With real Foreign Devils to fight, Saddam had been constrained to patch up his quarrel with Iran, ceding everything he had taken and making a few promises as well. In return, he got his POWs back to fight again or to free up more cannon fodder, and he got Iran’s assurances that it would not fall on his flank while his army was engaged in killing infidels and imperialists. Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that anyone who opposed the U.S. forces moving into the Middle East would be engaged in a “holy war.” The Teheran daily Kayhan International was more subdued, wondering if it was wise “to think that the enemies of our enemy are our friends.” President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani remained on record in support of the UN sanctions and he managed to keep his countrymen there with him.
The normalization of relations enabled Saddam to strip his defenses on the Iranian border and move thousands of reinforcements to Kuwait, doubling and tripling and finally, on paper, quadrupling the numbers of his forces. His troops set to work building roads, improving supply lines, and digging earthen berms and bunkers. Antiaircraft sites were set up, and minefields were dug. Kuwait’s oilfields and refineries were rigged with explosives. Tariq Aziz and First Deputy Prime Minister Taha Yassin Ramadan told a Palestinian diplomat that they expected a U.S. attack in the second part of October or in early November.
The forces deployed directly on the Saudi border were the People’s Army, there to be used as “throwaways.” Their function was to act as cannon fodder to screen the steadier mechanized and armored units of the regular army behind them. The Republican Guard had been pulled back to southern Iraq and reinforced. The disposition of forces was designed for attrition, a replay of the conflict with Iran. It also had the disadvantage of putting the least steady forces forward, to bear the brunt of any attack. Panic is a contagious disease under fire.
There were the anticipated clashes of cultures between the westerners and the Arabs. The Americans bent over backward so as not to offend their hosts’ sensibilities. Chaplains were referred to by the Saudis as “morale officers” and services were held out of the view of proper Believers. There was not even a little lite beer to be found, much less anything harder; the closest anyone could come up with was non-alcoholic imitation stuff. The hardest part for the Arabs, though, was the fact that a significant proportion of the U.S. armed forces consists of women.
The Saudis are the strictest of Muslims. Saudi women, unlike those of Kuwait or most other places, are not even allowed to drive cars. When they appear in public, they wear the chador (in Saudi Arabia it is called an abbaya), a shapeless black dress that covers them from head to foot and gives no hint whether the wearer is a beauty or a hag. The Americans immediately started describing them as “Ninja women.”
American women do not wear the chador. They drive cars. They do the same work, in most instances, as do American men. Most of those who expected to get a break because of their sex had given up on the idea of a military career.
This was bad enough for the provincial Saudi sensibilities. Even worse, though, many American women are good-looking. To men to whom a bare face is in approximately the same category of interest into which American men put a bare breast, a smiling redhead from Kansas City is distracting by definition. Further, the armed forces require their members to keep in shape, so many of them jog or run. Saudi Arabia is a hot country, so no one will run in heavy clothes, much less in a chador. When they run, women jiggle.
No army can fight when half its members are coming down with the vapors and the other half is trying to pop the eyes back into its collective head. The Americans compromised; women didn’t wear shorts and they stopped jogging for the most part. But they were there with a job to do; they continued their awful habits of driving and doing the same work as the men, and they were to be found dressed about the same as their male counterparts.
The Saudis made their own efforts and slowly came to accept the fact that their own customs were not laws of nature. Many of the mutawwas, the busy-body religious police, were removed from Eastern Province by the government to avoid friction. There continued to be unpleasant incidents, but somehow both sides survived the experience. For the most part they managed to understand each other even if not to agree: “This is their culture,” Capt. Susan Beausoleil, told Newsweek. “We shouldn’t impose our ways on them.”
Rep. Pat Schroeder disagreed with her. “Gender apartheid” was a tub just waiting to be thumped to oppose American involvement. “Can you imagine if we sent black soldiers to South Africa and told them to go along with the apartheid rules?” she demanded.
Sometimes foreign cultures are just so... foreign.
One morning in October, Awatif Wasmi, an Iraqi citizen who had lived in Kuwait since she was a child, when her parents left for political reasons, was awakened at quarter to five in the morning by troops banging at her door. The Iraqis took away her husband, Fallah, for questioning, and kept him for two weeks. On the way out they helped themselves to Fallah’s two gold watches and 5,000 Iraqi dinars—about $1,500—in cash.
