War Stories
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By the summer of 1979, the Syrian strongman Hafez al Assad, feeling vulnerable, sought to find some common ground with his Iraqi neighbors and flew to Baghdad. When Assad arrived at the airport on June 16, 1979, Saddam refused to meet him.
A month later, Khomeini started broadcasting appeals directly to the Shi’ite population of Iraq to “bring an end to the infidel Baath regime.” Saddam ordered the army to crack down on Shi’ite terrorist groups like the al-Dawah and the al-Mujahedin, which he believed were operating out of mosques in Karbala and Najaf. Senior army officers, concerned that their Shi’ite conscripts might mutiny, refused to act. Saddam decided he’d had enough.
On July 28, Saddam announced that the Interior Ministry had discovered a plot to overthrow the Iraqi government—not by Iran but by Syria. Eleven days later, at a meeting of the Baath Central Committee, Saddam watched impassively as twenty-one members of the Baath Party leadership were hauled from their seats, denounced, marched into the hallway, and shot by members of the Amn Al Khass, part of his Hydra-headed security organ. When the carnage of August 8, 1979, was over, President al-Bakr was “retired” and Saddam Hussein was president, prime minister, chairman of the RCC, and chairman of the Baath Party. Within thirteen months, and with much of the world distracted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Saddam would plunge his country into the bloodiest military confrontation since World War II.
On the night of September 17, 1980, Saddam Hussein went on Iraqi national television and tore up—literally—the Algiers agreement on the Shatt al Arab that he and the shah had so carefully negotiated in 1975. Everyone knew that the act meant war. But no one imagined that it would last more than seven years and consume more than a million lives.
When Saddam attacked along a 750-mile front on September 22, most of the world expected that the Iraqi army would make short work of the heavily purged and demoralized Iranian army. Khomeini and his zealots had decimated the Iranian officer corps. Not only that, the United States had cut off the supply of parts and ammunition to the American-built Iranian military. Most of the West had done the same. Within a matter of weeks, the Iraqis had captured the Iranian port of Khorramshahr and surrounded the oil fields and refineries at Abadan. Saddam predicted an end to the war before the end of the year. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
By the end of the year, instead of victory, Saddam had a stalemate, as the carnage continued. And though the war was being fought mostly on the Iranian side of the border, Iraqi casualties mounted—as did public disaffection, principally among the Kurds in the north and the Shi’ite population in the south.
While both sides were supposedly subject to the same UN-imposed arms embargo, Saddam convinced his neighbors that Iraq was fighting for them. He told them that his cause was their cause, against a radical theocratic regime that was a threat to every Islamic country. Consequently, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan became conduits and suppliers of every kind of weapon and ammunition. And they weren’t alone. Ordnance from the Soviet bloc continued to be delivered to Iraq via Egypt and Libya and, most of it, through Jordan.
NATO turned a blind eye to Italian land mine shipments. The Germans sent explosives and chemicals. Belgian-made machine guns were delivered by the thousands. And until June 7, 1981, when the Israelis bombed the reactor at Osirik, the French provided parts and know-how to Saddam’s nuclear program.
Yet despite the volume of weaponry, the Iraqi army could advance no farther. In early 1982, the Iranians started sending human wave attacks through the minefields east of Basra—killing tens of thousands of youngsters, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old—and drove the Iraqis back. Al Faw Peninsula fell to Iranian assaults, and Basra was left little more than a bombed-out wreck.
By 1987, the war had degenerated into what had come to be called “the tanker war,” with Iraqi and Iranian air and naval units targeting oil tankers leaving each other’s ports. To keep the sea lanes open, the U.S. Navy began patrolling the Persian Gulf. Then, on March 17, an Iraqi pilot flying a French-built Mirage F-1 fighter fired two French Exocet AM39 missiles into the side of the USS Stark, killing thirty-seven U.S. sailors.
