The Iraq War

by John Keegan

  The plan worked perfectly. On the first day the 1st and 2nd US Marine Divisions and the Arab forces drove into the Iraqi positions immediately west of the Gulf, breaking through trench lines and destroying much enemy armour in tank gunnery battles. Meanwhile the mobile forces on the desert flank were moving north but also swinging east. On the second day the flank forces, positioning logistic resources as they went, swung to threaten the Iraqi rear. On the third day the Marines and Arab forces continued their advance into the Iraqi main position while the mobile forces in the desert steepened their turn inward against the Iraqi rear. On the fourth day the Marines and Arabs largely overran the territory of Kuwait while the desert force cut across to reach the Euphrates river and complete the encirclement of the Iraqi occupation army.

  By that stage the principal problem for the coalition was collecting and caring for the prisoners of the war. The enemy had begun to surrender freely as soon as the fighting started, many of them simply out of hunger. By the fourth day surrenders became a flood, the Iraqi conscripts leaving their positions en masse to come forward with their hands up. By 28 February at least 80,000 Iraqi soldiers had surrendered, while another 100,000 had fled into Iraq or actually been withdrawn from Kuwait in the last days of occupation as the pointlessness of resistance became obvious even to Saddam. Some Iraqi units did fight; elements of the Republican Guard armoured divisions stuck to their positions and exchanged fire with the attackers, until overwhelmed. The disparity in casualties, however, reveals the nature of the conflict. Only 148 American, 47 British, 2 French and 14 Egyptian soldiers were killed in action, against an estimated total of 60,000 Iraqi combat deaths or even more. The British contingent estimated that 2,500 Iraqi tanks, 2,000 infantry fighting vehicles and 2,000 guns had been knocked out. Coalition equipment losses were negligible. The most visible Iraqi losses were suffered during the flight from Kuwait over the Mitla ridge, when coalition air and ground attacks on packed masses of armoured and soft-skinned vehicles produced devastation.

  The Iraqi régime had persisted with its diplomacy throughout the war, seeking to arrange interventions by the Soviet Union and to influence resolutions in the UN Security Council. The Soviet peace plan, though it called for the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, was unacceptable to the United States and other members of the coalition because it also demanded the abrogation of all outstanding Security Council resolutions on the situation. The Pope was meanwhile repeating his condemnation of the war; his policy was in part determined by the presence of an historic Christian community in Iraq which he sought to protect. The United States showed no interest in any peace plan which did not insist on instant withdrawal from Kuwait and the payment of reparations to Kuwait for war damage inflicted; Saudi Arabia also demanded reparations.

  By 27 February Iraq’s military condition was so desperate that its Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean Christian and so one of the Pope’s flock, communicated to the Security Council Iraq’s readiness to accept the resolutions declaring its occupation of Kuwait null and void and its responsibility to pay reparations. His communication was rejected by the permanent members, who insisted on acceptance of all twelve resolutions on Iraqi conduct passed since 2 August 1990. The following day President Bush announced that a cease-fire would be instituted if Iraq would end hostilities and stop firing Scud missiles. Iraq accepted the American offer and a temporary cease-fire came into effect at 0500 GMT.

  The crisis had lasted 209 days, of which forty-two had been spent in open warfare. Coalition air sorties flown had reached the total of 106,000. During their occupation of Kuwait and retreat from it, Iraq had set fire to 640 oil wells and damaged another ninety. Iraq had suffered not only heavy loss of life, largely through military casualties, but also severe material damage, to its roads, bridges, electricity-generating plant, telephone and television networks and its infrastructure in general.

  At the termination of hostilities, it was also thrown immediately into widespread disorder. In the south many of the Shi’a majority rose in revolt, attacking centres of Ba’athist power and killing state and party officials. The revolt began in Nasiriyah but spread swiftly to Basra, Kut, Hillah, Karbala and Najaf, the last two the holy places of Shi’a belief. Saddam reacted with a mixture of violence and conciliation. To retain the loyalty of his own Sunni supporters, he announced a rapid demobilization of older reservists, distribution of cash handouts and an increase of food rations. To put down resistance, he assembled the armoured vehicles that had survived the army’s defeat and concentrated them against the centres of resistance. Confronted by heavy weapons they did not themselves possess, the rebels quickly collapsed. Saddam inflicted crushing reprisals.

  In the north the Kurds, who had been in more or less open revolt for many years, seized the opportunity to take possession of the provincial capitals and set up a local administration, hoping for help from neighbouring Iran. The ayatollahs were unwilling to support a movement whose long-term aim was the creation of a greater Kurdistan, partly at Iran’s territorial expense. Even less so were the Turks, whose population included a large and troublesome Kurdish minority. Saddam, after suppressing the Shi’a revolt, transferred his internal security forces to the north; a full-scale repression proved unnecessary, however, because the Kurdish leadership rightly judged that Saddam was open to negotiations, to Kurdish advantage, if the rebellion were curtailed. This redirection of Kurdish policy, strongly underpinned by Western offers of support for the protection of ‘safe havens’ inside Kurdistan, led to the declaration of a cease-fire on 19 April after which began the return of over a million Kurds who had fled their homes to the mountains or to refuge in Iran and Syria. In the aftermath the Western powers, under UN authority, would impose military supervision over Iraqi forces north of the 36th parallel. Similar limitation of military authority would later be imposed over the Shi’a south.

