The Iraq War

by John Keegan

  That was foolhardy on a number of counts. Whatever else was wrong with Saddam’s international position, lack of military force was not one of his postwar weaknesses. He controlled the largest and most experienced army in the Gulf region and the sixth largest air force in the world. Moreover his difference with the Emir of Kuwait was not born of any recent and material dispute but went back to the early days of Iraqi independence. Under the Ottomans, who had ruled Mesopotamia since the sixteenth century, Kuwait had been administered as part of the province (vilayet) of Basra. Under the tutelage of the British, who had run an undeclared empire over the Gulf States through the government of India and the Royal Navy throughout Victoria’s reign, Kuwait had acquired a sort of independence from the Turks. This was not accepted by the Iraqi political class which, as soon as the mandate was ended in 1932, began to articulate a claim to Kuwait as part of the national territory. The claim was in part nationalist but was perhaps more strongly driven by Kuwait’s oil wealth, contained in fields which straddled the common border, and by Kuwait’s better access to the waters of the Gulf across its longer coastline. Whatever the merits of the Iraqi case, and they were not widely supported in the international community, it was a popular cause at home.

  Saddam, moreover, was determined to persist in pressing his demands. During July 1990 Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, put his country’s case forcefully to the secretary of the Arab League, arguing that both Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were depriving Iraq of a considerable portion of its legitimate oil income through depressing the price by overproduction; ‘a drop of $1 in the price of a barrel of oil leads to a drop of $1 billion in Iraqi revenues annually’. He went on to argue that Iraq had, during the war with Iran, fought to protect the whole Arab homeland. It had spent in hard currency $102 billion on weapons and had lost $106 billion in income because of disruption of production. Yet Kuwait and the UAE were still demanding repayment of loans. ‘How can these amounts be regarded as Iraqi debts to its Arab brothers when Iraq made sacrifices that are many times more than these debts in terms of Iraqi resources during the grinding war and offered rivers of blood of its youth in defence of the [Arab] nation’s soil, dignity, honour and wealth?’

  The threat, particularly to Kuwait, was made more explicit in a television broadcast by Saddam Hussein on 17 July. ‘Raising our voices against the evil of overproduction is not the final resort if the evil continues. There should be some effective act to restore things to their correct positions.’ What that act might be he indicated to the American ambassador, April Glaspie, in Baghdad on 25 July. In a letter he gave her to be sent to President Bush, he warned, ‘We don’t want war … but do not push us to consider war as the only solution to live proudly and to provide our people with a good living.’

  The dialogue that followed has been minutely dissected. Supporters of April Glaspie hold that she made clear to Saddam Washington’s disapproval of an attempt to settle the dispute with Kuwait by force. Critics believe that her exposition of American policy was ambiguous. The strongest point she made was that his deployment of troops (30,000 had just been concentrated on the Iraq–Kuwait border) made it ‘reasonable … to be concerned’. Weakly, she conceded that ‘we have no opinion on the Arab–Arab conflicts, like your border dispute with Kuwait … we hope that you can solve this problem via [the Arab League] or President Mubarak [of Egypt]’. Saddam responded by saying that he wanted a meeting with the Kuwaitis and that that might settle the matter. ‘But if we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.’ On that note Saddam and Glaspie parted, she apparently believing that she had merely been present at another instalment of Arab rhetoric. She would later tell The New York Times, ‘Obviously I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.’

  Glaspie seemed to be attempting to excuse her misinterpretation of Saddam’s despatch of a large army to the Kuwait border by suggesting that the troops might have occupied only the disputed Rumeila oil field and the oil-bearing islands of Warba and Bubiyan. It was an odd evasion of responsibility by a professional diplomat; even partial annexations of foreign territory are infractions of international law. Whatever her thinking, and however muddled or not, her exchange with Saddam can only be described as disastrous and rightly led to the extinction of her career.

