When World War II began, Germany invaded Poland, Britain and France mobilized and deployed their forces—and then the armies of both sides sat and stared at each other for eight months in what the troops called the Phony War. As with the earlier conflict, there was much that was going on behind the scenes and outside the theater while Coalition and Iraqi troops faced each other for the next five months.
George Bush, mindful of Jimmy Carter’s self-imposed captivity in the White House during the Iran hostage crisis, went to Maine for three weeks of summer vacation, where he spent the time “recreating”—fishing, boating, and playing golf—and being pummeled by the press for not “doing something.”
American antiwar factions stirred predictably in response to the confrontation. The opening barrage came ten days after the invasion, with the first deployments. Thomas L. Friedman, chief diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times wrote in a front-page article for that paper:
The United States has not sent troops to the Saudi desert to preserve democratic principles. The Saudi monarchy is a feudal regime that does not even allow women to drive cars. Surely it is not American policy to make the world safe for feudalism. This is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will set the price of oil.
The second salvo came as Alex Molnar, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, watched his son, a 21-year-old Marine, and his comrades head off to Saudi Arabia. He felt compelled to write a melodramatic letter to Bush—and to have it published in the New York Times on August 23rd:
I met many of my son’s fellow soldiers. They are fine young men. A number told me they were from poor families. They joined the Marines as a way of earning enough money to go to college... Now that we face the prospect of war I intend to support my son and his fellow soldiers by doing everything I can to oppose any offensive American military action in the Persian Gulf... In the past you have demonstrated no enduring commitments to any principle other than the advancement of your political career. This makes me doubt that you have either the courage or the character to meet the challenge of finding a diplomatic solution to the crisis. If, as I expect, you eventually order American soldiers to attack Iraq, then it is God who will have to forgive you. I will not.
The orthodox left spent much of its time from the 2nd of August through the 23rd of February looking for a valid—or at least catchy—reason to oppose the war. Friedman and Molnar between them laid out or reflected the main axes of attack, why Kuwait and Saudi Arabia weren’t worth American lives.
1. The skewed male-female relationships peculiar to hard-line Islam, what came to be called “gender apartheid,” invalidated any other moral claim in favor of war;
2. Any action in the Middle East amounted to protecting the profits of the oil companies, which was bad by definition;
3. The services are made up of po’ folks, who join up to earn college money, not to fight;
4. “Support for the troops” could be redefined as not letting them fight the Iraqis if need be;
5. Bush was, somehow simultaneously, an unprincipled, trigger-happy wimp.
On September 5th, Brookings Institution military analyst Joshua Epstein held a press conference at which he presented a model projecting that the Americans and the Saudis would suffer casualties of 32,000 to 48,000 troops if they attacked Iraq, adding the sixth, “body bag” argument to the arsenal.
None of these, to include the ad hominem attacks on Bush, would take hold with the public; Saddam was just too much of a Bad Guy, the reasons for opposing him too obvious, the arguments against too far to the left of the main issue. The same set of arguments, however, continued recurring throughout the crisis, often stridently, sometimes querelously, as though those making them thought perhaps the public hadn’t heard them the first time. This is the “repetition technique” of agitprop, which makes a premise a given, whether or not it is true.
There were 150,000 foreigners who had been working in Kuwait at the time of the invasion, most of them East Europeans, Arabs, and Pakistanis, who had fled to Jordan, eluding the Iraqi “traval ban.” They told of food shortages and widespread looting by the invaders. These included both the troops who had taken the country and an influx of civilian carpetbaggers who had followed on their heels, sent to run the government. Members of the People’s Army robbed people of cash and jewelry on the streets, or stopped cars and stole them with the engines still running. Many of the escapees had had to bribe their way out. It was just too hard to come up with a coherent argument against opposing the instigator of such a state of affairs.
Molnar’s letter is particularly contemptible in that it uses his son to push his political ends. The writer apparently hadn’t taken much interest in his son’s military career prior to that point, or he would have known that Marines do not like being confused with “soldiers.” Soldiers are in the Army; Marines are different, and they are very conscious of the fact, rather like the difference between an Irishman and an Englishman. Marines consider soldiers to be sloppy and unmotivated. (We won’t discuss soldiers’ perceptions of Marines; suffice it to say that it is equally unflattering.)
