America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (21 page)

At a press conference on November 8, one day after the midterm elections, President Bush announced that he had ordered additional troops to the Gulf. The aim, he said, was “to ensure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option should that be necessary to achieve our common goals.”
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The oblique language fooled no one. Unless Saddam Hussein unexpectedly conceded to all U.S. demands, the likelihood of Bush exercising the “option” he was creating approached 100 percent. Schwarzkopf understood that. “Forget the defensive bullshit,” he told his commanders.
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Saddam had started something that the United States was now going to finish.

So over the next two months further reinforcements poured in. From Germany came the U.S. Army’s VII Corps, with two mechanized divisions, an armored cavalry regiment, and a host of supporting units. From the United States came the famed 1st Infantry Division—the Big Red One—along with a division of Marines to round out the I Marine Expeditionary Force. Among the new arrivals were many reservists, activated in the biggest call-up since the Korean War. By the time these additional forces all took up their positions in mid-January, Schwarzkopf’s command equaled in total strength the number of U.S. troops serving in Vietnam at the height of that conflict.
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In the interim, Bush conscientiously checked the requisite legal and constitutional boxes. On November 29, the so-called international community gave him the go-ahead, UN Security Council Resolution 668 authorizing the use of “all necessary means” to enforce its previous order for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. The Security Council gave Saddam until January 15 to comply.

With that deadline approaching, the United States Congress belatedly took up the matter. After a contentious debate, the Congress on January 12 passed a de facto declaration of war, with the Senate voting 52–47 in favor and the House of Representatives 250–183. Nominally, the outcome fell along partisan lines, the vast majority of Republicans supporting the resolution and most Democrats opposed. More accurately, however, the divide was between members still haunted by Vietnam and those determined to jettison Vietnam-induced constraints. The latter camp included a fair number of Democrats such as Senators Al Gore of Tennessee and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.
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Representative Stephen Solarz, an influential Democrat from New York and Vietnam War opponent, co-sponsored the resolution and was among those insisting that Munich, not Vietnam, offered the proper historical analogy. “The great lesson of our times is that evil still exists,” he told his colleagues, sounding like Lyndon Johnson or Dean Rusk in 1966, “and when evil is on the march it must be confronted.”
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There was also a third camp. Senior members of the officer corps, notably including Powell and Schwarzkopf, numbered among those both haunted by Vietnam and determined to undo that war’s verdict. Indeed, understanding the campaign to liberate Kuwait, its planning and conduct, requires seeing it in considerable part as a proxy war waged against the past.

Like some ghostly presence, Vietnam hovered over the entire proceedings, both in Washington and in the theater of operations. Although memoirs subsequently penned by the principals in this drama disagree about many things—notably the granting of laurels and the allocation of blame—on one point they are in lockstep. From start to finish, both civilians like Bush and Cheney and soldiers like Powell and Schwarzkopf were intent on ensuring that the war against Iraq was not going to be a rerun of Vietnam. This time, by common agreement, there would no micromanaging by meddling civilians, no gradual escalation, no fighting with one hand tied. This time generals would direct the fight, and the American people would be fully on board. A war against Iraq would be Vietnam done right, with decisive victory the result. No shillyshallying allowed.

For soldiers like Powell and Schwarzkopf, the term
decisive
had specific and concrete meaning, tied directly to the fate now awaiting Saddam’s army. “First we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it,” Powell promised in a widely reported statement.
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But the ultimate expression of “it” was the Iraqi Republican Guard, the elite of the Saddam’s military. This corps-sized formation consisted of several mechanized divisions with imposing names—Hammurabi, Medina, Nebuchadnezzar, Tawakalna—arrayed in depth behind the Iraqi conscripts strung out along the Saudi border. Victory required their complete liquidation. “We need to destroy—not attack, not damage, not surround—I want you to
destroy
the Republican Guard,” Schwarzkopf thundered at his commanders. “When you’re done with them, I don’t want them to be an effective fighting force. I don’t want them to exist as a military organization.”
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Defeating an ostensibly battle-hardened Republican Guard offered the prospect of wiping away the stigma of having failed to defeat an army of Asian peasants.

Yet this preoccupation with settling past accounts occluded a clear understanding of the situation at hand. What the yearned-for battlefield vindication could realistically be expected to yield received only passing attention. So too did the possible implications of deepening direct U.S. military involvement in the Islamic world. Intent on vanquishing the specter of Vietnam, those charged with managing the forthcoming war lost sight of the actual context in which the encounter with Iraq was occurring. The Persian Gulf was not Southeast Asia. The long Cold War had ended. This was something different.

By twentieth-century standards, the Second Gulf War ranks as a moderately large conflict waged for quite limited objectives. By ejecting the Iraqi army that had occupied Kuwait, the forces under Schwarzkopf’s command were to restore the sovereignty of that country. (Note that making good on this political requirement did not necessarily require the complete destruction of the Republican Guard; the linkage between Washington’s advertised political aim and Schwarzkopf’s stated operational objective was tenuous.) Beyond that specified goal of liberating Kuwait lay the vague hope that a demonstration of superior American power might somehow lay the foundation for what President Bush was calling a “new world order.”
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The operative word was
order
. The pragmatic Bush (in contrast to the next U.S. president to bear that name) entertained no illusions about a war against Iraq advancing the cause of freedom, democracy, and human rights. What the elder Bush sought—and what his administration would happily settle for, especially in the Islamic world—was stability.

In fact, however, there existed little reason to expect that ousting Saddam from Kuwait was going to produce much in the way of secondary benefits. Arab armies had more or less routinely gone down to defeat at Israeli hands. Even so, the underlying causes of disorder and dysfunction, not only in an Arab-Israeli context but elsewhere in the Greater Middle East, had persisted. To fancy that another Arab defeat, this time administered by Americans, would produce a more conclusive outcome required a real leap of faith.