  Saddam had already made his intentions clear, in a communication to Kuwait which must have been made known to Washington. On 17 July, the twenty-second anniversary of the ‘Ba’athist revolution’ that had overthrown President Arif, he had demanded a stabilization of the oil price, the renunciation of the war loans and the creation of an Arab ‘Marshall Plan’ to rebuild Iraq. In the event of Kuwait’s failure to accept, Saddam threatened that ‘we will have no choice but to resort to effective action to get things right and ensure the restitution of our rights’. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, also one of Saddam’s creditors, urged the Emir of Kuwait to capitulate and was eventually able to tell Saddam that the Emir was willing to do so. Saddam, however, chose to disbelieve him. ‘At that moment’, said one of Fahd’s closest advisers, ‘the King realised Kuwait was doomed.’

  That indeed appears to have been the case. Saddam, acting as Stalin or Hitler might have done in dealing with a stiff-necked neighbour, had simply decided that he wanted to have his way. He had also concluded that he would not be opposed. It is significant that Saddam appears to have known more about Stalin than Hitler. Hitler overreached himself, in attacking Poland in 1939. Stalin never did. By one of the great injustices of history he got away with all his aggressions. Saddam probably calculated that he could do the same. It was certainly in a spirit of invulnerability that he set out on his annexation of Iraq’s ‘nineteenth province’ on 2 August 1990.

  The Iraqi army was experienced and plentifully equipped. Fully mobilized, it numbered a million men, organized into sixty divisions, including twelve armoured and mechanized. Seven of the divisions belonged to the Republican Guard, better equipped and chosen for political reliability. These, however, were paper strengths; the coalition identified only forty-three divisions on the ground. Equipment figures were better verified: over 4,000 tanks, over 4,000 infantry fighting vehicles and over 1,000 self-propelled guns. On paper the Iraqi air force had over 700 fighter and strike aircraft, at various levels of serviceability. In the event, at an early stage, it was flown to refuge in Iran and took no part in operations after the twelfth day (28 January 1991). The Iraqi navy was tiny and of no military importance, except for its minelaying before the war. The coalition eventually discovered that 1,200 mines, both of contact and influence types, had been laid, which required a heavy clearance effort; two major US warships suffered serious mine damage.

  The Kuwaiti army was only 16,000 strong and was swept aside by the initial onslaught, mounted by three Republican Guard divisions. They were shortly followed by 100,000 other troops which took up positions on either side of the Iraq–Kuwait border and began to construct entrenchments. In the first shock of the Iraqi invasion, however, what Saddam’s enemies in the wider world feared was not his consolidating his conquests but extending them. The forward elements of the Republican Guard immediately established outposts on the Kuwait–Saudi Arabian border, thereby positioning itself to advance also towards Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Nearly half the world’s oil reserves had fallen under the shadow of Saddam’s power.

  The unprovoked and illegal occupation of Kuwait – from which 300,000 people at once fled into Saudi Arabia – was of itself enough to galvanize the powers into activity; not only the powers but lesser nations also and the international organizations. The UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions, in August, September, October and November, condemning Iraq’s actions, calling for withdrawal and imposing sanctions and embargoes of various severity. On 2 August, the day of the invasion, it passed Resolution 660, not only condemning the invasion but also demanding that Iraq withdraw and begin negotiation
s. Resolution 661, on 6 August, embargoed all trade with Iraq. Resolution 665, on 25 August, imposed a naval blockade. Resolution 670, on 25 September, called on all member states to restrict flights to Iraq and to detain Iraqi-flagged ships that had been breaking sanctions. Finally, Resolution 678, on 29 November, the last of twelve, approved ‘all necessary means’ to drive Iraq from Kuwait if it had not left by 15 January 1991.