On August 14th, in a 15-minute speech, Saddam announced that he had decided to accept Iran’s terms for peace: retreat of the Iraqi army from the 1,200 square kilometers of Iranian territory it had held since the cease-fire; immediate exchange of prisoners; acceptance of the Shatt al-Arab as the border and all the other provisions of the Algiers agreement he had torn up in front of the TV cameras ten years previously.
The Iranian gambit was a bust from the first, a transparent attempt to get Iran to switch sides and join a jihad against the Great Satan, perhaps even against Israel. The Iranian government welcomed the Iraqi move—and then reiterated that it would stand by the UN resolutions on sanctions and that it would increase its oil exports.
Saddam’s next political move was to publicly tie talks on the status of Kuwait to a settlement of the Palestinian problem, figuring that if it had not been solved in the past forty years he was good for at least another forty in possession of his new province. The presence of infidels in the land of Mecca and Medina also aroused newfound religious ire; the fact that they were armed and intent on not letting him have his way may have had something to do with it, but it played well to some sectors of the Arab public. Muslim fundamentalists like the Arab Brotherhood climbed on board, dutifully reacting to the religious and anti-U.S. themes.
Yasser Arafat and the PLO were quick to endorse Saddam’s aims in return for the tip of his beret to the Palestinian cause, despite their having been subsidized heavily for years by the Kuwaitis. Many of the Palestinians who had worked in Kuwait remained and collaborated openly with the invaders. Others, Palestinian Ba’athists of the Arab Liberation Front, were brought in by the Iraqis as security extras. The Kuwaitis grimly noted these facts. They started making a list and checking it twice.
Bush’s response to Iraq’s Palestinian gambit was simply to say that there would be “no linkage” between Kuwait and any other of the Middle East’s multitude of problems, and then to stick to that statement through thick and thin.
UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar flew to Amman to see if he could talk some sense into the Iraqis. CBS’ Dan Rather interviewed Saddam, who stated flatly that the conquest of Kuwait was nonnegotiable. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat circulated his own peace formula, calling for Kuwait to become a semi-autonomous principality after a plebiscite; its relationship with Iraq would be similar to that of Monaco to France.
King Hussein toured North Africa and Western Europe, promoting the “Arab solution,” even while assiduously fostering the impression at home that he was supporting Saddam; one particularly touching poster that went up around Jordan showed the king presenting the dictator with a new gun. Amman’s ad-Dustour predicted that, “The U.S. will realize, when it is too late, that its reckless actions will burn the ground under the feet of the invaders and elicit the sincerest sentiments of Arab support for the Iraqi people.”
Arab radicals convened in Amman to set fire to the ground, calling for holy war against the Western presence in Saudi Arabia, warning of worldwide strikes against U.S. interests should Iraq be attacked. The guest list included George Habash and Nayet Hawatmeh, leading lights of the international terror network. “Let the sheiks and emirs go to hell, go to hell,” Hawatmeh shouted. The Amman newspaper al-Ra’i called on all Arabs to support Iraq in confronting the U.S. and to withdraw their ambassadors from those countries supporting the coalition. Having heard the shouting, Saudi Arabia cut off half its oil exports to Jordan and expelled nearly all King Hussein’s diplomats, saving him the trouble of calling them home.
In September, King Hussein came to Washington to try and calm the waters. His reception was chilly. Jordan derived 40 percent of its GNP from trade with Iraq and he wanted to make sure the allies would compensate his country for the loss. Not until Jordan was actively on board with the embargo, Bush told him. Jordan officially joined the embargo, while professing its “neutrality.” Suspicion remained throughout the crisis that it was continuing to aid Iraq.
There was public outrage at the oil companies when the price of gasoline jumped from about a dollar a gallon at the beginning of August to a dollar and a half by the end of the month. The propensity of the oil companies to gouge the public, pushing prices up quickly and steeply and then letting them fall only slowly and never quite as low as the point where they started, may have something to do with the low esteem in which they are held. The oil companies deny that this is what they do, and even that they are held in low esteem; nevertheless, not quite a year after the invasion, the price of a gallon of gas was around $1.10 and holding steady.
The Washington Post helpfully suggested that a ten cents per gallon gasoline tax was just the way to deal with the rise in prices. The extra dime would foster conservation, contribute to alternative fuels research, and fund public transportation. This argument is an old stand-by with the Post’s editorial writers. When prices are low, they call for the tax because the pain of its introduction would be minimal. When they are high, the tax is needed to encourage conservation. Regardless of where the price is, the call for the tax is always in the same place.
