The air assault started on Wednesday night, Eastern time. Thursday night-Friday morning Iraq launched its first missile attack on Israel in a bid to bring that nation into the war and undermine the coalition. Saddam Hussein coldly miscalculated: Israel always responded to aggression quickly, mercilessly. The Israeli response to such a blatant attack as a SCUD placed in downtown Tel Aviv would be retaliatory strikes against Iraq. The retaliatory strikes would make the conflict an Arab-Israeli fight, with the Americans on the side of the Israelis. The Arab members of the coalition would bail out, or even better, would change sides. Saddam Hussein had announced his intentions before the bombing began.
The SCUD is Old Technology. It is a lineal descendent of the V2 missiles used on England by the Germans in the Second World War, and the line is not very long. In its unmodified form (Iraq had several home-brew versions) it has a range of about 300 kilometers, and it is capable of carrying high explosive, chemical, nuclear warheads, or, if everything else is used up, a concrete training warhead. It was first developed by the Soviets in the early 1950s and has undergone a few modifications since then, but is still essentially the same missile. Its impact point is mathematically computed, and except for a self-destruct mechanism its crew has no control over it once it has been launched. At extreme range it can be described as accurate only if one is being exceptionally courteous to the designers. Especially with the Iraqi-modified versions, the SCUD showed a tendency to break up in the air somewhere in the vicinity of its target, indicating that the airframe is not as stable as it could ideally be.
If a person happens to be standing under a SCUD, however, he will be killed if the warhead happens to fall on him by accident, even the concrete training warhead. Iraq had demonstrated its willingness to use the missiles on both military and civilian targets during the war with Iran. The U.S. had taken the threat seriously enough to ask Israel in advance not to strike back.
Early Friday morning the air-raid sirens went off throughout Israel. Government radio called for citizens to put their gas masks on and to move into the sealed rooms each household had been asked to prepare. The SCUDs landed in Tel Aviv and Haifa. There were initial reports of nerve gas, which proved false. Eight missiles landed. Four elderly Israelis and a three- year-old girl died, of heart attacks or improperly adjusted gas masks.
Tel Aviv mayor Schlomo Lahat used to joke that any missile aimed at his city would be turned away because there would be no room for it to park. Quite by chance, one of the missiles headed straight for a densely populated neighborhood—and demolished a parking lot.
Israel didn’t have to launch a retaliatory strike; the Americans, British, Saudis, and others were already doing it. Most of the fixed SCUD sites had been taken out in the first attack. Within hours of the first launches, six mobile launchers had been creamed.
This is not to say that the diplomatic dance that kept Israel from flying off the handle was not intricate and, especially at the start, doubtful. At one point Israeli fighters were reportedly already off the ground, on their way to strike back, before their government called them back. But in the final analysis, the Israeli leadership was capable of being both statesmanlike and practical.
More ominously for the Iraqis, a SCUD launched against Dhahran was destroyed by a missile fired by the “Patriot puppies” of the 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, the first public instance of a successful antimissile intercept in combat. As Specialist Sheila Sexton described it to Newsweek: “We went on alert [and] there were explosions everywhere. We were just saying, ‘Please, Patriot, work.’ It did, and we were all in shock.”
“I’m sitting in my jet,” Air Force Lt. Steve Kirik said, “getting ready to go. I looked over at my port engine, and there it was. It was like a big, brilliant flare. It jumped off the ground, snaked back and forth a couple of times and then boom! It was pretty spectacular.”
It is also something like hitting a bullet with a bullet. The SCUD re-enters the atmosphere at a speed of close to 6,000 miles per hour, and is acquired by the launcher’s radar at a range of 50 miles. The Patriot missiles are fired in pairs, just in case. They reach a speed of Mach 2 by the time intercept takes place, usually at an altitude somewhere between 35,000 and 100,000 feet. The first blast heard in a launch is a fairly standard “bang,” the ignition of the rocket engine. This is followed by a house-rattling roar, not the sound of the Patriot hitting the SCUD, but of the sound barrier being broken as it leaves the tube. The sound of the interception is a third, more muffled blast.