  Against the background of UN diplomacy, President George Bush, strongly supported by the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was meanwhile assembling a coalition of states that would be prepared to send troops to an international liberation force and, if necessary, to fight. Initially it was Mrs Thatcher who supplied the spark; the President did not think Saddam would attack Saudi Arabia and hoped to settle the crisis by negotiation. His outlook was influenced by a current domestic dispute with Congress as to who controlled foreign policy. Mrs Thatcher convinced him that negotiations would entail delay without an eventual solution and that military preparations were essential. Once persuaded, the President was relentless in pursuit of supporters of his coalition, telephoning constantly around the world and extracting promises of troops, ships and aircraft. There was dissent: the USSR, China and France initially opposed the use of force but, in the event, did not oppose Resolution 678. The European Union revealed its weakness as an instrument of pan-European policy-making; the Western European Union had to be enlisted as a strategic instrument, and it co-ordinated a mine-hunting operation by six member states. Eventually, under one guise or another, sixteen states contributed naval forces, eleven air elements and eighteen ground troops, including Egypt, Syria and Pakistan; the adhesion of these Muslim countries to the coalition and the size of their contributions – Egypt sent two divisions – was of the greatest importance in depriving Saddam of title to represent himself as a champion of Arab nationalism or a Muslim religious leader. Saddam tried hard nonetheless; despite his secular past as a committed Ba’athist, he began to have himself filmed at prayer. He also concocted a spurious genealogy, falsely showing his descent from the Shi’a imams Hussein and Ali. Above all he worked strenuously to establish a link between his quarrel with Kuwait and his hostility to Israel. During the coming war he would attempt to widen the conflict, and detach from the coalition its Arab supporters, by bombarding Israel with Scud missiles.

  His diplomacy did not avail; even his effort to mend his relationship with Iran, by offering to return the last scraps of occupied territory and the west bank of the Shatt el-Arab, failed to extract any support from the ayatollahs, despite their continuous hostility to America and the West in general. As the crisis persisted and he stubbornly refused to withdraw from Kuwait, he found himself increasingly isolated. After 13 September, when 400 Islamic leaders meeting in Mecca authorized the Kuwaitis to proclaim a holy war against him, he was entirely alone.

  It was in those circumstances that on 16 January 1991 the First Gulf War opened, at 2330 GMT. The first phase, that was to last until 24 February, was fought by the coalition exclusively as an air campaign. The coalition was completely dominant and was scarcely opposed; after 26 January, when the Iraqi air force fled to Iran, it was not opposed at all, except by anti-aircraft missile and gun defences. The lack of opposition was not surprising; at the outset, though Iraq possessed 700 aircraft, the size of the coalition air force was 2,430 aircraft and by 24 February it reached 2,790.

  The air campaign fell into four phases. The first was designed to destroy Iraq’s military and civil communications systems – radars, cable networks, radio and television stations – its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons research and development centres, its military industry, such as it was, and its main transportation points, bridges, railroad stations and freight yards. Targets also included civil and military headquarters, ministries and government offices. The principal weapons used in this phase were F-117A stealth bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles, launched from submarines and surface ships. After the opening day, the British, Canadian, French and Italian air contingents joined in, flying Tornados, Mirages and Jaguars; the US Air Force and naval air force provided the main might of the attack.

  In the second and third phases the attack was directed against the Iraqi army’s positions in Kuwait, to destroy equipment and defences and to interdict supply. The burden of the campaign was carried by B-52 bombers delivering patterns of carpet bombing to a round-the-clock timetable.

  Phase 4 accompanied the ground attack, to hit targets of opportunity, to disrupt Iraqi ground manoeuvres and to deliver firepower at the point of assault.

  During the thirty-four days of preliminary air attack, the RAF flew 6,000 missions and the US Navy 18,000, while the USAF flew about 1,000 missions each day. By the end, a quarter of Iraq’s electricity-generating capacity had been destroyed and another half severely damaged. Supplies to the Iraqi front line had been reduced from 20,000 tons a day to 2,000. As the coalition troops would discover, this reduced many of the invaders to near-starvation.

