The reaction to the Iraqi offer at the Pentagon was “more relief than surprise,” but there would be no cease-fire until there was proof of withdrawal. Only the most naive, after all, expected truth from Saddam Hussein and his regime. The Iraqis had stated in August that they were withdrawing, had even shown video tapes of their forces moving north. Before Baghdad Radio had even finished broadcasting the announcement, a Kuwaiti had told CBS News, simply, “I don’t believe it.”
With good reason. The broadcast from Baghdad went on and the conditions attached to the “unconditional withdrawal” became more and more grandiose, more and more conditional, and more and more advantageous to the Iraqis:
all foreign forces were to leave the Persian Gulf;
the Patriot missiles were to be withdrawn;
Israel would withdraw from the Occupied Territories;
there was to be a “return to democracy” in Kuwait;
the Royal Family would not return to Kuwait;
all debts from the Iran-Iraq War were to be written off;
the West was to help with the reconstruction of both Iraq and Kuwait;
and there was to be an end to Syrian intervention in Lebanon.
There may have been more conditions; by then we had stopped listening. The Iraqis probably regarded them as an initial negotiating position, but they were out of touch with reality. Saddam was again seeing the fight in Middle Eastern terms, something like Lebanon’s continuing wars: fight, negotiate, then fight again. George Bush was in no mood to negotiate. The U.S. had made its efforts to negotiate prior to January 16th. The conditions stated would have been unacceptable even then. They were conqueror’s terms.
Peter Arnett showed us jubilation in Baghdad. Government officials at the al-Rashid Hotel were shaking each others’ hands. “Everyone with a gun” was firing it off into the air, and there were celebratory air raid sirens blown. The end of the war was in sight to true believers. The Iraqi concessions, Arnett told us, were based on Evgeny Primakov’s mission to Baghdad. The Iraqis were stressing that it was a proposal, not a set of demands, and the press corps in Baghdad saw it as an “open door,” a pause in the shooting war.
Steve Hurst, in Moscow, reported on Vitaly Cherkin’s Foreign Ministry briefing; the Soviets had not been told of the proposal in advance. It was Cherkin’s opinion that Saddam Hussein wanted to retain power and wanted guarantees of Iraqi sovereignty.
The allies lost little time in throwing cold water on the celebrations. The British announced that a mere verbal indication of Iraq’s intent on the radio would not be enough to stop hostilities; there would have to be proof of withdrawal. CENTCOM told Charles Jaco in Dharhan that the air war would continue until the command heard differently from the President.
On Saturday, President Bush described the cease-fire offer as a “cruel hoax,” and British Prime Minister John Major called it “a bogus sham.” Predictably, it was welcomed and praised in Jordan, in Libya, and by the PLO. In the United States, Coretta Scott King called on Bush to accept it. Iraq stated that it would present its withdrawal plan to the Security Council.
We could tell there would be more to come in the diplomatic offensive when President Gorbachev called President Bush to ask him to hold off on the start of a ground campaign to allow diplomatic avenues to be explored.
It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if Saddam Hussein had been intelligent enough to withdraw from Kuwait at just that moment. Had the Iraqis simply picked up and gone home, with no promises given and no admission of any sort of responsibility, the psychological, as opposed to the legal, justification for the war would have been removed. The air war would have had to stop — the Iraqis would have been out; the ground offensive being prepared would never come off. Saddam would have stood up to the pounding of the allies and made his political points without surrender. The diplomatic confusion would have taken years to sort out; who was responsible for damages to whom, if there was no admission of responsibility?
Six months later, he could have gone back and retaken Kuwait and the momentum behind the alliance would have been lost. He would probably have kept it the second time.
Luckily for Kuwait, he was not that intelligent.
The ground offensive could start at any time. Marines were moving to front-line positions. Rick Sallinger reported on preparations made by medical units to receive heavy casualties, including a Swedish medical contingent made up of volunteers — the first time Sweden had taken part in a war since 1814.
