America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (23 page)

Upon returning to the United States, Schwarzkopf led his troops past cheering throngs during gala confetti-strewn parades in the nation’s capitol and through Lower Manhattan’s “Canyon of Heroes.”
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Out of victory came a sense of closure and perhaps of national reconciliation. After marching down Constitution Avenue with a contingent from VII Corps, Franks went directly to the Vietnam Memorial. “This one was for you,” he thought, as he ran his fingers over the names of fallen comrades.
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Meanwhile, down in Little Rock, the young governor of Arkansas made a point of including Vietnam vets in the parade honoring local returning Desert Storm heroes. “I’ll never forget how moved I was,” Bill Clinton recalled, “as I watched them march down the street to our cheers, and saw the Vietnam veterans finally being given the honor they deserved all along.”
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It’s hard to imagine two people more dissimilar than Franks and Clinton, the one having lost a leg in Vietnam, the other having made a considerable effort to avoid service there, but on this occasion their views aligned.

Schwarzkopf himself, now an A-list celebrity, was both the most authoritative proponent and the principal beneficiary of this euphoria. Members of the press swooned. Schwarzkopf had “the IQ of a genius” and a “taste for Pavarotti.” As “the heartthrob of America,” he represented “a new model for male leadership”—“introspective but decisive, caring but competent, one of the guys and a leader.” “Schwarzkopf of Arabia” had engineered “a triumph of almost Biblical proportions—his enemy slain in countless numbers, his own soldiers hardly touched by the battlefield’s scouring wind.” Rather than “a dour martinet like William Westmoreland”—a reference to the Vietnam commander tagged (fairly or not) with getting that war disastrously wrong—Schwarzkopf was “a warrior with a soul.” His battlefield achievements were without parallel. “Generations hence military historians will ponder the lessons of the liberation of Kuwait,” directly attributable to its commander. Simply put, “no one has done it better than Schwarzkopf.”
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Personal honors continued to accumulate. From President Bush, Schwarzkopf received the Medal of Freedom, from Congress a gold medal, and from the Queen of England a knighthood. Awed members of Congress proposed his elevation to five-star rank, putting him (and Powell) alongside World War II greats such as Marshall and Eisenhower.
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He also inked a $5 million contract to write his memoirs, which became a huge bestseller.

Yet virtually from the moment that President Bush had announced a suspension of offensive operations, events on the ground had begun to subvert the victory narrative. Loose ends abounded, as Bush himself vaguely apprehended. An entry in his diary on the morning of February 28 already reflected a growing sense of unease. On the one hand, Bush assured himself, “there’s been nothing like this in history.” On the other hand, “it hasn’t been a clean end.”
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Evidence that the end was less than clean had begun to accumulate even prior to Schwarzkopf’s confab at Safwan. The day before (and therefore three days after Bush had declared the war ended), the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) had engaged elements of the Hammurabi Division as they withdrew toward Baghdad. The division commander, Major General Barry McCaffrey, claimed that his troops had come under fire. If so, that fire was notably ineffective. In what became known as the Battle of the Junkyard, American tanks, field artillery, and attack helicopters from the 24th Mech destroyed a roadbound column of some several hundred vehicles. To escape the deadly assault, Iraqi soldiers simply abandoned their equipment and fled. When the action ended after some four hours, U.S. casualties were none killed and one wounded. Whatever the accuracy of McCaffrey’s version of events, the incident suggested that Schwarzkopf’s “mother of all briefings” had not told the full story. Either the Republican Guard still retained considerable combat capability or U.S. forces had engaged in unnecessary slaughter well after the commander in chief had ordered a halt to the proceedings.
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That both were true was also a possibility.

Worse was the crisis exploding within Iraq itself—a popular uprising against the continuation of Saddam Hussein’s rule. In the midst of the Second Gulf War, President Bush had urged the Iraqi people to rid themselves of Saddam, whom he described as “Hitler revisited.”
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U.S. government propaganda outlets had emphasized the same message.
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At a press conference on March 1, the president reiterated his solution to the Saddam problem: “The Iraqi people should put him aside.” That, he continued, “would facilitate the acceptance of Iraq back into the family of peace-loving nations.”
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Whether or not they were responding to Bush’s suggestion, large numbers of Iraqis, notably Shiites and Kurds who had not fared well under Saddam’s Sunni-dominated Ba’ath Party, now launched an effort to oust the dictator. Saddam responded with pitiless repression, which had the intended effect. Thousands were killed. Many hundreds of thousands more fled. In the United States and elsewhere in the West, images of forlorn Kurdish refugees, huddled in the desolate Turkish outback without food, water, or shelter, led nightly news programs. (The largely unseen suffering of Iraqi Shiites garnered less attention.) Meanwhile, the forces under Schwarzkopf’s command, still occupying southern Iraq as they prepared to redeploy, did nothing. The result was an epic humanitarian disaster and a huge embarrassment for the United States.

Assuming responsibility for the Kurds had never figured as part of the Bush administration’s game plan. Yet once again, the optics were terrible. Surely, Bush’s “new world order” was not going to allow such crimes. At his March 1 press conference, Bush had posited that by enhancing American stature and influence, Desert Storm was going to make the world a better and more peaceful place. “I think because of what has happened,” he said, “we won’t have to use U.S. forces around the world. I think when we say that something is objectively correct, like don’t take over a neighbor or you’re going to bear some responsibility, people are going to listen.”
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As suggested by the unhappy plight of Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds, that message had apparently not sunk in with Saddam Hussein. Through violence, the United States had sought to end violence and impose order. Instead, within Iraq, U.S. intervention had produced conditions conducive to further violence and further disorder—another persistent theme in America’s War for the Greater Middle East.

