood to listen. Why were the rulers of this tiny city-state so sure of themselves? Apparently, the Kuwaitis thought they knew something the Iraqis didn 't."
Then Sheikh Sabeh said, "We are not going to respond [to Iraq]...If they don 't like it let them occupy our territory...We are going to bring in the Americans."
On August 2, King Hussein had a telephone conversation with Saddam Hussein in which he urged the Iraqis to withdraw. Saddam said, "Well I will withdraw, it is a matter of days, perhaps weeks." The king said, "No, don 't talk about weeks, only a matter of days." Saddam then said the planned condemnation by Arab leaders in Cairo would not help.
King Hussein, who thought he had worked out a peace plan, believed that Egypt Mubarak sabotaged it by reneging on a pledge not to publicly condemn Saddam Hussein and that American and British pressure was behind this change of heart.
The question that must be answered is why Bush took such a perversely rigid position. Let us stipulate that Hussein was 95% in error. In that five percent were real grievances, the recognition of which might have saved tens of thousands of lives and enormous physical and environmental damage. But Bush would have none of it.
In this one instance we will not have to pay a proportionate cost of his intransigence. But consider this: what if Bush had been president at the time of the Cuban missile crisis and had applied the same principles? On second thought, forget it. If Bush had been president, we might not even be here to consider it.
The Cuban missile crisis was resolved because the Kennedy administration carefully took bits and pieces of Soviet positions as rambling and inconsistent as those of Hussein and used them to move the Russians towards a coherent and peaceful solution. The Kennedy team, of course, acted as though they were grown-ups with some moral core, not like teenaged hoods looking for a fight because it was all they knew how to do.
Certainly the current president 's terminal adolescence helps to explain his behavior. Bush lives in a infantile world of good guys and bad guys, sorted out simply by their obeisance or obstinacy towards him.
His distaste for complexity also helps to explain his actions. Thatcher 's early and persistent hawkishness contributed as well. Thatcher has been far more influential on the Reagan and Bush administrations than any member of Congress.
But something more may have been afoot: the possibility that the Pentagon and National Security Council had actually been out shopping for an enemy. There are indications, for example, that the Pentagon and the White House had considered a major military operation in the Andes, using the excuse of the war on drugs, but had rejected the plan as too risky. Castro 's Cuba may have been eyed as a target -- and may be one yet. Then Hussein hove in sight. Or was pushed there.
Was April Glaspie baiting Hussein, knowingly or unknowingly, for Bush 's Iraqi sting operation? Was it mere coincidence that prior to the Kuwait annexation, General Schwarzkopf and his command held a wargame based on the following scenario: What if Iraq invades Kuwait? Some of the strategy for the real-life adventure that followed was reportedly developed during that wargame.
If the game and the reality were connected it would not have been the first time. Prior to the Grenada invasion, the US military staged a wargame using a fictitious island that bore remarkable resemblances to the one that would be subsequently invaded.
We must at least consider the possibility that from an early stage, Hussein was being set up as the next Noriega in Bush 's game of musical Hitlers and that the Iraqi dictator was just paranoic and egomaniacal enough to fall into the trap.
Can we talk about linkage now?
Of all the costly inanities uttered by the president over the past few months, none was less supportable than his argument that the Kuwaiti and Palestinian annexations could not be linked.
The fact that he was so desperate not to have them linked was a good indication that they were. It is not an unreasonable supposition that one of the forces that created Saddam Hussein in the first place was Arab bitterness over the decades-long failure by Israel and the west to give Palestinians the self-determination they deserve.
As the New Yorker recently put it, Hussein did not invent the grievances in the region, "and they will not simply disappear when he is eventually gone. In the Middle East, `linkage ' is not some option to be debated. It is simple fact. The only real question is how many more wars will have to be fought and how many more lives will have to be lost before that fact is recognized."
That Hussein seized the issue out of self-interest and demagoguery is irrelevant. While demagogues may abuse a cause, their demagoguery does not prove it wrong. It merely adds one more insult for the cause to bear.
If Bush had not been so overflowing with hubris that he was unable to recognize the relationship between Palestine and Kuwait, he might have managed a truly great stroke: resolving two world-wrenching issues with one agreement. It was one more opportunity missed.
With the irony of history, however, the very success of the American effort may, in the end, force Israel 's government to relent in its unsupportably cruel policy towards the Palestinians. It now makes neither moral nor strategic sense. Missiles do not respect buffer zones.
Why has the Palestinian cause been so neglected for so long? The politics of the Israeli and the US government have obviously been critical. But those of the progressive ilk have also played a role. Many, out of deference to American Jewish allies, have looked the other way, soft-pedalled rhetoric, found excuses, and sought shelter in vague expressions of hope for a resolution over an indeterminate time span.
On the merits, however, the Palestinian cause has been just as worthy of our time and effort as, say, the abuse of blacks in South Africa. Certainly, as we have seen in recent months, its international consequences have been greater.
Now not only has our government engaged in an immoral war but the causes of America 's progressive movement have been severely damaged, in part due to our politeness over the Palestinian issue. We can no longer avoid it. We have become part of the linkage.
If there is one good thing that can come out of this miserable adventure, it is that American progressives will no longer be reticent in the face of this traditional taboo, that the progressive movement will find as much heart and courage to pursue Palestinian self-determination as it did the cause of black South Africa. We must tell Israel it is wrong as loudly as we tell our government it is wrong, not only because we believe both to be wrong but because of our faith in their capacity to be right.
How well did US weaponry really work?
Getting the answer to this is not an exercise in military exotica. It could determine how successful the Pentagon and the defense industry are in retaining control of America 's economy and politics.
For example, military propagandists have been touting the success of the Stealth fighters. If conventional fighters had incurred high casualties and the Stealth hadn 't there would be a case for the Stealth. But, in fact, neither incurred significant casualties and the Stealth was basically engaged in the same work as conventional fighters at far greater cost.
Eugene Carroll Jr. of the Center for Defense Information raises another question about our air power. Carroll points out that on Jan. 30, General Schwarzkopf reported that US aircraft had flown 790 sorties against 33 bridges in Iraq. He then showed films displaying the magnificent accuracy of the bombs. Carroll 's question is "If every bomb hit a bridge, why was it necessary to make 790 attacks?" This equates to 12 attacks against each bridge, even assuming that half the sorties were by support aircraft.
Then there is the sainted Patriot missile, whose public relations triumph illustrates why car manufacturers spend so much time figuring out what to call their new models. The reality of the Patriot, however, is far less appealing than its name.
In the first place, the Patriot, contrary to congressional and media opinion, has nothing to do with Star Wars. The argument that the Patriot proves the validity of SDI is like saying that a tricycle proves the validity of a solar-powered car.
Secondly, the Patriot has yet to be tested against either aircraft or a modern missile. We only knows that it works pretty well against an outmoded, slow missile with no counteractive devices.
The Patriot aims for its target with the aid of radar. It is designed to damage the missile rather than to vaporize it. The problem is relatively simple with a SCUD in which the warhead and the body of the missile stay together. But with a modern missile, the warhead or warheads detach from the rest of the missile and the Patriot has to decide what to seek. In the case of an aircraft target, one would not have the smooth trajectory of a missile, making targeting more difficult. Thus, the Iraq experience has given us little information about the Patriot vs. anything but the ancient SCUDs.
In addition, we were repeatedly told that the Patriot missiles blew up incoming SCUDS and that the stuff falling to the ground was "debris." Depending on where the missile was damaged, the debris might or might not have included the warhead itself. In the case of the attack on the US barracks, officials admitted that the warhead had landed. But in how many other cases of SCUD attacks was the "debris" actually the warhead?
Many weapons systems were in the Gulf and will be credited as having proved themselves even though this is far from the case. Two important examples are the Bradley vehicle and the M1 tank. Because they were not tested in a real war, we do not know whether the critics concerns about the armor protection of the Bradley is justifiable. Nor do we know whether the M1 could function under true battlefield conditions. Its one good workout was against a demoralized, retreating Iraqi force in which the enemy tanks were outnumbered more than two to one.
You may recall the long shots of America 's military might rolling across the desert. Those strange looking large vehicles, appearing like something out of a Mad Max movie, were the fueling trucks for the M1. They are very important because the M1 gets only about two gallons per mile [sic] even on the military equivalent of a freeway.
A typical M1 tank battalion consists of 58 tanks plus 16 ten-ton fueler trucks, 25 quarter-ton trucks and 31 2° ton trucks. The tanks, of course, are well armored. Their vehicular support staff, is not. In a real war, an enemy, especially one with air power, might simply destroy the fueler trucks to disable a tank battalion.
These are just a few examples of why an honest analysis of weapons performance in the desert is essential.
Of course, if it is the intention of the American empire to go to war (as has recently been the case) only against third world countries with third rate militaries, then many of these weapons are, in fact, more than adequate. One 's only remaining concern is how much taxpayers are paying for the psychic pleasure of massacring obstreperous non-white dependencies with tools originally designed to protect us from the Evil Empire.
What 's an atrocity?
The concept of an atrocity is one that is subject to as much political manipulation in time of war as is the word patriotism. Generally speaking, in a war both sides commit atrocities, but only the enemy 's are so described. Universally speaking, war itself is an atrocity.
Keeping in mind Dylan Thomas 's comment following an air raid that "after the first death there is no other," here a list, compiled from the British section of Amnesty International and other sources, that might prove helpful in consideration of the subject:
Iraq: Torture, rape and random murder of an unknown number of Kuwaiti citizens. Endangering large numbers of citizens for an expansionist adventure of puerile motive. Deliberate oil spills and setting fire to hundreds of oil fields. Prior examples of extreme brutality include use of chemical warfare on Kurds and Iranians, resulting in thousands of deaths.
United States & allies: Initial reports from Iraq indicate that the civilian death toll may be in the tens of thousands. Early estimates of Iraqi military deaths from the US massacre against its army range from a low of 25,000 to a high of 100,000. Apparently, many of these deaths were caused after Iraq agreed to leave Kuwait and was in the act of doing so. To put these figures in some perspective, American combat deaths in Vietnam over a nine year period were approximately 47,000. The Iraqi deaths occurred in less than a month and a half. Other recent American atrocities include the killing of hundreds or thousands of innocent Panamanian citizens during the invasion of that country [For a chilling account of the invasion, see the recent report, This is the Just Cause, published by the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights in Central America, A.P 189, Paseo del los Estudiantes, San Jose, Costa Rica.]
Soviet Union: Brutal repression of independence movements in various republics.
Saudi Arabia: Amnesty International reports that Saudi Arabian security forces have tortured and ill-treated hundreds of Yemeni nationals since the Gulf crisis began. Common Saudi tortures include beating the soles of the feet, sleep deprivation and hanging by the wrists accompanied by beating.
Israel: Placing Palestinian population of over one and a half million under house arrest during the course of the war, unable to shop, harvest, work, study or recreate. Numerous Palestinian civilians deaths over the years due to air bombardment, military attacks and individual assaults.
Syria: Systematic torture of political prisoners. Methods include rape, forcing objects in the anus and threats to sexually abuse prisoners ' families.
Kuwait: Early reports of torture, rape and other brutality towards Iraqi prisoners and suspected sympathizers. A March 6 AP report recounted beatings with typewriters and chairs, cigarette burning, and fingernails pulled out.
Turkey: Favored tortures include hosings with ice cold water and electric shocks to the genitals. Turks who opposed the government 's Gulf policy have been jailed. For example, Nevruz Turkdogan was arrested in Ankara for distribution of a journal of the Women 's Association for Democracy. Despite pleading with the police that she was pregnant, she was severely beaten and thrown into a dark cell with a wet, concrete floor. She lost her baby in the prison toilet.
Said Amnesty International: "During the 1980s, Amnesty reported human rights abuses not just from Iraq but from every country in the Middle East. The world 's governments had the opportunity to deal with these issues, but they did not. They paid no attention to the human rights records of countries to which they gave military, security and police assistance, despite the facts that such aid was being, or could be, used to commit further violations."
The administration and the pundits said it wasn 't another Vietnam. They were, of course, correct. As one historian has noted, the Spanish American War is a far better analogy, both in terms of military aims and the use of war as a psychic boost for a troubled country. But the Iraqi affair also has certain similarities with the War of 1812: Hawks from the south and west herding the nation to war, an embargo, claims that the embargo wasn 't working, the wanton destruction of a capital city, the targeting of command and control centers (such as the White House and the Capitol) and the major battle occurring after a peace plan had been worked out in a third country. Like the recent conflict, the War of 1812 settled none of the issues that caused it and, in time, hardly anybody could remember why we fought it.
Collateral damage
What we 've lost already
Operation Budget Shield: America has been suckered into a war to make the world safe for huge defense budgets. While oil has played a role, it appears to have been more of an excuse than a fundamental cause. At its heart, this war is really a jihad by the defense industry for continued control of the US Treasury.
America 's military-industrial complex was the one clear loser with the end of the Cold War. Neither Grenada nor Panama were convincing enough demonstrations of the need for a massive military in the face of growing talk of a peace dividend and economic conversion. A major world crisis could save the defense budget for years to come, especially if it could be demonstrated that the runaway costs of the defense establishment had produced weapons that actually worked.
Sen. Arlen Specter recently expressed a conventional congressional view: "When the time has come for the necessity to project strength, we have done it in a phenomenal and historic way." Added Sen. Stephen Symms, "It restores a lot of credibility from all the doubters who said that all this money has been wasted." And Symms added that the benefit would not merely accrue to conventional weapons systems: "I think the one program that will receive a tremendous boost from this will be SDI," a prediction confirmed a few days later by George Bush 's annual address and atypical nods to Star Wars by liberal legislators. Ironically, the proximate cause of this new enthusiasm for SDI was the success of the Patriot missile against SCUD missiles, the latter an idea some quarter of a century past its time. Unnoted by either politicians or press was the fact that the Patriot was actually developed prior to Star Wars.
There are other aspects of what has become the world 's most expensive test marketing program that have received far less attention than they should. Consider, for example:
- Different types of fighter planes are carrying out essentially the same mission. The major difference is that the some are several times more expensive than others.
- Aircraft that Congress bought because of their all-weather capability are being kept on the ground in bad weather
- The B-1 bombers --$27 billion worth -- aren 't in the Gulf at all even though they were first put in service in 1986. The entire fleet of these planes was grounded for an entire month recently because of a series of problems such as engine failure, including an explosion that caused an engine to drop off a plane during a training flight. The B-1, revived by Ronald Reagan with nationalistic fervor after the project had been scrapped by Jimmy Carter, was designed to carry nuclear bombs. So far it has been certified to carry only one type of conventional bomb. Meanwhile, as $27 billion of weaponry sits idle, the Air Force carries out its bombing missions with B-52s, first commissioned in the 1950s.
- Many weapons systems --such as the Patriot --may work but are vastly overbuilt for the job they are carrying out and untried for the job for which they were designed.
- Other weapons systems have yet to be tested in battle, or could have been purchased at far less cost from allied countries, or are lacking adequate support equipment - such as the M-l tank that gets about 8-9 gallons to the mile and whose supply trucks are too few in number and inadequately armored.
.The war, like a great Indian potlatch ceremony, is wasting our military wealth at a staggering rate. When it 's allover , the lobbyists will be back arguing for replacing weapons systems that didn 't work, improving (at enormous expense) those that did and inventing new ones for the next military escapade.
Little of this is getting through to the public given a military censorship that is extending even to previously released weapons performance data and a disinterest in much of the media in anything other than the wonders of the Patriot.
The cost of this military trade fair will not be limited to the billions actually expended in the war . It will include the expense of extravagant military budgets for many years to come. The costs will be covered not only by new taxes but by a long-term strangulation of badly needed domestic programs of every variety. Massive expenditures on weapons systems will also further America 's economic decline. Economics writer Robert Kutner points out that since the 70s, when this country went heavily into high tech weaponry, our share of the global consumer electronics market has dropped from 70% to 5%.
There will be little resistance to this budgetary scam by members of Congress. Not only will the war be used for continuing justification of large defense budgets, but military expenditures will, as in the past, be carefully and cleverly disbursed to make Congress hostage to the whim of the Pentagon and its kill-PACs. For example, only nine states in 1989 received less than one million dollars in expenditures for portions of the B-2 bomber program. Three of our largest states --New York, California and Texas --received over $1 billion each. Few politicians can push themselves away from that much of pork.
Casualties: In the first month of fighting: .2500 American citizens died --of AIDS
2100 American babies died in their first month of life.
810 American children died because of poverty.
150 American teenagers committed suicide.
270 American children died of gunshot wounds.
About 650,000 children worldwide died of malnutrition or ill health.
These deaths would, of course, have occurred whether or not there was a war, but the cost of the war insures that they will continue to occur without the benefit of round-the-clock media coverage, multibillion dollar budgets, the call-up of any reserves to do something about it.
Meanwhile, as of February 6, only three dozen Americans have been reported killed or missing in action. No firm figures have been released for casualties of ordinary human beings. As the Washington Times noted recently, "the Gulf conflict is becoming the country 's first 'clean war ' in which a discussion of killing is taboo."
In the first two weeks of the war there were more than 30 press briefings at the Pentagon and the US Central Command without an official estimate of how many Iraqi military, let alone civilians, had been killed No one yet knows not only how many civilians have been killed as direct result of "surgical strikes" but how many will die as a result of damage to such human lifelines as water supplies and power stations. A study of wars in the 1950s, however, found that 52% of the casualties were civilians. By the 1980s the proportion of civilian casualties had increased to 85%.
Estimates of casualties in the Kuwaiti invasion itself vary from Amnesty International 's figure of hundreds to the 7,000 casualties claimed by Kuwait nationals. By comparison, civilian casualties if America 's invasion of Panama vary from 200 (the Army 's figure) to independent estimates of approximately 4,000. Of course, Panama occurred a whole year ago and the UN General Assembly resolution denouncing America 's "flagrant violation of international law" didn 't carry the same weight as UN opinions these days.
