Taking his own counsel, which he admitted rested on his religious convictions and intuition, George W. Bush decided after becoming president that he would rid the world of Saddam Hussein, which already had congressional sanction in 1998. Bush made several public statements about his mission to remove “evil” tyrants and destroy governments that sponsored terrorists. Bush’s instincts took more stimulus from Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neoconservatives in the national security system. Even before 9/11 the White House had investigated what a global war on terrorism might entail. For a president impatient with the complexities of foreign policy, the national security analyses provided little comfort. No other government (not even Israel’s) had much stomach for redefining the continuing struggle against terrorism as a war upon a particular state, including Iraq. Even after the shock of 9/11 and the start of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, the Bush administration found little international interest in making Iraq Target Number One for international action. Instead, the consensus, communicated by the State Department and CIA, was that Saddam Hussein’s days were numbered and that his ability to attack his neighbors had been largely, if not completely, destroyed. Saddam was “contained.” The president did not accept these reassurances.
From the summer of 2001 until the start of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM on March 19, 2003, the Bush administration did not debate about getting rid of Saddam Hussein but on how to justify a preventive war if needed. Its argument was that Saddam Hussein’s regime should be destroyed before it used WMD to destroy others. To win congressional acquiescence, which he needed, and to receive UN sanction, which he did not really want, Bush had to persuade the public that Iraq was a charter member of “the axis of evil” of state-supported terrorism that he intended to destroy. In meetings on September 17–20, 2001, Bush defined military invasion as the only sure instrument to remove Saddam Hussein, since all other forms of coercion had failed. The president also continued to ask intelligence officers about connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda. There were none of any consequence. Encouraged by Rumsfeld and Cheney, Bush began to doubt that the State Department and the CIA knew much about Iraq, even though three other agencies (the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Security Agency) reported to George Tenant in his dual role as Director of Central Intelligence. Bush allowed Rumsfeld to create an Office of Special Plans, the mission of which was to review all intelligence agency reports, which was really Tenant’s responsibility or that of the NSC staff. Condoleezza Rice, however, did not challenge Rumsfeld’s ploy, probably because she knew Bush and Cheney saw its utility in manipulating the case against Iraq. It was useful to make Bush look as if he were weighing all sorts of anti-Saddam options, which he was not. The administration also wanted to ensure that the UN and IAEA inspectors did not reduce the level of threat Iraq posed with WMD, since the seizure and destruction of WMD was the only issue that could rally skeptics and supporters.
The administration went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the UN and any other source of expertise and legitimacy did not weaken the WMD case against Iraq. It reinterpreted UNSCOM and IAEA reports to produce positive (not tentative) evidence of renewed Iraqi nuclear programs. It encouraged journalists and public figures to study its analyses and to learn that European nations also had alarmist views. It deliberately leaked classified analysis conducted by Cheney loyalists in the Pentagon, as well as a pessimistic CIA study of Iraqi WMD, completed in October 2002. It accepted specious evidence of Iraqi international efforts to create nuclear weapons. The Office of Special Plans became an enthusiastic patron of the exiled Iraqi National Congress, whose leader, Ahmed Chalabi, had not lived in Iraq for forty years but who claimed to have incontrovertible evidence of Iraqi WMD from agents and defectors. The INC certainly saw itself as the heir apparent for the next Iraqi government. Powell and Rice had reservations about the WMD cover story, but neither, for reasons personal and political, went public with their doubts.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had no doubts that there would be a war, and he wanted it to demonstrate the importance of “transformation” in the American way of war. The first CENTCOM contingency plan he examined in late 2001 looked like DESERT STORM II. He did not like it. Neither did the CENTCOM commander, General Tommy Franks, who found himself caught between cautious planners and an incautious boss. In fact, the proposed expeditionary force was half the size of its 1990–1991 predecessor. So too was the Iraqi army—and its equipment status was even worse than it had been in the Gulf War. The new CENTCOM force would have been 380,000, although Franks thought perhaps 275,000 could produce the “shock and awe” Rumsfeld favored. The optimism about the weakness of the Iraqi armed forces was well founded. Years of undercover persuasion convinced the CIA and JCS that the Iraqi regular army and even most of the regular Republican Guard would not fight and could be