There were also the expected calls for a “national energy policy.” This concept also somehow translates into making people pay more to drive their cars and heat their homes. Those who push it often point out that in Europe people pay $2.00, $3.00, even $4.00 per gallon for gasoline, while ignoring the fact that the population of Europe is concentrated in cities, while in the United States people live in smaller towns and suburbs, often with considerable commuting distance to work. Perhaps recalling the gasoline rationing stamps printed up as soon as the crises of the 1970s were over, people seemed more interested in the military buildup than in paying think tanks to come up with ways to cost them more money. The oil companies gouge shamelessly, but the alternative of a gas bureaucracy, perhaps run with the same efficiency as the postal service, is too horrible for most of us to contemplate.
Domestically, the problem that loomed largest in August and September 1990 was that there were 3,800 American citizens stuck in Kuwait, many more in Iraq. By the end of August, the Iraqis were rounding them up. Iraq was a signator of international conventions prohibiting hostage-taking; perhaps that was why they referred to these people euphemistically as “guests.” A pious Saddam said, in a speech on Iraqi television:
Banning some foreigners from travel is not motivated by vengeance, but rather a measure to prevent a crime of aggression which President Bush intends to commit against the people of Iraq after his crime of occupying [Saudi Arabia,] the land of Mecca and the shrine of the Prophet Mohammed. If he commits this crime, a major catastrophe will befall not only the region but also the world.
The Iraqi Foreign Ministry sent a not very diplomatic note to Western embassies warning them of the Revolutionary Command Council’s decree that anyone harboring a foreigner could be hanged as a spy. The note then demanded that diplomats present for registration any foreigners on their compounds. The international reaction was so loud that the Iraqis soon backed down, saying they would take no action against embassies sheltering civilians.
The ubiquitous Jesse Jackson elbowed his way into the limelight, visiting Baghdad as a journalist. He was allowed to extract a few sick hostages, but the reaction of the American public to his grandstanding was mostly negative.
“The People of Iraq have decided to play host to the citizens of these aggressive nations as long as Iraq remains threatened with an aggressive war,” stated the speaker of Iraq’s parliament. Saddam went so far as to put the foreigners on television. The world saw him patting an obviously frightened 5-year-old boy named Stuart Lockwood on the head, heard him telling the assembled British kids that they were “heroes of peace.” He had earlier termed the hostages “human shields,” and stated that they would be positioned to ward off attacks on vital installations.
The Iraqis at first considered the kiddie show a propaganda coup. “Wasn’t that wonderful, the president is so gentle and compassionate,” enthused one high-ranking official to a wondering Western diplomat. The world public opinion returns came in quickly, however. British politicians described it as “sickening.” Iraq’s ambassador to Britain was called to the Foreign Office and given what Time described as “a 20-minute dressing down.” Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd called the actions “disgraceful, inhumane and contrary to civilized behavior.” Other reactions were similar. Even Libya’s Muammar Kaddafi denounced the move.
Once the reaction had sunk it a little, the Iraqis seemed to relent and announced on the radio that they were graciously willing to let women and children go. The catch was that husbands and fathers would have to accompany them to get the necessary visas. The women and kids got out, after negotiating appropriately intricate red tape and paying their taxes and bribes; the husbands who showed up disappeared into custody.
Bush had at first even refused to utter the word “hostage.” It was too reminiscent of Iran’s humiliation of Jimmy Carter. When he finally did, he vowed not to be intimidated. It was a tough move for him to make, one that called for courage. Effectively, he had to write off the innocent “human shields” as casualties of war. Much to the surprise of the media, the country, and even the hostages, supported the move. “I don’t want to die, I have too many things I want to do, too many places I want to go,” a fugitive “guest” told a Newsweek reporter. “But if Mr. Bush allows 20,000 expatriates to direct his decisions, then he’s not taking care of business.” Another, also in hiding in Kuwait, offered his considered advice: “It’s difficult to say this, but ultimately intervention is the best option. Be decisive and be expedient—and try not to hit this house.”
As Ragab al-Banna noted in the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram, because the hostages were the victims of Saddam’s policies, American anger was directed at him, not at their own government. Bush was not Carter, and Iraq was not Iran.
It was also ten years later. “Tie a yellow ribbon ‘round... your mouth,” columnist Mike Royko suggested to the handwringers, a reference to the immobility and mawkishness of the earlier affair.
