War Stories (5 page)

The Iraqi invasion of tiny oil-rich Kuwait by an army that had been pummeled and punished for eight years in the Iran-Iraq War came as a complete surprise to everyone. A CIA officer I have known since my days on Ronald Reagan's NSC staff told me afterward that his warnings about an Iraqi buildup along the Kuwaiti frontier in July had been set aside because the administration of George H. W. Bush was preoccupied by the events surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. A military officer with whom I had served put it differently: “Given their losses in the war with Iran, who would have thought that the Iraqi military could recover in just two years?”

Whatever the reasons for underestimating and misunderstanding Iraqi capabilities and intentions, Saddam's attack, which he pretentiously called the “Revolution of August Second,” shocked not only
the United States but the rest of the world as well. The Saudis, who hadn't seen it coming either, immediately called for help.

The United States responded straight away, reinforcing Saudi defenses with U.S. Air Force fighter squadrons, a carrier battle group, and a Marine Expeditionary Unit. By the time Saddam proclaimed Kuwait to be the “nineteenth province of Iraq,” an even bigger buildup—one that would not only defend Saudi Arabia but also evict the Iraqis from Kuwait—was also under way.

On August 6, 1990, the UN Security Council condemned the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait, and debate in the council began on a resolution authorizing the use of force to expel the invaders. The United States started building what would become a remarkable thirty-eight-nation coalition of more than 700,000 troops from NATO and Arab soldiers from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, even Syria—under the command of an American general, H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

As the buildup in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf got under way and Saddam threatened to use Western hostages in Iraq as “human shields,” the finger pointing began. Congressional critics of the Bush administration wanted to know how the U.S. could have been so surprised. Blame initially focused on April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, for delivering what some said was a mixed message to the Iraqi foreign ministry.

Administration spokesmen appearing on the Sunday talking-head TV shows tended to explain Saddam's motivations as an oil grab. College professors, “Arabologists”, retired diplomats, and archaeologists sat for hours in front of the cameras pontificating on Iraq's age-old claims to Kuwaiti territory, the wrongs of British imperial rule, and the evils of America's support for Israel—as if all this somehow explained or justified the Iraqi invasion. Even the environmental lobby managed to get into the debate by insisting that the whole mess was the consequence of America's dependence on cheap foreign oil.

What all these accounts failed to grasp was what had been happening inside Iraq from the time the Iran-Iraq War ended on July 21, 1988. The badly battered Iraqi army—primarily Shi'ite and Kurdish conscripts led by Sunni officers—came back from the front to a country deeply in debt, with few jobs to offer and a homeland internally at war with itself. The Baath socialist health care, education, and public works programs that had been the regime's sole appeal for the affections of the average Iraqi had been terminated in the mid-1980s, when the costs of the war spiraled out of control. And now that the troops were home, they learned that rumors they had heard of horrific atrocities in Kurdish and Shi'ite enclaves of the country were actually true.

Shortly after the Iran-Iraq cease-fire, Saddam sought relief from the billions he owed to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Soviets for the arms he had used against the ayatollah. He tried borrowing more from the international banks, OPEC, the EU, even the Japanese. His diplomats made overtures to the UN and the United States, quietly reminding Washington of the intelligence support the CIA had provided to Iraq when an Iranian victory seemed possible.

Throughout the war, Saddam had held things together in Iraq by depicting himself as the savior of the nation. He had presented himself to his people and the world as the one person who could keep Iraq from being turned into another Shi'ite theocracy. He told anyone who would listen that he was fighting a regime that tortured Western hostages, hijacked airplanes, and blew up embassies. For eight years, it had worked. Arms and money had flowed into the country from every neighboring state and much of Europe, despite a UN arms embargo for both Iran and Iraq.

But with the war over, stories of the atrocities committed by the regime began appearing in the Western press. Suddenly, the gratitude was gone, as was Saddam's rationale for the hardship, rationing, and
repression he had enforced. With mounting debt and a restive, potentially threatening army sitting in the barracks, Saddam looked for a way to keep the army busy and to pay some bills. He found a way to do both in Kuwait.