The Patriot is an ugly thing; the launcher looks vaguely like a dumpster turned on its side and then elevated at an angle. The missile, with its 43-mile range and its proximity fuze, would turn the feared SCUD into a laughingstock until the last days of the ground war. By the time the men and women of the 11th Brigade returned to Fort Bliss, Texas, they had been earned the title “Scudbusters.”
Friday saw the first combat videos. “Having been at the early hours of the Grenada campaign,” Gen. Schwarzkopf told newsmen and viewers at the day’s CENTCOM briefing, “I would tell you that we probably have a more accurate picture of what’s going on in Operation Desert Storm than I have ever had before in the early hours of a battle.”
Lt. Gen. Chuck Horner showed the tapes from the aircraft that had been doing the bombing, normally classified “Secret”:
The first showed F-111s bombing airfields at night, using infrared sighting. Interesting, not that exciting.
Then there was a strike on a SCUD storage depot; the pilot sent two 2000-pound bombs through the front door.
The next showed a near-impregnable air defense headquarters. The only way to get into it would be through the air shaft. The pilot obligingly put his bomb down the air shaft, after which anyone on the scene would have been able to walk in and out through the walls freely, always assuming they were able to walk.
Finally, there was Air Force HQ in Baghdad. We watched as the pilot lined up the cross-hairs, square in the middle of the roof. “That’s my counterpart’s headquarters in Baghdad,” Horner told us, as the missile hit precisely on target, blowing off the top floors of the building.
The intent behind the video displays was to give the lie to reports of indiscriminate bombing of civilians. There were, and would be, civilians killed, but the United States, unlike Iraq, was neither intentionally targeting them, nor was it indiscriminately bombing them. While this may make little difference to a corpse, it does to the man and women doing the planning and to those who are not in the wrong place at the wrong time. For one thing, it reduces the number of wrong places to be in.
The left and some elements of the press, on the other hand, hit on the concept of “The Nintendo War,” with loutish pilots zapping Iraqi targets like space invaders. “Antiseptic language, reinforced by Nintendo thrills, airbrushes the damage,” wrote Todd Gitlin in the February 19th Village Voice. To historian Gerald Linderman, of the University of Michigan, Desert Storm was “a war that seemed to bring to life the best of the video games. We have seen no soldiers subjected to seemingly endless artillery barrages, cradling dying comrades.” He sounded disappointed. (Actually, they were there; they just weren’t on the allied side.)
ABC’s Cokie Roberts needled Schwarzkopf with the Nintendo argument a few days after the briefing, on “This Week with David Brinkley:” “You see a building in a sight—and it looks like a video game more than anything else. Is there any sort of danger that you don’t have any sense of the horrors of war here? That it is all just a game?”
Schwarzkopf has no patience with needlers, and unlike Roberts, he has seen the real horrors of war up close. He replied bluntly: “You don’t see me treating it like a game. And you don’t see me laughing and joking about it going on. There are human lives being lost when that happens. And at this stage of the game, it is not a time for frivolity on the part of anybody.” Roberts came away from the interview looking frivolous herself.
The tapes shown publicly were tame compared to some that weren’t. One showed an Iraqi pilot in his cockpit and his crew chief frantically trying to get him aloft as a fighter blew them both away, along with the plane. Another showed a panic-stricken crewman racing for a shelter and being blown to bits. No one assumed they were Goombahs or Koopah Troopahs.
Nor was the war antiseptic even to those on its edges. National Review related the story of a British banker’s answer to a friend’s call from London after a SCUD-Patriot encounter: “Did you evacuate your house?” the caller asked. “Don’t be silly,” the banker replied. “I was desperately trying not to evacuate my bowels.”
