At 9 p.m. EST, President Bush addressed the nation. He said, simply, “Kuwait is liberated. Iraq’s army is defeated. Our military objectives are met.” Accordingly, the U.S. would declare a unilateral cease-fire, to take effect at midnight — after 100 hours exactly of ground action. The Iraqis were instructed to designate military commanders to receive the allies’ terms.
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney described the end of the war with a paraphrase of Saddam: “The Mother of All Battles” had turned into “the Mother of All Routs.”
The networks showed footage of free Kuwait, of dancing and singing in ravaged streets. Those who had fled overseas were preparing to return home and start rebuilding. AT&T announced that it would restore limited telephone service that weekend.
The pro-Saddam protests continued in Amman, but they took on a quizzical quality. The Jordanian Prime Minister told his Parliament that the withdrawal was not a sign of defeat, that the Iraqis were trying to move troops into position to defend their own country. By Friday, they were feeling that they and their king were being unjustly punished for standing up for their beliefs, though there was still defiance. Azzam Tamimi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, stated that “To us, the U.S. is no longer a friend, no longer an ally, and unless it changes its policies and stops intervening in Arab affairs, the U.S. will continue to be our enemy.” This was little loss, as the U.S. had always been the Bad Guys to the fundamentalist Brotherhood.
Baghdad’s opinion was ambivalent. One man-in-the-street described the allied landings in Nasiriyah as a propaganda ploy; if it was really true, let the allies show it in television clips. It was a very strange war, against very strange people.
The attitude may also have had something to do with a Baghdad Radio communique that stated that the cease-fire had been ordered by Bush because of heavy allied losses. Christiane Amanpour, on the other hand, found weary relief, hope that the war was finally over. The Iraqi military, off the radio, seemed to share that opinion. They were cooperating in the efforts to implement the cease-fire.
The footage from Saudi Arabia took on a different quality. We saw pilots sitting around in civvies, drinking what looked suspiciously like beer. The abstemious Saudis must have been looking at other things at that particular moment. Combat engineers were busy demolishing abandoned Iraqi equipment.
And the war carried on by “Arabs, Muslims, and Men of Good Will” went on. An Israeli student’s throat was cut by a Palestinian hero in revenge for the Iraqi defeat.
NBC showed us a sand model that the Iraqis had built to work out their war plans to deal with the anticipated allied invasion. It showed fortifications defending the beaches of Kuwait against the anticipated Marine amphibious assault, complete with neatly placed chemical warfare placards.
Why hadn’t they used those chemical weapons? This is one of the most interesting questions of the war, and probably the one that will never be answered unless Saddam Hussein — or more likely his theater commanders — write their memoirs. Brig. Gen. Neal is probably correct, as he stated at a CENTCOM brief: the Iraqi chemical defense equipment simply left a lot to be desired. It was old, it was shoddy, and it wasn’t very well cared for. EPW interrogations suggested that the Iraqis were more afraid of the allies’ own chemical capabilities and feared that chemical weapons would be employed against them in retaliation.
CBS showed some of the most self-serving footage of the war: a correspondent sitting down and interviewing other CBS correspondents. “We’re awfully proud of you all,” he told them solemnly. “Thank you for your brave and important efforts.”
Jim Hickey was nearly as bizarre. He had heard near unanimous accounts of brutality and atrocities from the Kuwaitis, had seen some evidence with his own eyes. “It’s hard to tell the extent of the alleged atrocities,” he told us. “but clearly, talking to the people who have suffered and survived through all of this, something quite terrible did go on here.” “Alleged” means charged but not proven; Iraq’s actions had, we all thought until hearing Hickey, been fairly well proven.
Tom Brokaw also saw no evidence of mass executions, adding that there was “some doubt about the number of babies pulled from incubators.” He then proceeded to recount stories of men taken away by the Iraqis, to fates unknown.
It didn’t take CNN long to find some of the evidence, for systematic torture if not for mass executions. They went to the Kuwait City morgue—not that unusual a place to find corpses—and interviewed the staff. The attendants were kind enough to open drawers for them and display what had happened. Bodies had been burned with acid, were spotted with cigarette burns, eyes had been plucked out. It was everything the Kuwaitis had said it had been.
The morgue in fact contained 41 bodies with bullet, knife and burn wounds, many with their eyes gouged out. At a suburban cemetary in the Riqqa district, gravediggers claimed about three quarters of the thousand corpses interred there during the occupation and war had been shot. Torture chambers were uncovered with the electrodes still plugged into the sockets. "What the Iraqis did was beyond belief," a Kuwaiti doctor.
Charles Jaco was doing better than Brokaw, Hickey, or most of CBS. He interviewed Lt. Basil al-Sabah, commander of Kuwait’s 17-man Special Forces — the same ones who were striking such delicious terror into the hearts of The Nation’s writers. The lieutenant was young, good-looking, spoke perfect American English, and was in the process of clearing out Iraqi stragglers from the city. The remaining Bad Guys were not organized as units, but had simply holed up in an empty house. Such things were going on — alleged to be going on, if Hickey was reporting — all over the city.