  The most striking feature of the air campaign was the very high degree of precision attained. The war of 1991 was the first in which high-precision weapons – cruise missiles with on-board guidance systems and laser-guided bombs – were deployed. The results, by comparison with those achieved in previous air campaigns, appeared sensational. On-board television cameras showed cruise missiles, at the termination of flight, hitting targets within a margin of error of a few feet. ‘Smart’ bombs achieved similar accuracy. Indeed, almost anything the coalition sought to destroy, from static targets as large as bridges to mobile targets as small as individual tanks – were hit. The only failure in targeting was in the attack on Iraq’s Scud missile launchers. At the outset Iraq possessed about 100 Scuds, a surface-to-surface missile mounting a one-ton conventional explosive warhead, launched from a mobile transporter-erector, to a range of 150 miles. The Scud was a development of the German V-2 rocket of the Second World War; like the V-2 it lacked accuracy and derived its military value from its elusiveness as a target. The missile could be launched from any piece of hard ground and, from arrival to departure, the system needed to be static for less than an hour. For that reason it was difficult to catch both when moving between launch positions or at the moment of launch; when not deployed, it was easily hidden under highway overpasses.

  Iraq fired about ninety Scuds, half at US military targets in Saudi Arabia, the other half at civilian targets in Israel. The most successful strike was on an American barracks in Dahran, which killed twenty-eight US servicemen. The attacks on Israel were intended to provoke Israeli retaliation, in the hope that Israel’s involvement would weaken or end Arab support for the coalition; diplomacy was successful in deterring Israel from responding in any way and, in the event, the casualties inflicted – four dead, 120 injured – were too low to provoke an Israeli reaction. American deployment of Patriot anti-missile missiles, which successfully intercepted about thirty-five Scuds, did much to quell alarm.

  One of the few recorded failures of the ground forces during the campaign was in the destruction of Scud launchers. Though special forces ranged far and wide behind enemy lines, allegedly as far away as Baghdad itself, their success in finding and eliminating Scuds and their platforms was low. Only sixteen are known to have been destroyed and numbers remained hidden after the conclusion of hostilities.

  The conventional ground campaign, however, from its opening on Sunday, 24 February to its termination on Thursday, 28 February, was an unequivocal success. Iraq’s efforts to disrupt the preparation of the offensive before it was launched were ineffective. During 20 January – 1 February 1991 the Iraqis launched a spoiling attack on the town of Khafji, just inside Saudi Arabia, but failed to secure the place and were driven out, largely by forces of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, chosen by the coalition high command to emphasize the multinational character of the alliance. Other border incursions staged by the Iraqis also proved costly and ineffectual. Most of the Iraqi ground forces’ activity in the w
eeks before 24 February were devoted to fortifying their positions. Saddam’s strategy was determined by his experience in the war with Iran, which he believed had taught that air power was of secondary importance, that fixed positions were the critical element of a successful defence and that the infliction of heavy casualties would halt any offensive. What had been true against the Iranians proved not the case against the coalition. Its air resources vastly exceeded those his troops had encountered in the war of 1980–88, his fortifications were easily penetrated or outflanked by the American and British mobile formations, which deployed mine-clearing and obstacle-breaching equipment of a sophistication not matched by the Iranians, while their ability to inflict casualties exceeded that of the enemy many times. Saddam had simply failed to appreciate the disparity in strength and capability between his own troops and those of the enemy.

  The situation at the outset of the coalition attack found the Iraqis concentrated in a narrow sector between the head of the Gulf and a dry desert watercourse, the Wadi al-Batin. Their forward positions were manned by about thirty divisions of the regular army, with six divisions of the Republican Guard holding the ground behind them, both to stiffen their resistance and to act as a counter-attack force if necessary. The coalition forces, by contrast, were deployed on a much wider front. While the heavy formations, largely American armour and Marines, faced the Iraqis between the Gulf and the Wadi al-Batin, more mobile formations – airborne and airmobile divisions, mechanized divisions and the French and British armoured divisions – had been thrown out into the desert to outflank the Iraqi defences and strike at the interior of the country. The coalition plan was to fix the bulk of the enemy in the positions where they stood, meanwhile encircling them by a strike from the desert across their rear from west to east.