Suddenly Iraq was back on the front pages of American newspapers, and it soon became apparent that Saddam had been regularly employing chemical weapons against the Iranians and had begun using them against his own people as well. In April, he ordered Ali Hassan al-Majid, the secretary-general of the Baath Party’s “northern bureau,” to use chemical weapons against a Kurdish guerrilla stronghold in the mountains of northwest Iraq. By February 1988, chemical weapons—including mustard gas, hydrogen cyanide, and sarin, a nerve agent—were being routinely used against not only the Iranians, but also the Iraqi people.
By the time Saddam and Khomeini agreed to a UN-brokered cease-fire on July 21, 1988, as many as one million Iranians and Iraqis were dead, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians and tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. More than 1,200 entire Kurdish towns had succumbed and 250,000 of the surviving Kurds were forcibly disarmed and relocated. When the killing was over, every single Iraqi who survived knew the name of someone who had been killed in the prior eight years of carnage.
A year after the war ended, Saddam Hussein, resplendent in the dress uniform of a field marshal and mounted on a white stallion, led the Iraqi army beneath Baghdad’s newest monument. Called the Victory Arch, it comprises two massive forearms rising up from the ground at each end of the parade ground. Each hand holds an enormous sword, said to be replicas of the sword carried by Saad ibn Waqas, the leader of the outnumbered Islamic force that beat the Persian cavalry at Qadisiyah in 637 A.D.
The symbolism was inescapable. Saddam didn’t want the war seen as a draw so he simply declared it to be an Iraqi victory. Yet not an inch of Iranian territory had been permanently taken. Ayatollah Khomeini was still in Tehran, exporting terror and fomenting threats. There were nearly half a million Iraqi casualties—many dead at the hand of Saddam, not Iran. Despite all of this, Saddam reinforced his “victory” by telling his people that they had stopped the Iranian revolution inside Iran. Saddam had won! That’s how the man on the white horse presented himself to the world—not as a man who had barely survived stalemate and defeat, but as a victor. Before all the dead could be counted, before his shattered cities were rebuilt, Saddam began thinking of other victories. In the land between the rivers he had a million-man army, 4,000 tanks, chemical weapons, missiles, and long-range rockets, and he knew how to use them all. The only question was where and when.
The Gulf War Legacy
Baghdad
August 1990–February 2003
Shortly after midnight on August 2, 1990, more than 150,000 Iraqi troops, accompanied by 350 Soviet-built tanks and five hundred armored personnel carriers, swarmed across the northern border of Kuwait. Thirty-five hours later, the last Kuwaiti army unit had either surrendered or been driven south across the border into Saudi Arabia. The emir of Kuwait and the al Sabah family barely escaped with their lives. Iraqi armored units crossed the Kuwait-Saudi border to occupy the city of Khafji on the coast highway. If American and British intelligence had been half as good as it was thought to be, this disaster might never have happened.
The Iraqi invasion of tiny oil-rich Kuwait by an army that had been pummeled and punished for eight years in the Iran-Iraq War came as a complete surprise to everyone. A CIA officer I have known since my days on Ronald Reagan’s NSC staff told me afterward that his warnings about an Iraqi buildup along the Kuwaiti frontier in July had been set aside because the administration of George H. W. Bush was preoccupied by the events surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. A military officer with whom I had served put it differently: “Given their losses in the war with Iran, who would have thought that the Iraqi military could recover in just two years?”
Whatever the reasons for underestimating and misunderstanding Iraqi capabilities and intentions, Saddam’s attack, which he pretentiously called the “Revo
lution of August Second,” shocked not only the United States but the rest of the world as well. The Saudis, who hadn’t seen it coming either, immediately called for help.
The United States responded straight away, reinforcing Saudi defenses with U.S. Air Force fighter squadrons, a carrier battle group, and a Marine Expeditionary Unit. By the time Saddam proclaimed Kuwait to be the “nineteenth province of Iraq,” an even bigger buildup—one that would not only defend Saudi Arabia but also evict the Iraqis from Kuwait—was also under way.
On August 6, 1990, the UN Security Council condemned the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait, and debate in the council began on a resolution authorizing the use of force to expel the invaders. The United States started building what would become a remarkable thirty-eight-nation coalition of more than 700,000 troops from NATO and Arab soldiers from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, even Syria—under the command of an American general, H. Norman Schwarzkopf.