Iraq was to try to exploit western mawkishness almost continually throughout the crisis. It was quick to raise the issue of starving Iraqi babies as soon as the sanctions were imposed. When the allies started stopping ships bound for Iraq, the propaganda machinery made sure there were innocent women on board to become distraught. There would be more along these lines later.
What Saddam’s propagandists did not dwell on were the conditions in Kuwait, subject to the mercies of Colonel Ali and Ali Hassan al-Majid. By mid-September, Iraq was already in the process of depopulating its new province so it could move its own people in. This is an old practice in that area of the world—the Babylonians and the Assyrians practiced it regularly three thousand years ago, and in the bible the Jews seemed to spend most of their time in some sort of dispersal or other. Saddam had much more recently done the same with the Kurds in northern Iraq.
Around 200,000 Kuwaitis had been either deported or otherwise forced out of their country. Further, the invaders were destroying birth and nationality records, trying to erase the fact that there had ever been a Kuwait. (The Kuwaitis had prudently made copies.) Every government office and every symbol of the Sabah family was being destroyed. Universities, schools, power plants, telephone exchanges, hotels and shopping centers were being made into shambles.
There was an element of sheer destructiveness to the Iraqis’ actions that they made little effort to disguise and, except for the initial period of the occupation, to control. This is accounted for not only by a lack of discipline among the Iraqi troops, but also by petty and small-minded vindictiveness, insult and sadism, which sits in stark opposition to the constant harping by Saddam on the subjects of “honor” and “decency.” Kuwaitis who fled the country in August would return to find that their homes had been used as billets by the Iraqi troops, who had gone out of their way to “trash” them, cooking their meals on the carpets and leaving their droppings on beds and floors. Outside, it was even worse: a woman who went out to dump her garbage one day found the naked body of a young Kuwaiti woman stuffed into a basket, the victim of a gang rape.
One Kuwaiti hotel served as a depot for troops foraging through homes, gathering TVs and appliances to be sent back to the motherland. Army trucks carried off printing presses, college libraries, and museum pieces. It was reported (and since the end of the war repeatedly disputed) that the invaders had even tossed premature babies out of incubators so the machines could be shipped back to the Fatherland. Jean P. Sasson, in her book The Rape of Kuwait, quotes the account of Eaabal Abu-Mustafa, a Kuwaiti woman who saved a baby girl and an 18-month-old boy from a looted hospital and brought them to safety in Saudi Arabia. “It brings us back 400 or 500 years,” Suleiman al-Shaheen, a Kuwaiti foreign affairs official told Newsweek after the war. “Back to when tribes pillaged each other because one had more than the other.”
The Iraqis at first made some attempts to control the lawlessness. Eyewitness reports reaching Jordan described the hanged bodies of looters, soldiers as well as civilians. Others spoke of stern punishment meted out by army officers for rape and theft. But such measures were sporadic, short- lived and apparently ineffectual. After five months much of the country would be gutted.
The International Committee of the Red Cross repeatedly reminded the Iraqi government of its obligations to civilians under the Geneva Conventions, with no success.
The wights of “honor and decency” forced their way into the Dutch, Canadian, French and Belgian diplomatic compounds in Kuwait, briefly detaining several diplomats and hauling away three French citizens who had been given sanctuary by their ambassador. The Moroccan embassy had been entered on August 28th and its staff removed to Baghdad. Iraq’s envoy to France, Abdel Razzak al-Hashemi, claimed that foreign representatives in Kuwait were “no longer diplomats,” since there was no longer a Kuwait. The French disagreed, and they sent 4,000 of their best troops to the Gulf to underscore their point.
Attacks on embassies are severely frowned upon under international law; the soil they occupy is considered that of their mother countries, and an attack on an embassy is an attack on the country itself. The UN Security Council unanimously condemned Iraq’s action, even Cuba and Yemen joining the vote.
Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono was understandably uneasy at the vulnerability of the first troops landing in Saudi Arabia. The 48 F-15s of the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, from Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, had been ordered to Riyadh and Dhahran on the 6th of August, to cover the men of the 82nd Airborne, but air cover alone could not make up for the lack of heavy armor on the ground. The 82nd’s paratroopers were armed with light antitank weapons and aluminum M-551 Sheridan armored reconnaissance vehicles. There were no real tanks on hand for a week. Even worse, the logistics system to support the troops was initially bug-ridden. Soldiers of 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Regiment, ran out of Army rations a few days after arriving in Saudi Arabia on August 15th. The Saudis provided for them with massive orders of burgers and fries from the local Hardee’s. These arrived stone cold, soaked in their own grease. The effect on the troops’ digestive tracts was predictable, as large numbers of them came down with dysentery.