2nd Armored Division’s forward brigade moved an artillery task force up to about five kilometers south of the border the morning of the 15th, and at noon its own and 1st Infantry Division’s engineers cut twenty holes through the berm while the artillery fired at known and suspected enemy positions up to fifteen kilometers inside Iraq. Moving without warning, the brigade advanced across a thirty kilometer front and established a screening force ten kilometers inside Iraq. Two days later they were pulled back — it was feared that as the only unit north of the berm, the task force would tip the Iraqis to the direction of the main attack.
2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment took part in a corps exercise on February 16th which doubled as an actual movement of about 125 km, to Forward Assembly Area Utah, just south of the Iraqi border. The regiment crossed a practice berm similar to the one marking the Saudi-Iraqi border and trained to make sure it did not outrun the corps.
Sgt. Kirk Alcorn, a Bradley gunner, had some long talks with his vehicle commander, SFC Ronnie Mullinix, who was a Vietnam veteran. Mullinix told Alcorn that the hardest part about combat is not the combat itself — the combination of training and adrenaline pulls us through — but the thought, once through it, of going back for a second helping.
The Saudi newspaper al-Jazira pointed out that “amputating rotten limbs protects the body from corruption,” and suggested that “the sons of Iraq, Jordan and Yemen who are still in their right minds” might consider dismembering their respective heads of state.
Vice President Quayle, addressing military families at Fort Hood, Texas, sang a rather more muted version of the song the Syrians and Saudis had first sung. He suggested that the Iraqi military and people force Saddam Hussein “to step aside.” President Bush would echo that sentiment in a day or two, and that would become one of the main themes in the last days of the war. It was, sadly for Iraq, a war aim that was not achieved by the ground offensive.
Sunday, a “senior Pentagon official” stated that the ground offensive would be “a tour de force of U.S. military capability unlike anything anyone has ever seen in such a concentrated time and place.” It could begin “virtually any moment.” Tariq Aziz was in Iran on his way to Moscow, probably wondering if it would.
Trying to delay the offensive, no doubt, anti-war protesters followed the President to Kennebunkport. Some of them dressed as broccoli, which Bush doesn’t like. They pounded tom-toms and danced. He probably didn’t like the dancing, either. At a demonstration in Los Angeles, Ron Kovic told 1,500 anti-war demonstrators that they were the real war heroes. Fifteen Catholic bishops stated that “the words of the Gospel cannot be reconciled with what is happening in the Gulf.”
The protestors were in Washington, as well, even though Bush was not there. Vicky Hutchings, of Britain’s New Statesman and Society visited them. Seven or eight people were lying on blankets, three or four of them with drums. They kept up a constant beating. One of those Hutchings met was a lady named Ellen, who claimed to have been there since 1983, “campaigning for peace.” She showed Hutchings a picture of Black Elk, the man who started the drumming. “Do you see that mark?” Ellen asked. “He had such force coming out of him. When we stood in a circle and held hands, I could feel it flowing into my body.” Then she pointed out another figure, even more remarkable. “When she came [to the perpetual demonstration], she was autistic. She couldn’t speak at all. Now she can. Every other word is fuck.”
Mister Rogers and one of his associate producers, a lady named Hedda Bluestone Sharapan, wrote an article for TV Guide addressing parents’ concerns over their kids’ watching of the war news. Babies and toddlers shouldn’t be exposed to such things at all, and we were advised to limit our own viewing for our own good, lest we fall into feelings of “helplessness and despair.” We should talk to our children about war — and peace — and be good listeners and help our children learn to handle anger constructively (lest they invade someone). We should monitor our children’s war play, too:
Play is one of the important ways children can work through their concerns. Of course, war play can become scary or unsafe, and at times like that adults should be nearby to redirect the play into caring and nurturing themes, perhaps by suggesting the building of a hospital for the wounded or making a pretend meal for soldiers.
Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy professed to find the air war “cowardly.” He called for a bombing halt, sneering that the U.S. “prefers naturally to put off a ground war, because there the threat of danger, despite reports of hunger and sickness among Iraqi conscripts, appears to be real. Safer to keep bombing from the air than shooting from the ground... After a month of obliterating Iraq, and now downtown Baghdad, the U.S. air war has been revealed as a coward’s war.”