The environment: One of the most costly aspects of the war will never be fully accounted for. To give you some idea, however, during the Iran-Iraq war one oil spill resulted in the destruction of 15% of the Persian gulf shrimp industry. The spill in January was at least six times larger .
The chief of Jordan 's council on science an( technology estimates that oil-well fires could( increase the emissions of carbon dioxide by 5% causing the region 's weather to become cooler and more rainy. There is the potential of affecting the Indian monsoons, which could cause a disaster for hundreds of millions of people. It is no inconceivable that the climate of the whole world could be affected.
On the more mundane level, we are systematically destroying two countries in the name of freedom. As aviation historian Richard Pipe put it: "We 're going to crater the place. We 're going to make it look like a giant moonscape."
And the damage is not just being done abroad. At the end of January the government announced that it would waive legal requirements for assessments on the effect that Pentagon projects have on the environment. This could not only quell questions of pollution from military installation but greatly ease military acquisition of new bombing: and test sites strongly opposed by environmentalists. As Gary Cohen, director of the National Toxic Campaign Fund, points out: "The Pentagon and its contractors are already the most pervasive and protected polluters in the nation."
At this point we are uncertain whether we are facing an ecological holocaust or merely an environmental disaster. In either case, the environment is already one of the biggest losers of the war. And, of course, the war has distracted our attention from other matters of more long-range consequence than the restoration of the Emir of Kuwait. For example, in the first month of fighting approximately one and a half million acres of rainforests were destroyed. Nobody had time to notice.
Other aggression: While we do not know exactly what payoffs the Bush administration made to various countries to obtain their cooperation in the war against Iraq, it is clear that two of the major beneficiaries were Syria and the Soviet Union. The former obtained a whole country, Lebanon, in return for its support and the Soviets got at least an implicit green light for repressing the emerging Baltic republics. Further, the Israelis have intensified their apartheid, using the cover of the war to get away with putting over a million and a half Palestinians under house arrest. At this point, we are losing the battle for national independence by at least a five to one margin.
The corporate state: In recent years, America has been sliding dangerously close to the sort of corporatism practiced by Nazi Germany and Mussolini 's Italy, in which the economy is controlled by an oligopoly in cooperation with the state. This is almost inevitable in a country with so much of its production devoted to the military .The war is both an symbol and a subsidy of the defense industry 's continued dominance of the economy. Under both the Reagan and Bush administrations complimentary policies have been pressed including relaxation of anti-trust enforcement and deregulation. An example is the airline industry where deregulation 's early consumer gains, such as increased routes and lower fares, are disappearing as carriers are merged or driven out of business. Even more dramatic is the current effort to deregulate banking, which --if successful --would create a financial oligopoly to match the industrial one. The war provides both an excuse and concealment for such activities.
Constitutional government: War inevitably transfers domestic authority from democratic institutions to the military and from legislative bodies to the executive. Once this authority has been transferred, it is hard to restore it to its proper place. One high law enforcement official has already been quoted as saying that security procedures instituted for the war will remain in place long after it is over.
This is not a trifling matter. The last three administrations have developed chilling plans for establishing martial law in the US during an ill- defined "national emergency ." With the exception of a few journals, like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald, most of the media has paid little attention to this. Even during the allegedly thorough Iran-Contra hearings, the moment the veil on these plans was lifted, committee chair Daniel Inouye rushed to push it back:
Rep. Brooks: Colonel Noth, in your work at the NSC, were you not asked, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?
Brendan Sullivan [North 's counsel]: Mr. Chairman ?
Sen. Inouye: I believe that question touched upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch on that.
Rep. Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event emergency, that would suspend the American Constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.
Sen. Inouye: May I most respectfully request that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I 'm certain arrangement can be made for an executive session.
From what is publicly known, there are plans to effectively suspend the Constitution under circumstances that are exceedingly vague but could easily develop in a situation like the Gulf crisis, especially if guerilla actions occur in this country. Despite Sen. Inouye 's remarkable contention, there is no matter that is more properly the concern of the American citizenry.
Sanctions: Unnoticed in all the rhetoric and analysis of the Gulf war is the fact that economic sanctions against Iraq are still in place. We will never know whether sanctions alone would have worked not because we tried war instead, but because we tried war in addition.
The war, in fact, would be immensely more difficult were Iraq able to be resupplied as the Chinese resupplied the North Koreans. Iraq is surrounded by countries at least partially involved in the embargo and --unlike many earlier attempts at sanctions --virtually all of Iraq 's trade and financial relations are subject to sanctions.
Even if Iraq leaves Kuwait, we will unlikely be able to determine whether it left for military or economic reasons, although the credit will inevitably be given to the military.
To see that this is more than a talking point; consider this summary from Time magazine of the effects of sanctions as of Jan. 15:
- Iraq will run out of foreign-currency reserves by spring.
- The embargo has cost Iraq 50% of its GNP . .Bread, sugar and soap are rationed
-.Imports have been reduced by more than 90%.
- Per capita food consumption down from 3100 calories a day to 1800 per day.
- The country 's military effectiveness will begin to decline in six to 12 months.
Civil liberties: Since this war is being fought in the name of freedom, it is worth noting what has happened to domestic freedom in recent weeks:
- The Justice Department is considering registering, photographing and fingerprinting Iraqis in this country.
- The FBI has conducted numerous sorties on Arab-Arnericans to suggest they cooperate with the agency 's anti-guerilla activities. The Arab- Americans involved have naturally regarded this as insulting and a considerable intrusion on their freedom.
- In order to visit your elected representative on Capitol Hill you must not only submit to x-ray scanners but have one 's coat searched by police. There is serious consideration being given to placing a fence around the Capitol to further limit access to elected officials.
- The freedom to travel, as perceived by Arnerica.ns, has declined markedly with a drastic reduction in international air travel. At one college in England, American students are being advised to stay away from the Hard Rock Cafe, Mcdonald 's and American Express as they are considered prime targets for attacks.
- In order for the President to safely deliver his annual address, a four square block cordon sanitaire was established in around the US Capitol.
- The American press is currently under the most severe censorship since World War II-
- Waiting in the wings is a plan drawn up for then vice-president George Bush in 1986 for the roundup and deportation of "suspected terrorists." According to the Washington Times: "It reportedly has been discarded but could be reinstated by a presidential declaration. The plan called for up to 1,000 suspected terrorists to be held at a US Bureau of Prisons detention center at Oakdale, La., and up to 5,000 in tents at other locations in southern states." The Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II were there because they, too, were considered suspected terrorists.
The budget: Only a few months ago, the future of the Republic was said to hinge on an agreement between Congress and the White House to reduce the deficit. Forget it. Today a report from the Congressional Budget Office that this year 's deficit will be a record-breaking and mind-boggling $29 billion only rates a few inches in the New Media Order.
Culture: Despite American protestations that they 're being careful, there are some initial indications that priceless cultural and religious sites are being damaged and destroyed. In a letter to US News & World Report, Carra Ferguson O 'Meara, a Georgetown University fine arts professor, notes that Iraq was home of "humanity 's first cities and earliest temples... Its most ancient sites... are close to the frontier near Kuwait... Many of the most precious objects are in the museum at Baghdad, perilously near the Iraqi defense ministry... We must ask ourselves whether we have the right to jeopardize the survival of this irreplaceable cultural and historical legacy that is of importance not only to Iraq but to all mankind."
Integrity: George Bush speaks or the war on Iraq with all the integrity of Marion Barry speaking of the war on drugs. Pentagon officials deny civilian targeting and then, when the photos are shown, explain it away with vague claims of proximity to military sites. The media accedes to extraordinary censorship without a decent fight Liberal members of Congress who voted for continued sanctions struggle publicly suppress any doubts they may have about this madness in a pointless implicit apology for having done the right thing.
The integrity of language is taking a solid beating as well, led by the Pentagon where soldiers are no longer killed -"Only "KIA." And the public has found refuge in circular thinking, proclaiming support for "our troops" as though this support was somehow divisible from support from what "our troops" are doing. This often well-intentioned effort to avoid the sort of crummy treatment Vietnam vets received, is being heavily used by the American right and the media to develop a false image of American unity not only behind the troops but behind the war they are fighting.
To be sure, many of those in the Gulf are there because, sadly, the military offered them the single best hope for economic survival. But easily manipulated expressions of "support" can do them little service. Jesse Jackson put it in the right context when he said, "We need to support our troops when they are not troops. We can not just love them when they are abroad; we must love them at home." And we must support our troops by keeping them alive, not dead, wounded or tortured. By bringing them home.
Refugees: When the battle erupted in Khafji, American media gave intense coverage to the story. But you had to listen long and hard to learn that the first battle of Khafji was already over when the war started, the 50,000 resident of the town had to leave --silent, unnoticed casualties of the New World Order. No one knows the final refugee total, but experts expect at least one to two million people to be displaced by the war.
The Middle East: The Middle East is being disrupted, disarranged, and destroyed by this conflict. It will take years to straighten out the mess. Jimmy Carter estimates 30 years; former JCS chief Admiral William Crowe says 40 years, "whether we like it or not." The contour of post-war developments is speculative at this point, but here is one scenario offered last November by Middle East commentator and anthropologist William Beeman:
Even if the conflict drags on for years, Iran will be seen by the people of the region as the one nation that did not capitulate to the United States, thus retaining its integrity. Its military forces remain strong and its economic prospects are equally bright. In the light of the Saudi Arabian acquiescence to US military occupation, and Iraq 's likely weakness in the future, Iran will stand alone as the dominant regional power. Saudi Arabia under its current monarchy will never again regain the influence it has had in the past among Arab nations. Nor will it retain its influence in OPEC. It will always be suspected of representing American interests. With Iraq weakened or dismantled, Iran will thus become the principal spokesman for Middle East oil interests. To reap these benefits, Iran need only sit back and wait... The more thorough the US route of Saddam Hussein, the greater long-term rewards for Iran. This must be deliciously ironic for Iranian leaders who, having been labeled by Washington as fanatic out 'aws, are now rewarded by every move the United States makes.
America 's reputation: The disproportionate response to Iraq 's annexation of Kuwait is sure to rank as one of the history 's great acts of military brutality. It is likely in fact. that the main purpose of the excessive military censorship is not to hide US failure but its wanton, destructive success. America will pay for this power-drunk rampage, in big ways and small, for years to come. .
In sum, the war in its first weeks has caused extraordinary damage to world peace. the earth 's ecosystem. the freedom of various peoples deemed of less importance than those of Kuwait, the freedom and rights of American citizens, national integrity and simple human dignity.
The irony is. of course. that the war is being fought in the name of the very values that are being sacrificed to the cause of military victory. The Bush administration is killing to save lives. endangering oil to save oil, lying to defend truth, suppressing to protect freedom, encouraging an ecological holocaust to save the earth.
A year ago a remarkable world revolution was underway. Most of the world 's inhabitants had lived their entire lives in a world dominated by either the fear or reality of war. Now for the first time one could foresee a world at peace.
When Soviet tanks rolled across the hopes of Hungary, it took decades for that country to recover. Now the tanks and planes of American empire are rolling across the hopes of the world and we must begin all over again to make peace a habit rather than a dream.
This then is George Bush.s greatest sin: He killed world peace while it was still an infant. --Sam Smith, March 1991
Letting Bush get away with it
Within a year of taking office, George Bush had invaded Panama, violating not only the US Constitution, but the UN Charter, the Charter of the Organization of American States, the Nuremburg Principles, the Panama Canal Treaty and various other international laws. His drug war has been a jungle of constitutional violations and evasions. Less well known, largely because the press has chosen to ignore it, has been Bush 's war against open government. Several million Americans in government and the defense industry have been pressured into signing gag agreements despite a congressional prohibition on spending money for such a purpose. Bush has quietly, and with few media murmurs, embarked upon a policy of putting as much of the United States government under cover as he can, clamping down on whistleblowers and attempting to make security clearances arbitrarily unobtainable or revokable without due process.
All this, of course, is before we get the answers to how deeply George Bush was involved in Iran-Contra and or whether he was part the scheme to delay the release of the hostages in Iran until after the 1988 election. And before, of course, his proposed commencement of war against Iraq without the congressional declaration the Constitution clearly and simply requires.
Yet despite this astonishing record, Bush does not deserve all the blame. The dirtiest secret in Washington is the extent to which those institutions intended to provide a counterweight to excessive executive power have capitulated to that power. As far as any issue remotely touching on `national security ' is concerned, Washington practices three-monkey politics: Congress prohibits no evil, the courts punish no evil; and the press reports no evil.
Thus it is not surprising that for more than three months after the Iraqi invasion, George Bush had a clear field to pursue a policy adolescent in its inspiration, hypocritical in its rationale, counter-productive in its goals, hyperbolic in its rhetoric, incoherent and inconsistent in its justification, and reckless in its risks.
There were, of course, the few in Congress and the media who understood what was going on from the start. Fifty some members of Congress prepared a legal brief challenging the president 's right to make war without legislative consent. Scott Armstrong wrote an article for the Columbia Journalism Review listing 64 questions that reporters were failing to ask about US policy towards Iraq.
But the tone of the early press coverage was set by the Chicago Tribune, which bleated on its front page August 8:
In a single stroke Tuesday, George Bush... brought the mantle of leadership back to Washington.
That same day, notes Extra!, the Washington Post 's E.J. Dionne managed to produce some subtle if anachronistic seminal red-baiting:
Soviet support for US moves has quelled criticism on the left.
And as late as November 30 the New York Times reported:
The House Speaker, Thomas S. Foley of Washington, and the House Republican Leader, Robert H. Michel of Illinois, told Mr. Bush at a private White House luncheon that he might prevail in Congress if he pressed for a vote now, but could fall short of a clear-cut mandate to use force against Iraq this winter, and might well set up a divisive debate among lawmakers. They advised Mr. Bush not to call a special session of Congress on the Persian Gulf.
This summed up both the prevailing morality and courage of official Washington in the first months of the crisis. Here we had the Democratic Speaker essentially telling the President that it 's okay to trash the Constitution. The question is not what the law says; it 's a matter of whether you 've got the votes. And God forbid that we should have a divisive debate over whether to put 400,000 American troops at risk for a cause not even its advocates can explain, let alone defend. The undeniable thrill of war had been felt and who could resist it? As General Sherman wrote his wife, "I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair; a kind of morning dash."
In early December, however, the tone of the political and press discussion of the crisis changed dramatically. With Bush having doubled our troop commitment and called up the reserves, the constituents were getting restless. The gap between what was happening on the tube and what was happening down the street closed markedly. Two out of three former chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and seven of eight former secretaries of defense urged Bush to go slow and give sanctions time to work. And in his mild mannered way, a former president, Jimmy Carter, alluded to what others were too busy to notice: in a world growing rapidly beyond war, the greatest remaining warmongers were Saddam Hussein and George Bush.
The cavalry of the ordinary concerned and the Gray Berets of the establishment had come to the city 's rescue giving many in Congress and the press new convictions about which to have some courage.
Bush has spoken of Hitler in connection with this affair. But when you speak of Hitler you bring up memories not only of small countries being crushed, but a large country being crushed by a leader with contempt for its institutions, its democracy and the decent sharing of ominous decisions. You bring up memories of an intimidated legislature and a cowed press. And you bring up memories of brutal actions also carried out in the name of a new world order. It is a dangerous metaphor to arouse. As The New Yorker wrote on December 10: "From the beginning President Bush 's policy in the Gulf. . .was better suited to a dictatorship than to a democracy."
Maybe it 's all just another Bush deception. Maybe when it 's over, the President will buy the Iraqis out of Kuwait the same way he bought dozens of countries into the UN resolution. But in one respect he has clearly shown his hand: he 'll do whatever he can get away with. And much of Congress and the media will help him. -- Sam Smith
The other crisis
The failure of Congress extends far beyond its inordinately slow reaction to Bush 's excesses. The Constitution calls for Congress to declare a war and not, by common consent, simply to ignore it. For example, a war supported by a wimpy do-what-you-got-to-do-George resolution, however, would not give Congress cover; it would merely make it a co-conspirator against the constitutional law.
Yet to an increasing number of people in power in Washington, whether Republican or Democratic, in government or in journalism, the Constitution is simply irrelevant to current concerns. Such carefully debated sections as the one that vested war-making powers in the Congress are implicitly considered, as General William Odom explicitly said recently, "old formalities obsolete for most situations."
Thus George Bush can announce that "I have an obligation as president to conduct the foreign policy of this country in the way I see fit," and no one in power challenges him, despite more than a half-dozen clauses of the Constitution that contradict his contention, including those relating to the power of the legislature, treaty-making, regulation of commerce, war powers, the raising of an army and navy, the organization and calling forth of the militia, and tariffs.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr, in the November 12 New York Times, wrote:
Secretary Baker suggests that the president 's role as commander in chief has become a sufficient source of authority to go to war. The Framers would hardly have accepted this argument. In the 69th Federalist, Alexander Hamilton observed that the commander-in-chief clause granted the president no more than the command of the armed forces -- in contrast to the British king, whose power `extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies -- all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature. '
Law professors Leon Friedman and Burt Newborne added on December 2 that the delegates to the constitutional convention overwhelmingly rejected Pierce Butler 's proposal that the president be given power to declare war. Eldridge Gerry of Massachusetts said that "he never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the executive to declare war." George Mason of Virginia said the executive is "not safely to be trusted with it" and that he was for "clogging rather than facilitating war; but for facilitating peace."
Ironically, the president of the Soviet Union has declared that for his country "the use of armed forces outside the country without sanction from the Congress is ruled out categorically, once and for all. The only exception will be in the case of a surprise armed attack from outside." It would appear that Mr. Gorbachev is more a strict constructionist than many in Washington.