Lacking any real human intelligence (HUMINT) from inside Iraq, the U.S. administration knew little of this at the time. Defectors from the regime who made their way to Jordan or Turkey discovered that their accounts of what was going on were widely discounted. One such man who claimed to know that Saddam intended to “sack” Kuwait was dismissed because he was thought to have a “personal agenda.”

Actually, “sack” may understate what Saddam did to Kuwait. While the UN debated a series of resolutions insisting on Iraqi withdrawal, and as antiwar activists rallied in U.S. cities and European capitals trying to prevent a resort to arms, Saddam stripped Kuwait of everything that could be carried away. Looting of the Kuwaiti treasury, the national museum, mosques, churches, public buildings, businesses, and private homes was so pervasive that U.S. satellites were able to capture images of long truck convoys carrying the booty back to Baghdad.

Kuwaiti women and young girls were raped, many of them repeatedly—by Iraqi soldiers. At Ali Al Salem airbase, west of Kuwait City, Ali Hassan al-Majid—the head of the Amn Al Khass secret police and the man nicknamed “Chemical Ali” for using nerve gas against the Kurds—set up a torture chamber for any Kuwaiti military officers or government officials caught by the occupiers. Within a matter of three weeks, the only things the Iraqis hadn't wrecked in Kuwait were the water system, the sanitation system, and the oil-production infrastructure, which Saddam planned to use to help pay down his debt.

On January 15, 1991, as a third UN deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait was ignored, President George H. W. Bush set a deadline of his own: twenty-four hours. A last-minute appeal from the UN, Russia, and France for Saddam to withdraw passed without action from Baghdad, other than the quiet withdrawal of the last Republican Guard division from Kuwait—an action that went undetected by coalition forces arrayed in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf.

Saddam may have thought President Bush was bluffing, but shortly after 0200 on January 17, when the dictator failed to respond to the ultimatum, the first cruise missiles and Stealth aircraft strikes of Operation Desert Storm began to rain down on Iraq and on Saddam's forces deployed in Kuwait. For the next thirty-eight days, military and government installations throughout Iraq and the 385,000 Iraqi army troops along the Kuwaiti-Saudi Arabian border were subjected to around-the-clock aerial bombardment. Saddam's response: anti-aircraft missiles that brought down thirteen allied aircraft and a promise that Iraq would achieve a “great victory in the mother of all battles.”

Then, just before dawn on February 24, with the 1st Marine Division on the right and the U.S. Army's Big Red One (the 1st Infantry Division) leading the charge on the left, Schwarzkopf launched his ground attack. As U.S. and British armor rolled across the “line of death”—the artificial berm the occupiers had constructed along the border with stolen Kuwait equipment—Iraqi defenses collapsed. Sunni officers fled, leaving Shi'ite and Kurdish conscripts to either surrender or be buried in their trenches. Those who were able to escape wreaked their final wave of destruction, killing Kuwaiti civilians and blowing up or torching more than half of the country's oil wells. If Saddam couldn't have them, nobody would.

By the time the sun rose on February 28, coalition forces had liberated Kuwait, taken more than 150,000 Iraqi prisoners, and cut the
Baghdad-Basra highway and rail line. The “mother of all battles” had taken fewer than one hundred hours. The international media, having predicted a long and difficult campaign with “thousands of U.S. war dead,” seemed chagrined to report that 148 American servicemen died during Desert Storm, and that total coalition forces losses were 358 killed and 1,235 wounded.

With more than a third of the Iraqi army destroyed or rendered ineffective, some advocated continuing the drive all the way to Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein's regime. But in Washington, London, Cairo, and Riyadh, others argued that none of the twelve UN resolutions dealing with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait authorized the use of force to invade Iraq and bring down Saddam. The resolutions were limited in scope, permitting the coalition forces only to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. And so when General Schwarzkopf summoned Iraqi military commanders to talks at the crossroads town of Safwan on March 3, he was authorized to negotiate a “ceasefire” and nothing more. There was to be no demand for a general surrender and no insistence on a regime change. In Baghdad, Saddam quickly agreed to the terms:

   
no-fly areas for fixed-wing aircraft in northern and southern Iraq

   
a full accounting for Kuwaiti and allied MIAs and immediate repatriation of POWs