Letters to the editor followed rapidly in response to the column. One writer described it as “beneath contempt.” Another termed it “offal.” Still another stated that McCarthy’s mental gymnastics “gives readers the impression that he accepts the Iraqi aggression and accepts violence, as long as some other party is the origin.”
Iraq’s ambassador al-Anbari, at the UN, offered more on the conditions attached to “unconditional withdrawal.” He said that they were issues for discussion, not conditions. Of course, it might take months to negotiate some of them, though others could be dealt with right away.
The Iraqis couldn’t admit to themselves that they simply didn’t have months, or perhaps they were trying to buy them. 26 Navy ships sailed from Dub’ai for the northern Gulf, including amphibious assault ships. Brig. Gen. Richard Neal, at the CENTCOM briefing, stated that over 78,000 sorties had been flown as of Sunday. There had been no friendly aircraft losses in the past 24 hours. The Iraqis had lost three tanks, two BTR-60 APCs, one multiple rocket launcher, and 20 EPWs in two separate small-scale counter-reconnaissance engagements. The U.S. forces had lost two killed and six wounded when a Bradley AFV and an M113 troop carrier had been fired on — by mistake, by an Apache helicopter. Subsequently, the commander of the helicopter battalion responsible was relieved of his command.
Ten of the EPWs had been taken at a mortar position brought under fire by Apaches. They had dropped their weapons and raised the white flag, and the helicopters had herded them back to Coalition lines. This prompted one of the reporters at the briefing to ask if this was the first incidence since the Indian Wars of prisoners being taken by the Apaches.
On the night of February 17th, three six-member Marine reconnaissance teams slipped across the Kuwait border. For the next 76 hours, they crept through Iraqi defenses at night and hid in burlap-covered holes by day. Using night-vision goggles, the Marines picked their way through minefields, learning that the mines were clumsily laid, most of them visible on top of the ground. From 1,000 meters, they watched an Iraqi encampment through binoculars.
“They were like civilians thrown into a military environment,” Sgt. Troy Mitchell described it. “They milled around. We never saw them carrying rifles. They had no patrols. They had no reaction to the air power flying over them.” Two days after the teams returned, F/A-18’s bombed the campsite. Then the Americans sent armored vehicles across in full daylight to within 100 yards of the encampment, where they demolished the site.
The same night the Marines went out to reconnoitre, long-range surveillance teams from VIIth Corps’ 207th Military Intelligence Brigade moved up to about a kilometer from the berm and dug holes, to stay there, monitoring enemy movements until the attack began. At the corps command post, the intelligence shop had swollen to 90 soldiers working under slightly more comfortable conditions.
Tariq Aziz was in Moscow on Monday, for talks that were described as “cordial and objective.” The “objective” part, we can assume, referred to the Iraqis having the dimensions of their hole pointed out to them. The Iraqi foreign minister would spend the night in Teheran before forwarding the Soviet ideas to Saddam Hussein and the Revolutionary Command Council. Iraqi officials were, Peter Arnett told us, awaiting his return. They were acutely conscious of the “allied armada” on their doorstep.
Brig. Gen. Neal had an addendum to Sunday’s briefing on Monday. While ten of the twenty EPWs taken had been waiting to be rounded up, they had been joined by 30 others.
The Marines had carried out a TEWT—Tactical Exercise Without Troops, pronounced “toot.” This was a dress rehearsal in the field, in which officers and NCOs went through a dry run of impending operations while the troops got a break. Even the Iraqis would be able to recognize the last stage of command and staff play. The operation went flawlessly. The Marines had been working on it, practicing, for six months.
310 bodies had been recovered from the Amiriyah bomb shelter, 149 children, 66 women, the rest men, described by the Iraqis as elderly. One man had lost 13 family members.
In Amherst, Massachusetts, 30-year-old Gregory Levey doused himself with turpentine and burned himself to death in an antiwar protest.
The Tuesday Saudi brief was almost routine. There had been reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance operations; air activity had been concentrated on the Republican Guard, battlefield interdiction, and strategic targets; there had been no air losses in the past 24 hours; and there had been artillery exchanges, with no friendly casualties. The Saudi navy was engaged in mine-sweeping operations.
Marlin Fitzwater, the President’s press secretary, stated that the central issue was whether Saddam Hussein would get his forces out of Kuwait unconditionally. So far there had been nothing of more substance than had been proposed the preceding Friday.