The Iraqi situation is only the latest and most visible sign of the indifference of the media and Congress to fundamental constitutional issues. You may not be aware, for example, that at the end of the last session Congress passed legislation that essentially legalized many of the worst crimes of Iran-Contra. It would give the president power to conduct covert operations and to use corporations and foreign countries to do so, thus allowing the president to carry out private wars and operations without Congress even having the leverage of withholding funds. Only 70 members of the House stood with Barbara Boxer when she attempted to prevent the covert action legislation. Did the media that spent hours and pages on the Iran-Contra rise as one to tell Americans about this? Not until Bush vetoed the legislation, and then mainly to give credibility to his incredible argument that the legislation would tie his hands. -- Sam Smith
Whose war is it?
George Bush 's behavior in this affair is bizarre even by presidential standards, let alone constitutional ones. He has barely consulted the joint chiefs of staff while making a commitment of American troops close to that in Vietnam. When Defense Secretary Cheney made a televised announcement that the US might be sending more troops to Saudi Arabia, Gen. Colin Powell learned of it while on his way back from the Middle East. And the president has clearly not consulted Congress.
The question inevitably arises: whose war is this going to be? Sununu 's? Cheney 's? Millie 's?
Some of the speculation has bordered on the grotesque. The emir of conventional journalism, David Broder, wrote on November 18: "It is almost impossible to imagine a more serious, calm, cautious, rational and prudent set of people than those the president has assembled,"
The New York Times 's R. W. Apple Jr., who got off to a bad start in August characterizing Bush as "tough" and "statesmanlike," had recovered enough by December to write:
Right from the start, foreign policy professionals have complained that Mr. Bush, something of a foreign policy professional himself, has drawn the circle too tight, limiting discussions of really important positions to himself, Secretary of State James A. Baker 3rd, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Brent Scowcroft, his national security advisor.
One foreign editor on the case described the vision of the White House as being as though looking through a "rifle sight." There is no apparent consideration of long-term effects, cultural factors, the links with other regional issues or history. I suspect that for George Bush, invading Iraq would not really be a war at all, but as with Noriega, more of a personal match -- tennis by other means. An old preppie treating the whole world as his country club.
It produces odd and scary results, such as the serial explanations for our Gulf presence offered by administration figures, some of them even in contradiction as when Lawrence Eagleburger said he thought the war was "about oil" and Cheney said that was "hog-wash."
As late as the end of November, the administration couldn 't decide what this business was about. In the manner of the GOP stumbling on Willie Horton, the convenient and unsupportable discovery of Iraq 's iminent "nuclear capability" (after a New York Times/CBS poll showed that 54% of the public thought this was a good enough reason to take military action) seemed a temporary godsend. Wrote the Times on November 26:
An Administration official said the survey results had been noted by the White House, which is also looking for an argument that will sway the public.
The sentence is familiar. We 've read it dozens of times during political campaigns, although in campaigns not as many people get killed. What we have been seeing is the way war would be if it were planned by a political consultant. -- Sam Smith
George Bush 's Second Annual War
Why what you think about it doesn 't make any difference
For all their differences, the people of America and Iraq have something in common: they live in countries led by men both capable and willing to use military force in an arbitrary fashion and beyond constitutional restraint. Twice in less than a year, George Bush has demonstrated this. Twice he has made us hostage of his grandiose and archaic vision of America 's role in the world, without consultation, without debate, without even a token nod to the Constitution, which gives Congress, and not the President, the power to declare war.
War, for America, has become a game of dealer 's choice, with the president as dealer. The public, the Congress and the media have little to say about the matter. With the presidential decision backed by massive propaganda, the Congress is scared into submission; pumped up by the prospect of war correspondence the press falls enthusiastically into line; and left without analytical leadership the public is offered no alternative but blind acceptance.
This is a relatively new phenomenon in American history, a product of our postwar imperial era. Most prior American involvement in wars was preceded by extensive public debate. The closest parallels to current American military policy were the Mexican war and the Spanish-American war, both wars of empire. Even in these cases, however, the war was precipitated by a direct attack on American forces. Ironically, these two conflicts,resulting in the acquisition of Texas, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, also remind us that Saddam Hussein did not invent the idea of annexation.
The Korean War was the first war we entered without a direct attack or substantial public discussion. Although American troops had been withdrawn and Dean Acheson had found South Korea outside the American Pacific "defense perimeter," Harry Truman quickly decided that the invasion had been directed by Moscow and restored South Korea to protectorate status. We found ourselves in our first war of dealer 's choice.
In the case of Vietnam, Eisenhower 's choice (the wisest) was to stay out; Kennedy 's choice was to dabble and Johnson 's choice was to enter the fray. The American "defense perimeter" had become the boundaries of the "free world," but -- as to this day -- the decision whether to defend a particular corner of that world had become a presidential prerogative. The three different approaches to Vietnam reflected not so much change in geopolitics as change in the personalities in the White House.
This personalization of the power of war is the most dramatic sign of America 's drift from constitutional and democratic principles that stood it in good stead for more than a century and a half. Although it is regularly argued that the shift is simply a reaction to a more complex and dangerous world, particularly the existence of nuclear weapons, in fact each of America 's military adventures since World War II -- large or small -- has had more in common with 19th century expansionism than with the nuclear holocaust so feared by all. These were wars and adventures to fix the boundaries of the American empire and to prevent the Soviets and Chinese from expanding theirs. In the two major wars fought under these new rules, the debate over our purpose and goals took place in the midst of the fighting. Significantly, one of these wars ended in a stalemate, the other in American defeat.
Since Vietnam, we have contented ourselves with such quick and easy targets such as Granada and Panama. The most generous view of these misbegotten affairs is that they had a sublimating effect on the White House 's military instincts. Unfortunately, the Gulf crisis suggests this is too optimistic. In fact, it appears that they merely whetted the appetite of the administration and the public for more.
The Gulf crisis is certainly more. Although planned on much the same simplistic premises as Granada and Panama, the implications of America 's action in the Middle East are anything but simple. In one swift military move, for example, America has vastly increased Arab hatred of this country and greatly complicated the Palestinian issue. These problems will remain whether the administration 's show-and-tell act succeeds or not. While there appears to still be time for both sides to back away from their bravado and belligerence, Bush 's hyper-reaction to the Kuwait annexation makes the prospect at best problematical.
A year before we landed on the dunes of Saudi Arabia, few would have guessed the coming eruption. By way of example, the Washington Post mentioned Iraq twice in August 1989 and Kuwait not all. As late at July 1 of this year, The Post was assuring us in a headline: "New Middle East War Seen Unlikely; Threats, Saber-Rattling Abound, but Deterrents Curb Both Sides." And on July 26 The Post paraphrased a Bush official as saying that "the prevailing administration view was that Saddam Hussein was bullying Kuwait and had no intention of invasion." In any case, there was no hint from media or the White House that Iraq, as later alleged by the president, was on the cusp of posing a threat to our whole way of life.
As occurred with Libya, Grenada and Panama, critical national interest was redefined almost overnight. Once again, the hate bites poured out of the White House, the troops were called up, and the media faithfully flacked the new found cause with the fervor of a recent convert to the Church of Scientology.
Perhaps, on some wall in the National Security Council offices, there is a map defining those countries we will defend to the death and those, in the words of Palestinian journalist Hanna Siniora elsewhere in this issue, we will just "let rot." If so, the markings must be erasable. As recently as July, the president vetoed legislation slapping Iraq on the wrist for using agricultural credits for the purchase of military weapons. In September of 1988, when some senators wanted to invoke trade sanctions against Iraq for its gassing of Kurdish rebels, the president threatened a veto and the matter was dropped. And one year earlier we were busy reflagging Kuwaiti tankers to protect them from the country everyone knew was the real danger in the Middle East, Iran.
A US News & World Report article from the time seems eerily up to date:
The plan seemed so simple at the outset. . .The sheer spectacle of American power would be sufficient to discourage further Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf. Over time, tensions would ebb. Instead, a nightmare scenario for the US may be unfolding. . . .Seldom has the Persian Gulf 's tinderbox atmosphere been more explosive or events there so directly threatening to American interests. . . . As the potential dangers become more obvious, White House aides are privately pointing fingers, trying to fix blame for what now looks like one more foreign policy misadventure. `I don 't think anybody thought through what we were doing, ' said one senior official. `Then people started to focus on it, trying to figure out: why are we getting ourselves into this? By then, it was so far down the road that you had to close ranks. '
It is not difficult to perceive of more sensible responses to the Iraqi problem than those concocted by Pentagon bulls in the global china shop and national security advisors confusing their virility concerns with the national interest. We could, for example, have taken our own rhetoric seriously and developed a true multi-lateral approach. We could have encouraged a much more prominent role for the United Nations and the Arab nations. We could have responded to the several feelers put forth by the Iraqis for negotiations with other than name-calling and vilification. We could have consulted with those with whom we are in alliance, rather than bullying them. We could have seized the opportunity to work out a several-sided solution to the crisis, including settlement of the Palestinian situation.
But such alternatives are irrelevant when there is no way to make them heard. The angst over the events in the Middle East comes not just from the danger these events present, but from the fact that, until it is too late, there is so little we can do about them. Should a full-scale war develop, we will be there, much as we were in Vietnam, confused in our purpose, uncertain in our strategy and unconfirmed in the righteousness of our cause.
It is not enough to say that Saddam Hussein is an evil man. His character, after all, was fixed and well known long before the Kuwait invasion. Was he less evil when he used chemical weapons on the Iranians than when he used conventional -- and hardly opposed -- forces against the Kuwaitis? Where was the White House outrage, the cabinet delegations to foreign leaders, the American sabre-rattling then?
It is not enough to belatedly claim allegiance to the UN Charter and principles. Certainly, a basic principle of non-intervention has been broken, but after Grenada and Panama and our coddling of Israel, what claim do we have before the Iraqis: that the invasion and annexation of weak neighboring territories is the prerogative of the United States and the Soviet Union? And what of Iraqi claims to Kuwait blithely ignored in the big power deal that gave it independence in 1961?
There could have been a moral core to the reaction to Iraq had the United States acted with more humility and less hypocrisy. There is genuine cause for outrage at the Iraqi action, but it is sullied by the self-serving and reckless American reaction to it.
But then this business isn 't really about morality at all. It 's about oil. And not even cheap oil. In fact, since the US has been throwing its weight around in the Persian Gulf the price of a barrel has risen from $10 a barrel in 1986 to $18 a barrel after the Iraq-Iran war to $30 a barrel the last time I looked. How this protects the interests of America is a little hard to see, but it certainly helps the oil producers. Further, as TRB pointed out in The New Republic in 1987, "Former Navy Secretary John Lehman estimates that the share of the Reagan-era military buildup specifically designed to make good on the so-called Carter Doctrine -- that the United States will protect Mideast oil supplies by force if necessary -- is costing American taxpayers about $40 billion a year. . . . Our protection is costing roughly ten dollars a barrel."
This crisis is also about the welfare fathers of a bloated military and defense industry desperately looking for a justification for themselves. It 's about growing economic problems in this country and about a war against drugs that has failed and how to make people forget about these things. It 's about scaring the Congress into the Bush budget. It 's about reviving nuclear energy. It 's about a nation so past its imperial prime that it sends its ministers around the world hawking limited partnerships to underwrite the activities of its mercenaries.
It 's about a Europe and Japan, the former 80% dependent and the latter fully dependent on oil imports, laughing on the way to the bank as the US, defends their interests.
It 's about worrisome political polls. And it 's about an administration that governs by voodoo politics -- sticking its propaganda pins into opponents as mild as *Michael Dukakis and as despicable as Saddamm Hussein, hoping that its incantations will distract the public from what 's really going on.
It is finally about a Congress, a media and a public that has surrendered the right to decide when to wield this nation 's terrible swift sword -- surrendered it to those who increasingly treat military adventurism as a policy of first resort, even as the economic foundation that this adventurism pretends to defend crumbles, indifferent to the cavalier and foolhardy bravado of George Bush and company.
If there is a war there seems no doubt that it will be an extraordinarily mean and dirty one. Having entered it without moral intention, its only moral will likely be that we should have thought and talked more about it first. -- Sam Smith, October 1990
If Saddam Hussein is Hitler, then James K. Polk and William McKinley were...
In 1845, President Polk sent General Zachary Taylor to annex Texas, using about half the US Army. Within a year we were in a war that then Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant described as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." One of the reasons for the Spanish-American war was to "liberate" Cuba. Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt 's view was, "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." The war allowed America to annex Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines
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Gulf War
Dictionary
Gulf War
n.
A war fought in 1991 in which a coalition of countries led by the United States destroyed much of the military capability of Iraq and drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. Also called Persian Gulf War.
Encyclopedia
Persian Gulf Wars or Gulf Wars, two conflicts involving Iraq and U.S.-led coalitions in the late 20th and early 21st cent.
The First Persian Gulf War, Jan.–Feb., 1991, was an armed conflict between Iraq and a coalition of 32 nations including the United States, Britain, Egypt, France, and Saudi Arabia. It was a result of Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990; Iraq then annexed Kuwait, which it had long claimed. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein declared that the invasion was a response to overproduction of oil in Kuwait, which had cost Iraq an estimated $14 billion a year when oil prices fell. Hussein also accused Kuwait of illegally pumping oil from Iraq 's Rumaila oil field.
The UN Security Council called for Iraq to withdraw and subsequently embargoed most trade with Iraq. On Aug. 7, U.S. troops moved into Saudi Arabia to protect Saudi oil fields. On Nov. 29, the United Nations set Jan. 15, 1991, as the deadline for a peaceful withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait. When Saddam Hussein refused to comply, Operation Desert Storm was launched on Jan. 18, 1991, under the leadership of U.S. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
The U.S.-led coalition began a massive air war to destroy Iraq 's forces and military and civil infrastructure. Iraq called for terrorist attacks against the coalition and launched Scud missiles at Israel (in an unsuccessful attempt to widen the war and break up the coalition) and at Saudi Arabia. The main coalition forces invaded Kuwait and S Iraq on Feb. 24 and, over the next four days, encircled and defeated the Iraqis and liberated Kuwait. When U.S. President George H. W. Bush declared a cease-fire on Feb. 28, most of the Iraqi forces in Kuwait had either surrendered or fled.
Although the war was a decisive military victory for the coalition, Kuwait and Iraq suffered enormous property damage, and Saddam Hussein was not removed from power. In fact, Hussein was free to turn his attention to suppressing internal Shiite and Kurd revolts, which the U.S.-led coalition did not support, in part because of concerns over the possible breakup of Iraq if the revolts were successful. Coalition peace terms were agreed to by Iraq, but every effort was made by the Iraqis to frustrate implementation of the terms, particularly UN weapons inspections.
In 1993 the United States, France, and Britain launched several air and cruise-missile strikes against Iraq in response to provocations, including an alleged Iraqi plan to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush. An Iraqi troop buildup near Kuwait in 1994 led the United States to send forces to Kuwait and nearby areas. Continued resistance to weapons inspections led to bombing raids against Iraq, and trade sanctions imposed on Iraq remained in place, albeit with an emphasis on military-related goods until the second Gulf conflict. See also Gulf War Syndrome.
The Second Persian Gulf War, also known as the
Iraq War,
Mar.–Apr., 2003, was a largely U.S.-British invasion of Iraq. In many ways the final, delayed campaign of the First Persian Gulf War, it arose in part because the Iraqi government failed to cooperate fully with UN weapons inspections in the years following the first conflict.
The election of George W. Bush to the U.S. presidency returned to government many officials from his father 's administration who had favored removing Saddam Hussein from power in the first war. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the United States moved toward a doctrine of first-strike, pre-emptive war to eliminate threats to national security. As early as Oct., 2001, U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld publicly suggested that military action against Iraq was possible, and in November President Bush asked Rumsfeld to undertake a war-plan review. In Jan., 2002, President Bush accused Iraq. along with North Korea and Iran, as being part of “an axis of evil,” and with the Taliban forced from power in Afghanistan in early 2002, the administration 's attention turned to Iraq.
Accusing Iraq of failing to abide by the terms of the 1991 cease-fire (by developing and possessing weapons of mass destruction and by refusing to cooperate with UN weapons inspections) and of supporting terrorism, the president and other officials suggested that the “war on terrorism” might be expanded to include Iraq and became more forceful in their denunciations of Iraq for resisting UN arms inspections, called for “regime change” in Iraq, and leaked news of military planning for war. President Bush also called on the United Nations to act forcefully against Iraq or risk becoming “irrelevant.” As a result, Iraq announced in Sept., 2002, that UN inspectors could return, but Iraqi slowness to agree on inspection terms and U.S. insistence on stricter conditions for Iraqi compliance stalled the inspectors ' return.
In October, Congress approved the use of force against Iraq, and in November the Security Council passed a resolution offering Iraq a “final opportunity” to cooperate on arms inspections. A strict inspections timetable was established, and active Iraqi compliance insisted on. Inspections resumed in late November. A December declaration by Iraq that it had no weapons of mass destruction was generally regarded as incomplete and uninformative, but by Jan., 2003, UN inspectors had found no evidence of forbidden weapons programs. However, they also indicated that Iraq was not actively cooperating with their efforts to determine if previously known or suspected weapons had been destroyed and weapons programs had been ended.
Despite much international opposition, including increasingly rancorous objections from France, Germany, and Russia, the United States and Britain continued their military buildup in areas near Iraq, insisting that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Turkey, which the allies hoped to use as a base for a northern front in Iraq, refused to allow use of its territory, but most Anglo-American forces were in place in Kuwait and other locations by March. After failing to win the explicit UN Security Council approval desired by Britain (because Britons were otherwise largely opposed to war), President Bush issued an ultimatum to Iraqi president Hussein on Mar. 17, and two days later the war began with an airstrike against Hussein and the Iraqi leadership. Ground forces (almost exclusively Anglo-American and significantly smaller than the large international force assembled in the first war) began invading the following day, surging primarily toward Baghdad, the southern oil fields, and port facilities; a northern front was opened by Kurdish and airborne Anglo-American forces late in March.