  Yet despite these reductions of Iraqi sovereign power, and the undoubted fact of his overwhelming defeat in war, Saddam refused to admit that he had been beaten or even humiliated. In the face of all the evidence to the contrary, he insisted that Iraq had won the war. In support of that extraordinary assertion, he cited the survival of his own régime and the fact that Iraq remained an independent state. Addressing the nation on 29 July 1991, he announced victory. ‘You [the Iraqi people] are victorious because you have refused humiliation and repression and clung to a state that will strengthen the people and the [Arab] nation forever.’

  People in the West, leaders and citizens alike, were infuriated by Saddam’s denial of what they saw as undeniable fact; they were also bewildered. How could a man, they asked, sitting amid the debris of a military catastrophe he had brought upon himself, in the ruined capital of a country he no longer fully controlled, despised and rejected by his fellow Arab leaders, continue to proclaim a triumph?

  There were several elements underpinning Saddam’s defiance. Two were salient. The first, easily understood in the Arab world, almost incomprehensible to Westerners, is the power that rhetoric exerts in Arab public life. Arabic is a language of poetry – the Koran itself is the greatest work of Arab poetry – which easily tips into extravagance and then fantasy, without, in Arab consciousness, losing touch with reality. Because of the beauty of Arabic as a language, what sounds right is easily accepted as being right. Thus, when Saddam proclaimed triumph, the sheer extravagance of his words, expressing an idea his audience wished to believe was true, seemed true. When he told his fellow Iraqis that, if they did not feel defeated, they were not defeated, he was believed; undoubtedly he believed so himself.

  Simultaneously, however, the practical half of Saddam’s mind was supporting rhetoric with calculation. It is a perfectly rational thought that a defeat is only as bad as the victor chooses to make it. If the victor declines to press his advantage to the utmost, the vanquished retains room for manoeuvre, which may win back ground that appears lost. Saddam had led a difficult life, and had been oppressed by many setbacks; by
refusing to acquiesce – in the failure of his assassination attempt on President Kassem, of his first attempt to unseat President Arif, of his attack on Iran in 1980, perhaps most of all in the indignity and hardship of imprisonment – he had eventually overcome. Very soon after the rout of his army, he seems to have recovered his resilience again. His enemies gave him cause to do so. They did not demand his removal from office as a condition of terminating hostilities, as the ayatollahs had done; they did not occupy his country; they did not insist on comprehensive disarmament; they even, in an ill-judged concession, gave him permission to fly his helicopters within Iraq, and it was with these that he would reassert a great deal of his power. Saddam may well have discovered their motives: that they shrank from ruling Iraq themselves, particularly from attempting to reconcile Kurds, Sunni and Shi’a; that they continued to regard Saddam as a check on the ayatollahs; that there was no alternative régime to hand; that the Americans in particular wanted no part in a new imperialism.

  He may even have guessed that the Pentagon and State Department expected the Saddam problem to be solved within Iraq itself, by assassination or exile, the traditional fate awaiting a loser in that country. It was a reasonable expectation. He took immediate and ruthless steps to see that it was not realized. He ordered exemplary executions of weak and culpable generals. He promoted the harshest of his followers to new responsibilities, making Ali Hassan al-Majid, ‘Chemical Ali’, the man who had gassed the Kurds, Minister of the Interior. He rearranged other governmental positions, to strengthen the representation of his relatives and tribal brothers from Tikrit. He farther elaborated the measures taken to protect his own security, no longer appearing in public, concealing his places of work and residence and moving frequently and unpredictably to disguise his whereabouts.

  Finally and most cunningly he contrived a scheme of apparent co-operation with the United Nations to hide and shelter his weapons of mass destruction. The one ingredient of Saddam’s warmaking that had alarmed the coalition was his use of Scud missiles, which threatened both military targets at ranges of 100 miles or more and the extension of the conflict by provoking an Israeli intervention. The Scud risk was heightened by Saddam’s known possession of chemical weapons and suspected determination to develop nuclear warheads. Fear of chemical weapons had actually increased civilian casualties in Israel by causing the population to keep out of cellars and bunkers where chemical agents would have been most effective. The United Nations Special Commission on Disarmament (UNSCOM), a body set up largely at American prompting, arrived in Iraq in May 1991 to begin work on identifying the extent of Saddam’s unconventional weapons programme, the degree of progress achieved, the location of manufacturing and research sites, and the location and size of stocks held. Saddam acquiesced in UNSCOM’s activities at the time because his hands were then fully occupied with suppressing the internal revolts. His acquiescence was secretly conditional, however, on the creation of a programme to delude and mislead UNSCOM’s enquiries. Tariq Aziz was put in charge of the deception scheme, designed to conceal weapon sites, disperse forbidden material, hide critical documents and brief essential personnel to deflect penetrating questions. It was not an exercise for which the Iraqis were unprepared. For ten years before 1991 the country had been subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and had successfully baffled its investigations. UNSCOM was a more rigorous body, its leader, Dr David Kay, being a brave and determined man. The nature of his enquiries was so invasive that the Iraqis were forced to destroy much material to prevent it falling into the hands of the inspectors. Ultimately, however, by Saddam’s transporting documents and material to numbers of his so-called ‘palaces’, (Presidential residences he defined as private homes immune from inspection), Kay and his team were frustrated. UNSCOM was eventually unable to certify that it had eliminated all Iraq’s forbidden military research and development, a state of affairs which would lead to the dispute over ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD) that would precipitate the Gulf War of 2003.