CNN interviewed Sen. John McCain, of Arizona, and Bernie Sanders, the Socialist representative from Vermont. Saddam Hussein, Sanders complained, was trying to surrender and the administration had expanded the goals of the war. Would it be worth 30,000 to 40,000 casualties to remove him from power?
McCain’s smile was fixed and artificial-looking throughout the interview; he could barely, we felt, restrain his contempt for his colleague, pointing out at one point that the source of Sanders’ figures was not held in high regard by planners, a polite way of saying they were inflated, worst-case, and perhaps off the wall. Unconditional withdrawal, he stated, meant no linkage, no “points for discussion” that would be haggled on for indecisive months; it meant withdrawal without conditions. Period. Sanders seemed to have trouble grasping the concept.
The press, with ground war seemingly days away, rediscovered Iwo Jima. The Japanese in the Second World War, they reminded us, had taken 70 days of pounding and had still be ready to fight. There had been 6,000 U.S. dead in that battle, along with 20,000 Japanese.
The White House reacted to the Soviet peace plan before its details were released, stating that it fell short of what would be required but not quite rejecting it outright. Bush had discussed it with Gorbachev point by point on Monday night, including its failure to address Iraq’s responsibility for the rape of Kuwait and its willingness to drop the idea of holding Saddam Hussein and his aides responsible for war crimes. The Soviets were proposing putting off discussion of the UN resolutions subsequent to 660 until later.
Vice President Dan Quayle put the U.S. position succinctly and logically: Saddam Hussein had been able to figure out how to invade Kuwait, and he should be able to figure out how to leave it. Bush clarified this even further: he wanted withdrawal within four days, immediate release of POWs, and disclosure of the locations of all mines.
By Wednesday, holes had been punched in the sandwalls along the Kuwait border so that the ground forces would be able to get at the Iraqis. Four Apaches had attacked a bunker complex, destroying 13-15 bunkers, and taking 450-500 prisoners, who had been evacuated by Chinook helicopters. 300 vehicles had been caught in the open by allied aircraft and the Air Force had spent the greater part of the day shooting them to pieces; there were 28 tanks, 26 other vehicles, three artillery pieces, and two ammunition depots confirmed destroyed.
This was one of those occasions of Gen. Kelly having his private joke at the reporters’ expense. An Iraqi tank brigade has about 175 tanks and other armored vehicles. When the pilots went after 300 of them out in the open, it meant they had caught an entire armored or mechanized division flat-footed. The Iraqis had only 11 of them in Kuwait to throw away.
Intelligence analysts are funny folk. They have been beaten up as a group in the press and in Congress since Vietnam and as a result of the experience have become inately cautious. They are likely to err on the side of inflating an enemy’s strength, on the side of under-reporting friendly successes. Reports are often studded with “waffle words” — “possibly,” “probably,” and “suspected.” It is tough to get a “confirmed.” It would be interesting to know the number of kills probable versus those confirmed, the number damaged versus killed. A confirmed kill is a tank that is burnt out, preferably with its turret popped — the result of the enormous pressure caused by its basic load of ammunition exploding inside it — or an APC in pieces. Damage is anything from a thrown track, through a dead engine, to having the vehicle riddled with depleted uranium slugs and the crew dead to a man. The ratio of damage to kills is usually about three or four to one — which would bring the numbers up around 150 to 200. If the Warthogs had the entire day to fly missions against an uncovered column, the Iraqis probably lost most of a division right there.
Thursday, the 21st of February, saw the nationwide peace offensive promised by the National Student and Youth Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, long after its psychological moment had passed:
In Austin, Texas, about 200 students at the University of Texas disrupted traffic as they marched about ten blocks from the campus to the state capitol; some wore sheep masks and “baa-ed” to mock the prevailing pro-war mood of Americans. One of a handful of counterdemonstrators in Austin carried a sign suggesting “Be a Patriot, not a Scud.”