By mid-April, 2003, Hussein 's army and government had collapsed, he himself had disappeared, and the allies were largely in control of the major Iraqi cities. The allies gradually turned their attention to the rebuilding of Iraq and the establishment of a new Iraqi government, but progress toward that end was hampered by lawlessness, especially in Baghdad, where widespread looting initially had been tolerated by U.S. forces.
On May 1, President Bush declared victory in the war against Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction, however, were found, leading to charges that U.S. and British leaders had exaggerated the Iraqi biological and chemical threat in order to justify the war. Hussein was captured in Dec., 2003. Subsequently, much of the intelligence used to justify the war was criticized as faulty by U.S. and British investigative bodies, and the U.S.-led occupation forces struggled into 2005 with Islamic insurgencies that military and civilian planners had failed to foresee.
Bibliography
For the second conflict, see W. Murray and R. H. Scales, Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (2003) and B. Woodward, Plan of Attack (2004).
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History
Persian Gulf War
A war between the forces of the United Nations, led by the United States, and those of Iraq that followed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein 's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. The United Nations forces, called the Coalition, expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait in March 1991.
His rallying of the U.N. against the invasion of Kuwait is considered the high point of George H. W. Bush 's presidency.
WordNet
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.
The noun Persian Gulf War has one meaning:
Meaning #1: a war in which the United States and its allies freed Kuwait from Iraqi invaders; 1990-1991
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Wikipedia
Gulf War
See also: 2003 invasion of Iraq and Gulf War (disambiguation) C Company, 1st Battalion, The Staffordshire Regiment, 1st UK Armoured DivisionThe 1991 Persian Gulf War was a conflict between Iraq and a coalition force of 34 nations mandated by the United Nations and led by the United States.
The lead up to the war began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 which was met with immediate economic sanctions by the United Nations against Iraq. Hostilities commenced in January 1991, resulting in a decisive victory for the coalition forces, which drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait with minimal coalition deaths. The main battles were aerial and ground combat within Iraq, Kuwait and bordering areas of Saudi Arabia. The war did not expand outside of the immediate Iraq/Kuwait/Saudi border region, although Iraq fired missiles on Israeli cities.
Other common names for the conflict include the Gulf War, War in the Gulf, Iraq-Kuwait Conflict, UN-Iraq conflict, Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Desert Sabre, 1990 Gulf War (for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait), 1991 Gulf War (1990-1991), the Second Gulf War (to distinguish it from the Iran-Iraq war) and Gulf War Sr. and First Gulf War (to distinguish it from the 2003 invasion of Iraq). In Iraq, the war is often colloquially called simply Um M 'aārak ("the Mother of All Battles").
Causes
Prior to World War I, under the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913, Kuwait was considered to be an autonomous caza within Ottoman Iraq. Following the war, Kuwait fell under British rule and later became an independent emirate. However, Iraqi officials did not accept the legitimacy of Kuwaiti independence or the authority of the Kuwaiti Emir. Iraq never acknowledged Kuwait 's right to be an independent nation and in the 1960s, the United Kingdom deployed troops to Kuwait to deter an Iraqi annexation.
During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Kuwait was allied with Iraq, largely due to desiring Iraqi protection from Islamic Iran. After the war, Iraq was extremely indebted to several Arab countries, including a $14 billion debt to Kuwait. Iraq hoped to repay its debts by raising the price of oil through OPEC oil production cuts, but instead, Kuwait increased production, lowering prices, in an attempt to leverage a better resolution of their border dispute. In addition, greatly antagonizing Iraq, Kuwait had taken advantage of the Iran-Iraq War and had begun illegal slant drilling for oil into Iraqi reserves, and had built military outposts on Iraqi soil near Kuwait. Furthermore, Iraq charged that it had performed a collective service for all Arabs by acting as a buffer against Iran and that therefore Kuwait and Saudi Arabia should negotiate or cancel Iraq 's war debts. Hussein 's primary two-fold justification blended the assertion of Kuwaiti territory being an Iraqi province arbitrarily cut off by imperialism, and the use of annexation as retaliation for the "economic warfare" Kuwait had waged through slant drilling into Iraq 's oil supplies while it had been under Iraqi protection.
The war with Iran had also seen the destruction of almost all of Iraq 's port facilities on the Persian Gulf cutting off Iraq 's main trade outlet. Many in Iraq, expecting a resumption of war with Iran in the future, felt that Iraq security could only be guaranteed by controlling more of the Gulf Coast, including more secure ports. Kuwait thus made a tempting target.
Former Iraqi President Saddam HusseinIdeologically, the invasion of Kuwait was justified through calls to Arab nationalism. Kuwait was described as a natural part of Iraq carved off by British imperialism. The annexation of Kuwait was described as a step on the way to greater Arab union. Other reasons were given as well. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein presented it as a way to restore the empire of Babylon in addition to the Arab nationalist rhetoric. The invasion was also closely tied to other events in the Middle East. The First Intifada by the Palestinians was raging, and most Arab states, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, were dependent on western alliances. Saddam thus presented himself as the one Arab statesman willing to stand up to Israel and the U.S.
Iraq and the United States pre-war
During the Iran-Iraq war, U.S.-Iraqi relations had warmed, as the U.S. found it useful to "tilt" toward Iraq. The Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department 's annual list of states that sponsor terrorism in 1982. Following the war, however, there were moves within the United States Congress to isolate Iraq diplomatically and economically over concerns about human rights violations, its dramatic military build-up, and hostility to Israel. Specifically, the Senate in 1988 unanimously passed the "Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988," which would have imposed sanctions on Iraq. The legislation died when the House balked as a result of intense lobbying against it by the Reagan administration. [1] (http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/1188/8811008.htm) Opposition to the regime in Iraq was thus shared by many on the left-wing as well as some neoconservatives, most prominently Paul Wolfowitz. These moves were disowned by high-ranking US senators like Robert Dole, who told Iraqi President Hussein that "Congress does not represent U.S. President George H. W. Bush or the government" and that Bush would veto any move toward sanctions against Iraq. (From the Iraqi transcript of the meeting, as published in Sifry et al, 1991.)
The relationship between Iraq and the United States remained close until the day Iraq invaded Kuwait, in the course of which the U.S. sold to Iraq "dual-use" items, such as helicopters which Iraq immediately deployed in its war with Iran. [2] (http://www.army.mil/professionalwriting/volumes/volume1/july_2003/7_03_2v2.html) In 1988, the U.S. government approved $500 million in credits to Iraq to buy U.S. farm commodities. On October 2, 1989, President George H.W. Bush signed secret National Security Directive 26, which begins, "Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security." [3] (http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsd/nsd26.pdf) With respect to Iraq, the directive stated, "Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East." In 1990, the US Department of Agriculture proposed allocating $1 billion in new credits to Iraq to purchase farming commodities.
An investigation by the Senate Banking Committee in 1994 determined that the U.S. Department of Commerce had approved the shipping of biological agents to Iraq during the mid 1980s, including Bacillus Anthracis (anthrax), later identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program, as well as Clostridium Botulinum, Histoplasma Capsulatum, Brucella Melitensis, and Clostridium Perfringens. The Committee report noted that each of these had been "considered by various nations for use in war." [4] (http://www.gulfweb.org/bigdoc/report/riegle1.html) Declassified U.S. government documents indicate that the U.S. government had confirmed that Iraq was using chemical weapons "almost daily" during the Iran-Iraq conflict as early as 1983. [5] (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/index.htm)
In late July, 1990, as negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait stalled, Iraq massed troops on Kuwait 's borders and summoned American ambassador April Glaspie for an unanticipated meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. In that meeting, Saddam outlined his grievances against Kuwait, while promising that he would not invade Kuwait before one more round of negotiations. Although Glaspie expressed concern over the troop buildup, some people perceived her answers as giving tacit approval for an invasion, by saying that the US "[has] no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait" (from the Iraqi transcript of the meeting, as published in Sifry). To emphasize this point, she also said at the meeting, "James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction." Although ambassador Glaspie shortly after left the foreign service, US sources say that she had handled everything "by the book" and had not signaled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein any approval for defying the Arab League 's Jeddah crisis squad, which had conducted the negotiations. However, Saddam 's expectations may have been influenced by a perception that the US just at this time was approving the reunification of Germany, another act that he considered to be nothing more than the nullification of an artificial, internal border.
In November 1989, CIA director William Webster met with the Kuwaiti head of security, Brigadier Fahd Ahmed Al-Fahd. Subsequent to Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait, Iraq claimed to have found a memorandum pertaining to their conversation. The Washington Post reported that Kuwaiti 's foreign minister fainted when confronted with this document at an Arab summit in August. Later, Iraq cited this memorandum as evidence of a CIA-Kuwaiti plot to destabilize Iraq economically and politically. The CIA and Kuwait have described the meeting as routine and the memorandum as a forgery. The document reads in part:
We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country 's government to delineate our common border. The Central Intelligence Agency gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that broad cooperation should be initiated between us on condition that such activities be coordinated at a high level.
Invasion of Kuwait
At the break of dawn on August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops crossed the Kuwaiti border with armor and infantry, occupying strategic posts throughout the country, including the Emir 's palace. The Kuwaiti Army was quickly overwhelmed, though they bought enough time for the Kuwaiti Air Force to flee to Saudi Arabia. Troops looted medical and food supplies, detained thousands of civilians and took over the media. Iraq detained thousands of Western visitors as hostages and later attempted to use them as bargaining chips. Hussein then installed a new Iraqi provincial governor, described as "liberation" from the Kuwaiti Emir; this was largely dismissed as war propaganda.
Diplomacy
Within hours of the initial invasion, the Kuwaiti and United States of America delegations requested a meeting of the UN Security Council, which passed Resolution 660, condemning the invasion and demanding a withdrawal of Iraqi troops. On August 3, the Arab League passed its own resolution condemning the invasion and demanding a withdrawal of Iraqi troops. The Arab League resolution also called for a solution to the conflict from within the Arab League, and warned against foreign intervention. On August 6, the Security Council passed Resolution 661, placing economic sanctions on Iraq.
The decision by the west to repel the Iraqi invasion had as much to do with preventing an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a nation of far more importance to the world than Kuwait. The rapid success of the Iraqi army against Kuwait had brought Iraq 's army within easy striking distance of the Hama oil fields, Saudi Arabia 's most valuable oil fields. Iraqi control of these fields as well as Kuwait and Iraqi reserves would have given it an unprecedented monopoly in the vital commodity. Saudi Arabia could put up little more resistance than Kuwait and the entire world believed the temptation for Saddam to further advance his ambitions would prove too great. The entire world — especially the oil hungry states of the United States, Europe and Japan — saw such an oil monopoly as very dangerous.
Iraq had a number of grievances with Saudi Arabia. The concern over debts stemming from the Iran-Iraq war was even greater when applied to Saudi Arabia, which Iraq owed some 26 billion dollars. The long desert border was also ill-defined. Rapidly after his victory over Kuwait Saddam began verbally attacking the Saudi kingdom. He argued that the American-supported Kingdom was an illegitimate guardian of holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Saddam combined the language of the Islamist groups that had recently fought in Afghanistan with the rhetoric Iran had long used to attack the Saudis.
The addition of Allahu Akbar to the flag of Iraq and images of Saddam praying in Kuwait were part of a plan to win the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and detach Islamist Mujahideen from Saudi Arabia. These attacks on Saudi Arabia escalated as western troops poured into the country.
President George H. W. Bush quickly announced that the US would launch a "wholly defensive" mission to prevent Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia - Operation Desert Shield [PRES], and US troops moved into Saudi Arabia on August 7. On August 8, Iraq declared parts of Kuwait to be extensions of the Iraqi province of Basra and the rest to be the 19th province of Iraq.
The United States navy mobilised two naval battle groups, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Independence, to the area [NAVY], where they were ready by August 8. The United States also sent the battleships USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin to the region, and they would later become the last battleships to actively participate in a foreign war. Military buildup continued from there, eventually reaching 500,000 troops. The consensus among military analysts is that until October, the American military forces in the area would have been insufficient to stop an invasion of Saudi Arabia had Iraq attempted one.
A long series of UN Security Council and Arab League resolutions were passed regarding the conflict. One of the most important was Resolution 678, passed on November 29, giving Iraq a withdrawal deadline of January 15 1991, and authorizing "all necessary means to uphold and implement Resolution 660", a diplomatic formulation authorizing the use of force.
The United States, especially Secretary of State James Baker, assembled a coalition of forces to join it in opposing Iraq, consisting of soldiers from 34 countries: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, The Netherlands, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States itself. US troops represented 74% of 660,000 troops in the theater of war. Many of the coalition forces were reluctant to join; some felt that the war was an internal Arab affair; others feared increasing American influence in Kuwait. In the end, many nations were persuaded by offers of economic aid or debt forgiveness. (Blum)
Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. and President Bush visit U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia on Thanksgiving Day, 1990.The United States went through a number of different public justifications for their involvement in the conflict. The first reasons given were the importance of oil to the American economy and the United States ' longstanding friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia [PRES]. However, some Americans were dissatisfied with these explanations and "No Blood For Oil" became a rallying cry for domestic peace activists, though opposition never reached the size of opposition to the Vietnam War. Later justifications for the war included Iraq 's history of human rights abuses under President Saddam Hussein, the potential that Iraq may develop nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction, and that "naked aggression [against Kuwait] will not stand." In Canada this was the main argument; Canada had long opposed unilateral aggression, including those by the United States, and used this as the argument for intervention.
Shortly after Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait, the organization Citizens for a Free Kuwait was formed in the US. It hired the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton for about $11 million, money from the Kuwaiti government. This firm went on to manufacture a fake campaign, which described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and letting them die on the floor. A video news release was widely distributed by US TV networks; false supporting testimony was given before Congress and before the UN Security Council. The fifteen-year-old girl testifying before Congress was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States; the supposed surgeon testifying at the UN was in fact a dentist who later admitted to having lied. [MCA] (For more, see Nurse Nayirah.)
Various peace proposals were floated, but none were agreed to. The United States insisted that the only acceptable terms for peace were Iraq 's full, unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. Iraq insisted that withdrawal from Kuwait must be "linked" to a simultaneous withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and Israeli troops from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon.
On January 12, 1991 the United States Congress authorized the use of military force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Soon after the other states in the coalition did the same.
Air campaign
A day after the deadline set in Resolution 678, the coalition launched a massive air campaign codenamed Operation Desert Storm: more than 1,000 sorties per day, beginning early morning on January 17, 1991. Weapons used included smart bombs, cluster bombs, daisy cutters and cruise missiles. Iraq responded by launching 8 Scud missiles into Israel the next day. The first priority for coalition forces was destruction of the Iraqi air force and anti-aircraft facilities. This was quickly achieved and for the duration of the war Coalition aircraft could operate largely unchallenged. Despite Iraq 's better-than-expected anti-aircraft capabilities, only one coalition aircraft was lost in the opening day of the war. Stealth aircraft were heavily used in this phase to elude Iraq 's extensive SAM systems and anti-aircraft weapons; once these were destroyed, other types of aircraft could more safely be used. The sorties were launched mostly from Saudi Arabia and the six coalition aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf.
The next Coalition targets were command and communication facilities. Saddam had closely micromanaged the Iraqi forces in the Iran-Iraq War and initiative at the lower levels was discouraged. Coalition planners hoped Iraqi resistance would quickly collapse if deprived of command and control. The first week of the air war saw a few Iraqi sorties but these did little damage, and thirty-eight Iraqi MiGs were shot down by Coalition planes. Soon after, the Iraqi airforce began fleeing to Iran. On January 23, Iraq began dumping approximately 1 million tons of crude oil into the gulf, causing the largest oil spill in history.
The third and largest phase of the air campaign targeted military targets throughout Iraq and Kuwait: Scud missile launchers, weapons of mass destruction sites, weapons research facilities and naval forces. About one third of the Coalition airpower was devoted to attacking Scuds. In addition, it targeted facilities useful for both the military and civilians: electricity production facilities, telecommunications equipment, port facilities, oil refineries and distribution, railroads and bridges. Two live nuclear reactors were bombed, in violation of the recently passed UN Resolution 45/52 banning such attacks. Electrical power facilities were destroyed across the country. At the end of the war, electricity production was at four percent of its pre-war levels. Bombs destroyed the utility of all major dams, most major pumping stations and many sewage treatment plants. In most cases, the Allies avoided hitting civilian-only facilities. However, on February 13 1991, two laser-guided "smart bombs" destroyed an air raid shelter in Baghdad killing hundreds of Iraqis. U.S. officials claimed that the bunker was a military communications center, but Western reporters have been unable to find evidence for this.
Iraq launched missile attacks on coalition bases in Saudi Arabia and on Israel, in the hopes of drawing Israel into the war and drawing other Arab states out of it. This strategy proved ineffective. Israel did not join the coalition, and all Arab states stayed in the coalition except Jordan, which remained officially neutral throughout. On January 29, Iraq attacked and occupied the abandoned Saudi city of Khafji with tanks and infantry. However, Battle of Khafji ended when Iraqis were driven back by Saudi Arabia and Qatar forces supported by U.S. Marines with close air support over the following two days.
Ground campaign A US Army convoy crosses the Iraqi desert.On February 22, 1991, Iraq agreed to a Soviet-proposed cease-fire agreement. The agreement called for Iraq to withdraw troops to pre-invasion positions within three weeks following a total cease-fire, and called for monitoring of the cease-fire and withdrawal to be overseen by the UN Security Council. The US rejected the proposal but said that retreating Iraqi forces would not be attacked, and gave twenty-four hours for Iraq to begin withdrawing forces.
On February 24, the US began Operation Desert Sabre, the ground portion of its campaign. US forces pulled plows along Iraqi trenches, burying their occupants alive. Soon after, a convoy of Marines penetrated deep into Iraqi territory, collecting thousands of deserting Iraqi troops, weakened and demoralized by the extensive air campaign. The US anticipated that Iraq might use chemical weapons; General Colin Powell later suggested that a US response to such an act might have been to destroy dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, drowning Baghdad in water, though this was never fully developed as a plan.
