CHAPTER 19
IMPOTENT AT THE GULF
FOR DECADES ON END Iraq participated in most of Israel’s wars. In 1936 a force of Iraqi volunteers helped organize the Palestinian revolt. In 1948 a division-sized Iraqi expeditionary force entered the West Bank and could only be prevented from reaching the Plain of Sharon, and thus cutting Israel in half, by dint of desperate fighting. Similarly in 1967 an Iraqi Tu-16 bombed targets inside Israel; Iraqi units were on their way across Jordan when they were met and forced to turn back by the IAF. Iraqi units remained in Jordan until 1970, when they withdrew; however, in 1973 the lead brigade of a 60,000-strong Iraqi expeditionary force clashed with the Israelis on the Golan Heights, suffering losses but helping to halt the IDF’s advance on Damascus. During the next seven years there was much speculation concerning the creation of a so-called eastern front consisting of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Had it come about, it would have deployed military resources more than equal to those of the coalition that faced Israel in the 1973 October War.1 In the event the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War nullified any such plans. So long as it lasted, Israel was more secure than at any time in history.
In late spring 1988 the situation changed. After eight years of war in which it suffered horrendous casualties to superior Iraqi firepower and saw its cities bombarded by Iraqi missiles, Iran, ruled by the Mullahs, appeared ready to give up. A cease-fire was signed, confirming Iraq’s original goals by giving it control over the entire Shatt al Arab Channel instead of drawing the border along the middle of the waterway, which according to the Iranians was the rightful thing under international law. This freed the hands of Saddam Hussein, whose military machine according to the best available estimates now consisted of as many as 1.25 million men, 60-65 divisions, 6,000 tanks, 5,000-8,000 APCs, 4,500-5,000 artillery barrels, more than 700 combat aircraft, and almost 500 helicopters of which some 200 were armed.2 To be sure, not all of the equipment was up to date, and much of the Iraqi force consisted of low-grade infantry units suitable only for stationary defense. Yet despite the protracted war with Iran it was considered to be, if not really up to NATO or Warsaw Pact standards, then at any rate tough and experienced in the conduct of defensive operations in particular.3
Impotent at the Gulf: Israelis wearing gas masks inside “sealed room.” The newspaper headline reads: “US bombing Iraq and Kuwait.”
What was more, following the destruction of his nuclear reactor by the IAF in 1981, the Iraqi dictator was known to have engaged in an extensive, very expensive effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In their war against Iran the Iraqis had repeatedly resorted to poison gas. Then and later they also used it against Iraq’s Kurdish population, spraying it over villages and killing hundreds if not thousands. Even more serious, there were signs that Baghdad was attempting to revive its nuclear program. Though Iraq consistently denied any intention to build nuclear weapons, and though the country is in fact a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, understandably these denials were not given much credence in Israel or elsewhere.
Just what Saddam Hussein intended to do with his steadily growing military might was not clear. Certainly Israel was only one factor in his calculations and by no means the most important; after all, Iraq has other concerns closer at hand including, besides Iran and the Gulf countries with Saudi Arabia at their head, the long-standing Kurdish ulcer that from time to time threatened to deprive it of some of its most important oil-producing provinces. Whatever Saddam’s intentions, in April there was a fierce verbal clash with Israel when he used the occasion of Baath Party Day to announce that “if Israel attacked a certain metal-working plant of ours” he in turn would “burn half of Israel.”4 The threat must have referred to a possible repetition of the 1981 reactor attack, the “burning” to the use of chemical weapons Iraq was known to be producing on a large scale. For what it was worth, Shamir as Israeli prime minister responded by reassuring Saddam that he had no intention of attacking Iraq.5 In truth a 1981-style attack would not have been practical at the time. The Iraqis never rebuilt their reactor for the production of plutonium; their effort to produce enriched Uranium-235 was dispersed at several sites and carefully concealed. Moreover, this time the vital element of surprise was lacking.