The 82nd Airborne soldiers quipped nervously that they were “speed bumps” on the road from Kuwait to Riyadh. Had Saddam moved against the U.S. force at that time, the U.S. would probably have been obliged to pull them out in humiliating defeat or to have fought a holding action which would have been expensive in lives.
The picture had improved somewhat by the end of August. The U.S. had the largest air- and sealift since D-Day underway, and the Army’s logistics system can do wonders once it gears up. Transport aircraft flew as many as 300 missions a day. They had by the end of the month moved 72,000 passengers and 100,000 tons of cargo to the Gulf, including 150,000 bottles of sunscreen and 168,000 chemical suits. There were also the first casualties: 13 servicemen died when a C-5A transport crashed in Germany, on its way to the Gulf.
The arrival of the 24th Infantry Division, with its 216 first-class M1A1 tanks, allowed Schwarzkopf to breathe much easier. To keep them company and to even the odds against the Iraqi force, he had ordered up all the tank killers he could lay hands on—Air Force fighters and A-10 close-support planes, and Army Apache helicopters. He had wangled more Patriot antiaircraft missiles to protect against expected surface-to-surface missile launches. And he had nudged the CIA into programming satellites to produce the accurate digitized terrain maps used by Tomahawk missiles. The 24th, his old unit, completed his feeling of security.
There was at least something of a knock-together plan for any U.S. involvement, called, not very romantically, OPLAN 1002-90. Gen. Schwarzkopf and his staff had just put it together, and in June and in July they had run a command post exercise, or CPX, to test it. 1002-90 was new in that it projected Iraq, rather than the Soviets, as a likely adversary in the event of a Mideast war. The results had indicated that four and a third, up from an initial estimate of two and a third, divisions would be needed.
On August 22nd, Bush ordered a callup of as many as 200,000 reservists and National Guardsmen. Much of the military’s support services had been assigned to the reserves and they were essential if the regulars were to employ their full combat power. Some combat units are also a part of the reserves; the 24th Infantry Division, for instance, has two active and one reserve maneuver brigade. In the event of a large-scale deployment calling up the reserves was a natural move, so no one was caught short or by surprise.
Except for the public and Congress, that is. The callup produced a psychological reaction that said that war was, if not imminent, then at least much more likely than anyone had thought.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Horner set up shop in Riyadh, acting as temporary in-theater commander until Schwarzkopf arrived. Once his boss was on site, he went back to commanding the Air Force component. Schwarzkopf recruited Lt. Gen. Calvin Waller, commander of I Corps at Fort Lewis, Washington, as his deputy. Lt. Gen. John Yeosock took over command of the Army contingent. The Navy component commander was Vice Admiral Stanley Arthur. Lt. Gen. Walter Boomer commanded the Marines, and Schwarzkopf’s Saudi opposite number was Gen. Khalid bin Sultan al-Saud.
Brigadier General Buster C. Glosson was established in what came to be known as the “Black Hole” in the basement of Royal Saudi Air Force headquarters in Riyadh. Glosson was assembling a cadre of officers and NCOs to block out a detailed targeting plan. This would put together the objectives to be hit in the event the force buildup did not deter the Iraqis. The planners worked in tight secrecy, using laptop computers, a secure (that is, untappable) local area network, and all the intelligence, both military and cerebral, they could lay hands on. They laid out targets and priorities that would shape the course of the war: the enemy command and control network; radars and surface-to-air missile sites; military factories, depots and labs; airfields, ports, highways and bridges; and finally the Iraqi forces themselves, starting with the Republican Guard.
Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael J. Dugan took reporters with him on a trip to Saudi Arabia and waxed eloquent on how his service was going to beat the Iraqis single-handedly. The other services were for show, Dugan bragged. The Air Force would win the war with massive air strikes, decapitating the enemy by targeting Saddam Hussein, his family, even his mistress. The day after the remarks appeared in print Secretary of Defense Cheney announced that, yes, he would accept Dugan’s resignation.