purchased with money, amnesty, and future employment. Rumsfeld believed that the force envisioned in Op Plan 1003V was still too large and would take too long to deploy to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. It would require too much logistical support and be much too expensive. Rumsfeld and Franks shared one romantic assumption: that this allied force (including a British division) would crush the Iraqi army and Republican Guard, then turn around and go home, cheered by the Iraqis whom the allies had liberated. As for the air campaign, it would begin with the ground war, not with a prolonged and preparatory “strategic” phase. The most revealing part of the planning was the absence of troops for rear-area security, for the extended support of an occupation force, for civil affairs and policing, for emergency engineering and public health missions, and for restoring some sort of Iraqi government, collectively known at the Pentagon as Phase IV operations. The only serious attention to follow-on troops was the formation of teams to find WMD, a force of over 600 formed in early 2003. Rumsfeld rejected the State Department plan for nation-building. His response was to create an Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, headed by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, USA, who had directed similar missions after the Gulf War. Rumsfeld’s lack of concern for Phase IV operations shocked anyone who understood the anarchy that would follow a tyrant’s fall.
For all its crusading self-confidence, the Bush administration saw the advantage of winning allies to its cause. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government became its primary prospective ally. Great Britain offered small but competent armed forces; its diplomats and intelligence officers had skill and experience in dealing with the Arab world. The British connection ensured leverage in NATO and the UN. Even American skeptics valued Blair’s potential influence on Bush in slowing the rush to war. The charming PM did not disappoint. Over much of 2002, Blair and his diplomats negotiated the preconditions for Great Britain’s participation and identified the flaws in the American planning. To the degree that the administration could recruit allies and international cooperation—essential to winning over or neutralizing the elite U.S. foreign policy establishment and media—it owed a debt to Great Britain. The British argued that the WMD issue had to be central to the justification for war, and Iraq had to be seen as a clear and present danger. Regime change was a means to that end, not an end in itself. What kind of regime would replace Saddam Hussein? The official “Cabinet Paper on Iraq” (July 2002) reported little American planning for postwar Iraq. The British thought that the UN-IAEA inspectors needed one more trip to Iraq if Saddam Hussein would permit it. If he did not, then he had clearly violated nine UN Security Council resolutions on WMD disarmament. The last British concern was that the Bush government would never find an Iraqi–al-Qaeda connection because none existed.
As the Bush administration prepared for war, Saddam Hussein retreated further and further into his own fantasy world. He believed that the United States would not attack because Americans lacked the will to take casualties. His forces could and would kill so many Americans that any Desert Storm II offensive would stall well short of Baghdad. He allowed no one in his inner circle to question his delusio
ns. He also believed that France and Russia, his allies, would deter the United States from displacing him because that was in their economic interests. He planned to save his oil wells and air forces for another postwar rebirth. The WMD threat may have been real to Saddam Hussein and other true believers like his sons, but the missiles, warheads, and deadly chemicals were scattered, hidden, forgotten, decaying, and never existed, although few Iraqis outside of Chemical Ali’s circle knew it. The Iraqi high command was so stacked with loyalists that the generals could easily assume someone else’s part of the armed forces had real capability. Information-sharing was an invitation to disgrace and death. The Iraqi Military Industrial Commission filed reports that suggested a WMD program existed, for that ensured its flow of money.
Iraqi defense planning reflected fear of a military coup as well as a popular revolt. Iraqi ground troops deployed in two broad rings around Baghdad but concentrated to the north and south of the capital. The weak regular army divisions clustered around Mosul to the north (nine divisions) and Basra in the south (six divisions). The inner circle put two Republican Guard divisions in the north, none in the south. The inner ring around metropolitan Baghdad held four Republican Guard divisions, one Guard brigade, and one regular brigade. The one Special Republican Guard division defended the offices and palaces of downtown Baghdad. The new paramilitary militias had special areas to defend under the most loyal Baath Party officials. Any commander who lost an engagement risked immediate execution. The towns and cities in the Tigris-Euphrates valley bulged with infantry weapons and ammunition, issued by Baath officials so the loyal Sunni militia could crush Kurds, Shi’a, dissident Sunnis, and foreign invaders. The roads to Baghdad ran through these towns and over their bridges.