Saturday morning three more missiles fell on Tel Aviv. Ten people were injured, but there were no deaths. The Israeli government again assured a nervous Washington that it would not retaliate—at that time. The U.S. sent two batteries of Patriots to Israel from Europe, manned by American crews.
The Israelis arrested West Bank politician Sari Nusseibeh and sentenced him to six months’ detention without charge or trial (later reduced to three months) after he was accused of having helped the Iraqis target their missiles. Because Nusseibeh was known as a “moderate” (like King Hussein), the accusations against him were viewed as a smear campaign in Arab and other quarters.
The SCUD launchings were really nothing more than a sideshow, a political move, rather than military. While the launches were taking place, in the real war the frigate Nichols was taking Iraqis from nine Kuwaiti oil platforms, where they were set up to fire shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles at allied planes. There had been 4,000 sorties by Saturday, many of them targeting the SCUD sites, others flown against strategic targets. The RAF announced that it had destroyed at least one mobile SCUD launcher. Ten Iraqi planes had been shot down. Many allied pilots were going up, delivering their loads, refuelling and reloading, then going back up—doing a “quick-turn burn”—leading to worry that the equipment couldn’t take such extended hard use.
Eight allied aircraft had been lost out of those 4,000 raids, a phenomenally low attrition rate, despite heavy antiaircraft fire. One Jaguar pilot described it succinctly: “Quite impressive, actually, watching it all go up... I’m watching it going off underneath me, but I’m more worried about running away bravely.”
CNN showed a redheaded Scots crewman at work loading bombs onto the Jags and cheerfully grumbling: “I put ‘em on, they take ‘em off... Where’s my screwdriver?”
After initially promising to cooperate with journalists, the Iraqis decided they could not handle the press, especially television networks. They ejected the fifty or so reporters who had stayed on after the onset of the bombing. CNN was able to persuade them to allow Arnett to remain, but everybody else got the boot except for Jordanians working for foreign publications and networks. USA Today correspondent Donald Kirk reported that drivers were demanding as much as $3,000 dollars to take them to the Jordanian frontier. He haggled down to $1,500, sharing the ride with a couple European journalists. Along about midnight, bombs were exploding not far from them as they drove through an area infested with SCUDs and other facilities.
Most of the network news reporting we got was from Dhahran. The International Hotel was known to the troops as “Little Hollywood” because of the presence of so many big-, little- and no-name reporters and their crews there. The blue domes visible from the hotel’s veranda became a set background.
Allied planes bombed a convoy of ten fuel tankers carrying oil from Iraq to Jordan. From the air, especially at jet aircraft speeds, tankers and SCUD transporters look remarkably alike. The funerals of six of the truck drivers turned into demonstrations against the U.S. and in support of Iraq. The attack, Lamis Andoni wrote in an article in Middle East International, confirmed King Hussein’s and his subjects’ suspicions that the U.S. was “ready to strangle Jordan, if not wipe it off the map, unless the country agreed to join the alliance.”
An Iraqi lieutenant, a section leader with an air defense battery, recorded in his diary, excerpts of which were later published in the Washington Post, how his unit had shifted bunkers, only to watch the old one be destroyed. “If the platoon was in the old position,” he wrote, “there would not have been a trace left of it. But we were spared that, thank God.” On the 18th of January a supply bunker was hit and exploded for more than an hour, as his platoon watched in awe. On the 19th a bomb fell right next to the platoon — but didn’t explode. Nine days later, after two weeks under continuous bombardment, the lieutenant made his final entry.
One Iraqi flew his Mirage F-1 after an EF-111A Raven, piloted by Air Force Captain Jim Denton, on a mission over western Iraq. The Iraqi launched an air-to-air missile at Denton, who released his chaff and set off flares to confuse the heat-seeking missile. Simultaneously, he dove to within a few hundred feet of the ground and threw the plane into a hard right. The missile passed him by. The Iraqi pilot, trying to get into position for another shot, followed Denton’s maneuver up to the point of throwing it into a hard right. He kept right on going and wiped out in a fireball on the ground. Air Force officials believe it is the first air-to-air kill to be credited to an unarmed aircraft.