Even after Fallah was returned to his wife and three children, the troops came back three more times, going through the house and ransacking several rooms. After the first time, Awatif left these exactly as the Iraqis had left them, in case they came back again, with clothes strewn on the floor, mattresses upended, drawers emptied.
Disabled Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, about whom the movie “Born on the Fourth of July” had been made, made a commercial from his wheelchair, opposing the buildup:
We have thousands of young men and women in the Persian Gulf. Not to defend democracy but to protect the big oil companies. We don’t want another Vietnam. How many more body bags and graveyards and monuments, how many more Americans coming home in wheelchairs like me, will it take before we learn?
The delivery and the speaker were effective, the message wasn’t.
The radical left journal The Nation predicted that Bush would move to “reinstall family feudalism in Kuwait” in mid-December, when he would have an “Anzio-class armada” assembled in the Gulf for a proper invasion “complete with tens of thousands of casualties, devastating political consequences and misery for millions.” Congress was being ignored, the writer explained, as the buildup went on, and Bush’s denial of a major Congressional role was already grounds for impeachment. Congress’ “cowardice” in not reining him in was “reason enough for ousters en masse.”
Having been duly warned, as Congress adjourned for the 1990 elections 82 House Democrats joined in a statement, drafted by California Representative Ron Dellums, expressing “grave concern” that war might be imminent, with catastrophic consequences and massive loss of life, including 10,000 to 50,000 Americans killed. The signers stated, “We are emphatically opposed to any offensive military action,” expecting Bush to launch a military offensive while Congress was out of session.
Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevarnadze made a landmark speech, threatening United Nations action to force Iraq to absent itself from Kuwait; the Iraqis dismissed the Soviets as American stooges—undoubtedly the first time that statement was ever made! President Mitterand, in his own address to the UN, suggested a possible compromise negotiating stance. The Iraqis saw hope there: “This is the first step to the breakup of the anti-Iraq coalition,” said Naji al-Hadithi, director general of press information.
The Iraqi press reported that the Americans deployed to Saudi Arabia “drink and party with semi-nude dancers near Islamic holy places.” The air forces were manned by Israeli pilots. Saudi soldiers were gunning down American GIs for having sex in the streets with their girlfriends.
Inside Iraq, ration cards were back. There were bread lines at all times of the day. Confectioners had been closed to economize on sugar. Le Monde reported that members of the Ba’ath Party were drilling into soldiers that Kuwait was Iraqi territory, to be defended to the last man.
The Marines who were facing them remained Semper Gumby—“Always Flexible.”
The National Council of Churches of Christ called for an immediate halt to the buildup, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Gulf region, and for the president and Congress to negotiate with Saddam. Former President Jimmy Carter also advised negotiations; if we attacked Iraq, it would erode U.S. support in the Middle East. We should keep in mind the Muslim propensity to become martyrs.
Newly-elected radical Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota held a news conference at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to criticize the administration’s Gulf policy. The publicity stunt drew cries of outrage from veterans and Republicans, but Wellstone got his name in the papers, which was the important thing.
The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi put forth a peace plan that involved having 7,000 people practice his “yogic flying” technique to produce a “state of coherence” in world consciousness.
Somehow maintaining his own coherence, Gen. Colin Powell flew to Saudi Arabia to talk to Gen. Schwarzkopf about what would be needed to cope with the non-Yogic forces the Iraqis had arrayed. Schwarzkopf from the first had no intention of butting against them head-first, but with the potential front line extended now he would need more troops. Powell needed to know which ones.
On November 8th, Bush announced that additional forces would be sent to the Gulf, nearly doubling the size of the 220,000 deployed. With the Saudis’ and other allied forces, the total would for the first time match or outnumber the 430,000 Iraqis estimated to be dug in Kuwait and southern Iraq. Time reported helpfully that the new troops wouldn’t be ready to fight until perhaps January, at the earliest. The new forces included about 1,200 tanks, to be added to the 800 already there.
