On Tuesday, the 29th of January, Socialist Jean-Pierre Chevenement, the French Minister of Defense, resigned, stating that “the logic of war risks moving us ever further from the aims established by the United Nations.” The “logic of war” included the French expanding their field of action from Kuwait only to Iraq. Writing of the resignation, Daniel Singer wrote in The Nation: “The end of the makebelieve [of an independent French foreign policy]... has had an immediate impact in the Arab world. There, whatever the princes may proclaim, people are not fooled... The tragic achievement of American action, and of European inaction, is that for millions of Muslims the butcher of Baghdad is by now a hero.”
This rationalization against military action, that any kind of resistance to Saddam Hussein would be counterproductive, that military measures strengthened his political hand, was similar to the ones advanced by Time, Jimmy Carter, Lee Hamilton and a host of others in September and October. The only difference was its coloration with The Nation’s anti-American ideology. An “independent” foreign policy was one which was almost by definition in opposition to that of the United States; it seems never to have occurred to Singer that French and American interests might in fact precisely coincide in this case.
Events in the Gulf were rendering Chevenement’s resignation a minor side issue, even in France, and Singer’s opinion irrelevant. By the 29th over 27,000 sorties had been flown. The U.S. military briefer reported that 24 tanks, APCs, and supply vehicles had been destroyed when American aircraft had caught an Iraqi column in the open.
Gen. Tom Kelly stated frankly that he couldn’t figure what the Iraqi strategy was. The flight of their aircraft to Iran represented nothing less than their combat forces leaving the field.
There was footage of a Marine heavy artillery battery staging a hit and run raid. “Hit ‘em, hurt ‘em, and leave ‘em,” one of the Marines described it. There was Iraqi footage of damage to Basra and Baghdad, with moving pictures of stunned children in hospital beds. It was the day of President Bush’s State of the Union address.
Iraq announced that one of the allied prisoners it was holding as a “human shield” had been killed in an allied bombing raid on Baghdad. No name was given.
The same day, Refiq Shafie Kiblawi, alias Abu Ziad, a ranking member of the PLO parliament-in-exile, was assassinated as he was leaving his house in Kuwait. By the resistance?
At Khafji, the deserted, oil-soaked Saudi coastal town, and at two other points west of there, Saddam Hussein again coldly miscalculated. The Iraqi army made probing attacks that were geared toward drawing the Coalition ground forces prematurely into battle—inflict heavy casualties and the anti-war movement would increase the pressure, leading to a U.S. withdrawal. The Marines and their Arab allies received their baptism of fire, and came out of the experience with more confidence than they had when they went in. It took 36 hours of fighting to push the Iraqis out.
Three Iraqi battalions crossed the border with tanks and troops on armored personnel carriers, headed for the evacuated town. “The thin line of troops in the area were not defenders,” Col. David Hackworth explained in an article for Newsweek. “They were Saudi soldiers from the 5th Battalion of the King Abdul Aziz Brigade, whose job was to act as the eyes and ears of the allies’ main line farther back”—reconnaissance elements, not a maneuver force.
The Iraqis used the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division, one of the better and larger regular divisions holding the Kuwait-Saudi border. Three brigade-sized columns moved on a 60-mile front, between the coast the the “elbow,” the bend in the border. The plan called for the two columns to the west to penetrate the border and push east, toward the coast, where it would link up with the third column at Khafji. Further brigades that were assigned to support the attack started 12 to 24 hours late—more slap-dash planning—and never really entered the battle.
The westernmost tank brigade ran into the light armored infantry battalion of the 1st Marine Division fifty to sixty miles from the coast. There was a running gun battle at the border, with Marine and Air Force planes hitting the tanks. The Marine vehicles, never designed to engage tanks, found that their night sights made it possible for them to outrange and destroy the Iraqis that survived the air strikes. It was during this fighting near Umm Hujul that an A-10 destroyed one of the LAVs with a Maverick missile, mistaking them for Iraqis. Seven Marines were killed. A second LAV was destroyed by an Iraqi tank, killing another four.
The center brigade tried to cross near the Wafra oilfield. As luck would have it, it engaged the 2nd Marine Division’s light armored infantry battalion. Stalled by the Marines, it retreated.
The third brigade attacked Khafji itself, which was held by the Saudis and Qataris with the Marines in support. Lead elements consisting of five T-55s with 150 infantry accompanying them moved in, the tanks positioning themselves on the outskirts while the infantry occupied the buildings. A 12-man Marine reconnaissance force in the town, led by Corporal Jeff Brown, was cut off. At one point, Iraqi soldiers searched the main floor of a building in which Brown and his team were hiding on the floor above.