Syria announced in mid-September that it was sending up to 15,000 more troops and 300 tanks to be added to the multinational force. The Syrians made an uncomfortable ally for the U.S. Hafez al-Assad was not quite as bloody-handed a dictator as Saddam, but he was still a dictator and neither were his hands clean. Damascus had its own Ba’ath regime, not so heavily populated by Assad’s relatives as the Iraqi version was with Saddam’s, but still obstructionist in its relations with Israel, stridently anti-American in its ideology. Like Baghdad, Damascus used the terror network for its own ends and supplied aid and comfort to those whose idea of heroism is blowing up sunbathers. It was a case of uniting in the face of a common enemy, whether either side liked the other or not. The Syrians sent their T-62 and T-72 tanks to counter the Iraqis’, they sent their troops, and they were to fight well, despite the aversion of America’s fastidious left.
Britain was sending its Desert Rats Brigade, of 6,000 men and 120 tanks. The “Brits” and the Americans are old friends. The two armies trained together in NATO exercises, most of their communications and other equipment were compatible, and they respected each other. Lt. Gen. Sir Peter de la Billiere was to work closely and smoothly with Schwarzkopf.
The French sent the Foreign Legion and the headquarters staff of the 6th Light Amored Division. The Legion consistently lives up to its tough as leather reputation. The French were ultimately to hold down the allies’ left flank. Like the British, the French train regularly with the forces of the other NATO countries, to include the United States, despite usually being stand-offish at the government level.
Italy and Canada each contributed a squadron of fighter planes. The Gulf States contributed virtually their entire armed forces. The Egyptian force was to reach a strength of 45,000 troops. Morocco sent a contingent, as did Pakistan, as did other Islamic nations. From Afghanistan there arrived a small contingent of mujahedin, the only contingent not a regular unit. Argentina sent a cruiser and a frigate to join the blockade. Japan and Germany, whose constitutions forbade them to send troops, contributed an initial $3 billion and $2 billion to the effort, respectively. The Soviets were reported to have given U.S. experts data on the latest of the Soviet- built surface-to-air missiles in the Iraqi arsenal. By the beginning of October, about thirty nations had contributed military or financial support.
A good part of the time between the invasion of Kuwait and the commencement of hostilities would be spent establishing some sort of command structure to weld these forces, speaking different languages and using different types of equipment, into some sort of cohesive unit. At a distance, how could we tell a Syrian T-72 from an Iraqi tank, an Egyptian M1946 artillery battery from an Iraqi M1946 battery? The political aspects were intricate as well: would the Syrians fight their Ba’ath brethren? Would the French fight under the Americans, and if so under what circumstances? Would Muslim forces join in action against their Iraqi brethren, or would someone decide to switch sides, possibly in the middle of a fight? Each question, and a hundred, a thousand others, was a concern for Schwarzkopf and his staff.
Bush and Saddam fought a wierd television duel. Accepting an offer from the Iraqis, the American president taped an eight-minute message to be broadcast on Iraqi television. Afterward, a government spokesman came on with a near-hysterical rebuttal that lasted three times as long. Then Saddam addressed the Americans the same way, speaking for nearly an hour. Compromise appeared to retreat before his words. Any rebuttal was redundant.
While the U.S. reaction was setting in, so also were the Soviets responding—and not the way Iraq expected. An article by Stanislav Kondrashov in Izvestie noted that Moscow had previously closed its eyes to Saddam’s regime of “personal power, unpredictable in its actions and carried away by a kind of megalomania,” while it shipped $12-13 billion worth of arms over the previous ten years.
“Such a friendship should be abandoned,” Kondrashov admitted. But at the same time:
The Soviet Union retains a geostrategic presence in the region, as well as a real weight augmented by real policy. That weight must be placed intelligently and skillfully on the side of the scale that will tip it toward peace, moderation, and an understanding of the parties in all of the Mideast conflicts...
The Soviets were willing to see Saddam stopped, but they hesitated to see the balance of power swing too much toward the United States. They still had a lot invested in the area, and despite the difficulty they were having at the time they hoped to see a return on it at some point in the future.
The embargo remained fairly tight, despite Iraqi efforts to circumvent it. At one point, Saddam offered free oil to any Third World country that would break the embargo by sending its ships to pick it up. Nobody showed up. Reports circulated that Iraq would send 200,000 barrels of crude oil a day to Iran in exchange for food and medicine. Iran adhered to the sanctions. Only Jordan continued trying to buy Iraq’s oil. By mid-September, some 700 ships had been intercepted.
French President Francois Mitterand remarked that his government had a long list of companies and countries that had attempted to break the embargo. The United States, Britain and Germany had similar lists. Iraq instituted rationing, and exhorted people to “eat dates and drink water.”