For all the joy in Kuwait, there was a palpable mood of revenge. The allied forces and the resistance fighters set about screening the Iraqi prisoners to find those responsible for the atrocities. It was not an easy task. Many of the worst offenders had fled, much of the evidence had been destroyed. Some of the Mukhabarat and the military secret police were found and dragged off to uncertain—hopefully unpleasant—fates. Some had met their ends at Mutlaa. And some would simply blend in with the thousands upon thousands of surrendering Iraqis, most of them far boys or street sweepings, whose sins were more nondescript.
There had been about 400,000 Palestinians in Kuwait before the invasion and about 180,000 of these had remained through the occupation. The resistance claimed that about 50,000 of these—nearly a third—had assisted the Iraqis in one form or another. The charge was vehemently denied by the Palestinians, despite the pro-Iraqi stances of Arafat, the PLO, and King Hussein. Whatever the numbers, there had been a large number of blatamt cases of collaboration, quite apart from the Palestinian Ba'athists who had been imported as auxilliaries by the Iraqis. Now almost everyone in Kuwait was armed, and retribution began to fall.
British Lieutenant General Peter de la Billiere, General Schwarzkopf’s counterpart, gave his briefing to the press. No cease-fire violations had been reported. Such Iraqis as hadn’t surrendered seemed bewildered, rather than aggressive. Iraq’s remaining military capability was estimated at 26-27 divisions within the country, about 200 aircraft, and no navy; it would be impossible for them to constitute a potent regional threat without opening up all Iraq’s borders. It would take many months for the Iraqis to reconstitute their lost forces.
Weren’t the Iraqis a pushover? a British reporter asked. They had been the 4th largest army in the world, de la Billiere explained patiently, for what seemed like the hundredth time, but they had been softened up with strategic precision before the start of the land war. The battlefield had been prepared and the ground forces had been attritted. Then, not only had the Iraqis been overwhelmed, but it had happened before they knew it was happening.
Martial law was declared in Kuwait, bringing gasps of indignation from American liberals with visions of drum-head courts martial. The city—and nation—had no civil government in residence, no civil infrastructure, no police, not even garbage collection. It was occupied by a multinational force that represented the resident authority for the time. The declaration can hardly be faulted.
The Kuwaitis themselves were busy with other concerns. There was footage of them burning an Iraqi flag, and an interview that compared Saddam Hussein to Genghis Khan and Hitler. Later footage had a picture of the dictator that someone had made up to look like a whore. A Kuwaiti nurse confessed that she had killed Iraqi troops brought to her for care by giving them lethal injections.
CBS managed to wait until Thursday night, the 28th, before pointing out querulously that the POWs hadn’t been released yet.
Le Monde reported on March 1st that Saddam Hussein was about to step down, or be ousted, and was considering seeking exile in Algeria or another foreign country. Quoting reports from Algiers, the newspaper said Algerian leaders were seeking assurances that no action would be taken against him if he fled Iraq.
That same day, King Hussein went on television to begin the process of trying to patch things up. He reminded the world of the Palestinians’ love of life, of virtue and peace, and he decried the continuing neglect by the international community of their suffering, of their despair at attaining justice. King Hussein urged that the Palestinians’ cause be addressed using the same criteria that were applied to Kuwait, alluding to the national rights of the Palestinians on their native soil. The king hadn’t been particularly loved by his Palestinian subjects prior to the start of the war, but his backing of Saddam Hussein had won him many points with them. He appeared to have borrowed a new horse to ride.
He was also trying another one at the same time. As his speech went on, he addressed the growing disparity between rich and poor nations in the region. Jordan is not a particularly rich country; it has a large Palestinian population, probably a majority, and it is not blessed with oil reserves such as the Saudis and Kuwaitis have. It has instead to rely on old-fashioned means of producing wealth— farming and light industry such as the production of Saddam Hussein memorabilia. Jordan had received aid from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait prior to the invasion, aid which had been cut off when the country sided with the Iraqis. Paychecks which had been sent home by Palestinians working in the Gulf — two out of five Jordanian workers — had ceased, and the country’s economic pinch was marked, so the King obviously had money on his mind. In case such an unfortunate turn of affairs should come again, he wanted a stable income, not table scraps; “not just as an expression of charity” was the way he put it.
Just in case, though, he wanted to assure the world “that Jordan throws its arms wide open to all those who wish to establish friendly relations based on mutual respect and cooperation. Jordan extends its hand to those who reciprocate with warmth and honor.” He was confident that the Arab nation had a greater sense of solidarity and harmony than the late crisis would suggest. In case there was any doubt as to who was being courted here, the king suggested the adoption of democracy in Arab nations as, he reminded us, Jordan practiced.
The U.S. ambassador was back in Kuwait by Friday and thousands of Kuwaitis welcomed him. The Iraqi foreign minister demanded that all foreign forces leave southern Iraq and cease “provocations.”
One of the experts appearing on CNN estimated that if there were three casualties per allied sortie, the Iraqis must have taken something on the order of 400,000 killed or wounded. Actually, the final number of sorties announced was 103,000, which would produce a figure of 309,000, still a huge number of losses to sustain. After the war was over, it was estimated that up to 100,000 Iraqis may have died, 60-80,000 in the air campaign and another 15-25,000 in the ground offensive.