Lt. Col. Mike Scott was the Air Force CENTCOM briefer. Friday, the 25th of January, D+9, he told us that 17 friendly aircraft had been lost to date, all to ground fire, none in the past 24 hours. There had in the same period been 19 shootdowns of Iraqi aircraft and 23 confirmed as destroyed on the ground. Two bombers had been caught loaded and ready for take-off on the ground in northern Iraq.
The emphasis in the air war had now shifted to battlefield preparation. Iraq’s nuclear capability had been 100 percent destroyed, as had most of its chemical production capability, though its chemical storage capability was still great. There had been 45 SCUDs fired since the beginning of the war, 25 at Saudi Arabia and 20 at Israel.
The Saturday Saudi briefing had more on the military side as well. Ten enlisted men and two officers had surrendered to two Saudi lieutenants. Saudi Arabia was classifying them as “military refugees.”
The number of Iraqi planes that had flown to Iran had grown to seven by Saturday. Iran had stated that it would intern the aircraft and their crews for the duration of the war.
Group Captain Niall Irving was the British briefer. He detailed the arrangements that were being made to care for POWs, praised the Tornado and Jaguar crews, and announced the deployment of Bucaneers to Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi front-line troops, according to what POWs had told the British, were down to one meal a day and some had not seen meat for two weeks.
In the past seven days, Group Captain Irving reported, British troops had received 30,000 valentines, 10,000 phone cards, and one ton of haggis. The folks back home were still thinking of the men at the front. The flow of deserters slowed as soon as word got out about the haggis.
The networks did not cover 2nd Armored Division’s forward brigade moving out of al-Jubayl. By the 25th the brigade had moved up Tapline Road to its desert camp, Tactical Assembly Area Roosevelt, northeast of Hafar al-Batin, where it began integrating into 1st Infantry Division. They began maneuver training at the unit level, and set up brigade-level command post and communications exercises. The brigade’s battalions began the process of cross-levelling units as they were task-organized for the ground war.
The January 26th antiwar rally in Lafayette Park, organized by the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, was the last big one. Among the sponsors were the Communist Party U.S.A., the Nicaraguan Solidarity Network of Greater New York, and the Coalition to Liberate Animals Worldwide. The emcee was Angela Sanbrono of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador; she condemned American complicity with the “death squad government,” apparently confusing Kuwait with her own area of interest.
At the “celebrities’ tent” could be found Molly Yard, from NOW; Jesse Jackson shook hands all around. Harlem’s Congressman, Charles Rangel was there. Margot Kidder — “Superman’s girlfriend” — was there and wrote about it in an excruciatingly cute “Dear Mummy” letter published in The Nation. SANE/Freeze, Greenpeace, and the Rainbow Coalition were represented. But labor leaders weren’t there; the union rank and file were behind the war. Rangel was the only congressman. Tim Robbins told Ehrenreich that Hollywood—presumably with the exception of Kidder—was “scared” to show up, despite the fact that he had been on the phone all week.
On “Newsmaker Saturday,” former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman stated that the success of U.S. and allied arms in the war was a vindication of the philosophy of the Reagan years, when the country had opted for a high-end, high-tech, all-volunteer force as opposed to a lower cost technology and a force made up largely of draftees. The Tomahawk missile had a success rate of over 50 percent, and the Sidewinder and Sparrow air-to-air missiles had success rates of over 90 percent.
It was fashionable to try and dilute the credit that the Reagan and Bush administrations deserved by pointing out that much of the technology that was currently so successful had been on the drawing boards during previous administrations. Lehman pointed out with some force that even though this was true, the projects had been unfunded. In the military procurement world being unfunded means that a project is effectively non-existent—all that exists is a prototype, or even just the basic research that could build one if and when. Research and development dollars must be turned into procurement dollars before a system can be fielded. Reagan’s administration had turned the plans into reality.
In Riyadh there had been one person killed and 30 injured by the falling wreckage of an intercepted SCUD attack. President Bush observed that “Saddam has sickened the world with his use of SCUD missiles, those inaccurate bombs that indiscriminately strike at cities, at innocent civilians.”
Iraq said there had been 87 air raids overnight and appealed to Arab members of the coalition to abandon the allies. A Paris newspaper was bombed by parties sympathetic to the Iraqi cause, and there had been a car bombing in Turkey, at Incirlik. There had been no casualties in either attack. Up to 50,000 people had attended the anti-war rally on the mall in Washington.