  5

  The Crisis of 2002–03

  The ‘Fall of the Wall’ – the destruction by popular action of the barrier separating West from East Berlin in November 1989 – not only led to the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and eventually to the collapse of the whole communist system in the Soviet Union and its empire. It also inaugurated, in the stated belief of President George Bush Senior, ‘a new world order’.

  President Bush’s vision foresaw the replacement of a world system, defined by the military antagonism between free-enterprise America and Marxist Russia, by a benevolent commonality of interest between the old power blocs, henceforth dedicated to sustaining the peace of the world through concerted action against aggressors and to eliminating the causes of conflict by fostering democracy and prosperity across the world. His hope of how the new order would work was exemplified by his construction of the coalition of sixty nations, including many former enemies, that punished President Saddam Hussein for his invasion and annexation of independent Kuwait in 1990, by defeating his army of occupation and restoring Kuwait’s sovereignty.

  Belief in a new world order held tenuous sway throughout the uneasy 1990s. Some signs were positive, others not. Domestic aggression in former Yugoslavia, centre point of the most flagrant violations of respect for human life and political liberty, was eventually checked by international action; on the other hand, organization of the action was too long delayed to avert atrocities that called the effectiveness of the new order into question. Still, grounds for optimism persisted. The setbacks in the Balkans might be seen as growing pains, not disabling weaknesses.

  Then, on 11 September 2001, two months short of the twelfth anniversary of the event in Berlin which brought freedom to hundreds of millions, another event in New York made mockery of the whole idea of a world order. Three hijacked airliners, seized by Islamic extremists belonging to the al-Qaeda organization, were flown into the Pentagon building in Washington and the two towers of the New York World Trade Center, causing damage to the one and the collapse of the other, with the loss of nearly three thousand lives. Many died in the most heartrending circumstances, throwing themselves to their deaths in the streets below the buildings to avoid incineration in the inferno inside. A fourth hijacked airliner crashed, killing all on board, after action by brave unarmed passengers against the terrorists.

  The events of 11 September – or 9/11 as the day soon became universally known – caused shock throughout the world. In the United States it provoked a revolution, changing national sentiment and redirecting national policy. Before 9/11 the American people, if largely uncomprehending of the outside world, viewed it through benevolent eyes; after 9/11 they saw enemies everywhere. Before 9/11 American governments had, for fifty years, sought to keep the peace by leading a Western alliance of the like-minded; after 9/11 Washington committed itself to the defence of America first and foremost. Thinking Americans, in and out of government, knew that their country still had foreign friends; but henceforth friendship would not be taken on trust. It would have to be demonstrated.

  At the turn of the millennium, from twentieth to twenty-first centuries, a new world order was indeed born. It took, however, a form entirely different from that envisaged by the father of the new American President, George W. Bush. Bush senior had foreseen a world continuing to be dominated by the traditional blocs, a First World of rich states, led by America, and a Second World of former Communist states, moving to join the Western system; the evolution of the Third World of poorer states would depend on the success of the first two in disseminating their wealth and ideas to that bloc’s peoples. Suddenly such stability had disappeared. The central power of the First World was under attack and would have to put its own security first. The source of the attack lay in the Third World and took forms against which traditional defence, nuclear deterrence and conventional forces organized in international alliances, offered little protection. The attitude of the Second World, f
or decades the main concern of Western foreign-policy makers, seemed suddenly irrelevant. Armies of experts who had made lifelong careers in the analysis of Marxist politics found themselves at a loose end. The urgent need was for an understanding of militant Islam.

  Government officials in the United States were particularly ill-equipped to address the problem, its academic community little better. America has only a tiny Muslim community; Arabic is a language very few Americans, outside a handful of university departments, speak. Historically, moreover, America has little knowledge of the Arab world. A few oil company executives apart, Americans do not live or work in the Arabic-speaking lands or elsewhere in the Muslim world. In that respect, the United States is less well placed to understand Islam than Britain or France, both of which have ruled Arab and other Muslim countries within living memory, and have accepted Muslim immigrants from their ex-colonies in large numbers. British experts, however, struggle to follow the tortuous paths taken by modern Islamic thought. In France, a country with 5 million Muslim inhabitants and a tradition of intellectual involvement with Islam, specialist scholars have led the way in interpreting movements of Islamic thought to other Westerners; yet even the French find difficulty in penetrating the veil. The modern Muslim mind is alien both to Christian and Enlightenment ways of thinking.