At predominantly black Howard University, in Washington, D.C., a small group of students took over a classroom for a teach-in, angering others whose lecture was displaced to another room. About two dozen showed up for an anti-war “teach-out” at George Washington University; a geography student named Christopher Hedick was spat upon while he was reading his speech. At Georgetown University, students seeking signatures on a petition to sell condoms at the Catholic institution drew more attention than the nearby antiwar teach-in at the student center.
Protest leaders mustered fewer than 200 students from eight campuses in the Boston area for a downtown march and rally. A little over 1000 protesters gathered at the Massachussetts state capitol. In Amherst, about 1,000 students from five area colleges rallied at the spot where Gregory Levey had burned himself to death the previous Monday. “This is a day of commemoration for the ... people killed in Iraq and for Gregory Levey. He is a martyr for the peace movement, he is a martyr for peace,” intoned Eyad Kishawi, a Palestinian and University of Massachusetts graduate at the rally.
Carl Bergstrom, a Harvard sophomore, said, “It’s disappointing that on this day of national action there isn’t more going on.”
“It was pathetically small, pathetically small,” George Washington history professor Leo Ribuffo, who spoke at the rally at his school, told the Washington Post. “It’s sad, but I guess it does show that the prevailing attitude is that the war is not at the center of consciousness for students.” He seems never to have considered the possibility that the vast majority might have supported the war.
Saddam Hussein made another speech on Baghdad Radio, complaining, as had Rep. Sanders, of the escalating demands by the Coalition and apparently rejecting Bush’s points. The speech was termed “a suicide note” for the Iraqi people:
There is no other course than the one we have chosen, except for the course of humiliation and darkness, after which there will be no bright sign in the sky or brilliant light on the Earth. We have chosen this course. The Iraqis... continue to ask and work for what will make them more brilliant, fathful and lofty... We will proceed on this course, irrespective of the nature of the political efforts which we are exerting... and which, if rejected, will expose all the covers and will only maintain the premeditated intentions of the aggression against us without any cover and without any slogans...
Oh brothers, oh people: Note how those who feared a ground battle have now avoided the showdown for over a month. They have persisted further in killing civilians... and destroying property with their long-range aircraft and missiles... They are doing this... to cover up their inability to confront our land forces in southern Iraq...
Massachusetts’ hardy perennial, Senator Ted Kennedy, helpfully suggested that the air war should be continued, rather than risking a ground war. Ground forces of all the allies were now engaged in artillery and MRL attacks across the border; the British fired 144 rockets on Iraqi positions, taking no return fire, no casualties.
At just past midnight on the 22nd, Moscow time, Tariq Aziz met with President Gorbachev, accepting the Soviet peace plan, the closest the Iraqis would get to getting out without taking on the Coalition in a ground war. Vitaly Ignatenko announced the terms publicly:
1. Iraq would fully and unconditionally withdraw from Kuwait.
2. Withdrawal would begin the second day after a cease fire.
3. Withdrawal would take place within “a fixed time frame” — not specified at that time, later set at 21 days.
4. After two thirds of the Iraqi forces had been withdrawn, the UN sanctions against Iraq would be lifted.
5. After withdrawal, since the conditions giving rise to their passage would no longer apply, subsequent UN resolutions against Iraq would also no longer apply.
6. POWs would be released immediately following a ceasefire.
7. Withdrawal of forces would be monitored by countries not involved in the conflict, as designated by the Security Council.
8. Work on the details of the proposal continued, and would be presented to the Security Council that day, the 22nd of February.
Even the CNN commentators passed over point 5, in one case substituting “sanctions” for “subsequent resolutions.” Had this set of proposals been accepted, Iraq would have been off the hook, at least in a legalistic sense, for the invasion, occupation, and for all war crimes. The translator had said “the causes for the resolutions,” and the translation from the Russian had been accurate. Bush noticed it, and pointed it out to Gorbachev on the telephone.
Simultaneously with the presentation of the proposal by Ignatenko, there were air raid sirens in Saudi Arabia.
Bush’s response was to give Iraq until noon, Saturday, to begin pulling out. Baghdad Radio stated that any land assault would be a failure, ending in Iraq’s “merciless revenge.” Iraq would not be swayed by “psychological warfare.” Gorbachev unveiled a tougher, six-point plan Friday, but it was overtaken by the Bush deadline.