The Iraqis used a ruse to bring their tanks within close range of the Coalition units. Shortly before noon on Tuesday, the Saudis saw a line of tanks approaching, as many as eighty vehicles, with their turrets facing to the rear, the signal they were surrendering. Accompanying infantry had their hands in the air and were not visibly armed. As the Saudis and Qataris held their fire, the Iraqis came closer, then swung their barrels around and opened fire, the infantry heroically pulling guns from their boots.
Neither the Saudis nor the Marines were amused. “They have engaged the Saudis in combat,” bluntly reported Marine Major Craig Huddleston over the radio net, “and we’re going to kill them.” The American howitzers opened up, followed by fire from multiple rocket launchers and supporting Cobra helicopters flying overhead.
The Iraqi 15th Mechanized Regiment struck at Khafji from the west, running into a Qatari tank unit equipped with AMX-30s. The regimental commander, riding in a Chinese-built K-63 armored personnel carrier, told his machine gunner to fire on the unit they were approaching. When the gunner saw that they were up against tanks he refused. The regimental commander, in true Ba’athist style, promptly shot him. His own legs were blown off seconds later, as a Qatari tank hit his vehicle. Things went downhill from there, and the unit was effectively wiped out. The accompanying infantry made it into the town.
Iraqi radio announced “an astounding victory.” Saddam Hussein himself, it was announced, had planned the attacks; his armies were “wiping out the renegade invaders and knocking out the forces of infidelity, corruption, and treason.” The “Mother of Battles Radio,” which began broadcasts from Kuwaiti transmitters on January 26th and was to go off the air without explanation on February 3rd, reported that the allies had “fled like women.”
The allied response to the thrust was smooth and coordinated. Saudi and Qatari troops counterattacked the next day, backed by U.S. Marine artillery, Harrier jets, and Cobra helicopter gunships. “The Saudi tripwire alerted the Marines who, with their allies, took on the task of containing and destroying the invaders,” Hackworth wrote. “Gunships and Harrier jets backed up by rapid-firing Marine artillery rolled in and did their job, enabling the Saudis and Qataris to move in for the final mop-up.” Corporal Brown and his team, stuck inside the town, called in continuous air and artillery strikes.
The decision to attack and retake the town was made on the 31st. Saudi and Qatari armor pushed into the town. A Marine observer who watched the battle said the exchange of fire between the two sides was “hellacious.” The Qataris and the 7th and 8th Battalions of the Saudi Arabian National Guard 8th Brigade, brought the Iraqis under fire from M-60 tanks, the 90-mm guns of their Cadillac-Gage V-150s, 84-mm Carl Gustav recoilless guns, and antitank guided missiles. The town was declared secure at 6:30 p.m. on February 1st.
By midday on Thursday the remnants of the forces that had seized the town had been driven into a single section and were under siege by Saudi and Qatari troops and armor, backed by U.S. artillery. House-to-house fighting lasted until that Friday. The invaders were generally happy to surrender to the Saudi troops, who were driving through the town and spraying houses with machine gun fire. Some of the prisoners claimed that they had advanced only at the point of their officers’ guns. At least 65 died, mainly as a result of the destruction of their armored personnel carriers. The Iraqis did manage to destroy three Saudi armored cars with RPG-7 antitank rockets.
In one incident, a Marine unit was attacked by two allied planes that dropped cluster bombs within a few hundred yards of its position, but caused no injuries. All twelve Marines of the two patrols that were in the town when it was attacked survived. Two soldiers were missing near Khafji, one male, one female. Baghdad said they were POWs.
CNN showed us footage of some of the fighting, though nothing of much substance — Marines returning fire on Iraqi positions from behind a block wall, Cobra helicopters standing off and killing two BMPs with missiles. Off-camera, as many as 1,000 enemy tanks — the other two brigades — were reported caught in the open in Kuwait, moving south toward the Saudi border; allied aircraft had “a turkey shoot.” There would be more turkeys to shoot later.
The retreat of the Iraqis from their "astounding victory" left 429 of their troops stranded in the city, to surrender to the Saudis and the Qataris. Many of the Iraqi armored vehicles were found abandoned. Although troops in towns will generally dismount for house-to-house fighting, the place of the driver and the gunner is always with the vehicle. In the case of the Iraqis, no one stayed; many of the destroyed vehicles were empty.
According to the Iraqi plan, the Marines, once they had been drawn into the trap of Khafji and engaged by 5th Mechanized Division, were supposed to be cut off by a commando force landed from the sea. The commandos set out in seventeen small boats, similar to Boston whalers. A British frigate picked them up on radar and called in Lynx helicopters on them, which were soon joined by U.S. Navy helicopters as well. Fourteen of the boats were sunk and three driven ashore. The next day, the convoy carrying a reinforced regimental combat team was picked up the same way. The force included a T43-class minesweeper, three ex-Kuwaiti TNC-45 fast attack boats, and three Polocny-class landing ships. The attack was broken up, the Iraqis sustaining heavy casualties as the landing craft were doused with Rockeye cluster bombs by carrier-based U.S. A-6s and Sea Skua missiles fired by the Lynxes.