So in remarkably short order, the victory narrative began to unravel. That Saddam had somehow managed to survive now defined the issue. Critics reproached Bush for not having pushed on to Baghdad, with even Schwarzkopf making the misleading claim that his own recommendation had been to “continue to march.”
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New York Times
columnist William Safire likened “President Bush’s decision to betray the Kurdish people” to debacles such as the Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs and Carter’s Desert One. (Eisenhower’s stone-faced response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution offered a more apt comparison.) Through inaction, Bush “threw away our newfound pride…as a superpower that stands for the right,” Safire fulminated. “It seems we defend the rich and sell out the poor.”
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In
The Washington Post,
foreign affairs columnist Jim Hoagland denounced Bush’s reluctance to rescue the Kurds as “monumental folly,” directly attributable to “the old mind-set about Saddam being a useful tool for U.S. goals.” Passivity, he warned, would “tarnish even the most splendid victory.”
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Charles Krauthammer agreed: “We’ve given Saddam enough chances. The time to finish him is now.”
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For their part, the president and his defenders offered multiple reasons for not having gone on to Baghdad, chiefly the probable mess waiting there and the refusal of Arab allies to sanction a precedent-setting war aimed at regime change. Redefining the objective as something other than liberating Kuwait would have shattered the coalition. Besides, as Cheney explained, “the assumption from the experts was that Saddam would never survive the defeat.”
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The experts, not the policymakers, had miscalculated.

Yet the most important reason for not going to Baghdad was the one least cited in public. In fact, Hoagland had it more than half-right: The Bush administration was still counting on Iraq to contain Iran.
Washington Post
columnist Mary McGrory stated the matter bluntly. “Bush doesn’t want the Shiite fundamentalist rebels to topple Saddam; that would make Iran the top dog in the Middle East.”
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As Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, later acknowledged, in making war against Saddam, the United States had sought “to damage his offensive capability without weakening Iraq to the point that a vacuum was created, and destroying the balance between Iraq and Iran”—a neat trick that assumed the ability to mete out punishment with micrometer-like precision.
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Yet from the First Gulf War to the Second, this strategic principle had remained sacrosanct: The United States had a compelling interest in positioning Iraq as a counterweight to a dangerous Islamic Republic. By comparison, Saddam’s own fate ranked as an afterthought.
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As for the Kurds, opposing their aspirations for an independent state was the one point on which Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey,
and
the United States could all agree. Except among Kurds, carving up existing states to make room for a sovereign Kurdistan generated little support.

Still, in the face of intensifying pressure to “do something” on behalf of Saddam’s latest victims, Bush gave way. On April 5, he ordered the U.S. military to begin delivering aid to the Kurds. (Iraqi Shiites were out of luck.) “I want to emphasize that this effort is prompted only by humanitarian concerns,” the president insisted—a partial untruth since Turkey’s unease with the detested Kurds entering its territory also prompted the course change.
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Thus began Operation Provide Comfort, a relief mission that in its way equaled Desert Storm in importance. Although nominally the Second Gulf War had ended, something else had already begun. Here was the first indication that the United States military was not going to “go home.” Soon enough, more followed.

What then are we to make of Operation Desert Storm? Certainly, the hopes expressed by the war’s American architects have not found fulfillment. Had the Second Gulf War “dramatically changed the situation in the Middle East”?
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Did it create “a far greater opportunity for peace in the Middle East than any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes”?
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The answers to those questions must be no. With the passing of a quarter-century, judgments about the war will vary depending on the vantage point of the observer.

Viewed as “a war for oil,” which indeed it was, Desert Storm produced a satisfactory yet imperfect outcome. The Emir of Kuwait had much for which to be thankful: He had regained his country. For their part, Saudi royals no longer faced the prospect of imminent invasion. The Americans had removed any doubts about their willingness to provide protection. Even so, as long as Saddam Hussein clung to power, he remained a menace and regional stability remained precarious.

Viewed as a postscript to Vietnam, the Second Gulf War qualifies as a clear-cut success that gave rise to problematic second-order effects. For officers such as Powell, Schwarzkopf, and Franks, Desert Storm signified redemption, not least of all because, as Powell put it, “the American people fell in love again with their armed forces.”
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Politically, this brief and seemingly epochal campaign also largely dismantled any restraints on the use of force. At the time, President Bush happily asserted that “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
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He was justified in making that claim. But did the new “Desert Storm syndrome” that emerged in its place—a belief that the United States now enjoyed unparalleled military supremacy—mark an improvement? Time would tell. Meanwhile, in the years immediately ahead, the American soldier, showered with popular affection, was going to get one helluva workout.

Viewed in the context of America’s expanding military involvement in the Greater Middle East—the primary interest here—Operation Desert Storm accomplished next to nothing. The Bush administration’s declaration of victory in 1991 did, in fact, turn out to be premature. That results fell short of expectations stemmed less from flawed generalship, however, than from a fundamental misreading of the overall situation.

Although during the coming decade Washington developed an Ahab-like mania regarding Saddam, the Iraqi dictator was merely a symptom of what the United States was contending with. The real problem had a multitude of aspects: the vacuum left by the eclipse of British imperial power; intractable economic backwardness and political illegitimacy; divisions within Islam compounded by the rise of Arab nationalism; the founding of Israel; and the advent of the Iranian Revolution.