As the buildup in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf got under way and Saddam threatened to use Western hostages in Iraq as “human shields,” the finger pointing began. Congressional critics of the Bush administration wanted to know how the U.S. could have been so surprised. Blame initially focused on April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, for delivering what some said was a mixed message to the Iraqi foreign ministry.
Administration spokesmen appearing on the Sunday talking-head TV shows tended to explain Saddam’s motivations as an oil grab. College professors, “Arabologists”, retired diplomats, and archaeologists sat for hours in front of the cameras pontificating on Iraq’s age-old claims to Kuwaiti territory, the wrongs of British imperial rule, and the evils of America’s support for Israel—as if all this somehow explained or justified the Iraqi invasion. Even the environmental lobby managed to get into the debate by insisting that the whole mess was the consequence of America’s dependence on cheap foreign oil.
What all these accounts failed to grasp was what had been happening inside Iraq from the time the Iran-Iraq War ended on July 21, 1988. The badly battered Iraqi army—primarily Shi’ite and Kurdish conscripts led by Sunni officers—came back from the front to a country deeply in debt, with few jobs to offer and a homeland internally at war with itself. The Baath socialist health care, education, and public works programs that had been the regime’s sole appeal for the affections of the average Iraqi had been terminated in the mid-1980s, when the costs of the war spiraled out of control. And now that the troops were home, they learned that rumors they had heard of horrific atrocities in Kurdish and Shi’ite enclaves of the country were actually true.
Shortly after the Iran-Iraq cease-fire, Saddam sought relief from the billions he owed to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Soviets for the arms he had used against the ayatollah. He tried borrowing more from the international banks, OPEC, the EU, even the Japanese. His diplomats made overtures to the UN and the United States, quietly reminding Washington of the intelligence support the CIA had provided to Iraq when an Iranian victory seemed possible.
Throughout the war, Saddam had held things together in Iraq by depicting himself as the savior of the nation. He had presented himself to his people and the world as the one person who could keep Iraq from being turned into another Shi’ite theocracy. He told anyone who would listen that he was fighting a regime that tortured Western hostages, hijacked airplanes, and blew up embassies. For eight years, it had worked. Arms and money had flowed into the country from every neighboring state and much of Europe, despite a UN arms embargo for both Iran and Iraq.
But with the war over, stories of the atrocities committed by the regime began appearing in the Western press. Suddenly, the gratitude was gone, as was Saddam’s rationale for the hardship, rationing, and repression he had enforced. With mounting debt and a restive, potentially threatening army sitting in the barracks, Saddam looked for a way to keep the army busy and to pay some bills. He found a way to do both in Kuwait.
Lacking any real human intelligence (HUMINT) from inside Iraq, the U.S. administration knew little of this at the time. Defectors from the regime who made their way to Jordan or Turkey discovered that their accounts of what was going on were widely discounted. One such man who claimed to know that Saddam intended to “sack” Kuwait was dismissed because he was thought to have a “personal agenda.”
Actually, “sack” may understate what Saddam did to Kuwait. While the UN debated a series of resolutions insisting on Iraqi withdrawal, and as antiwar activists rallied in U.S. cities and European capitals trying to prevent a resort to arms, Saddam stripped Kuwait of everything that could be carried away. Looting of the Kuwaiti treasury, the national museum, mosques, churches, public buildings, businesses, and private homes was so pervasive that U.S. satellites were able to capture images of long truck convoys carrying the booty back to Baghdad.
Kuwaiti women and young girls were raped, many of them repeatedly—by Iraqi soldiers. At Ali Al Salem airbase, west of Kuwait City, Ali Hassan al-Majid—the head of the Amn Al Khass secret police and the man nicknamed “Chemical Ali” for using nerve gas against the Kurds—set up a torture chamber for any Kuwaiti military officers or government officials caught by the occupiers. Within a matter of three weeks, the only things the Iraqis hadn’t wrecked in Kuwait were the water system, the sanitation system, and the oil-production infrastructure, which Saddam planned to use to help pay down his debt.