The coalition claimed they had killed thirty Iraqis in the fighting at Khafji; the independent Russian wire service Interfax reported that 1,500 had died, a figure that may include all three of the brigade-sized incidents and the intercepted commando force. Israeli sources said that two armored divisions had been “cut to pieces”; by their count, with 400-500 tanks and armored vehicles had been destroyed in the battle by the allies. A senior Pentagon official put the figures lower; the losses had been more on the order of a hundred vehicles. The Saudis captured eleven T-55s, seventy armored personnel carriers, and ten large trucks.
Khafji was a plan that looked good on paper, but it was predicated on the belief that the Americans really were paper tigers. It was fairly sophisticated, but it depended too much on synchronization and not enough on control by the commanders in the field. When the synchronization broke down — and it did, when two of the three brigades didn’t show up, when the others involved got a late start and then found something else to do, when the commandos were intercepted at sea — there was no backup, no flexibility. Nobody knew what to do next; the remnants of the brigade that actaully made it into Khafji was cut off, with no real possibility of support.
Sometimes we see what we expect to see, regardless of the actual facts. “Iraqi Ground Troops Battle with Tenacity,” a Washington Post article was headlined.
Schwarzkopf gave orders to shoot Iraqi tanks on sight, whether their main guns were turned to the rear or not. The rules of war had been broken, and the appropriate response was called for.
Iran took issue with the fact that it had been Arab forces who had retaken the town. The fundamentalist daily Jomhuri-ye Islami claimed that U.S. commanders “have treated the forces of most Islamic countries with utter contempt, wanting to use them as shields against danger... The... dispatch of Arab forces for the liberation [of Khafji] proved that the Americans prefer to entrust dangerous tasks to others.”
“Intelligence sources” told CNN reporter Steven Emerson that the Iraqi embassy in Amman had ordered PLO rocket attacks on Israel, in hopes of opening up a second front in the war and of bringing the Israelis in as active participants. If there was a concerted effort, it wasn’t very effective. Such attacks were sporadic and ineffectual throughout the war, but they continued to present a danger. Iran stated that if Israel entered the war, it would come in on the side of Iraq.
On Friday, Peter Arnett reported from Baghdad that there had been no further word on Khafji from government radio. Military Communique Number 34 from the High Command in Baghdad stated baldly that the force which had taken Khaji had returned to its old positions. By the 17th day of the war the battle was over.
Rather than discussing the details of its victory, Iraq stated its determination to fight the coalition, promising to use everything from kitchen knives to weapons of mass destruction. But more significantly, Iran was stated to be working to achieve a cease-fire. A PLO senior council delegation from Amman had also met with Iraqi parliamentarians. The Amman Sawt al-Sha’ab asked “Why don’t we... let the voice of reason win... by sitting at a table to discuss all outstanding problems in the Middle East?” Again there was the hint, perhaps not even very subtle, that Iraq was ready for negotiations.
This probably was another maneuver on Saddam Hussein’s part. His forces had been hurt by the pounding from the air, but he had drawn a little blood — not much — at Khafji, at great cost to the attacking force. A ceasefire would give him time to regroup, room to maneuver diplomatically. The model was not so much the U.S. negotiations with North Vietnam that had drawn out for years, but the constant cease-fires being instituted in Lebanon between warring factions. Saddam would be able to either achieve his aims through negotiations, or he would be able to reopen hostilities at a time of his own choosing and on his own terms.
The coalition didn’t rise to the bait. Cairo’s al-Wafd, for instance, observed that “Ever since Saddam Hussein began his autocratic rule over Iraq, the Arab masses have known him to be a... regional adventurer trying to fragment Arab unity.” Saddam was stuck with his war, and in getting himself stuck he had given the allies a chance to assess his capabilities. “[I]f the attack on Khafji is an example of what we can expect,” Hackworth wrote, “then the allies don’t have too much to worry about.”
Khafji set the stage for ground war. The battle brought the reality of ground fighting to the attention of the American public, and the sky did not fall. It showed that the Iraqis weren’t as tough or as good as they had been built up to be.
A few days later a Marine artillery battalion, three Saudi MLRS battalions, and the battleship Missouri pounded a concentration of Iraqi tanks and artillery for three hours, then moved back out of range. Forty five minutes later a few Iraqi rounds were fired in response, the nearest landing about a mile away from the allied troops.