So far as Israel was concerned, there matters rested. No more than its counterparts in other countries did the IDF intelligence service—headed at the time by Maj. Gen. Amnon Shachak, the subsequent chief of staff—succeed in keeping abreast of Saddam’s plans for occupying Kuwait. If anything the feeling was that Iraq’s need for economic recovery “was bound to inject a measure of moderation into [its] foreign policy”; it was expected to be “largely preoccupied with domestic problems” while “moderat[ing] its position on the Arab-Israeli conflict.”6 More than its counterparts in other countries, however, Israel could justify complacency by the fact it does not share a border with Iraq and that the latter, so long as it stayed out of Jordan, was not considered a “confrontation state.” The gulf is approximately a thousand miles away, so that a clash there need not affect Israeli interests directly.
As the diplomatic process for building a coalition against Iraq got into gear and as U.S. and other armed forces poured into the Persian Gulf region, some precautions were taken. In particular, additional gas masks were purchased from abroad. King Hussein of Jordan was permitting Iraqi aircraft to overfly his country and mount reconnaissance flights along Israel’s eastern border, so the IAF stepped up patrols. That apart, life went on more or less as usual. During autumn 1990, Israel’s attention was distracted first by a series of bloody terrorist knife attacks and then by a major clash on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. In the latter no fewer than nineteen protesting Palestinians lost their lives and another 100 or so were wounded, the former being the largest single-day figure during the Intifada till then.
As 1990 drew to an end, indications that an eventual war in the Persian Gulf would involve Israel multiplied. In the face of mounting international pressure Saddam Hussein regarded an attack on Tel Aviv as his best means for breaking up the Coalition, now formalized and gathering against him; his spokesmen insisted that in case conflict broke out, Iraqi missiles would “definitely” be launched against Israel.7 The atmosphere in Israel grew increasingly nervous; by October popular pressure forced the government to start distributing gas masks even though the minister of defense and the IDF high command felt that was premature.8 In a country supposedly accustomed to living under an existential threat, the extent to which people had become estranged from the deadly serious business of war was revealed when orthodox Jews successfully insisted that they should not be obliged to cut off their beards but be provided with special gas masks instead.
In other respects, too, preparations for the attack did not proceed as smoothly as they should have. In Beer Sheba, so nervous was the population in its attempt to lay hands on gas masks that female soldiers responsible for distributing them were beaten.9 Not only was IDF intelligence unable to provide the government with hard data on the size and nature of the threat (e.g., how many missiles Saddam possessed and whether he had chemical warheads for them) ;10 it turned out that authorities had overlooked the problem of protecting the young. In the end it was necessary to improvise by designing a sort of incubator suit, made of plastic sheets and provided with a filter.
As the clock ticked toward war, the mood inside Israel grew increasingly weird. The Intifada having already caused tourism to fall, now many foreign residents also left. Furthermore, an IDF “closure” prevented the Palestinians from leaving the Occupied Territories, thus slowing or even halting many kinds of economic activities. In a country noted for its exceptional dynamism and bustling atmosphere a strange quiet prevailed. Meanwhile a survey showed that the public shelters built throughout the country beginning in the fifties were all but useless. Not only were they too far away to be reached by the population in case of a missile alarm, but they could not be rendered gasproof and thus constituted death traps rather than ref
uges. Though all private houses built since the late sixties had to be constructed with shelters, they too had not been designed to withstand gas.11
Acting on instructions from their government, people went to work preparing so-called sealed rooms. The idea was that poison gas is heavier than air; therefore, in case of attack it was necessary to gather in the highest possible room, out of the wind’s way, and hermetically sealed against the outside. To accomplish this the population was told to use masking tape and plastic sheets for their windows; any cracks between doors and floors were to be closed with the aid of wet rags. The rooms were to be provided with food, water, and children’s games, and occupants were to don gas masks when ordered to do so. How valuable these preparations would have been if put to the test nobody knows. Perhaps the best that can be said is that so long as preparations were made they gave the population the feeling that there was something it could do.