Baghdad Radio was claiming 101 allied aircraft shot down. The SCUD launches had turned downtown Tel Aviv into “a crematorium” — particularly apt imagery. Saddam Hussein went on television and detailed his war aims: to make King Fahd of Saudi Arabia “rot in hell,” to destroy “the poisonous whole nest in Tel Aviv.”
Interfax, an independent Russian news agency, reported that the Iraqi air force and air defense commanders had been executed by Saddam for the poor showing of their services. As Lt. Gen. Tom Kelly put it, Saddam Hussein “has a fairly dynamic zero-defects program.” The dictator was later to boast on television that even when “the vultures were coming like rain... [the Iraqi air defense men] never relinquished their guns. They never left their places.” They also quit turning on their radars and they hit precious little.
Men like Lt. Steve Schwing were doing that to them. Schwing and his comrades, flying planes like the EA-6B Prowler, specialized in radar-zapping, flying at 500 mph just above the earth’s surface, “putting ‘trons on target.” The “’trons” were electrons; instead of seeing the U.S. jets, the Iraqi SAM crews were seeing anything from abstract art to screens filled with snow. The radar screens usually didn’t show the HARMs (high-speed, anti-radiation missiles) traveling the beams back to their sources. “It’s a good feeling,” Schwing described it. “It’s always nice to shoot a missile. You know you are ruining his day.”
Some Marine elements had taken ground fire from the Iraqis, but without any effect so far. The 82nd Airborne Division was reported moving up to positions on the Kuwaiti border, and there was concern about the Iraqis’ chemical arsenal.
At a U.S. observation post, reconnaissance teams observed seemingly oblivious Iraqi officers gathering on the veranda of a deserted holiday hotel each afternoon to sip coffee and tea and watch the bombers fly over, toward targets to the north. On January 20th the teams called in an air strike and put an end to the kaffee klatsches.
In Washington, Iraqi ambassador al-Mashat was called and reminded that Iraq was a signatory to the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war; the President was acutely conscious of the fact that, while the losses were low, some allied aircraft had been shot down. If there were no prisoners of war yet, there would be soon.
The president had also signed an Executive Order, extending reservists and allowing additional callups, to a total of 360,000 from the 162,000 figure that had already been called up. The term of the callup was set at a maximum of one year, and those already called up would have their time credited.
Lt. Gen. Kelly and Rear Adm. John McConnell became familiar figures to us. McConnell was good-looking and unflappable, professional Navy to the core. Kelly looked like someone’s grandfather: gray-haired with “birth control” glasses, a kindly face and a somewhat bumbling air about him. He was an easy man for the press to underestimate. He was smart as a whip, but he was basically kind enough not to amuse himself too much at their expense.
Only three days into operations, Kelly announced that the allies had the capability to gain and maintain air superiority in any sector of Iraq. The Bad Guys’ air defense system, especially in the south and the west, was leaking significantly. This was not a yet claim of total air superiority, but a statement that at any one place at any one time we were capable of achieving it, a "movable feast" concept.
The weather was restricting bomb damage assessment. The press sniped particularly hard at this, especially as the military was claiming an estimated 80 percent success rate for missions flown. Why were “more and more planes” coming back with their loads unexpended? (It wasn’t “more and more;” it was some. If planes couldn’t find their targets they weren’t authorized to drop their loads indiscriminately.) Certain targets were being retargeted; had they been missed the first go-around? Some damage, such as that done to runways, is tactical; it can be repaired relatively quickly and easily.
Five U.S. aircraft were reported down, four coalition, for a total of nine. There were still ten Iraqi shoot-downs, six of them MIG-29s, three Mirage F1s, and one that was believed to be a MIG-23. Nine U.S. fliers were missing in action, 4,700 sorties had been flown, and there had been 216 cruise missile launches.
