America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (24 page)

It’s hard to imagine how any victory over Iraq, no matter how complete, could have remedied this menu of challenges. After another decade of trying, the United States gave up the attempt. After 9/11, rather than vainly trying to prop up the Greater Middle East, Washington set out to transform it. A fundamental misreading of Desert Storm helped make that attempt appear plausible. The result was a disaster.

As winter slowly gave way to spring in 1991, the Kurdish crisis was casting a shadow over Desert Storm. To implement Operation Provide Comfort, the Pentagon hastily assembled a scratch force, drawn from various commands, with availability and relative proximity the chief determinants of who would go. At first, the effort had amounted to little more than “throwing popcorn at pigeons.”
¹
But the popcorn was soon appearing by the pallet-load and began to make a difference. Even so, forlorn refugees in numbers too great to count were still clinging to the sides of barren mountains in southeastern Turkey, exposed to the elements or at best huddling under plastic sheeting. Urgent shortages of food, water, and medical supplies persisted.

Not even the coldest heart could witness misery on such a vast scale without being moved to pity. Yet empathizing was the easy part, qualms of conscience at least partly mollified by airdropping relief supplies. This U.S. Air Force transports were doing with impressive efficiency, while fighter planes provided air cover and several thousand ground troops established a security zone extending from Turkey into northern Iraq itself.
²

Without doubt, efforts by U.S. and allied forces saved many lives. Yet more difficult was the problem of figuring out what this utterly dissonant postscript to Desert Storm—the equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction disrupting an otherwise impeccably rehearsed show—signified. What warnings did it convey? What did it foreshadow?

For the Bush administration and the U.S. military, Operation Provide Comfort ranked as little more than a footnote. The epoch-making liberation of Kuwait qualified as the main story. By comparison, the mission to rescue the Kurds was at most an unwelcome but not terribly significant addendum. Desert Storm heralded the future. Provide Comfort looked like a one-off event. So at least U.S. civilian and military leaders expected.

In fact, as America’s War for the Greater Middle East continued to unfold, the reverse proved true. Desert Storm—a brief, heroic war immediately followed by long celebratory parades—turned out to be the one-off event. By comparison, Provide Comfort served as a harbinger of morally ambiguous surprises still to come. The seemingly lesser of the two events ended up being the more important.

In retrospect, the policy implications of the Kurdish crisis seem plain as day. Here, for starters, was incontrovertible evidence that America’s Saddam problem wasn’t going away. The recalcitrant bad boy simply refused to behave. Although for political reasons—a presidential election was approaching—George H. W. Bush kept pretending that the Second Gulf War had produced decisive results, it obviously had not. (Something similar was to occur in 2011 when the Barack Obama administration prematurely declared the Third Gulf War over, only to have it roar back to life.)

By extension, intervention on behalf of the Kurds demolished expectations that the outcome of Desert Storm might allow the United States to police the Persian Gulf from offshore, while Iran and Iraq kept one another in check and thereby ensured a modicum of regional stability. As long as Saddam remained in power, counting on Iraq to contain Iran was going to be a nonstarter. Although stability remained Washington’s goal, the burden of ensuring it looked like one the United States itself was going to have to shoulder. That implied unforeseen costs and risks.

Further, while suggesting that the U.S. military was going to have more work to do, the Kurdish crisis simultaneously raised questions about the actual benefits stemming from the military preeminence demonstrated in Desert Storm. Here were hints that those benefits might not fully live up to Washington’s expectations. After all, in less than a month, events had invalidated President Bush’s prediction that “when we say that something is objectively correct…people are going to listen.” To be sure, U.S. forces had responded with commendable alacrity in rescuing the Iraqi Kurds. But the very nature of this contingency intimated that the role awaiting the U.S. military was going to involve something more than occasionally beating up some ineptly led third-rate army.

The ongoing evolution of Provide Comfort itself made that very point. To avoid having Iraqi Kurds become permanent refugees—and a permanent problem like the Palestinians displaced back in 1948—the United States needed to persuade them to go back where they came from. From humanitarian assistance, the emphasis now shifted to resettlement. Yet keeping the Iraqi Kurds where they belonged meant guaranteeing their safety when they got there.

So on July 24, 1991, Operation Provide Comfort gave way to Operation Provide Comfort II. Rather than delivering life-sustaining essentials, the mission had morphed into one focused on providing protection. To accomplish this task, thereby providing the Kurdish returnees with a semblance of normalcy, the Pentagon devised an innovative approach. Averse to using ground troops to defend Iraqi Kurdistan, the United States chose to keep Saddam Hussein at bay and the Kurds in place by relying exclusively on airpower. Operating from Turkish bases, U.S. Air Force combat patrols, with initial assistance from France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, began enforcing a “no-fly zone” that included all of Iraq north of latitude 36 degrees, an area encompassing Iraqi Kurdistan along with a generous buffer. The immediate aim was to permit the Kurds to enjoy nearly complete autonomy from Baghdad, in effect becoming an independent nation in all but name. More broadly, the aim was to keep a boot on Saddam’s neck.