Meanwhile Western statesmen and politicians, seeking to prevent any crack in the Coalition, avoided Jerusalem as if it had already come under attack. For the same reason the Israelis were unable to coordinate with the United States or even to obtain precise information as to the latter’s military plans for dealing with the threat. In the absence of reliable information about Iraqi capabilities, speculation abounded; each day produced a fresh crop of experts, some in uniform and others not. Some, on the basis of calculations taken from the Iran-Iraq War, forecasted thousands of casualties in the event of a major Iraqi chemical attack; others insisted that not one of Saddam’s missiles would get through the hail of U.S. firepower directed against them.12
Talks in Geneva having failed to solve the crisis,13 on the night of January 16-17 the Coalition forces attacked. Understandably most of the effort was concentrated against Iraqi strategic targets, such as command centers, communications nodes, radars, antiaircraft defenses, and airfields. However, a substantial number of sorties were also flown against western Iraq where the missiles threatening Israel were suspected to be hidden. Early reports originating in the headquarters of U.S. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf seemed to indicate that all Iraqi missile launchers had been destroyed, though whether the Americans believed this or were deliberately attempting to mislead their Israeli (and Saudi) allies is not clear. In any case the mood in Israel during the first forty-eight hours tended to be confident if not self-congratulatory. At 2 A.M. during the night of Friday, January 18, however, the quiet was broken as the wail of sirens was heard in Israel for the first time since the opening minutes of the 1973 October War. Two minutes later five missiles landed in Tel Aviv and another three in Haifa, and the country found itself in what is best described as a one-sided war.
During the months immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities the question as to what Israel should do in case it came under Iraqi attack was often debated. 14 As Arens later explained, a modern military unit can cover 500 miles in twenty-four hours ; 15 hence he considered the most serious threat to consist of an Iraqi invasion of Jordan16 and set into motion a contingency plan for landing a complete airborne division in the eastern Jordanian desert. Supported from the air, the paratroopers were to occupy one of several ridges (apparently the operation was canceled before it was necessary to decide just which one). With other forces presumably standing by to ward off eventual threats from Egypt or Syria, an IDF ground corps would break loose. It would cross the River Jordan, climb the escarpment to the east, and link up with the paratroopers in forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Jordan’s air force with its handful of obsolescent aircraft was not seen as a serious threat, and its army was too small to do much more than show how bravely it could fight. Regarded from an operational point of view the plans were probably sound. Strategically, though, they rested on a gross overestimate of the ability of the Iraq army, already under some of the heaviest air attacks in history, to move and operate so far from its bases.
Details concerning the Israeli plans for attacking Iraqi missile launchers are, understandably, even more scarce. Like the Coalition the Israelis intended to rely on their air force. More than the Coalition they would be operating at extreme range. Unlike the Coalition, they did not possess satellite reconnaissance of the area over which they would operate but depended on their own planes flying photo-intelligence missions (plus whatever the Americans would be kind enough to provide). Finally, and again like the Coalition, the IDF was planning to put teams of commandos on the ground. Whether the IAF would have been more successful in targeting launchers than the Coalition—who, it was later revealed, never hit even one launcher—is immaterial. At least one former IAF commander, the redoubtable Major General Peled, is on record as saying that it would not have.17
As matters stood, Israel’s ability to retaliate against the Iraqi attacks by striking targets other than missile launchers was also in doubt. Unlike the USAF, the IAF is mainly an operational service and has never acquired strategic bombers capable of carrying heavy bomb loads over thousands of miles. To be sure, some of its fighters would be able to reach Baghdad and other strategic locations; operating at extreme range, however, their capacity to inflict damage would be limited. Compared to the rain of ordnance already coming down on Iraq it would almost certainly amount to mere pinpricks; the lack of bombers could not be compensated with precision-guided munitions with their relatively small warheads. To produce a real impression on a country of 170,000 square miles and almost 18 million inhabitants Israel would have to resort to weapons of mass destruction. Though not unimaginable, this course would have been considered only in retaliation if Saddam resorted to such weapons.