The burden of converting faith into reality fell on Schwarzkopf. With the UN ultimatum about to expire and Saddam still refusing to comply, all eyes turned to the field commander. The impending battle was his to fight. So the lessons of Vietnam dictated. It was, therefore, his to win or to lose.

Schwarzkopf was the first of several generals during America’s War for the Greater Middle East to achieve apparent immortality—only to discover that the grant was temporary. When his celebrity was at its peak, a fellow officer who had attended West Point with Schwarzkopf offered this effusive appraisal of his classmate: “Norm is this generation’s Doug MacArthur. He’s got the tactical brilliance of Patton, the strategic insight of Eisenhower, and the modesty of Bradley.”
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Perhaps.

Yet to an unhealthy extent, Schwarzkopf also shared MacArthur’s penchant for theatrics. As with Patton, maintaining his emotional balance required a constant struggle. Like Eisenhower, Schwarzkopf had a volcanic temper, which (unlike Ike) he made little effort to keep in check. And like the thin-skinned Bradley, he was quick to take offense at any perceived slight. Generalship in wartime requires foresight, equanimity, and a supple intelligence. Whatever his other talents, Schwarzkopf was not especially graced with these qualities. The campaign to liberate Kuwait would display his gifts and his flaws in equal measure.

That campaign, dubbed Operation Desert Storm, began at 2:40
A.M.
on January 17 with a helicopter attack that destroyed two crucially important Iraqi radar installations. Minutes later F-117 stealth bombers were rolling in on downtown Baghdad while terrain-hugging cruise missiles began pounding high-priority targets such as air defenses and government buildings across the Iraqi capital. These formed the opening salvos of a coalition air offensive that continued with minimal interruption for the next forty days. The limited information parceled out to the public portrayed the air offensive as unprecedented in intensity, accuracy, and effectiveness. In many respects, it was.

On the first night alone, nearly seven hundred combat aircraft, the vast majority of them American, penetrated Iraqi airspace. Remarkably, only one plane, an F/A-18 from the USS
Saratoga
flown by Lieutenant Commander Scott Speicher, was lost.
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By morning, coalition forces had achieved air superiority. The first wave of attacks crippled Iraqi air defenses and strategic communications. In the days that followed, the target list expanded to include electrical generation plants, petroleum refining and storage facilities, transportation assets, airfields, and suspected weapons of mass destruction sites. Saddam’s air force, dominant against Iran but vastly inferior to the coalition air armada, essentially chose not to engage. During the first week of combat, it mustered only thirty sorties per day. By January 27, with Iraqi air assets either destroyed or fleeing to landing fields in Iran, the coalition enjoyed unquestioned air supremacy. The weight of its effort now turned to isolating Saddam’s forces in Kuwait, laying into major troop concentrations and then, through what coalition pilots called “tank plinking,” incrementally reducing what remained of the Iraqi army’s capacity and will to fight.
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Saddam responded with reassuring incoherence. He flung Scuds toward Saudi Arabia and Israel, neither country reacting as he anticipated—the Saudis stayed in and the Israelis out.
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Opening the valves of a Kuwaiti oil terminal, Saddam released thousands of barrels of crude into the Gulf, apparently expecting pollution to give pause to the world’s leading polluters. He rashly launched a brigade-sized probe into Saudi Arabia proper. Devoid of air support, the small-scale attack ended in an utter rout. This ill-advised foray served chiefly to reveal the shortcomings of Saddam’s army as, in the words of one American general, “the gang that can’t shoot straight.”
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The noose was tightening.

For army officers like Powell and Schwarzkopf, that air power alone might suffice to win the war qualified as an inadmissible heresy—like questioning the universality of American values or the perfection of the U.S. Constitution. Where Powell and Schwarzkopf parted company was on the timing of the ground offensive required to administer the coup de grâce. The politically savvy Powell was acutely sensitive to the pressures on President Bush, chiefly coming from impatient allies but also from the press, to move sooner rather than later. The JCS chairman prodded Schwarzkopf to get on with it.

Schwarzkopf pushed back. He had heard whispers that back in Washington people were comparing him to the dilatory Civil War general George McClellan, to any American general officer an intolerable insult.
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Weighed down by the burdens of command, the CENTCOM chief seemed at times precariously close to coming unglued. “Colin, I think I’m losing it,” he complained to Powell at one point. “I feel my head’s in a vice.”
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From where he sat, Schwarzkopf could not see what all the hurry was about. With each additional day of bombing, Iraq’s army grew perceptibly weaker, the task awaiting American soldiers and Marines less dangerous, and the likelihood of Schwarzkopf himself failing less likely.

On February 22, Saddam’s troops began torching hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells, as if to signal an impending scorched-earth retreat. Almost six weeks of bombing—nearly one hundred thousand sorties plus over three hundred cruise missiles—had left his army (and his country as a whole) reeling. According to U.S. intelligence estimates, frontline Iraq army divisions had suffered 50 percent losses due to casualties and desertions. The Republican Guard had fared somewhat better, but it too had sustained losses of approximately 25 percent.
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Schwarzkopf finally conceded that the enemy needed no further softening up.

In fact, although these estimates proved reasonably accurate, they told only half the story. From the very outset, CENTCOM had substantially overstated the threat. The Iraqis never had what the Americans thought they had; after weeks of mauling from the air, they had even less. As a consequence, by the last week of February, Schwarzkopf was facing an enemy that was both badly battered and numerically inferior to his own forces, perhaps by as much as a 3:1 margin.
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