In the autumn of 2002 a war with Iraq looked certain despite reservations within the Bush administration and Congress. In October the White House asked for a use of force resolution that would allow Bush to use the armed forces as he judged best to meet “the continuing threat” posed by Iraq. The Senate vote was 77–21 in favor of the resolution, while in the House the affirmative vote was 296–139. Neither vote represented the same ringing endorsement of the previous year for the war in Afghanistan. In December the administration released a special White House study, “National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which argued that a war against WMD would be a high priority (perhaps the highest) for American defense planning. There was a distinct emphasis on the concept that an immediate threat demanded immediate action. With some dismay, however, the administration had to live with a UN initiative to return to Iraq for more WMD inspections. In September 2002, after Bush’s UN speech on enforcing the UN resolutions on disarming Iraq, Saddam Hussein accepted a new UNMOVIC-IAEA inspection group. The inspectors returned to Iraq on November 27, 2002, and left one day before the war started on March 19, 2003. The nuclear investigators of IAEA made 237 visits to 148 sites, including 231 new ones, and found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. The UNMOVIC teams conducted 731 inspections and found evidence of chemical and biological warfare preparation and missile activity, but most (if not all) had been wrecked by DESERT FOX and not reactivated. The inspectors could have found an Iraq barren of all WMD capability, but by 2003 only Saddam Hussein’s abject surrender could have stopped a war. Inside his cocoon of delusion, Saddam Hussein, the Lion of Tikrit, awaited an American attack he would defeat as he had the attack in 1991.
For General Franks and CENTCOM, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF) had become only a matter of timing. Plans for the ground offensive, named COBRA II for its 1944 Normandy predecessor, called for a combined, simultaneous air-ground attack that would halt only with the capture of Baghdad and the fall of the Iraqi government. The principal operational challenge was the defeat of the Republican Guard. Iraq was divided into three operational zones. For the north and south, speed was of the essence in order to save the Kurds and Shi’a from slaughter and to prevent the Iraqis from destroying their oil fields, the golden goose for financing reconstruction. The northern area would be assaulted from three directions: the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) under Major General Raymond T. Odierno from Turkey, a Special Forces task force with the Kurdish partisans (the pesh merga) from the northeast, and the 101st Air Assault Division (Major General David Petraeus, USA) by helicopter from the southwestern desert. The southern region was the objective of the British 1st Armored Division (Major General Robin Brims) and focused on Basra and its nearby oil fields. If necessary, this force could be reinforced from the I Marine Expeditionary Force (Lieutenant General James T. Conway, USMC). The capture of Baghdad became the mission of the U.S. Army V Corps (Lieutenant General William L. Wallace, USA), the principal arm of the Combined Forces Land Component Command (Lieutenant General David D. McKiernan, USA). The other major part of the Baghdad offensive was the I MEF’s 1st Marine Division (Major General James Mattis, USMC). The I MEF’s air task force from the 1st and 3rd Marine Aircraft Wings flew fixed-wing missions as part of the Combined Forces Air Component Command (CFACC), but its helicopters stayed under direct Marine control. An additional Marine brigade remained afloat in reserve. The last element would be a Special Forces task force, rich in electronics, that would scour the desert between Jordan and Baghdad for WMD sites and pretend to be a mechanized force driving toward the capital from the west, a contingency the Russians emphasized in advising the Iraqis. Even with the development of Kuwait as a base area since 1991, the OIF forces needed six months to assemble in the Gulf region.