On Sunday we were shown footage of ground forces moving north. Charles Jaco showed us the Tiger Brigade, which was slated to join the 2nd Marine Division and fall under Marine command. There had been patrol-sized fire fights, no casualties, nothing serious.
Greg Lamotte reported that there had been FROG launches into Saudi Arabia. The FROG is a surface to surface missile held at division level — the SCUD is held at field army (Iraqi corps) level or higher — with a range of 60-65 kilometers. The missiles had landed harmlessly in the sand and the Saudi Air Force had destroyed the launchers.
There were protests in Germany, particularly in Berlin, where red paint was poured into the streets. While a thousand people staged a pro-war demonstration in Seattle, 40,000 marched against the war in San Francisco, shouting “No Blood for Oil!”
“Supporters of the use of force have no monopoly on national pride, any more than protesters have sole claim to the desire for peace,” a Time writer observed querelously. Rev. Emory Searcy Jr., of Atlanta, director of the antiwar National Clergy and Laity Concerned, said that, “The movement has learned from its mistakes,” a reference to the vilification heaped on the troops in Vietnam.
They still had a few more to work on. The “Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East,” founded by Ramsey Clark, staged a rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, across from the White House, involving an estimated 15,000 people. Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general, is a fixture on the pacifist circuit. The “coalition” was described by The New Republic as being a front for the Workers World Party, a Trotskyite group distinguished by its support for the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Present were groups like the Hands Off Cuba Committee, Young Koreans United, and a few others, dubbed “bonkerists” by left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn — who himself was once described by George Will as “the last Stalinist, who should be put in a case in the Smithsonian.”
To warm up the crowd, the organizers played John Lennon’s “Imagine” and “Revolution” over the PA system, along with the new movement’s unofficial theme song, “Give Peace a Chance.” A succession of speakers denounced U.S. imperialism in Central America and the Middle East. Daniel Ellsberg addressed the group. A speaker named Dacajeweah, from the American Indian Movement, told the crowd that the entire history of the U.S. was one of racism and oppression and demanded Amerika’s withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, Panama and Arizona. Mwalimu Keita of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party denounced the “illegal state of Israel” and shouted “Down with Zionism.” Jesse Jackson addressed not only the Coalition’s rally, but also that of the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, which held its demonstration a week later.
“Despite the seemingly growing anti-war movement,” as the CNN team described it, a CNN-Gallup poll said that 86 percent of Americans approved of the way Bush was handling the war. CNN seemed to be missing something here.
Betsy Loth, of Watertown, Conn., didn’t. Prior to the start of hostilities she had put up peace-rally posters in her two clothing stores. On Thursday morning, she took them down. “It’s not of my choosing,” she told Time, “but we’re in a full-fledged war. We should get on with it.”
The Iranian news service was reporting that two captured pilots, identified as American, had been paraded through the streets of Baghdad. There was no confirmation as yet from the Pentagon.
A Beirut newspaper quoted a PLO official who said the Iraqis had told him they had 140 mobile SCUD launchers hidden underground, waiting to be used. Surprisingly, that was a fairly accurate figure. They also claimed they had chemical weapons plants and a nuclear reactor hidden the same way.
There was a report from Peter Arnett, in Baghdad, still there, soon to become both a fixture and an issue in his own right. Power and water were off in the city, he told us, but there was no extensive damage to civilian property after three days of bombing. Iraq was claiming the attacks were killing many women and children, but the stalls were still open in the city. There was British footage of Friday night bombing raids on the main power station and a communications tower. The Iraqi minister of information stated that he was confident of victory.
That may have had something to do with the fact that the Jordanian Parliament was in emergency session. It was considering calling for a UN cease-fire resolution. Jordanian citizens were waving Iraqi flags and staging pro-Saddam demonstrations.