They were good tanks and they were good units. VII Corps, commanded by Lt. Gen. Fred Franks, was one of the two U.S. corps that had been stationed in Europe for many years, anticipating and training for war with the Soviets. In Germany, VII Corps had consisted of 1st Armored Division, 3rd Infantry Division, and 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Its stateside division, which would have been deployed to join it in Germany, was 1st Infantry Division, at Fort Riley, Kansas. 3rd ID had stayed back, and 3rd Armored Division had been chopped from V Corps to take its place. 1st ID rounded it out to full wartime structure. All three divisions and the 2nd Cav were equipped with top-of-the-line M1A1 Abrams tanks, which had been fielded to provide the American forces with a tank superior to the Soviets’ T-80. The T-80 was the successor to the T-72, with which the Iraqis’ best were equipped.
Additionally, the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force and the 5th Marine Amphibious Brigade were dispatched, and three Army National Guard combat brigades were alerted. The National Guard brigades never made it; their standard of training was not high enough.
Baghdad announced it was sending an additional 250,000 troops to Kuwait. Most would, of course, be reservists and People’s Army, but the numbers kept the Iraqi force bigger on paper than the Coalition’s. By mid-November they were credited with elements of 28 to 29 divisions in the Kuwait Theater of Operations organized into two corps, IIIrd and IVth, 14 or 15 of them in Kuwait proper. This translated into an estimated 480,000 men, 4,000 tanks, 2,500 armored personnel carriers, and 2,700 artillery pieces.
Bush stated that he was not “trying to sound the tocsin of war,” but that time was running out for Iraq. Time purported to be confused about the apparent contradiction, and asked about it. A White House official replied that, “We thought our message was simple enough, that we’d like Saddam to withdraw peacefully but that we will kick him out if he doesn’t. But we’ve learned that’s too complicated for most reporters to understand.” Time admitted it was still confused, proving his point.
The uproar that followed the announcement of the buildup astonished Bush. “The public thought it meant war was inevitable,” an aide said. “We saw it as part of the Big Bluff.” Polls showed that most Americans still wanted to stay with economic sanctions; only one in four wanted to go to war over Kuwait.
Some “experts” insisted the sanctions were working. Others said it would take months to a year or more before the sanctions’ effect would be felt in Iraq. Demonstrators, with their ubiquitous “No Blood for Oil” placards, were turning up at nearly every presidential appearance around the country.
2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment had spent more than 40 years patrolling the East German and Czech borders. When the Cold War ended one border had gone away. The other became the border between two friendly social democracies. The Cav was suddenly left with nothing to do but train. That changed with Bush’s and Cheney’s announcements on television that they would be leaving for the Middle East. The regiment’s command was told to expect about ten days’ notice before they would have to start loading equipment. On November 12th they received the order to begin loading—the next day.
Col. L. Donald Holder told his men to hop to it and things were very busy for the next few days as men worked around the clock and cursed all the plans that left out this or that little element. Tanks, for instance, would be shipped by rail, but there was no equipment to tie them down for the trip on flat cars and the troops were forced to jury rig. Virtually all the regiment’s equipment was loaded onto ships at North Sea ports by Thanksgiving and the troops began taking off from Nuernberg and Rhein-Main Air Base on December 3rd.
1st Infantry Division, at Fort Riley, Kansas, had been discussing deployment to Saudi Arabia since the Iraqi invasion, and had begun preparing in September. There was a good deal of equipment conversion to be done; The HMMWV—High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, pronounced “Hum-vee” or “Hummer”—was replacing the division’s Chevy Blazers. Two of the four tank battalions had to be converted from the “original” M1, with its 105mm rifled main gun to “crispy,” the 120mm smooth-bore. Helicopters were fitted with new navigational equipment. With so much homework already done, the division’s operational plans came together fairly smoothly when the alert notification was received. Within a week of the November 8th announcement, Maj. Gen. Thomas Rhame and his planning staff were in Saudi Arabia meeting with Lt. Gen. Franks and with the CENTCOM staff. The mechanized infantry division was to have the mission of breaching the Iraqi lines, passing the British 1st Armoured Division, keeping the breach open and passing the other VII Corps divisions. By late November the division was loading vehicles on trains headed for Houston for overseas shipment.
2nd Armored Division Forward, based in Germany, became the division’s 3rd Brigade. 2 AD Forward consisted of a truncated division staff and a single brigade, with the remainder back in Texas. Its commader was designated as deputy commander of 2nd Armored Division. It was equipped with “heavies,” M1A1s with additional armor plate made of depleted uranium—non-radioactive, and very dense. 1st ID’s normal 3rd Brigade, based in Germany and designated 1st ID Forward, was being deactivated as part of the Conventional Forces Europe treaty between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Strictly by luck, Brig. Gen. Jerry Rutherford, commander of 2nd AD Forward, had been Maj. Gen. Rhame’s deputy commander until a year previously. He assumed his old job, while Col. David Weisman took over command of the brigade from Col. V. Paul Baerman, who was an insulin-dependent diabetic.