On January 15, 1991, as a third UN deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait was ignored, President George H. W. Bush set a deadline of his own: twenty-four hours. A last-minute appeal from the UN, Russia, and France for Saddam to withdraw passed without action from Baghdad, other than the quiet withdrawal of the last Republican Guard division from Kuwait—an action that went undetected by coalition forces arrayed in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf.
Saddam may have thought President Bush was bluffing, but shortly after 0200 on January 17, when the dictator failed to respond to the ultimatum, the first cruise missiles and Stealth aircraft strikes of Operation Desert Storm began to rain down on Iraq and on Saddam’s forces deployed in Kuwait. For the next thirty-eight days, military and government installations throughout Iraq and the 385,000 Iraqi army troops along the Kuwaiti-Saudi Arabian border were subjected to around-the-clock aerial bombardment. Saddam’s response: anti-aircraft missiles that brought down thirteen allied aircraft and a promise that Iraq would achieve a “great victory in the mother of all battles.”
Then, just before dawn on February 24, with the 1st Marine Division on the right and the U.S. Army’s Big Red One (the 1st Infantry Division) leading the charge on the left, Schwarzkopf launched his ground attack. As U.S. and British armor rolled across the “line of death”—the artificial berm the occupiers had constructed along the border with stolen Kuwait equipment—Iraqi defenses collapsed. Sunni officers fled, leaving Shi’ite and Kurdish conscripts to either surrender or be buried in their trenches. Those who were able to escape wreaked their final wave of destruction, killing Kuwaiti civilians and blowing up or torching more than half of the country’s oil wells. If Saddam couldn’t have them, nobody would.
By the time the sun rose on February 28, coalition forces had liberated Kuwait, taken more than 150,000 Iraqi prisoners, and cut the Baghdad-Basra highway and rail line. The “mother of all battles” had taken fewer than one hundred hours. The international media, having predicted a long and difficult campaign with “thousands of U.S. war dead,” seemed chagrined to report that 148 American servicemen died during Desert Storm, and that total coalition forces losses were 358 killed and 1,235 wounded.
With more than a third of the Iraqi army destroyed or rendered ineffective, some advocated continuing the drive all the way to Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. But in Washington, London, Cairo, and Riyadh, others argued that none of the twelve UN resolutions dealing with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait authorized the use of force to invade Iraq and bring down Saddam. The resolutions were limited in scope, permitting the coalition forces only to
expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. And so when General Schwarzkopf summoned Iraqi military commanders to talks at the crossroads town of Safwan on March 3, he was authorized to negotiate a “ceasefire” and nothing more. There was to be no demand for a general surrender and no insistence on a regime change. In Baghdad, Saddam quickly agreed to the terms:
no-fly areas for fixed-wing aircraft in northern and southern Iraq
a full accounting for Kuwaiti and allied MIAs and immediate repatriation of POWs
the immediate return of all Kuwaiti property taken in the invasion
an immediate end to the Iraqi WMD program and the destruction of all such weapons stockpiles
an end to Iraqi support for international terrorism
a promise to abide by all United Nations resolutions
Some in Washington and London wondered why Saddam so readily agreed to these onerous conditions. By the time combat operations ceased at 0800 on February 28, U.S. and British military officers were well aware that Saddam had succeeded in extricating his Republican Guard divisions, virtually unscathed, from the coalition juggernaut. But lacking adequate intelligence about what was happening in Baghdad—or even a few miles from where the allied advance had stopped—they did not know that Saddam was already seeing the beginning of yet another internal rebellion.
Some of this revolt began even before the allied victory. In February, a Baath Party headquarters had been destroyed and its occupants burned alive during a Shi’ite food riot in the town of Diwaniyah, on the banks of the Euphrates. By the end of the month, when the allied advance halted, the Shi’ite towns in the south and Kurdish enclaves in the north had been showered with leaflets and broadcasts from U.S. psychological operations units urging the two communities to rise up and overthrow the “Butcher of Baghdad.”