General Colin Powell briefs President George H. W. Bush and his advisors on the progress of the ground warThe United States originally hoped that Saddam would be overthrown in an internal coup, and used CIA assets in Iraq to organize a revolt. When a popular rebellion against Saddam began in southern Iraq, the United States did not support it due to the fact that the coalition refused to aid in an invasion (and also due to various policy changes within the United States). As a result, not only was the rebellion brutally subdued, but the main CIA operative who was tasked with organizing the revolt was disavowed and accused of "disobeying orders to not organize a revolt".
In their cowritten 1998 book, "A World Transformed" George Bush the Elder and Brent Scowcroft discussed regime change in Iraq:
Trying to eliminate Saddam [in 1991], extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guidelines about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep ', and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs... Would have have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable 'exit strategy ' we could see, violating another of our principles... Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome.". (quoted in Losing America, pg 154) The "Highway of Death"Iraq did not use chemical weapons and the allied advance was much swifter than US generals expected. On February 26, Iraqi troops began retreating out of Kuwait, setting fire to Kuwaiti oil fields as they left. A long convoy of retreating Iraqi troops — along with Iraqi and Palestinian civilians — formed along the main Iraq-Kuwait highway. This convoy was bombed so extensively by the Allies that it came to be known as the Highway of Death. One hundred hours after the ground campaign started, President Bush declared a ceasefire and on February 27 declared that Kuwait had been liberated. Journalist Seymour Hersh has charged that, two days after the ceasefire was declared, American troops led by Barry McCaffrey engaged in a systematic massacre of retreating Iraqi troops, in addition to some civilians. McCaffrey has denied the charges and an army investigation has cleared him. (Forbes, Daniel)
A peace conference was held in allied-occupied Iraq. At the conference, Iraq negotiated use of armed helicopters on their side of the temporary border. Soon after, these helicopters — and much of the Iraqi armed forces — were refocused toward fighting against a Shiite uprising in the south. In the North, Kurdish leaders took heart in American statements that they would support a people 's uprising and began fighting, in the hopes of triggering a coup. However, when no American support was forthcoming, Iraqi generals remained loyal and brutally crushed the Kurdish troops. Millions of Kurds fled across the mountains to Kurdish areas of Turkey and Iran. These incidents would later result in no-fly zones in both the North and the South. In Kuwait, the Emir 's dictatorship was restored and suspected Iraqi collaborators were attacked extra-judicially, especially Palestinians. Eventually, over 400,000 people were expelled from the country.
On March 10 1991, Operation Desert Farewell began to move 540,000 American troops out of the Persian Gulf.
Canadian involvement
Canada was one of the first nations to agree to condemn Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait and it quickly agreed to join the U.S. led coalition. In August Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent the destroyers HMCS Terra Nova and HMCS Athabaskan to enforce the trade blockade against Iraq. The supply ship HMCS Protecteur was also sent to aid the gathering coalition forces. When the UN authorized full use of force in the operation Canada sent a CF18 squadron with support personnel. Canada also sent a field hospital to deal with casualties from the ground war.
When the air war began Canada 's planes were integrated into the coalition force and provided air cover and attacked ground targets. This was the first time since the Korean War that Canadian forces had participated in combat operations.
Canada suffered no casualties during the conflict but since its end many veterans have complained of suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.
Casualties
Casualties During the War
Gulf War casualty numbers are controversial. Coalition military deaths seem to be around 378, with US forces suffering 148 battle-related and 145 non-battle-related deaths (included in the 378). The UK suffered 47 deaths, the Arab contingents had about 40 killed, and France lost 2 men. The largest single loss of Coalition forces happened on February 25, 1991 when an Iraqi Scud missile hit an American military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia killing 28 U.S. Army Reservists from Pennsylvania. The number of coalition wounded seems to have been less than 1,000.
Independent analysts generally agree the Iraqi death toll was well below initial post-war estimates. In the immediate aftermath of the war, these estimates ranged as high as 100,000 Iraqi troops killed and 300,000 wounded. According to "Gulf War Air Power Survey" by Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, (a report commissioned by the U.S. Air Force; 1993-ISBN 0-16-041950-6), there were an estimated 10-12,000 Iraqi combat deaths in the air campaign and as many as 10,000 casualties in the ground war. This analysis is based on enemy prisoner of war reports.
The Iraqi government claimed that 2,300 civilians died during the air campaign.
One infamous incident during the war highlighted the question of large-scale Iraqi combat deaths. This was the `bulldozer assault ' in which two brigades from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized)--The Big Red One--used plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury Iraqi soldiers defending the fortified "Saddam Line." While approximately 2,000 of the troops surrendered, escaping burial, one newspaper story reported that the U.S. commanders estimated thousands of Iraqi soldiers had been buried alive during the two-day assault February 24-25, 1991. However, like all other troop estimates made during the war, the estimated 8,000 Iraqi defenders was probably greatly inflated. While one commander thought the numbers might have been in the thousands, another reported his brigade buried between 80 and 250 Iraqis. After the war, the Iraqi government found 44 bodies.
Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/appendix/death.html
The Post-War Effects of Depleted Uranium
In 1998, Saddam government doctors reported that Coalition use of depleted uranium caused a massive increase in birth defects and cancer among Iraqis, particularly leukemia. The government doctors claimed they were unable to provide evidence linking depleted uranium to the cancer and birth defects because the sanctions prevented them from obtaining necessary testing equipment. Subsequently, a World Health Organization team visited Basra and proposed a study to investigate the causes of higher cancer rates in southern Iraq, but Saddam refused.
sources: "Iraqi cancers, birth defects blamed on U.S. depleted uranium" by Larry Johnson, Nov. 12 2002. "Depleted uranium shells propaganda target by Iraqis" by Michael Woods, March 26, 2003.
The World Health Organization was nonetheless able to assess the health risks of Depleted Uranium in a post-combat environment thanks to a 2001 mission to Kosovo. A 2001 WHO fact sheet on depleted uranium concludes: "because DU is only weakly radioactive, very large amounts of dust (on the order of grams) would have to be inhaled for the additional risk of lung cancer to be detectable in an exposed group. Risks for other radiation-induced cancers, including leukaemia, are considered to be very much lower than for lung cancer." In addition, "no reproductive or developmental effects have been reported in humans" as a result of DU exposure.
source: http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/env/du/en/
The U.S. Department of State has also published a fact sheet on depleted uranium. It states that "World Health Organization and other scientific research studies indicate Depleted Uranium poses no serious health risks" and "Depleted Uranium does not cause birth defects. Iraqi military use of chemical and nerve agents in the 1980 's and 1990 's is the likely cause of alleged birth defects among Iraqi children." In regard to cancer claims, the fact sheet states that "According to environmental health experts, it is medically impossible to contract leukemia as a result of exposure to uranium or depleted uranium," and "Cancer rates in almost 19,000 highly exposed uranium industry workers who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory projects between 1943 and 1947 have been examined, and no excess cancers were observed through 1974. Other epidemiological studies of lung cancer in uranium mill and metal processing plant workers have found either no excess cancers or attributed them to known carcinogens other than uranium, such as radon."
source: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/state/1007dufactsheet.htm
However, there are claims that the effect is more severe as the Depleted Uranium ammunition would fragment into tiny particles when it hit the target. In addition, Iraq’s arid climate meant that tiny particles of DU were likely to be blown around and inhaled by civilians for years to come.
http://www.sundayherald.com/40096 http://www.ccnr.org/du_hague.html http://www.google.com.my/search?q=depleted+uranium+cancer&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N
Cost Kuwaiti oil wells on fire.The cost of the war to the United States was calculated by Congress to be $61.1 billion. Other sources estimate up to $71 billion. About $53 billion of that amount was paid by different countries around the world: $36 billion by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States; $16 billion by Germany and Japan (who were not part of the coalition due to the treaties that ended WWII). About 25% of Saudi Arabia 's contribution was paid in form of in-kind services to the troops, such as food and transportation.
US troops represented about 74% of the combined force, and the global cost was therefore higher. The United Kingdom, for instance, spent $4.1 billion during this war.
Media
The Gulf War was a "televised war". For the first time people all over the world were able to watch live pictures of missiles hitting their targets and fighters taking off from aircraft carriers. Allied forces were keen to demonstrate the "pin-point" accuracy of their weapons.
The big-three network anchors led the network news coverage of the war. ABC 's Peter Jennings, CBS 's Dan Rather, and NBC 's Tom Brokaw were anchoring their evening newscasts when air strikes began on January 16, 1991. ABC News correspondent Gary Shepard, reporting live from Baghdad, told Jennings of the quietness of the city. But, moments later, Shepard was back on the air as flashes of light were seen on the horizon and tracer fire was heard on the ground. On CBS, viewers were watching a report from correspondent Allen Pizzey, who was also reporting from Baghdad, when the war began. Rather, after the report was finished, announced that there were unconfirmed reports of flashes in Baghdad and heavy air traffic at bases in Saudi Arabia. On the "NBC Nightly News", correspondent Mike Boettcher reported unusual air activity in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Moments later, Brokaw announced to his viewers that the air attack had begun. But it was CNN who gained the most popularity for their coverage. CNN correspondents John Holliman and Peter Arnett and CNN anchor Bernard Shaw relayed telephone reports from the Al-Rashid Hotel as the air strikes began. Newspapers all over the world also covered the war and "Time" magazine published a special issue dated January 28, 1991, the headline "WAR IN THE GULF" emblazoned on the cover over a picture of Baghdad taken as the war began.
The US policy regarding media freedom was much more restrictive than in the Vietnam War. The policy had been spelled out in a Pentagon document entitled "Annex Foxtrot." Most of the press information came from briefings organized by the military. Only selected journalists were allowed to visit the front lines or conduct interviews with soldiers. Those visits were always conducted in the presence of officers, and were subject to both prior approval by the military and censorship afterward. This was ostensibly to protect sensitive information from being revealed to Iraq, but often in practice it was used to protect politically embarrassing information from being revealed. This policy was heavily influenced by the military 's experience with the Vietnam War, which it believed it had lost due to public opposition within the United States.
At the same time, the coverage of this war was new in its instantaneousness. Many American journalists remained stationed in the Iraqi capital Baghdad throughout the war, and footage of incoming missiles was carried almost immediately on the nightly television news and the cable news channels such as CNN. A British crew from CBS News (David Green & Andy Thompson) equipped with satellite transmission equipment travelled with the front line forces and having transmitted live tv pictures of the fighting en route, arrived the day before the forces in Kuwait City, transmitting live television from the city and covering the entrance of the Arab forces the following day.
Consequences Saddam Hussein in a propaganda picture overseeing a war scene in the foregroundFollowing the uprisings in the North and South, no-fly zones were established to help protect the Shiite and Kurdish people groups in South and North Iraq, respectively. These no-fly zones (originally north of the 36th parallel and south of the 32nd) were monitored mainly by the US and the UK. Combined, they flew more sorties over Iraq in the eleven years following the war than were flown during the war. These sorties dropped bombs nearly every other day. However, the greatest amount of bombs was dropped during two sustained bombing campaigns: Operation Desert Strike, which lasted a few weeks in September 1996, and Operation Desert Fox, in December 1998.
Widespread infrastructure destruction hurt the Iraqi population. Years after the war electricity production was less than a quarter its pre-war level. The destruction of water treatment facilities caused sewage to flow directly into the Tigris River, from which civilians drew drinking water, resulting in widespread disease.
Economic sanctions were kept in place following the war, pending a weapons inspection regime with which Iraq never fully cooperated. Iraq was allowed to import certain products under the UN 's Oil for Food program. A 1998 UNICEF report found that the sanctions resulted in an increase in 90,000 deaths per year [IAC]. The sanctions on Iraq and the American military presence in Saudi Arabia contributed to the United States ' increasingly negative image within the Arab world.
A United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on weapons was established, to monitor Iraq 's compliance with restrictions on weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Iraq accepted some and refused other weapons inspections. The team found some evidence of biological weapons programs at one site and non-compliance at many other sites.
In 1997, Iraq expelled all US members of the inspection team, alleging that the United States was using the inspections as a front for espionage, which the U.S. later admitted was true. The team returned for an even more turbulent time period between 1997 and 1999; one member of the weapons inspection team, US Marine Scott Ritter, resigned in 1998, alleging that the United States was blocking investigations because they did not want a full-scale confrontation with Iraq. He also alleged that the CIA was using the weapons inspection teams as a cover for covert operations inside Iraq. In 1999, the team was replaced by a new team which began inspections in 2002. For more on these inspections, see Iraq disarmament crisis. In 2002, Iraq — and especially Saddam Hussein — became targets in the United States ' War on Terrorism, leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.
Many returning coalition soldiers reported illnesses following their participation in the Gulf War, a phenomenon known as Gulf war syndrome. The number of children born in soldier 's families with serious congenital defects or serious illnesses is also alarmingly high, 67%, according to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs. [6] (http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/4.html) There has been widespread speculation and disagreement about the causes of the syndrome and birth defects (though the government has attempted to downplay the seriousness of the situation). A report published in 1994 by the General Accounting Office said that American troops were exposed to 21 potential "reproductive toxicants". Some factors considered as possibly causal include exposure to radioactive depleted and non-depleted uranium used in munitions, oil fires, or the anthrax vaccine.
The People 's Republic of China (whose army in many ways resembled the Iraqi army) was surprised at the performance of American technology on the battlefield. The swiftness of the Coalition victory resulted in an overall change in Chinese military thinking and began a movement to technologically modernize the People 's Liberation Army.
A crucial result of the Gulf War, according the Gilles Kepel, was the sharp revival in Islamic extremism. The change of face by Saddam 's secular regime did little to draw support from Islamist groups. However it, combined with the Saudi Arabian alliance with the United States and Saudi Arabia being seen as being on the same side of Israel dramatically eroded that regime 's legitimacy. Activity of Islamist groups against the Saudi regime increased dramatically. In part to win back favour with Islamist groups Saudi Arabia greatly increased funding to those that would support the regime. Throughout the newly independent states of Central Asia the Saudis paid for the distribution of millions of Korans and the building of hundreds of mosques for extremist groups. In Afghanistan the Saudi regime became a leading patron of the Taliban in that nation 's civil war.
Technology Missouri launches a Tomahawk missile.Precision guided munitions (PGMs, also "smart bombs"), such as the United States Air Force guided missile AGM-130, were heralded as key in allowing military strikes to be made with, supposedly, a minimum of civilian casualties. Specific buildings in downtown Baghdad could be bombed whilst journalists in their hotels watched cruise missiles fly by. PGMs amounted to approximately 7.4% of all bombs dropped by the coalition. Other bombs included cluster bombs, which break up into clusters of bomblets, and daisy cutters, 15,000-pound bombs which can "[disintegrate] everything within hundreds of yards". (Walker)
Among the numerous special forces from the United States, the Light Armoured Recon (LAR) played a powerful role in the removal of Iraqi troops. Light Armored Vehicles (LAV) provided logistic command centers, logistics posts, mortar positions and long range suppressing fire with their powerful 50mm guns.
Scud is a low-technology rocket bomb that Iraq used, launching them into both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Some bombs caused extensive casualties, others caused little damage. Concerns were raised of possible chemical or biological warheads on these rockets, but if they existed they were not used.
America 's Patriot missile defense was used for the first time in combat. The US military claimed to have shot down many Scud rockets in flight, with an effectiveness of 100%. Afterwards, it was demonstrated that the Patriots ' effectiveness was primarily psychological: some claim that their effectiveness was as low as between 0% to 10%. However, there really is no good evidence to prove whether the Scuds were intercepted or not, so no figures are really backed up by undisputed facts. The higher figures tend to be calculated based on the percentage of Scud warheads which were known to have impacted and exploded compared to the number of Scud missiles launched, but due to factors such as duds, misses and impacts which were not reported, this is not really a good way to measure effectiveness. The lowest figures are typically based upon the number of interceptions where there is proof that the warhead was hit by at least one missile, but due to the way the poorly built Al-Hussein (Scud derivative) missiles broke up in flight, it was often hard to tell which piece was the warhead, and there were few radar tracks which were actually stored which could be analyzed later, hence the very low figures. Realistically the actual performance was probably somewhere inbetween. The US Army maintains the Patriot delivered a "miracle performance" in the Gulf War.
Global Positioning System units were key in enabling coalition units to navigate easily across the desert. Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and satellite communication systems were also important.
Military awards This T-shirt was worn by members of the Florida National Guard in Kuwait during the Gulf War. The shirt is stylized in a parody of Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts, reading "Hard Luck Cafe" in a circle with a background of an oil field. Below the logo reads, "Kuwait City, Kuwait: under new management."
The Kuwait Liberation Medal.The U.S. Southwest Asia Service Medal was established in March of 1991 to recognize those U.S. military members who had participated in the Gulf War. The governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also issued a medal, known as the Kuwait Liberation Medal, which was first created in 1994 and is an authorized foreign military decoration for wear on U.S. military uniforms.
The Gulf War : 'Triumph Without Victory? ' by MAJ Lim Yew Hock The Gulf War began on 2 August 1990 when Iraqi troops poured across the Kuwaiti border. The Kuwaiti resistance was crushed within two days. Following this unprovoked aggression, the United Nations (UN) condemned the act and imposed sanctions of increasing toughness which culminated in the UN Resolution 6781, giving 15 January 1991 as the deadline for the unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi troops from Kuwait. It also empowered the US-led coalition forces to use "all necessary means"2 to drive the Iraqi forces out should they fail to comply.
The deadline came and went, and on the night of 16 January 1991, allied aircraft and cruise missiles attacked command and communications targets and air defence sites in Iraq. The allies ' strategic air campaign set the stage for launching the land forces on 24 February 1991 after Iraq failed to meet a second deadline. The allied offensive burst on the Iraqi forces over a 500-km front, capturing tens of thousands of Iraqi prisoners. On 28 February 1991, after exactly 100 hours of land battle, a totally defeated Iraq agreed to rescind the annexation of Kuwait, accepting the various UN Resolutions.