Tom Foley was on CNN “Newsmaker Sunday,” along with General Schwarzkopf. Foley didn’t fare very well. He seemed vague. He hoped for a short war, but couldn’t guess as to how long hostilities would last. Things were going better than anybody had expected, which seemed to surprise him; the precision and effectiveness of the bombing was “remarkable.” Had President Bush made the right decision? Foley hedged: the decision had been made, and once the war was started Americans would join together to support it. He sounded legalistic as he attempted to describe why Congress had given the President the authority he had requested, but had not officially declared war on Iraq. It was not his best day.
Neither was it Baghdad’s. Peter Arnett reported that while the Iraqis were claiming five cruise missiles shot down, they were also admitting to 40 civilian dead and 140 wounded, and to 31 dead and 51 wounded on the battlefield.
Neither was it that great a day for Navy Corpsman Clarence Connor. He received the first Purple Heart of the war, awarded for wounds received in battle. He had been wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel from Iraqi artillery fire.
The networks carried the translation of another of Saddam Hussein’s radio speeches:
The poor and the needy will be granted grace from God because they fear God and he will give them an abundance.
Men of good will know... that the Iraqis will fight, and they will fight persistently and continually.
It remains for us to say to all the Arabs and to all believers and strugglers and to all men of good will throughout the world that you have the duty of jihad, of Holy War, to eliminate evil and corruption everywhere and to strike at their interests everywhere. This is your duty, you should carry out, you should be associated with the struggle of your brethren in Iraq. You are part of our valiant armed forces and [of] the struggle... and if you are seized by the enemy you will have a reward from God. And you will be inevitably released when the war is over according to international laws and conventions on the release of war prisoners...
God is Great! God is Great, and Shame to the Shameless.
Structurally, the speech consisted of (false) piety, then bravado, then an appeal for help. The declaration of Holy War was directed at others: “Help us out of this mess I’ve gotten us into... We’ll get you off when we’ve won the war.” And then it closed on the same note of piety. There wasn’t much there of substance, nor was there much reaction in deed throughout the world.
This was another cold miscalculation on Saddam’s part: that the world terror network would come to the defense of Iraq, in effect winning the war far from the theater of operations. While the Iraqis were fighting “persistently and continually,” Arabs, Muslims, and “men of good will” in general would be bombing airports and machine-gunning school buses to undermine morale throughout the coalition.
Instead, the terror network failed to come in on Saddam’s side, despite Yasser Arafat’s open embrace of the Iraqi cause, despite the Jordanian street demonstrations. We have to assume either that the Syrians and the Iranians exerted a greater counter-pressure on the terrorist factions to remain neutral than Iraq could bring to bear, or that the factions made the decision themselves. While there were to be a few terrorist attacks, there was nothing massive, nothing concerted to be seen, scarcely anything above the background noise of terrorism.
There was a large SCUD attack on Saudi Arabia, as many as nine missiles fired. Six of them were shot down in the eastern half of the country and three near Riyadh, all by Patriots. Charles Jaco showed us a piece of wreckage from a SCUD; “To say people are on edge around here,” he told us, “is a definite understatement.”
And then, on Sunday the 20th, there were the downed pilots, first the audio tapes, then the videos that followed. “I think our leaders and our people have wrongly attacked the peaceful people of Iraq,” Lt. Jeffrey Zaun told us, his face puffy and bruised. All three of the prisoners spoke slowly, mechanically, as though drugged.
This was again a cold miscalculation, though actually minor in the overall context of the war. The world reaction to the TV appearances was outrage and revulsion. So fierce was the reaction that the practice of putting prisoners on TV was stopped almost immediately.
There was similar outrage and revulsion at the press almost as soon as the names of the first prisoners were released. At Camp Pendleton, the homes of Chief Warrant Officer Guy L. Hunter and Lt. Col. Clifford M. Acree were besieged by journalists from around the world. The Acrees’ phone rang so much that his wife, Cindy, had the number changed. Local and national camera crews staked out their home. Members of a Japanese television crew pounded on her front door and, when she did not answer, pointed a camera in the front window until local police arrested them.