Former presidential candidate George McGovern, in an article in The Nation, called for “Negotiations Now.” It could be argued that Bush was justified in deploying troops to Saudi Arabia to deter a possible Iraqi invasion, he admitted generously. But now it was time to turn that mission over to the UN. The “focus of activity” should shift from a “dangerous and costly military buildup to a determined diplomatic and economic effort to get Iraq out of Kuwait and to restore some measure of stability to the gulf.” In an interview on Des Moines television, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin agreed with McGovern’s demand that the burden be shifted to the UN. “We have to be part of the world order that says no to Saddam Hussein. We can’t go it alone like the policeman of the world.” In other words, to let somebody else do it.
Professional antiwar activist Daniel Ellsberg, in the same issue, called for “Urgently educating and rallying the public through town meetings, talk shows, Op-Ed columns and demonstrations—helping to organize a public movement...” He also called for Congressional hearings. “Those members who already recognize that war would be catastrophic should use all their influence to bring about immediate hearings that can raise the rest of Congress, along with the public and the Administration itself, to that awareness.” The question should be put: “How much blood will there be in the gasoline?”
Perhaps having read Ellsberg’s article, Sam Nunn ordered public hearings before his committee, calling as witnesses carefully selected former chairmen of the JCS and former secretaries of defense, who urged that the sanctions be given a better chance. As Newsweek put it, “This made it politically safe for Democrats like House Speaker Thomas Foley and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who had strong doubts about using force, to go on the attack. The hearings kindled a run of op-ed criticism and opened the first national debate on the crisis.” Or maybe it was the second.
Nunn was careful to say he was not against using force at some point, just not precisely at that moment. He refused when pressed to say when he would use it, instead asking Richard Cheney, “If we have a war, we’re never going to know whether [sanctions] would have worked, are we?”
New York’s Governor Mario Cuomo was one of those debating. He made some remarkably cynical and appeasing remarks on Iraq at an appearance in Los Angeles on November 19th: Work a deal with Saddam, he suggested. “You could negotiate something that gets them out of Kuwait for the most part, leaves them maybe a little bit of water, leaves them a little bit of oil...” A few days later he awkwardly backpedaled from that statement. A year later he was denying that he ever made it, calling forth derisive hoots from columnists as disparate as George Will, Richard Cohen and Mary McGrory.
After due consideration of all the factors involved, Senator Edward Kennedy urged Bush “to give peace a chance.” On December 2nd, he told “Meet the Press” that, “I believe we can avoid war, and I think it’s important that we do avoid war.” Asked if he would back the use of force at some point, Kennedy not very artfully dodged the question.
Showing even less finesse, 45 House Democrats filed suit asking the federal courts to enjoin Bush from committing U.S. forces to combat without prior authorization from Congress.
Bush spent Thanksgiving with the troops in the Gulf and when he returned his temper with the nay-sayers and moral theoreticians was short. The Rev. Edmond Browning, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, came to the White House to urge patience and restraint. “You should read the Amnesty International report,” Bush snapped at him. “Then you tell me what I should do.”
The Iraqis occupying Kuwait were refusing to distribute sugar, rice, or baby formula to Kuwaitis who did not have Iraqi identification cards. The arrests, deportation, looting, and other outrages were continuing. The Kuwaitis were to Bush flesh-and-blood people whose country had been stolen from them, not a theoretical list of “shoulds.”
Secretary of State James Baker took an eight-day, seven-country trip through the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and Europe, lining up support for a UN resolution authorizing the use of force if Iraq did not cease and desist. The Soviets declared, reluctantly, that they recognized that war might indeed be necessary. China and France both indicated that they would not veto such a motion.
The idea of the deadline came from the Soviets, who thought it would help. Baker wanted none, preferring to leave things open-ended, but Moscow insisted. The U.S. Secretary of State suggested January 1st. The Soviets wanted to give Saddam a little longer to come to his senses; they suggested January 15th and Baker concurred. The Security Council approved the resolution on the last day of November.