While the world marvelled at the swift and overwhelming victory of the allied forces over the Iraqis, some critics and war analysts criticised George Bush for failing to complete his mission in the Persian Gulf by allowing Saddam Hussein to survive. There were debates on why George Bush did not go further to eliminate the root cause of the war - Saddam Hussein himself. In particular, modern historian Brian Bond, in his book "The Pursuit of Victory - From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein" commented :
"The ironic result of the Gulf War seems to be either Saddam Hussein will be left in power to build up his forces for renewed aggression or, by some means short of another great coalition war, he will have to be deposed. There can rarely have been a case in history where the chasm between a decisive military victory and an unsatisfactory political outcome has been so wide. It was a "triumph without victory".3
It is no wonder that Brian Bond made such a statement. Today, almost 10 years since the end of the Gulf War, with both George Bush and John Major out of office, Saddam Hussein is still very much in power and in control of Iraq. Although he had yet to "build up his forces for renewed aggression", there was enough left of his forces for him to stage a massive rampage to crush the Kurdish uprising in northern Iraqi a few months after the Gulf War. Hundreds of Kurds were executed and thousands more were arrested. There were also reports of cruelties and atrocities committed which fuelled the criticism that Saddam Hussein should not have been allowed to survive in the first place. In the ensuing months to come, Saddam Hussein also showed defiance against complying with the UN Resolutions that he had agreed upon by not co-operating with the UN Weapons Inspection officers.
So was the Gulf Campaign really a "triumph without victory" for the coalition forces? This essay looks at the issue using Clausewitz 's ideas on the relationship between the political purpose and the military objectives.
War as an Instrument of Policy
Carl von Clausewitz, the great military thinker of the 17th century, emphasised the central role of politics in war. "The political object is a goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose," according to Clausewitz.4 He viewed war as "an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will", stating that war comes about because of 'some political object ' and that 'war is therefore an act of policy '.5
Defeating the enemy is not an end in itself but a means to achieve political objectives. It is the political objectives of a war that determine the form of the war and its intensity. The political policy determines the nature of the war, and political circumstances accordingly shape strategy.6
Besides being the central motivation for war, politics is also a key consideration in determining the end of war. As Clausewitz stated, "Since war is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifice made for it in magnitude and also its duration. Once expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political purpose, the purpose must be renounced."7 Hence, besides the strategy that is being governed by political considerations, the decision to terminate war is also controlled by its political objectives.
Political Objectives of the Gulf War
The political objectives of the US-led coalition forces were clearly spelt out by George Bush in an address to his nation on 8 August, 1990:
"Four simple principles guide our policy. First, we seek the immediate, unconditional and complete withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Second, Kuwait 's legitimate government must be restored to replace the puppet regime. And third, my administration, as had been the case with every President from President Roosevelt to President Reagan, is committed to the security and stability of the Persian Gulf. And fourth, I am determined to protect the lives of American citizens abroad."8
Throughout the Persian Gulf crisis, the political goals of the coalition remained paramount. As the national, coalition, and theatre strategies shifted, the campaign plan was adapted to ensure that military action could adequately support those political goals established at the very beginning.9
Were these political objectives met? The first objective was situation-specific and was translated into the key military objective for liberating Kuwait. It was the main focus of the coalition forces throughout the campaign. This objective was met at the end of the Gulf War when the coalition forces were able to eject all Iraqi forces from Kuwait city. The second objective was also met when, following the withdrawal of the Iraqi forces, the legitimate government of Kuwait was restored to begin the uphill task of rebuilding the country. Furthermore, with Saddam Hussein 's unconditional acceptance of the UN Resolution 68710 , one can safely conclude that the first two objectives were accomplished.
As for the latter two objectives, however, it is not obvious whether they were met at the end of the war. They were more of reiterations of traditional, longer-term goals11 , and were the cause of debates on whether the termination of the war was premature.
Destruction of Saddam Hussein
Was the destruction of Saddam Hussein, be it his death or his removal from power, an objective of the coalition war effort? However desired or hoped, the destruction of Saddam Hussein was never stated as a political goal, presumably because it was not acceptable to the governments supporting the general US effort.12 The Soviet Union and China, both members of the UN Security Council, stated that they were generally supportive of the coalition effort so long as the US objectives did not extend to a change of regime in Iraq.13 Furthermore, the UN mandate permitting the liberation of Kuwait made no reference to the invasion of Iraq.14
Nevertheless, it was the unofficial but widely assumed Allied war aim that an overwhelming military defeat would lead to the flight or enforced removal of Saddam Hussein.15 GEN Norman Schwarzkopf also mentioned, "At the strategic level we decided that Saddam Hussein was the key, but that we could do nothing about him legally and ethically. We could and did isolate him and cause the battle to be fought without centralised command."16
What were the possible reasons for George Bush not pressing on to Baghdad? Let us now try to understand why George Bush terminated the war and not push on to Baghdad and the considerations that he could have had.
Security and Stability of the Persian Gulf
The third political objective of the coalition forces was the security and stability of the Persian Gulf region. The first step towards achieving this was ensuring that Saddam Hussein did not have the capability to project military power and weapons of mass destruction beyond its borders. To achieve this, the destruction of the Republican Guard was the focus of the coalition effort. Saddam Hussein 's power base was heavily dependent on the continued existence of the Republican Guard, as was his ability to defend Kuwait. It possessed the bulk of his offensive force projection capability and served as the heart of the domestic power base to retain control of the Iraqi government. Elimination of the Republican guard, if totally successful, would have eliminated a major source of his power.17
Towards the end of the war, Iraqi armoured forces were decimated and the elite Republican Guard was rendered ineffective. Thus Saddam Hussein 's military power projection capability was clipped. Saddam Hussein had only about 500 tanks left from the initial 4,000 tanks. This was considered as "not enough left at all to be a regional threat to the region".18
As part of the cease fire agreement, the UN Resolution 687 also required Saddam Hussein to grant access to UN Weapons Inspection teams to inspect any suspicious installations that might be capable of producing weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Thus, any other potential threat was also checked. Some may argue that Saddam Hussein should have been removed from power to ensure permanent security and stability in the region. However, there were others who were of the opinion that it was critical that Iraq remained an integrated country and not be fragmented so as to maintain the balance of power in the region. If Iraq was completely destroyed, either militarily or politically, a struggle between Syria and Iran, the next leading powers, was likely. The conflict might have expanded beyond Kuwait and Southeast Iraq and the whole region might have plunged into a series of factional wars - described by some as a 'regional Beirut '.19
There were further speculations that George Bush deliberately held back support to the Kurdish and Shiite revolts and allowed Saddam Hussein to successfully suppress these domestic uprisings. If the Kurdish and Shiite revolts following the ground war had been allowed to succeed, Iraq might have disintegrated, thereby generating profound instability. Both the American and Saudi governments had been frightened by intelligence reports that Iranian-trained brigades had crossed into Iraq to provide the backbone to the Shiite revolt . 20
The conflict between ensuring the integrity of Iraq and disposing Saddam Hussein was that there was no obvious candidate, who was suitable or capable of holding the country together, available to replace him. Given Iraq 's complex and volatile political system, it was believed that only someone with a firm hand was able to safely run the country - someone like Saddam if not Saddam himself. No Arab leader in the coalition sought Saddam Hussein 's removal: they were of the view that they had coexisted with the government of Saddam Hussein and would be able to coexist and even co-operate with him.21 This same opinion generally prevailed among most governments in the region, with the exception of the Syrian government, which voiced support for Saddam Hussein 's removal. Even the Israelis could see the advantages in having Saddam Hussein remain in power. With a new Iraqi dictator, it might soon be 'business as usual ' when it came to arms supplies if the UN relaxes its supervision of Iraq. So long as Saddam Hussein was in power, he would be under close scrutiny and Iraq would be isolated and excluded from regional power plays.22
In view of all the above considerations, not eliminating Saddam Hussein totally appeared to be the lesser of the two evils. Thus it would appear that the decision not to pursue Saddam Hussein in Baghdad was in line with the third objective.
Minimise Casualties
The fourth political objective called for the casualty rate to be kept to an absolute minimum. This may be seen as having stemmed from the fear of a repeat Vietnam-style imbroglio, and hence the twin imperatives of minimising casualties and avoiding a prolonged conflict.23 Had the coalition forces pushed on to Baghdad, they would have inevitably been involved in urban warfare, generally characterised by high casualties rates - rates which coalition political leadership and citizens may have been unwilling to accept.24
The coalition leaders ' desire to limit friendly casualties therefore formed the basis for the decision to suspend offensive operations and the conduct of the operations was guided by the principle of proportional use of force. There was no longer a need to risk coalition lives unnecessarily when further gains were deemed to be only marginal. There was also a desire to prevent any wanton destruction of Iraqi forces since they had been effectively ejected from Kuwait and the legitimate Kuwaiti government restored. This would have been especially relevant since some Iraqi forces would definitely be required to maintain the territorial integrity of the Iraqi state.25 This decision and its considerations were clearly stated by Gen Norman Schwarzkopf, "At that point we were at risk of killing Iraqi teenagers and American teenagers for no reason. The mission had been accomplished".26
The decision to rapidly withdraw from southern Iraq was also due to the desire to minimise casualties by reducing the exposure of those ground forces to the casualty-producing effects of minefields, unexploded munitions and incidental contacts with trapped Iraqi forces withdrawing. Withdrawal from the Iraqi territory would tangibly demonstrate efforts to safeguard lives of US and coalition personnel while living up to the promises made to regional states, the Soviet Union, and UN members that the military objectives were limited. At this point, the greater political goals for regional stability and a "new order" based on international law and negotiated resolution of disputes were paramount.27
Coalition Integrity
During the Gulf War, the integrity of the coalition forces was arguably its strategic centre of gravity. Saddam Hussein 's provocation of Israel was an aimed attack on this centre of gravity.28 By going into Baghdad, the war would inevitably be prolonged and the risk of Israel getting drawn in would increase. The situation would have been exacerbated had Israel embarked on military operations against Iraq. George Bush said that any decision to push on further into Iraq and target Saddam Hussein would have split the coalition as the move would not have been supported by some Arab countries and even some European states.29 Many experts and war analysts agree that if Israel had been dragged into the war as Saddam Hussein had threatened, then Arab support for the coalition would have disintegrated.30
To protect the integrity of the coalition forces, it was reported that the US put a great deal of pressure on Israel to resist being drawn into the battle and that the US would respond for Israel to any attack on that country.31 Israel had wanted to retaliate after the Iraqi Scud missile attacks but George Bush warned that he would not give them the IFF (Identification Friendly or Foe)32 codes and hence the Israeli airforce risked the threat of friendly fire.33 In response, George Bush also promptly dispatched a high-level US negotiating team to Israel and deployed Patriot missiles in Israel. This was further reinforced by the high priority subsequently allocated to 'Scud hunting '.34 Thus great effort had been made to contain the war to minimise destabilising the region as well as to curb the casualty rate.
Public Opinion And Support
Another probable consideration that George Bush had was that of public opinion and domestic support. Towards the end of the war, the withdrawing forces fleeing Kuwait were a disorderly rabble and were trapped along the road to Basra. They were attacked by waves of aircraft with hundreds of vehicles destroyed and thousands of casualties inflicted. The scenes of endless carnage were broadcast worldwide and dubbed, the "Highway of Death" and a "turkey shoot" by the newspapers. This created much upheaval and George Bush, sensing that any more carnage would lead to public revulsion, called a halt to the operation.35
Anti-Americanism
Had the coalition gone ahead to destroy Saddam Hussein, they would subsequently have had to ensure peace in the region - a peace made difficult by the power vacuum left by the absent Iraqi army. The resultant instability in the region could have ranged well beyond the borders of a single nation.36 The Bush administration was strongly opposed to assuming responsibility for governing Iraq. It feared that US forces would become bogged down in the quagmire of Iraqi politics and a welcomed liberation force would soon turn into an unwanted army occupation.37 Had the fighting carried on, or the US military presence been perceived as more permanent, the regime in power might also have faced an overthrow as anti-Americanism overwhelmed economic concerns.38 Again, the threat to the region 's stability prompted the termination of the war.
Self-destruction of Saddam Hussein
Finally, assuming that George Bush had really wanted Saddam Hussein removed from power, he was likely to favour an internal revolt by Saddam 's people rather than initiate any action on his part. The most notable evidence of this was in a statement where he invited the Iraqi people to "take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside".39
In March 1991, George Bush was given an intelligence forecast predicting that Saddam Hussein would be out of office within a year. This same message also came from the Arab members of the coalition, who did not believe that Saddam Hussein would survive the post-war turmoil in Iraq.40 This could have prompted George Bush to suspend his operation and await the inevitable fall of Saddam Hussein.
Conclusion
Did George Bush "goof" up in letting Saddam Hussein survive or was it a deliberate decision to allow him to survive? Nearly a decade after the end of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein is still in power, but he is very much defanged and contained. He did not manage to rebuild his war machine or carry out more acts of aggression towards his neighbours. The casualty rate of the coalition forces was kept to an absolute minimum and the threat of further instability was removed by the early termination of the war. Hence, it can be concluded that the third and fourth political objectives were met.
Since all the political objectives were met, as Clausewitz propounds (that war is just a means to achieving political objectives), the coalition had indeed triumphed even though Saddam Hussein had not been totally eliminated. It is also according to the Clausewitzian view that the war terminated at a point where no further unnecessary sacrifice was made. On the other hand, a decisive military victory with Saddam Hussein ferreted out and totally destroyed would have in contrast, been a hollow victory, as too many lives would have been lost. In such as situation, the political objectives would not have been accomplished and according to Clausewitz, the essence of the war would have been lost.
From the political standpoint, George Bush had made the correct decision to terminate the war after achieving the political objectives and not to march on to Baghdad to eliminate Saddam Hussein. Seen in this light, Brian Bond 's stand that the Gulf War was a "triumph without victory" cannot stand.
Economic consequences of the Iraq War
From dKosopedia, the free political encyclopedia.
Table of contents [show]
Prewar economic analysis
William Nordhaus, Professor of Economics at Yale university, provided the most comprehensive prewar analysis of the economic consequences of a war in Iraq. He published a non-technical version of his study in a December 5, 2002 article in the New York Review of Books.
Consequences for Iraqi citizens
• Fatalities
• Non-fatal injuries
• Property destruction
• Foregone GDP
• Environmental costs
Consequences for US citizens
• Fatalities
• Non-fatal injuries
• Budgeted government expenditures
• Foregone GDP
• Elevated oil prices
Other consequences
• Costs of non US coalition partners
• Environmental costs to Iraq 's neighbors
Gulf War
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Gulf War I)
See also: 2003 invasion of Iraq and Gulf War (disambiguation)
C Company, 1st Battalion, The Staffordshire Regiment, 1st UK Armoured Division
The 1991 Gulf War was a conflict between Iraq and a coalition force of 34 nations mandated by the United Nations and led by the United States.
The lead up to the war began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, which was met with immediate economic sanctions by the United Nations against Iraq. Hostilities commenced in January 1991, resulting in a decisive victory for the coalition forces, which drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait with minimal coalition deaths. The main battles were aerial and ground combat within Iraq, Kuwait, and bordering areas of Saudi Arabia. The war did not expand outside the immediate Iraq/Kuwait/Saudi border region, although Iraq fired missiles on Israeli cities.
Other common names for the conflict include the War in the Gulf, Iraq-Kuwait conflict, UN-Iraq conflict, Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Desert Sabre, 1990 Gulf War (for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait), 1991 Gulf War (1990-1991), the Second Gulf War (to distinguish it from the Iran-Iraq war) and Gulf War Sr. and First Gulf War (to distinguish it from the 2003 invasion of Iraq). In Iraq, the war is often colloquially called simply Um M 'aārak ("the Mother of All Battles").
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Causes
• 2 Iraq and the United States pre-war
• 3 Invasion of Kuwait
• 4 Diplomacy
• 5 Air campaign
• 6 Ground campaign
• 7 Coalition involvement o 7.1 Canada
• 8 Casualties o 8.1 Casualties During the War o 8.2 The Post-War Effects of Depleted Uranium
• 9 Cost
• 10 Media
• 11 Consequences
• 12 Technology
• 13 Military awards
• 14 Films
• 15 Related articles
• 16 Further reading
[edit]
Causes
Prior to World War I, under the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913, Kuwait was considered to be an autonomous caza within Ottoman Iraq. Following the war, Kuwait fell under British rule and later became an independent emirate. However, Iraqi officials did not accept the legitimacy of Kuwaiti independence or the authority of the Kuwaiti Emir. Iraq never recognized Kuwait 's sovereignty and in the 1960s, the United Kingdom deployed troops to Kuwait to deter an Iraqi annexation.
During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Kuwait was allied with Iraq, largely due to desiring Iraqi protection from Shi 'ite Iran. After the war, Iraq was heavily indebted to several Arab countries, including a $14 billion debt to Kuwait. Iraq hoped to repay its debts by raising the price of oil through OPEC oil production cuts, but instead, Kuwait increased production, lowering prices, in an attempt to leverage a better resolution of their border dispute. In addition, Iraq began to accuse Kuwait of slant drilling into neighboring Iraqi oil fields, and furthermore charged that it had performed a collective service for all Arabs by acting as a buffer against Iran and that therefore Kuwait and Saudi Arabia should negotiate or cancel Iraq 's war debts. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 's primary two-fold justification for the war was a blend of the assertion of Kuwaiti territory being an Iraqi province arbitrarily cut off by imperialism, with the use of annexation as retaliation for the "economic warfare" Kuwait had waged through slant drilling into Iraq 's oil supplies while it had been under Iraqi protection.