According to his published memoirs, Minister of Defense Moshe Arens was firmly in favor of retaliation. However, he was being held back by Prime Minister Shamir who for once took a more moderate line. In the event, each time the issue became urgent—meaning each time the Iraqis fired a salvo—some obstacle would come up and prevent the IAF from taking action.18 At first it was lack of up-to-date photo intelligence. Then it was the Americans refusing to provide the necessary identification friendfoe codes, without which Israeli and U.S. aircraft risked getting in each other’s way (the Israelis could not know that had they attacked, the Americans planned to withdraw their aircraft from western Iraq to create a corridor for IAF forces).19 The next several days were allegedly wasted while the United States sent over a two-star Air Force general, Tom Olson, to discuss the matter; then again when the weather over the theater of operations became cloudy and prevented the IAF from taking action on its own. Dispatched to Washington in order to tell the Americans that Israel was “determined to take military action even without coordinating with them,” Generals Barak and David Ivri (the latter as director general of the ministry of defense) returned without having persuaded Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney of the seriousness of the threat. Thus Arens, by his own account, was like an athlete going after an opponent on the field while shouting “Hold me back!” For weeks on end one excuse followed another until finally one day the war was over and the opportunity, if one ever existed, had passed.
Whatever Arens might do or say, Israel’s population was well aware of the IDF’s limitations. “Don’t we have an Army? An Air Force? An atomic bomb? Special Forces?” asks the heroine in a best-selling novel published soon after the war; “They cannot do nothing,” answers the paratrooper captain (res.), stretched out on the sofa .20 But once the euphoria of the first two days wore off, Israelis resigned to life under threat of missile attack. Doing so was easier thanks to Coalition dominance of the skies over western Iraq, which permitted Saddam’s military to leave hideaways and operate only at night. During the day Israel was safe, and life, although considerably subdued by the fact that schools had been closed and mothers could not go to work, continued more or less as normal.
The missiles being fired at Israel and Saudi Arabia were the El Hussein type, a stretched-out version of the Soviet Scud (itself based on the German World War II-vintage V-2) with a liquid-fuel engine and a high-explosive payload of 250-300
kg. Before the war there had been considerable speculation concerning Iraqi ability to launch them in rapid succession from mobile launchers while under attack by Coalition air forces; in the event, these difficulties appear to have been overcome. Arriving at several times the speed of sound, the missiles, provided they exploded (not all did), could cause considerable damage at the point of impact. Yet the effectiveness of their already primitive guidance systems had been further reduced by modifications the Iraqis introduced to increase range. Accordingly they did not have the accuracy to threaten anything but area targets the size of cities, and several hit unpopulated areas or, falling short, the West Bank.
Militarily, and from the point of view of the casualties that it caused, the Iraqi missile threat was negligible. Psychologically it was very considerable, however, the more so because it soon turned out that preparations by HAGA (Hagana Ezrachit, Civil Defense Organization) had been inadequate. When the war started it was discovered that not all areas had been provided with air-raid sirens and that some existing ones did not work. Dividing the country into regions in accordance with the extent of the threat (outlying rural areas were considered to be in less danger than central urban areas) proved crude and repeatedly caused hundreds of thousands of people to be confined to sealed rooms without any good reason and for longer than necessary. According to the state comptroller’s subsequent report, one-third of the gas masks distributed did not fit; had they been put to the test, the children’s incubators would have proved all but useless.21 As if to emphasize that they did not know what they were doing, the IDF at first used codes (nachash tsefa, or “viper snake”) to refer to incoming missiles. Soon after, realizing that it was opening itself to ridicule by trying to conceal what everybody knew, it abandoned the practice.
The Sword And The Olive Page 44