The massing of the U.S.-British expeditionary force concerned its senior commanders. As the planners studied the requirements of desert and urban warfare for a mobile, mechanized American army and calculated the logistical and security problems of supporting this force from Kuwaiti bases hundreds of miles away, the generals doubted that they had enough of the right troops. The problems ran back to Rumsfeld and his neocon disciples, whose basic assumption was that the Iraqis would not fight to save Saddam Hussein. They overlooked the Iraqis’ history of fighting any foreign invader, however hopelessly. As General Franks’s protests weakened in the face of Secretary Rumsfeld’s hectoring, the COBRA II troop list shrank. Bush had set an arbitrary limit of 200,000 for the force, and Rumsfeld made even deeper cuts. Had the Army had its way, it would have added the 1st Cavalry Division or the 1st Armored Division or both to the CFLCC. It managed to get two armored cavalry regiments and the 82nd Airborne Division added, but as late arrivals. When Turkey objected to allowing the 4th Infantry Division to launch an offensive from its territory, the division diverted to Iraq, but not in time for the invasion. The commanders felt further shocks when, despite the awesome logistical effort in Kuwait, Rumsfeld limited the number of service support units sent to the theater and cut back the reserve mobilization. For example, planners estimated that CFLCC might have to handle over 100,000 enemy prisoners of war (EPW), but V Corps controlled only one small MP brigade until it received a patchwork National Guard MP brigade that was supposed to provide traffic and police services in Kuwait. The troop shortages did not seem fatal to the COBRA II drive to Baghdad, but the planners worried about the pacification of all Iraq and Phase IV operations. CENTCOM war games until 2003 predicted the need for 300,000 troops. On March 19, CFLCC went to war with 122,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines and 21,000 members of the British armed forces.
In terms of its broad strategic mission, destroying the organized Iraqi armed forces and any WMD in their possession and displacing the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM fulfilled its champions’ most optimistic expectations. Victory, officially announced by President Bush on the flight deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, meant the end of “major combat operations.” “Mission Accomplished!” the banner above Bush trumpeted. The president admitted that Iraq still presented reconstruction problems, the understatement of the decade. From the first air strikes on March 19 to the disappearance of the Special Republican Guard in Baghdad, the CFLCC with awesome air support ruine
d the Iraqi national, uniformed armed forces. Driving M-1A2 tanks, Bradley tracked fighting vehicles, and armed HUMVEES (a super Jeep), the 3rd Infantry Division broke over the border sand berm on March 20 and refueled its tanks in downtown Baghdad on April 7.
No contingency plan ever works exactly as planned, but COBRA II came close. The war started a day early because Bush approved a decapitating air strike on a Baath compound called Dora Farms. Intelligence analysts put the Hussein family there for a meeting, and the president could not resist ordering two USAF F-117A stealth fighter-bombers to destroy Dora Farms with precision-guided penetrating bombs, followed by a barrage of cruise missiles. People died, but not the Hussein males. Hours before the president told the world that the United States would lead a coalition force into Iraq, Special Operations Forces were on the ground on their missions, and the skies filled with aircraft and drones looking for targets and ruining any Iraq air-defense radars with electronic jamming. Assured of friendly skies, the CFACC aircraft went for the targets throughout Iraq ahead of the ground forces.
Source: U.S. Army Center of Military History, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The U.S. Army’s Role in Peace Enforcement Operations, 1995–2004
Remembering the confusions of the “scud hunt” of 1991, Central Command deployed more than twenty batteries of the improved Patriot air defense missile from four Air Defense Artillery brigades to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, and Israel. If the Iraqi nuclear threat was exaggerated, CENTCOM had to assume that its forces might face tactical ballistic missiles with high explosive, chemical, and biological warheads. It was a sound precaution. Between March 20 and April 3, the Iraqis launched seventeen missiles at CENTCOM bases in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. One missile fell to a Patriot of the 43rd Air Defense Artillery Brigade only three miles from CFLCC headquarters. Patriots destroyed eight other Iraqi missiles. The eight unintercepted missiles, carefully tracked, fell apart or landed without causing harm.
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