The war with Iran had also seen the destruction of almost all of Iraq 's port facilities on the Persian Gulf, cutting off Iraq 's main trade outlet. Many in Iraq, expecting a resumption of war with Iran in the future, felt that Iraq 's security could only be guaranteed by controlling more of the Gulf Coast, including more secure ports. Kuwait thus made a tempting target.
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
Ideologically, the invasion of Kuwait was justified through calls to Arab nationalism. Kuwait was described as a natural part of Iraq carved off by British imperialism. The annexation of Kuwait was described as a step on the way to greater Arab union. Other reasons were given as well. Hussein presented it as a way to restore the empire of Babylon in addition to the Arab nationalist rhetoric. The invasion was also closely tied to other events in the Middle East. The First Intifada by the Palestinians was raging, and most Arab states, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, were dependent on western alliances. Saddam thus presented himself as the one Arab statesman willing to stand up to Israel and the U.S.
[edit]
Iraq and the United States pre-war
Prior to the Iran-Iraq War, U.S.-Iraqi relations were cool. The U.S. was concerned with Iraq 's belligerence toward Israel and disapproval of moves towards peace with other Arab states. It also condemned Iraqi support for various Arab and Palestinian nationalist groups such as Abu Nidal, which led to its inclusion on the incipient State Department list of states that sponsor terrorism on December 29, 1979. The U.S. remained officially neutral during the outbreak of hostilities in the Iran-Iraq War, as it had previously been humiliated by a 444 day long Iran hostage crisis and expected that Iran was not likely to win. In March 1982, however, Iran began a successful counteroffensive (Operation Undeniable Victory). In a bid to open the possibility of relations to Iraq, the country was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Ostensibly this was because of improvement in the regime 's record, although former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense Noel Koch later stated, "No one had any doubts about [the Iraqis '] continued involvement in terrorism....The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran." [1]
With Iran 's newfound success in the war and its rebuff of a peace offer in July, arms sales from other states (most importantly the USSR, France, Egypt, and starting that year, China) reached a record spike in 1982, but an obstacle remained to any potential U.S.-Iraqi relationship - Abu Nidal continued to operate with official support in Baghdad. When the group was expelled to Syria in November 1983, the Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld as a special envoy to cultivate ties.
From 1983 to 1990, the US government approved around $200 million in arms sales to Iraq, according to the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI). [2] These sales amounted to less than 1% of the total arms sold to Iraq in the relevant period, though the US also sold helicopters which, although designated for civilian use, were immediately deployed by Iraq in its war with Iran. [3]
An investigation by the Senate Banking Committee in 1994 determined that the U.S. Department of Commerce had approved, for the purpose of research, the shipping of dual use biological agents to Iraq during the mid 1980s, including Bacillus Anthracis (anthrax), later identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program, as well as Clostridium Botulinum, Histoplasma Capsulatum, Brucella Melitensis, and Clostridium Perfringens. The Committee report noted that each of these had been "considered by various nations for use in war." [4] Declassified U.S. government documents indicate that the U.S. government had confirmed that Iraq was using chemical weapons "almost daily" during the Iran-Iraq conflict as early as 1983. [5]
Chiefly, the U.S. government provided Iraq with economic aid. Iraq 's war with Iran, and the consequent disruption in its oil export business, had caused the country to enter a deep debt. U.S. government economic assistance allowed Hussein to continue using resources for the war which would have otherwise had to have been diverted. Between 1983 and 1990, Iraq received $5 billion in credits from the Commodity Credit Corporation program run by the Department of Agriculture, beginning at $400 million per year in 1983 and increasing to over $1 billion per year in 1988 and 1989, finally coming to an end after another $500 million was granted in 1990. [6] Besides agricultural credits, the U.S. also provided Hussein with other loans. In 1985 the U.S. Export-Import Bank extended more than $684 million in credits to Iraq to build an oil pipeline through Jordan with the construction being undertaken by Californian construction firm Bechtel Corporation. [7] [8]
Following the war, however, there were moves within the Congress of the United States to isolate Iraq diplomatically and economically over concerns about human rights violations, its dramatic military build-up, and hostility to Israel. Specifically, the Senate in 1988 unanimously passed the "Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988," which would have imposed sanctions on Iraq. The legislation died when the House balked as a result of intense lobbying against it by the Reagan administration. [9]
These moves were disowned by some Congressmen though some U.S. officials, such as Reagan 's head of Policy Planning Staff at the State Dept. and Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs Paul Wolfowitz disagreed with giving support to the Iraqi regime.
The relationship between Iraq and the United States remained collaborative until the day Iraq invaded Kuwait. On October 2, 1989, President George H.W. Bush signed secret National Security Directive 26, which begins, "Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security." [10] With respect to Iraq, the directive stated, "Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East."
In late July, 1990, as negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait stalled, Iraq massed troops on Kuwait 's borders and summoned American ambassador April Glaspie for an unanticipated meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Two transcripts of that meeting have been produced, both of them controversial. According to the transcripts, Saddam outlined his grievances against Kuwait, while promising that he would not invade Kuwait before one more round of negotiations. In the version published by The New York Times on September 23, 1990, Glaspie expressed concern over the troop buildup, but went on to say:
[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late '60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via [Chadli] Klibi [then Arab League General Secretary] or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.
Some have interpreted these statements as signalling a tacit approval of invasion, though no evidence of this has been presented. Although the State Department did not confirm the authenticity of these transcripts, U.S. sources say that she had handled everything "by the book" (in accordance with the US 's neutrality on the Iraq-Kuwait issue) and had not signaled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein any approval for defying the Arab League 's Jeddah crisis squad, which had conducted the negotiations. Many believe that Saddam 's expectations may have been influenced by a perception that the US was not interested in the issue, for which the Glaspie transcript is merely an example, and that he may have felt so in part because of U.S. support for the reunification of Germany, another act that he considered to be nothing more than the nullification of an artificial, internal border. Others, such as Kenneth Pollack, believe he had no such illusion, or that he simply underestimated the extent of American military response.
In November 1989, CIA director William Webster met with the Kuwaiti head of security, Brigadier Fahd Ahmed Al-Fahd. Subsequent to Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait, Iraq claimed to have found a memorandum pertaining to their conversation. The Washington Post reported that Kuwaiti 's foreign minister fainted when confronted with this document at an Arab summit in August. Later, Iraq cited this memorandum as evidence of a CIA-Kuwaiti plot to destabilize Iraq economically and politically. The CIA and Kuwait have described the meeting as routine and the memorandum as a forgery. The purported document reads in part:
We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country 's government to delineate our common border. The Central Intelligence Agency gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that broad cooperation should be initiated between us on condition that such activities be coordinated at a high level.
[edit]
Invasion of Kuwait
At the break of dawn on August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops crossed the Kuwaiti border with armor and infantry, occupying strategic posts throughout the country, including the Emir 's palace. The Kuwaiti Army was quickly overwhelmed, though they bought enough time for the Kuwaiti Air Force to flee to Saudi Arabia. The heaviest fighting occurred at the Emir 's Palace, where members of the royal guard fought a rear guard action to allow the royal family time to escape. A cousin of the Emir, who commanded the guard, was amongst those killed. Troops looted medical and food supplies, detained thousands of civilians and took over the media. Iraq detained thousands of Western visitors as hostages and later attempted to use them as bargaining chips. Hussein then installed a new Iraqi provincial governor, describing this as "liberation" from the Kuwaiti Emir; this was largely dismissed as war propaganda.
[edit]
Diplomacy
Within hours of the initial invasion, the Kuwaiti and United States of America delegations requested a meeting of the UN Security Council, which passed Resolution 660, condemning the invasion and demanding a withdrawal of Iraqi troops. On August 3, the Arab League passed its own resolution condemning the invasion and demanding a withdrawal of Iraqi troops. The Arab League resolution also called for a solution to the conflict from within the Arab League, and warned against foreign intervention. On August 6, the Security Council passed Resolution 661, placing economic sanctions on Iraq.
The decision by the West to repel the Iraqi invasion had as much to do with preventing an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a nation of far more importance to the world than Kuwait. The rapid success of the Iraqi army against Kuwait had brought Iraq 's army within easy striking distance of the Hama oil fields, Saudi Arabia 's most valuable. Iraqi control of these fields as well as Kuwait and Iraqi reserves would have given it an unprecedented monopoly in the vital commodity. Saudi Arabia could put up little more resistance than Kuwait and the entire world believed the temptation for Saddam to further advance his ambitions would prove too great. The United States, Europe, and Japan in particular saw such a potential monopoly as dangerous.
Iraq had a number of grievances with Saudi Arabia. The concern over debts stemming from the Iran-Iraq war was even greater when applied to Saudi Arabia, which Iraq owed some 26 billion dollars. The long desert border was also ill-defined. Soon after his victory over Kuwait Saddam began verbally attacking the Saudi kingdom. He argued that the American-supported Kingdom was an illegitimate guardian of holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Saddam combined the language of the Islamist groups that had recently fought in Afghanistan with the rhetoric Iran had long used to attack the Saudis.
The addition of Allahu Akbar to the flag of Iraq and images of Saddam praying in Kuwait were seen as part of a plan to win the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and detach Islamist Mujahideen from Saudi Arabia. There was further escalation of such propaganda attacks on Saudi Arabia as western troops poured into the country.
President George H. W. Bush quickly announced that the US would launch a "wholly defensive" mission to prevent Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia - Operation Desert Shield - and US troops moved into Saudi Arabia on August 7. On August 8, Iraq declared parts of Kuwait to be extensions of the Iraqi province of Basra and the rest to be the 19th province of Iraq.
The United States navy mobilised two naval battle groups, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Independence, to the area, where they were ready by August 8. The United States also sent the battleships USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin to the region, and they would later become the last battleships to actively participate in a war. Military buildup continued from there, eventually reaching 500,000 troops. The consensus among military analysts is that until October, the American military forces in the area would have been insufficient to stop an invasion of Saudi Arabia had Iraq attempted one.
A long series of UN Security Council and Arab League resolutions were passed regarding the conflict. One of the most important was Resolution 678, passed on November 29, giving Iraq a withdrawal deadline of January 15, 1991, and authorizing "all necessary means to uphold and implement Resolution 660", a diplomatic formulation authorizing the use of force.
The United States, especially Secretary of State James Baker, assembled a coalition of forces to join it in opposing Iraq, consisting of forces from 34 countries: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, The Netherlands, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States itself. US troops represented 74% of 660,000 troops in the theater of war. Many of the coalition forces were reluctant to join; some felt that the war was an internal Arab affair, or feared increasing American influence in Kuwait. In the end, many nations were persuaded by Iraq 's belligerence towards other Arab states, and offers of economic aid or debt forgiveness.
Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. and President Bush visit U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia on Thanksgiving Day, 1990.
The United States gave several public justifications for involvement in the conflict. The first reasons given were the importance of oil to the American economy and the United States ' longstanding friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia. However, some Americans were dissatisfied with these explanations and "No Blood For Oil" became a rallying cry for domestic opponents of the war, though they never reached the size of opposition to the Vietnam War. Later justifications for the war included Iraq 's history of human rights abuses under President Saddam Hussein, the potential that Iraq may develop nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction, and that "naked aggression will not stand."
Although the human rights abuses of the Iraq regime before and after the Kuwait invasion were well-documented, the government of Kuwait set out to influence American opinion with a few spectacular, but embellished and false accounts. Shortly after Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait, the organization Citizens for a Free Kuwait was formed in the US. It hired the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton for about $11 million, money from the Kuwaiti government. This firm went on to manufacture a campaign which described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and letting them die on the floor. A video news release was widely distributed by US TV networks; false supporting testimony was given before Congress and before the UN Security Council. The fifteen-year-old girl testifying before Congress was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States; the supposed surgeon testifying at the UN was in fact a dentist who later admitted to having lied. (For more, see Nurse Nayirah.)
Various peace proposals were floated, but none were agreed to. The United States insisted that the only acceptable terms for peace were Iraq 's full, unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. Iraq insisted that withdrawal from Kuwait must be "linked" to a simultaneous withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and Israeli troops from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon. Morocco and Jordan were persuaded by this proposal, but Syria, Israel, and the anti-Iraq coalition denied that there was any connection to the Kuwait issue. Syria joined the coalition to expel Saddam but Israel remained officially neutral despite rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. The Bush administration persuaded Israel to remain outside the conflict with promises of increased aid, while the PLO under Yasser Arafat openly supported Saddam Hussein, leading to a later rupture in Palestinian-Kuwaiti ties and the expulsion of many Palestinians from Kuwait.
On January 12, 1991 the United States Congress authorized the use of military force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Soon after the other states in the coalition did the same.
[edit]
Air campaign
A day after the deadline set in Resolution 678, the coalition launched a massive air campaign codenamed Operation Desert Storm: more than 1,000 sorties per day, beginning early morning on January 17, 1991. Weapons used included smart bombs, cluster bombs, daisy cutters and cruise missiles. Iraq responded by launching 8 Scud missiles into Israel the next day. The first priority for coalition forces was destruction of the Iraqi air force and anti-aircraft facilities. This was quickly achieved and for the duration of the war Coalition aircraft could operate largely unchallenged. Despite Iraq 's better-than-expected anti-aircraft capabilities, only one coalition aircraft was lost in the opening day of the war. Stealth aircraft were heavily used in this phase to elude Iraq 's extensive SAM systems and anti-aircraft weapons; once these were destroyed, other types of aircraft could more safely be used. The sorties were launched mostly from Saudi Arabia and the six coalition aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf.
The next coalition targets were command and communication facilities. Saddam had closely micromanaged the Iraqi forces in the Iran-Iraq War and initiative at the lower levels was discouraged. Coalition planners hoped Iraqi resistance would quickly collapse if deprived of command and control. The first week of the air war saw a few Iraqi sorties but these did little damage, and thirty-eight Iraqi MiGs were shot down by Coalition planes. Soon after, the Iraqi airforce began fleeing to Iran. On January 23, Iraq began dumping approximately 1 million tons of crude oil into the gulf, causing the largest oil spill in history.
The third and largest phase of the air campaign targeted military targets throughout Iraq and Kuwait: Scud missile launchers, weapons of mass destruction sites, weapons research facilities and naval forces. About one third of the Coalition airpower was devoted to attacking Scuds. In addition, it targeted facilities useful for both the military and civilians: electricity production facilities, nuclear reactors, telecommunications equipment, port facilities, oil refineries and distribution, railroads and bridges. Electrical power facilities were destroyed across the country. At the end of the war, electricity production was at four percent of its pre-war levels. Bombs destroyed the utility of all major dams, most major pumping stations and many sewage treatment plants.
In most cases, the Allies avoided hitting civilian-only facilities. However, on February 13, 1991, two laser-guided "smart bombs" destroyed the Amiriyah bunker facility, which the Iraqis claimed was for the auspices of an air shelter. U.S. officials claimed that the bunker was a military communications center, but Western reporters have been unable to find evidence for this. The White House claims, in a report titled Apparatus of Lies: Crafting Tragedy, that US intelligence sources reported the bunker was being used for military command purposes.[11] In his book, Saddam 's Bombmaker, the former director of Iraq 's nuclear weapon program, who defected to the west, supports the theory that the facility was used for both purposes.
We sought refuge several times at the shelter.... But it was always filled.... The shelter had television sets, drinking fountains, its own electrical generator, and looked sturdy enough to withstand a hit from conventional weapons. But I stopped trying to get in one night after noticing some long black limousines slithering in and out of an underground gate in the back. I asked around and was told that it was a command center. After considering it more closely, I decided it was probably Saddam 's own operational base.
Iraq launched missile attacks on coalition bases in Saudi Arabia and on Israel, in the hopes of drawing Israel into the war and drawing other Arab states out of it. This strategy proved ineffective. Israel did not join the coalition, and all Arab states stayed in the coalition except Jordan, which remained officially neutral throughout. On January 29, Iraq attacked and occupied the abandoned Saudi city of Khafji with tanks and infantry. However, the Battle of Khafji ended when Iraqis were driven back by Saudi forces supported by US Marines with close air support over the following two days.
The effect of the air campaign was to decimate entire Iraqi brigades deployed in the open desert in combat formation. The air campaign also prevented effective Iraqi resupply to forward deployed units engaged in combat, as well preventing the large number (450,000) of battle-hardened Iraqi troops from achieving force concentration essential to victory.
The air campaign had a significant effect on the tactics employed by opposing forces in subsequent conflicts. No longer were entire divisions dug in the open facing U.S. forces but rather were dispersed, e.g. Serbian forces in Kosovo. Opposing forces also reduced the distance of their supply lines and area defended. This was seen during the war in Afghanistan when the Taliban preemptively abandoned large swaths of land and retreated into their strongholds. This increased their force concentration and reduced long vulnerable supply lines. This tactic was also observed in the Second Gulf War whereby the Iraqi forces retreated from northern Iraqi Kurdistan into the cities.
The success of the air campaign has had the adverse effect for the American military of forcing all potential opposing forces of embracing tactics which minimize the effects of air power.
[edit]
Ground campaign
A US Army convoy crosses the Iraqi desert.
On February 22, 1991, Iraq agreed to a Soviet-proposed cease-fire agreement. The agreement called for Iraq to withdraw troops to pre-invasion positions within three weeks following a total cease-fire, and called for monitoring of the cease-fire and withdrawal to be overseen by the UN Security Council. The US rejected the proposal but said that retreating Iraqi forces would not be attacked, and gave twenty-four hours for Iraq to begin withdrawing forces.
On February 24, the US began Operation Desert Sabre, the ground portion of its campaign. US forces pulled plows along Iraqi trenches, burying their occupants alive. Soon after, U.S. Marines and their Arab allies penetrated deep into Kuwait, collecting thousands of deserting Iraqi troops, weakened and demoralized by the extensive air campaign. A few days into the campaign, Kuwait City was recaptured by units of the Kuwaiti Army.