In Israel, CNN interviewed Hanna Siniora, a Palestinian editor who saw the war as a clash between two presidents, one with an election coming up in two years, the other “with ice in his veins.” Iraq could accept withdrawal, Siniora explained, but not surrender, which Bush was demanding. Saddam Hussein would allow this deadline, as he had allowed the others, “to tick away.” To prevent further bloodshed, a third party was needed as a mediator — the Soviets. The Palestinians, meanwhile, would rely on their own efforts, an indication that this one Palestinian, at least, had written off Iraq already.
Saturday brought still more last-gasp maneuvers. Tariq Aziz accepted the Soviet six-point plan and Resolution 660, but pointedly ignored the remaining eleven resolutions. Gorbachev asked Bush for two more days for further discussions, but Bush refused; the allied timetable was fixed. The terms were take-it-or-leave-it. Time had run out for Saddam.
Peter Arnett reported from Baghdad with one hour left before the deadline expired. He echoed Siniora’s assessment: if Saddam Hussein remained true to form, he would disregard the ultimatum. Speculation was now more on what form the ground war would take. With nothing else to do, he interviewed Nihad Abdullah, a stylishly dressed executive at the Al Rashid Hotel. She looked worried; Bush, she felt, was not looking for peace. It was difficult for a president like Saddam Hussein to do just as Bush said, the conditions were unreasonable. There was no choice for the Iraqis but to do what they could do.
The Saudi brief reported the fall of a SCUD in the desert, harmlessly. Mine-sweeping operations were continuing. The Egyptians had made a reconnaissance in force across the border, with no contact. The EPW count now stood at 1,390, 99 of them officers. That seemed like a lot. Saudi engineers had spent about 45 minutes clearing a path through the feared minefields. And there were reports of executions of civilians in Kuwait, setting fire to oil wells in earnest, and rounding up of men and boys. In response to a reporter’s questions, the briefer stated that Iraqi forces withdrawing north once a ground campaign had begun would be dealt with militarily, as legitimate targets. The last few sands were running out of the glass.
Gorbachev had given Tariq Aziz one final piece of advice as he was leaving Moscow: Think about what a ground war would mean.
Catastrophe loomed for us all: Carl Sagan and Richard Turgo announced their fear that the smoke from the burning oil wells would cool the earth, in a manner similar to nuclear winter. Wags almost immediately began wondering if that would offset global warming.
Catastrophe loomed for the troops, too. The Nation’s Alexander Cockburn reported that through the murk of censorship in Saudi Arabia “a somber picture emerges of poor liaison, dubious equipment, badly prepared troops.” Kuwaiti Special Forces were planning on slaughtering Palestinian residents of Kuwait. Kuwait would be contested, house by house. The Iraqis would be fighting on their native soil. When 100,000 Iranians had pushed to within sight of Basra, they lost half their number. The impending battle would be as significant as Marathon and Salamis, about nothing less than dominance in the capitalist world.
The Pentagon reported that there were 1,700 confirmed kills to date of Iraqi tanks, 900 APCs, and 1,500 artillery pieces. The Iraqi executions of civilians had escalated in the past 24-48 hours — “terrorism in its finest hour,” Brig. Gen. Neal, the CENTCOM briefer put it. A Pentagon official suggested to Wolf Blitzer that the Iraqis were “destroying the evidence.” 200 oil wells were on fire. While the earth’s temperature had not dropped, there was still no sign of a pull-out by the Iraqis.
There was live footage of further bombing of Baghdad, 15 minutes before the expiration of the ultimatum. Baghdad Radio announced that Iraqi officials were seriously considering establishment of a “national democratic government” in Kuwait — we can only wonder if it would have been headed by Col. Ali — if the Coalition refused to accept the latest Soviet plan. This would be established “in cooperation with religious and national forces opposed to Imperialism and foreign domination.” The threat sounded so stale it was moldy.
At noon, EST, on the 23rd of February the deadline passed. At 1:10 p.m., Saudi time, VII Corps opened its radio networks. Twenty minutes later, 210th Field Artillery Brigade, three howitzer batteries, and an MLRS battery opened up with nine minutes of fire against every suspected enemy position.