Charles Jaco “committed one of the war’s biggest gaffes,” as TV Guide described it, when he smelled something unusual while reporting live in the midst of a SCUD attack on the 21st and put on his gas mask in front of millions of viewers. The gas attack was false and Jaco, to many, looked silly, mistaking Arabian cooking for mustard gas. It was a lose-lose situation: had Jaco keeled over dead in front of those same millions of viewers, he would also have been dubbed a fool, only a dead one.
By the 22nd of January, six days into the war, more than 10,000 sorties had been flown and the Iraqis had started blowing up oil wells and storage tanks in Kuwait. It was probably around this point that Saddam arrived at the realization that he would not be keeping his 19th province, whether he admitted it or not, even though much of Iraq’s military machine was assessed as still being intact. Here again was displayed that quality of savage vindictiveness: if they couldn’t have it, nobody would.
60 to 70 people had been injured in a SCUD attack on Tel Aviv, but the Israelis were still showing restraint. Despite the provocation, the psychological moment for retaliation had passed. Saddam wasn’t going to have his political diversion. Instead, the Israelis were doting on the American Patriot crews and bringing them home-cooked meals.
The Marines of F Battery, 1st Marine Division, had been coming under fire from the Iraqis nightly, and Sunday night-Monday morning they had fired 71 rounds in response. Not reported was the fact that there were long-range reconnaissance patrols out roaming around Kuwait and southern Iraq, spotting targets and generally collecting data on the Iraqis.
Bernard Shaw was back on CNN by Wednesday, a comforting and familiar face. Shaw was turning into the Walter Cronkite of this war, the trusted reporter, both believable and competent.
Captain Ayedh al-Shamrani of the Saudi Air Force had shot down two French-built F1 Mirages, the first Saudi kills of the war. We got cockpit footage of the lock-on and destruction of the enemy planes, not as clear as we had seen in the movie “Top Gun,” but much more gripping.
There was Iraqi footage of damage to civilian areas, but of more interest was the fact that a Navy bomber had sunk an Iraqi minelayer in the Gulf and that three Iraqis had been killed and 29 taken prisoner from Kuwait’s Qurah Island. A “massive” rehearsal was taking place for a possible amphibious landing by the Marines.
There had been 15,000 sorties during the first week of the war. Iraqi aircraft had been moved to hardened shelters, and B52s were pounding the Republican Guard.
And by Thursday, the 24th, the war had taken on its shape. People were becoming used to the way it was being covered by CNN and by the broadcast networks. We had settled into the routine of the daily briefings by CENTCOM, by the Pentagon, by the British, and by the Saudis. The briefers were becoming old friends of ours.
Even the hooey was becoming familiar: Baghdad Radio reported that Saddam Hussein had visited the troops in Kuwait and promised that they would “liberate” the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina. The world dismissed the statement with barely a pause. We doubted the dictator had set foot out of Iraq.
Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and “Saturday Night Live” were amusing themselves by poking fun at Wolf Blitzer’s name.
The perception was growing in Congress that the United States might not come out of the war in disgrace. Attitudes were shifting in the direction of support. A constituent who wrote to Senator John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, about the Gulf War received two replies, one out of each side of the “Kennedyesque” senator’s face. Walter Carter wrote during the Congressional debate to urge Kerry to support the request that Congress approve the “use of all necessary means” against Saddam in Kuwait.
The first reply he received, dated January 22nd, thanked Mr. Carter for expressing his opposition to the war and added, “I share your concerns.” The letter went on to point out Kerry’s January 11th vote against the resolution giving President Bush immediate authority to go to war against Iraq.
The second, dated January 31st, thanked Mr. Carter for expressing his support for Mr. Bush and stated that Kerry wholeheartedly supported the President. “From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush’s response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment to the Persian Gulf.”
Mr. Kerry’s press secretary said the two letters were the result of a computer malfunction.