At the same time, the U.S. VII Corps launched a massive armored attack into Iraq, just to the east of Kuwait, taking the Iraqis completely by surprise. The left flank of this movement was protecting by the French 6th Light Armored Division (which included units of the Foreign Legion), and their right flank by the British 1st Armored Division. Once the allies had penetrated deep into Iraqi territory, they turned eastward, launching a massive flank attack against the Republican Guard. Tank battles flared as the Republican Guard attempted to retreat, which the Allied won with minimal losses.
The US anticipated that Iraq might use chemical weapons; General Colin Powell later suggested that a US response to such an act might have been to destroy dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, flooding Baghdad, though this was never fully developed as a plan.
General Colin Powell briefs President George H. W. Bush and his advisors on the progress of the ground war
The United States originally hoped that Saddam would be overthrown in an internal coup, and used CIA assets in Iraq to organize a revolt. When a popular rebellion against Saddam began in southern Iraq, the United States did not support it due to the fact that the coalition refused to aid in an invasion. As a result, not only was the rebellion brutally subdued, but the main CIA operative who was tasked with organizing the revolt was disavowed and accused of "disobeying orders to not organize a revolt".
In their cowritten 1998 book, A World Transformed George Bush and Brent Scowcroft discussed the possibility of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 1991:
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guidelines about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep ', and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs... Would have have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable 'exit strategy ' we could see, violating another of our principles... Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome. (quoted in Losing America, pg 154)
The "Highway of Death"
Iraq did not use chemical weapons and the allied advance was much swifter than US generals expected. On February 26, Iraqi troops began retreating out of Kuwait, setting fire to Kuwaiti oil fields as they left. A long convoy of retreating Iraqi troops — along with Iraqi and Palestinian civilians — formed along the main Iraq-Kuwait highway. This convoy was bombed so extensively by the Allies that it came to be known as the Highway of Death. One hundred hours after the ground campaign started, President Bush declared a ceasefire and on February 27 declared that Kuwait had been liberated. Journalist Seymour Hersh has charged that, two days after the ceasefire was declared, American troops led by Barry McCaffrey engaged in a systematic massacre of retreating Iraqi troops, in addition to some civilians. McCaffrey has denied the charges and an army investigation has cleared him. (Forbes, Daniel)
A peace conference was held in Iraqi territory occupied by the coalition. At the conference, Iraq won the approval of the use of armed helicopters on their side of the temporary border, ostensibly for government transit due to the damage done to civilian transportation. Soon after, these helicopters — and much of the Iraqi armed forces — were refocused toward fighting against a Shiite uprising in the south. In the North, Kurdish leaders took heart in American statements that they would support an uprising and began fighting, in the hopes of triggering a coup. However, when no American support was forthcoming, Iraqi generals remained loyal and brutally crushed the Kurdish troops. Millions of Kurds fled across the mountains to Kurdish areas of Turkey and Iran. These incidents would later result in no-fly zones being established in both the North and the South of Iraq. In Kuwait, the Emir was restored and suspected Iraqi collaborators were repressed. Eventually, over 400,000 people were expelled from the country, including a large number of Palestinians (due to PLO support for Saddam Hussein).
Iraqi forces were heavily outnumbered from the start - approximately 750,000 Allied troops to approximately 450,000 Iraqi troops. A further 100,000 Turkish troops were deployed along the common border of Turkey and Iraq. This caused significant force dilution of the Iraqi military by forcing it to deploy its forces along all its borders (except ironically its bitter enemy Iran). This allowed the main thrust by the Americans to not only possess a significant technological advantage but also a large advantage in force numbers.
The main surprise of the ground campaign was relatively low Allied casualties. This was due to some tactical errors on the part of the Iraqis such as deploying tanks behind sand berms which offered no protection against the kinetic energy rounds of the M1 Abrams tanks and also gave away the position of the Iraqi tanks from a great distance. The Iraqi forces also failed to utilize urban warfare in Kuwait City, which could have inflicted significant casualities on the attacking forces. Urban combat would have reduced the greatest advantage of the Allies, long range killing. In the desert M1 Abrams tanks scored kills out to 4 kilometers. Rarely in urban combat does fighting range exceed 1 km, a range at which theoretically the M1 Abrams tank was vulnerable to the 125mm gun of the T-72 tanks that the Iraqis possessed.
On March 10, 1991, Operation Desert Farewell began to move 540,000 American troops out of the Persian Gulf.
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Coalition involvement
Members of the Coalition included Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States of America. Germany and Japan provided financial assistance instead of military aid.
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Canada
Canada was one of the first nations to agree to condemn Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait and it quickly agreed to join the U.S. led coalition. In August Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent the destroyers HMCS Terra Nova and HMCS Athabaskan to enforce the trade blockade against Iraq. The supply ship HMCS Protecteur was also sent to aid the gathering coalition forces.
After the UN authorized full use of force in the operation Canada sent a CF18 squadron with support personnel. Canada also sent a field hospital to deal with casualties from the ground war. When the air war began, Canada 's planes were integrated into the coalition force and provided air cover and attacked ground targets. This was the first time since the Korean War that Canadian forces had participated in offensive combat operations.
Canada suffered no casualties during the conflict but since its end many veterans have complained of suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.
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Casualties
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Casualties During the War
Gulf War casualty numbers are controversial. Coalition military deaths have been reported to be around 378, but the DoD reports that US forces suffered 147 battle-related and 325 non-battle-related deaths. The UK suffered 24 deaths, the Arab countries lost 39 men (18 Saudis, 10 Egyptians, 6 from the UAE, 3 Syrians, and 1 Kuwaiti), and France lost 2 men. The largest single loss of Coalition forces happened on February 25, 1991, when an Iraqi Scud missile hit an American military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia killing 28 U.S. Army Reservists from Pennsylvania. The number of coalition wounded seems to have been less than 1,000.
Independent analysts generally agree the Iraqi death toll was well below initial post-war estimates. In the immediate aftermath of the war, these estimates ranged as high as 100,000 Iraqi troops killed and 300,000 wounded. According to "Gulf War Air Power Survey" by Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, (a report commissioned by the U.S. Air Force; 1993-ISBN 0-16-041950-6), there were an estimated 10-12,000 Iraqi combat deaths in the air campaign and as many as 10,000 casualties in the ground war. This analysis is based on enemy prisoner of war reports.
The Iraqi government claimed that 2,300 civilians died during the air campaign.
One infamous incident during the war highlighted the question of large-scale Iraqi combat deaths. This was the `bulldozer assault ' in which two brigades from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) used anti-mine plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury Iraqi soldiers defending the fortified "Saddam Line." While approximately 2,000 of the troops surrendered, escaping burial, one newspaper story reported that the U.S. commanders estimated thousands of Iraqi soldiers had been buried alive during the two-day assault February 24-25, 1991. However, like all other troop estimates made during the war, the estimated 8,000 Iraqi defenders was probably greatly inflated. While one commander, Col. Anthony Moreno of the 2nd Brigade, thought the numbers might have been in the thousands, another reported his brigade buried between 80 and 250 Iraqis. After the war, the Iraqi government claimed to have found 44 such bodies. [12]
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The Post-War Effects of Depleted Uranium
In 1998, Saddam government doctors reported that Coalition use of depleted uranium caused a massive increase in birth defects and cancer among Iraqis, particularly leukemia. The government doctors claimed they were unable to provide evidence linking depleted uranium to the cancer and birth defects because the sanctions prevented them from obtaining necessary testing equipment. Subsequently, a World Health Organization team visited Basra and proposed a study to investigate the causes of higher cancer rates in southern Iraq, but Saddam refused.
The World Health Organization was nonetheless able to assess the health risks of Depleted Uranium in a post-combat environment thanks to a 2001 mission to Kosovo. A 2001 WHO fact sheet on depleted uranium concludes: "because DU is only weakly radioactive, very large amounts of dust (on the order of grams) would have to be inhaled for the additional risk of lung cancer to be detectable in an exposed group. Risks for other radiation-induced cancers, including leukaemia, are considered to be very much lower than for lung cancer." In addition, "no reproductive or developmental effects have been reported in humans" as a result of DU exposure. [13]
The U.S. Department of State has also published a fact sheet on depleted uranium. It states: "World Health Organization and other scientific research studies indicate Depleted Uranium poses no serious health risks" and "[d]epleted Uranium does not cause birth defects. Iraqi military use of chemical and nerve agents in the 1980 's and 1990 's is the likely cause of alleged birth defects among Iraqi children." In regard to cancer claims, the fact sheet states that "[a]ccording to environmental health experts, it is medically impossible to contract leukemia as a result of exposure to uranium or depleted uranium," and "[c]ancer rates in almost 19,000 highly exposed uranium industry workers who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory projects between 1943 and 1947 have been examined, and no excess cancers were observed through 1974. Other epidemiological studies of lung cancer in uranium mill and metal processing plant workers have found either no excess cancers or attributed them to known carcinogens other than uranium, such as radon." [14]
However, some claim that the effect is more severe as the Depleted Uranium ammunition would fragment into tiny particles when it hit the target. [15]
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Cost
Kuwaiti oil wells on fire.
The cost of the war to the United States was calculated by Congress to be $61.1 billion. Other sources estimate up to $71 billion. About $53 billion of that amount was paid by different countries around the world: $36 billion by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States; $16 billion by Germany and Japan (which sent no forces due to the treaties that ended WWII). About 25% of Saudi Arabia 's contribution was paid in the form of in-kind services to the troops, such as food and transportation.
US troops represented about 74% of the combined force, and the global cost was therefore higher. The United Kingdom, for instance, spent $4.1 billion during this war.
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Media
The Gulf War was a heavily televised war. For the first time people all over the world were able to watch live pictures of missiles hitting their targets and fighters taking off from aircraft carriers. Allied forces were keen to demonstrate the accuracy of their weapons.
The big-three network anchors led the network news coverage of the war. ABC 's Peter Jennings, CBS 's Dan Rather, and NBC 's Tom Brokaw were anchoring their evening newscasts when air strikes began on January 16, 1991. ABC News correspondent Gary Shepard, reporting live from Baghdad, told Jennings of the quietness of the city. But, moments later, Shepard was back on the air as flashes of light were seen on the horizon and tracer fire was heard on the ground. On CBS, viewers were watching a report from correspondent Allen Pizzey, who was also reporting from Baghdad, when the war began. Rather, after the report was finished, announced that there were unconfirmed reports of flashes in Baghdad and heavy air traffic at bases in Saudi Arabia. On the "NBC Nightly News", correspondent Mike Boettcher reported unusual air activity in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Moments later, Brokaw announced to his viewers that the air attack had begun. But it was CNN who gained the most popularity for their coverage. CNN correspondents John Holliman and Peter Arnett and CNN anchor Bernard Shaw relayed telephone reports from the Al-Rashid Hotel as the air strikes began. Newspapers all over the world also covered the war and TIME Magazine published a special issue dated January 28, 1991, the headline "WAR IN THE GULF" emblazoned on the cover over a picture of Baghdad taken as the war began.
US policy regarding media freedom was much more restrictive than in the Vietnam War. The policy had been spelled out in a Pentagon document entitled Annex Foxtrot. Most of the press information came from briefings organized by the military. Only selected journalists were allowed to visit the front lines or conduct interviews with soldiers. Those visits were always conducted in the presence of officers, and were subject to both prior approval by the military and censorship afterward. This was ostensibly to protect sensitive information from being revealed to Iraq, but often in practice it was used to protect politically embarrassing information from being revealed. This policy was heavily influenced by the military 's experience with the Vietnam War, which it believed it had lost due to public opposition within the United States.
At the same time, the coverage of this war was new in its instantaneousness. Many American journalists remained stationed in the Iraqi capital Baghdad throughout the war, and footage of incoming missiles was carried almost immediately on the nightly television news and the cable news channels such as CNN. A British crew from CBS News (David Green & Andy Thompson) equipped with satellite transmission equipment travelled with the front line forces and having transmitted live TV pictures of the fighting en route, arrived the day before the forces in Kuwait City, transmitting live television from the city and covering the entrance of the Arab forces the following day.
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Consequences
Saddam Hussein in a propaganda picture overseeing a war scene in the foreground
Following the uprisings in the North and South, no-fly zones were established to help protect the Shi 'ite and Kurdish groups in South and North Iraq, respectively. These no-fly zones (originally north of the 36th parallel and south of the 32nd parallel) were monitored mainly by the US and the UK, though France also participated. Combined, they flew more sorties over Iraq in the eleven years following the war than were flown during the war. These sorties dropped bombs nearly every other day. However, the greatest amount of bombs was dropped during two sustained bombing campaigns: Operation Desert Strike, which lasted a few weeks in September 1996, and Operation Desert Fox, in December 1998.
Widespread infrastructure destruction hurt the Iraqi population. Years after the war electricity production was less than a quarter its pre-war level. The destruction of water treatment facilities caused sewage to flow directly into the Tigris River, from which civilians drew drinking water, resulting in widespread disease.
Economic sanctions were kept in place following the war, pending a weapons inspection regime with which Iraq never fully cooperated. Iraq was later allowed to import certain products under the UN 's Oil for Food program. A 1998 UNICEF report found that the sanctions resulted in an increase in 90,000 deaths per year. Many argue that the sanctions on Iraq and the American military presence in Saudi Arabia contributed to an increasingly negative image of the United States in the Arab world.
A United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on weapons was established, to monitor Iraq 's compliance with restrictions on weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Iraq accepted some and refused other weapons inspections. The team found some evidence of biological weapons programs at one site and non-compliance at many other sites.
In 1997, Iraq expelled all US members of the inspection team, alleging that the United States was using the inspections as a front for espionage; members of UNSCOM were in regular contact with various intelligence agencies to provide information on weapons sites back and forth. The team returned for an even more turbulent time period between 1997 and 1999; one member of the weapons inspection team, US Marine Scott Ritter, resigned in 1998, alleging that the Clinton administration was blocking investigations because they did not want a full-scale confrontation with Iraq. He also alleged that the CIA was using the weapons inspection teams as a cover for covert operations. In 1999, the team was replaced by UNMOVIC, which began inspections in 2002. In 2002, Iraq — and especially Saddam Hussein — became targets in the United States ' War on Terrorism, leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.
Many returning coalition soldiers reported illnesses following their participation in the Gulf War, a phenomenon known as Gulf war syndrome. The number of children born in soldier 's families with serious congenital defects or serious illnesses is also alarmingly high, 67%, according to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs. [16] There has been widespread speculation and disagreement about the causes of the syndrome and birth defects (though the government has attempted to downplay the seriousness of the situation). A report published in 1994 by the Government Accountability Office said that American troops were exposed to 21 potential "reproductive toxicants". Some factors considered as possibly causal include exposure to radioactive depleted and non-depleted uranium used in munitions, oil fires, or the anthrax vaccine.
The People 's Republic of China (whose army in many ways resembled the Iraqi army) was surprised at the performance of American technology on the battlefield. The swiftness of the coalition victory resulted in an overall change in Chinese military thinking and began a movement to technologically modernize the People 's Liberation Army.
A crucial result of the Gulf War, according to Gilles Kepel, was the sharp revival in Islamic extremism. The change of face by Saddam 's secular regime did little to draw support from Islamist groups. However, it, combined with the Saudi Arabian alliance with the United States and Saudi Arabia being seen as being on the same side of Israel dramatically eroded that regime 's legitimacy. Activity of Islamist groups against the Saudi regime increased dramatically. In part to win back favour with Islamist groups Saudi Arabia greatly increased funding to those that would support the regime. Throughout the newly independent states of Central Asia the Saudis paid for the distribution of millions of Qur 'ans and the building of hundreds of mosques for extremist groups. In Afghanistan the Saudi regime became a leading patron of the Taliban in that nation 's civil war, and one of the only foreign countries to officially recognize the government.
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Technology
Missouri launches a Tomahawk missile.
Precision guided munitions (PGMs, also "smart bombs"), such as the United States Air Force guided missile AGM-130, were heralded as key in allowing military strikes to be made with a minimum of civilian casualties compared to previous wars. Specific buildings in downtown Baghdad could be bombed whilst journalists in their hotels watched cruise missiles fly by. PGMs amounted to approximately 7.4% of all bombs dropped by the coalition. Other bombs included cluster bombs, which break up into clusters of bomblets, and daisy cutters, 15,000-pound bombs which can disintegrate everything within hundreds of yards.
Among the numerous special forces from the United States, the Light Armored Recon (LAR) played a powerful role in the removal of Iraqi troops. Light Armored Vehicles (LAV) provided logistic command centers, logistics posts, mortar positions and long range suppressing fire with their powerful 50mm guns.
Scud is a low-technology rocket bomb that Iraq used, launching them into both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Some bombs caused extensive casualties, others caused little damage. Concerns were raised of possible chemical or biological warheads on these rockets, but if they existed they were not used.
America 's Patriot missile defense was used for the first time in combat. The US military claimed to have shot down many Scud rockets in flight, with an effectiveness of 100%. Afterwards, it was demonstrated that the Patriots ' effectiveness was primarily psychological: some claim that their effectiveness was as low as between 0% to 10%. However, there really is no good evidence to prove whether the Scuds were intercepted or not, so no figures are really backed up by undisputed facts. The higher figures tend to be calculated based on the percentage of Scud warheads which were known to have impacted and exploded compared to the number of Scud missiles launched, but due to factors such as duds, misses and impacts which were not reported (some Scud variations were re-engineered in a manner outside their original tolerance, and said to have frequently failed or broken up in flight), this is not really a good way to measure effectiveness. The lowest figures are typically based upon the number of interceptions where there is proof that the warhead was hit by at least one missile, but due to the way the poorly built Al-Hussein (Scud derivative) missiles broke up in flight, it was often hard to tell which piece was the warhead, and there were few radar tracks which were actually stored which could be analyzed later, hence the very low figures. Realistically the actual performance was probably somewhere in between. The US Army maintains the Patriot delivered a "miracle performance" in the Gulf War. [17]
Global Positioning System units were key in enabling coalition units to navigate easily across the desert. Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and satellite communication systems were also important.