On the 27th, about 1,200 college students met in Washington and formed a national steering committee against the war. They set February 21st as a date for nationwide protests. The agenda adopted called for an end to the war, the disengagement of U.S. troops, an “end to all occupation in the Middle East,” and “a sustainable energy policy.” They also opposed racism and a military or “economic” draft. A pro-Iraqi contingent of perhaps a dozen people, who identified themselves as members of a socialist group, displayed a banner reading “Victory to Iraq! Defeat U.S. Imperialism.” The students adjourned without voting on about 50 proposed amendments to their platform that addressed such critical issues as a cease-fire, the impeachment of President Bush, and solidarity with Arabs, though presumably not with Kuwaiti Arabs.
Meanwhile, Iraq announced that the allies had bombed an infant formula factory. Colin Powell stated that it was a biological weapons factory and wondered why a “baby milk” factory needed to be surrounded by barbed wire. There would be further footage on that strike in the next few days.
2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment continued training in the desert at Richardson. On the 27th a command field exercise was held, emphasizing engineering assets, fire support elements and combined services support. Col. Holder’s mission was to cover VII Corps so it could arrive in good condition at a line on a map called Phase Line Smash, to develop Gen. Franks’ corp battle. “My orders were to destroy all enemy armor and artillery,” Holder told Army Times, “but to bypass infantry... We concentrated on the objective, which was the Republican Guard.” If the ground war actually came, Holder intended to take his force through a gap between the Iraqi 26th Infantry Division and the 46th Infantry Division to its west, to probe for the Republican Guard.
The mission called for the regiment to act as an offensive covering force, to “hold the Republican Guard’s nose so that the rest of [VII Corps] could kick them in the ass,” as the unit’s written history of Desert Storm was to describe it. This was a different proposition from a U.S. cavalry regiment’s more usual defensive role.
By Monday allied bombing had given the lie to Iraq’s statement that the oil spill had originated with damaged tankers. There was footage of the U.S. strike at the source of the spill, on the pipes carrying the oil. The oil slowed to a trickle, after what was first estimated at 10-11 million barrels had been dumped into the Persian Gulf. The British and the Americans were sending skimmers, containment booms, and technicians to cope with the spill. Charles Jaco showed footage of the spill and a few seconds on the town near the source of it—Khafji.
Peter Arnett was granted an interview with Saddam Hussein that effectively pronounced the death sentence on the anti-war movement.
For the interview, as Arnett described it in a later Washington Post article, he was picked up by five “burly young men in suits and ties” who strip-searched him and put his personal belongings into a plastic bag. His hands were bathed with disinfectant, and he was instructed to neither talk to nor touch anyone. He was taken to the interview site by a roundabout route that was designed to throw off any “tails.” The site itself was “a comfortable bungalow” in a prosperous residential neighborhood. The living room had been “transformed into a makeshift presidential suite.”
The Iraqi dictator spoke with Arnett for two hours, with the footage shown on CNN:
The U.S. had demonstrated its lack of concern for the environment by attacking tankers and storage facilities; therefore, if Saddam’s field commanders used oil in the framework of self-defense they were justified.
Iraq and Iran were neighboring Muslim countries, for all their past differences, and both saw the war as a fight against the infidel; Iraq would respect the decision of Iran with regard to Iraqi aircraft.
On the use of POWs as “human shields:” Iraqi "students" were being imprisoned in the West.
On the use of chemical weapons: Iraq would use arms which were “equitable” to the weapons used against it. The al-Hussein — a modified SCUD — possessed nuclear, chemical, and conventional capabilities, which Iraq could be obliged to use.
And finally: Iraq’s forces would win the admiration of the world for their actions and much blood would be shed. Saddam had not one doubt “in a million” as to the outcome of the war; he knew that God was on the side of the Iraqis.
Arnett asked if Saddam had any message for the outside world. The Iraqis wished the American people (presumably as distinct from their government) well and prayed that no more of their sons would die. The Iraqi people were grateful to “all the noble souls” in America and elsewhere demonstrating against the war.
Arnett reported that he saw no sign of any willingness to accept a diplomatic solution to the conflict; Kuwait was part of Iraq “forever.”
Saddam Hussein may have had no doubt of victory, but his definition of victory may have been fluid. Only three of Iraq’s airfields were active that day. 30 Iraqi missions had been flown, of which 25 consisted of planes fleeing to Iran. Four of the remaining five planes were shot down.