No obvious criteria existed for determining when to declare the mission accomplished. As long as Saddam remained in power, anxiety among the Kurds was going to run high. So once begun, Provide Comfort II kept going, continuing until December 31, 1996. By that time, the air force had flown some forty-two thousand sorties over northern Iraq, with the allies contributing another twenty thousand.
³
Even then, air operations did not end—they just got a new name. Redesignated Northern Watch, they continued for another several years, while piling up a further thirty-six thousand sorties.

Meanwhile, on August 27, 1992, the United States initiated a southern counterpart, appropriately named Southern Watch. Flying out of bases in Saudi Arabia or from nearby U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, combat aircraft crisscrossed Iraq south of the 32nd parallel, prohibiting Iraqi military activity, not only in the air but also on the ground.
⁴
Nominally, the purpose of this operation was to shield Iraqi Shiites from Saddam’s wrath, although it came too late to help much in that regard. In reality, the point was to put the squeeze on Saddam, part of a larger diplomatic and economic strategy intended to weaken and, with a bit of luck, even depose him. By the time it ended with the start of the Third Gulf War in 2003, pilots enforcing the southern no-fly/no-drive zone had flown over 150,000 sorties.
⁵

“What we have effectively done since 1992 is conduct an air occupation of a country.” So claimed General Ronald R. Fogelman, U.S. Air Force chief of staff.
⁶
If so, the occupation was neither benign nor peaceful. In fact, enforcing the no-fly zones resembled the continuous jousting that occurs between Israel and adversaries such as Hamas or Hezbollah. The Israeli term for this is
batash,
roughly translated as “current security.” This anodyne phrase refers to everyday warlike actions in circumstances where national survival is not immediately at stake.
Batash
means keeping the other side off-balance or exacting retribution for lesser offenses, with no expectation of achieving decisive results. Over the skies of Iraq, the United States had chosen to get into the
batash
business.
⁷

Saddam responded to this appropriation of Iraqi airspace with large quantities of vitriol but only token resistance. In December 1992, a single Iraqi MiG ventured into the southern no-fly zone, only to be promptly downed by a U.S. Air Force F-16. Early the following month other incursions occurred. More troubling, U.S. intelligence detected signs of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) infiltrating south of the 32nd parallel. On January 13, 1993, the outgoing George H. W. Bush administration responded by attacking Iraqi air defenses throughout the southern no-fly zone. U.S. forces were unopposed and suffered no losses. Saddam claimed that the raid, which involved over one hundred aircraft, had killed nineteen civilians. He vowed to “turn the skies of Iraq into a lava against the oppressors.”
⁸

On January 17, another MiG tried its luck, this time in the northern no-fly zone. It suffered the same fate as the first, knocked down by another F-16. That same night, in an unrelated incident, several dozen cruise missiles, launched from U.S. Navy warships, slammed into a suspected nuclear facility south of Baghdad, punishment for Saddam’s refusal to permit UN weapons inspectors to enter his country. A day later, in a sort of backhanded farewell from an administration due to step down forty-eight hours later, U.S. forces gave Iraqi air defenses one final shellacking. Seventy-five aircraft participated. All returned to base safely. As Bill Clinton took the oath of office as the forty-second U.S. president, hostilities subsided.
⁹

They had by no means ended, however. Throughout the 1990s, fighting ebbed and flowed, always one-sided, never yielding a conclusive outcome. Threatened and sometimes actually engaged by Iraqi defenders, U.S. aircraft retaliated in what became a variant of the tank plinking that figured in Desert Storm. Now the plinking focused on taking apart Saddam’s air defenses. In a single twelve-month period, Northern Watch aircraft attacked some 225 targets. In the southern zone, from 1999 to 2000 alone, over two thousand American bombs and missiles rained down on Iraqi SAM batteries, radars, and communication nodes. All of this activity attracted minimal public or press attention, largely because during this entire time Iraq failed to hit even a single U.S. aircraft. The gang that couldn’t shoot straight had not improved its marksmanship.
¹⁰

This is not to say that U.S. forces suffered no casualties. They did, albeit not at Iraqi hands. In April 1994, Northern Watch F-15s inadvertently shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawks, mistaking them for Russian-built Iraqi helicopters. The twenty-six killed included fifteen Americans.
¹¹
Then, in June 1996, terrorists attacked Khobar Towers, an apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, used to house U.S. personnel supporting Operation Southern Watch. The bombing killed nineteen and wounded several hundred others. With a swiftness that recalled the
Stark
episode, U.S. and Saudi officials fingered Iran as the perpetrator, a mutually convenient verdict since neither party had any interest in admitting the possible involvement of Saudi citizens. Subsequent evidence suggested that Al Qaeda may have been responsible, retaliation prompted by the continuing presence of infidels in the Land of the Two Holy Places.
¹²

Yet all of this, along with periodic eruptions of larger scale violence—a 1993 U.S. cruise missile attack that demolished Iraq’s intelligence headquarters in Baghdad and a four-day bombardment of suspected Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities in 1998—vanished from memory once the Third Gulf War began in March 2003.
¹³
This is regrettable. For at least two reasons, restoring the “air occupation” of Iraq to a place of prominence in America’s ongoing War for the Greater Middle East is in order.