The Iraqis were waiting impatiently for the political reaction to set in on the United States. Congress did not think highly of “war and war’s alarms,” and it made no secret of the fact. “It’s one thing to have support for deployment,” Rep. Lee Hamilton, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, warned. “It’s another to have support for combat casualties.” Deployment somehow became divorced in such rhetoric from the determination to do something—which might result in casualties—once deployed.
Hamilton may have heard the remarks of Latif Jassim, Iraq’s minister of information, a buddy of Saddam’s from Takrit. He vowed to reporters that “We’ll eat American fliers who fall from the skies.” That was a pretty blood-thirsty statement, so he toned it down later: “We won’t eat them; we’ll feed them to the dogs.”
Congress collectively grabbed Cheney’s elbow as he set out to spend the funds the allies were coughing up to pay for the buildup. It stopped a plan to sell $21 billion worth of armaments to Saudi Arabia, forcing Bush to scale back the size of the sale, with the remainder to be debated at some indefinite point in the future.
The expected search for scapegoats was begun, as well. With 20-20 hindsight, Hamilton criticized John Kelly, the State Department’s assistant secretary for the Middle East, for “signaling” Saddam that the U.S. would not come to the defense of Kuwait if Iraq invaded. Hamilton’s pot was black as well, though he didn’t dwell on that fact; six days before the invasion he had voted against agricultural trade sanctions aimed to bring pressure on Baghdad. Senator Claiborne Pell, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, preferred the “We are all responsible” position. He decided that “Our policy toward Iraq has been characterized by wishful thinking, appeasement and greed.”
Even though the media could see the contents of the Iraqi propaganda flowing into American living rooms, they were still surprised to find that Americans were supporting Bush in his stance against Saddam. The press tended to be dismissive of this backing. “[Bush’s] current high standing in the polls may suffer if many Americans conclude that their young men and women are being sent out to fight for cheap oil or to make the world safe for monarchy,” Newsweek wrote.
In Britain, the magazine The Middle East reported, a series of letters to the editor began arriving, apparently an Iraqi school project to rally the young and make them feel part of the war effort. Many which appeared in the offices of the magazine were written by the same person, with “Gulf Crisis” written in both Arabic and English across the top. “Why should your son die in defense of a medieval feudal bully of a sheikh in Kuwait?” Nadia Said, of Baghdad, asked.
Another article in Newsweek echoed that restoring the Emir would make Kuwait “safe for feudalism.” It went on to observe that the troops, even though volunteers, were mostly young and scared (and probably incompetent, though that part was left unsaid.) “For every professional killer,[14] there is a boy who joined the Marines to see the world and get a college loan, not to die in the desert,” we were told. The Friedman and Molnar arguments were already becoming monotonous.
Robert Tucker, a highly regarded Middle East expert at Johns Hopkins University, called the crisis “madness.” “The idea that we can’t compromise the current situation is as nonsensical as it is dangerous,” he told Time. Since the Kuwaitis had nothing left with which to compromise, they tended to disagree.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, distinguished delicately between securing the nation’s oil supply, which he saw as an American responsibility, and getting Iraq out of Kuwait, which he saw as an international one. The implication was that such a goal was not worth a costly American effort. That the two objectives might in this case be the same seemed to be beside the point.
Time warned against war:
Casualties would be high; hostages would be taken—and perhaps killed; international terrorism would soar; Israel would inevitably be drawn into the conflict, thus further fueling Arab enmity against the West; the use of chemical weapons by a desperate Saddam could provoke a tactical nuclear response; the oil flow would probably be disrupted; and the Arab world’s other undemocratic states (all of them) would be ripe for destabilization. Above all, unless Saddam does something so brash that everyone urges war, the U.S. will again find itself alone, and the major triumph of events so far, a U.S.-Arab alliance against Iraq, will be shattered.
The magazine was exhibiting the same lack of understanding of the difference between form and substance as Hamilton: the idea that an alliance might be formed for a purpose, and that the purpose might ultimately include war if it could not be deterred, seems to have escaped them both.
In late September, the CIA sent an assessment of the effect of the sanctions to the White House: in the short or medium term, they would not drive Saddam from Kuwait. If Iraq was to leave, it would probably be as a result of war.
The Iraqis thought so, too. The Revolutionary Command Council promised that "There is not a chance for any retreat..." War would mean “the Mother of All Battles.”