War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom

by Oliver North

  Given the situation, no one should have been particularly surprised that within hours of General Schwarzkopf sitting down with his defeated opponents at Safwan, those who had suffered most under Saddam’s heel decided it was time to fight back. Shi’ite uprisings in Basra, Karbala, and Najaf, aided by Iraqi army deserters, were easily crushed by Republican Guard troops who were told that they were saving Iraq from Khomeini-inspired operatives intent on establishing an Iranian theocracy in the land between the rivers. With allied troops sometimes within earshot, Republican Guard tanks, supported by helicopter gunships, massacred the lightly armed mujahideen and their families. Artillery pounded mosques, homes, ancient shrines, and anyone who took refuge there. Once the Republican Guard had done the “heavy work,” the dreaded Amn Al Khass arrived, usually in the dead of night, to hunt down survivors. In entire towns throughout the southern part of Iraq, every male between the ages of fifteen and thirty simply disappeared. All through the month of March, bulldozers worked through the night. It would take more than a decade to confirm that what they were digging were mass graves.

  In the Kurdish areas of the north the outcome was much the same, though because of the terrain—and because Saddam perceived the Shi’ite intifada to be the most immediate threat—it took a little longer.

  At the end of March, Saddam shifted three Republican Guard divisions from the killing fields of southern Iraq to the mountainous north. Kurdish pesh merga fighters, who had taken control of Zakho, Sulaimaniyah, and Kirkuk, and threatened Mosul, were no match for armor, massed artillery, and helicopter gunships. These were people with firsthand knowledge of what Saddam’s chemical weapons could do. Though resistance was futile and the carnage horrifying, they valiantly fought on, hoping for the coalition allies, with half a million troops still in the region, to come to their rescue.

  Washington and London met Kurdish appeals for help with paralysis. Initial hopes that the Iraqi military would stage a coup in the aftermath of the Kuwaiti debacle were unrealized. Uncertain about who might take over if the Shi’ites and Kurds succeeded, sympathetic to Saudi concerns about Iranian intentions, and warned by NATO ally Turkey that an independent Kurdistan would not be tolerated, the U.S. and Britain opted to do nothing.

  By the end of April it was all over. Though the final toll will probably never be known, perhaps as many as 250,000 Shi’ites were killed, and almost as many Kurds. More than two million refugees had been created. Scores of villages in the north and south of the country had been emptied of every living soul. The Kurds and the Shi’ites had failed to unite in common cause against their common enemy, and Saddam had utterly destroyed any hopes they had for freedom or independence. In the end, the only help that America delivered was the massive airlift of food, medicine, tents, and blankets to nearly one million displaced Kurds in Operation Provide Comfort.

  Saddam had survived once again.

  By May 1991, the land between the rivers was a terrible place. Baghdad, heavily bombed throughout the war, was a shambles. Every bridge across the Tigris was damaged or destroyed. Electrical power, water, sewer systems, telephone service, even mail delivery were sporadic at best in the capital and almost nonexistent throughout the rest of the country. The treasures looted from Kuwait were being pawned to buy food.

  Realizing that perception is reality in Iraq, Saddam set out to convince the Iraqi people, if not the rest of the world, that he had won the “mother of all battles.” He purged the military and the Baath Party in order to put a new face on the regime and to eliminate internal dissent. Despite rampant debt and inflation, Saddam embarked on a massive rebuilding campaign.

  Within months of the Safwan Cease Fire Agreement, despite economic sanctions imposed by UN Resolution 687, critical infrastructure was being rebuilt, new presidential palaces were under construction, and new weapons were being purchased on the black market. And though dozens of UN inspectors were now wandering through his arsenals, Saddam continued to acquire and build more weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, and nuclear.

  In August 1991, UN Resolutions 706 and 707 established what came to be known as the Oil-for-Food Program, allowing Iraq to sell fixed amounts of crude oil in exchange for food and medicines, ostensibly for consumption by the starving Iraqi people. This noble idea was doomed from the start.

  First, the program had to rely on Iraqi administrators—who just happened to be members of the Baath Party. The result was that desperately needed food and medicines were dispersed through the Baath Party apparatus based on loyalty to Saddam. The people quickly learned the new rules: Turn in your neighbor as an opponent of the regime and you eat. Speak out against the rampant inflation or the building of a new palace and your children starve. Second, the amount of oil that the UN resolutions permitted to be sold, though adjusted several times over the years, was never close to Iraq’s maximum production output. The Western world was willfully blind when it came to Iraq’s excess oil capacity. With oil prices above $20 a barrel, a lucrative black market soon developed via a pipeline through Syria and overland by truck through friendly Jordan and the territory of two enemies, Turkey and Iran.

  The new source of “secret” revenue emboldened the Iraqi dictator. When President George H. W. Bush was defeated in his bid for reelection, Saddam claimed it was because Iraq had beaten the Americans in the “mother of all battles.” He then ratcheted up the obstacles in his game of cat and mouse with the UN weapons inspectors. The black market black gold also gave him the cash to line his own pockets and start financing new adventures.

  In late April 1993, an assassination plot was discovered—a plan to kill former president George H. W. Bush while he visited Kuwait. Explosives hidden in a Toyota Land Cruiser were to be detonated when the former president’s motorcade passed by. The Kuwaiti Security Service intercepted the vehicle and arrested seventeen people in connection with the scheme. Confessions by the perpetrators and FBI forensic work traced the conspiracy to Saddam’s intelligence service, the Mukhabarat.

  In retaliation, President Clinton ordered an air strike on Baghdad—not aimed at Saddam Hussein but at the Mukhabarat’s headquarters. Twenty-three cruise missiles later, six low-level Iraqi government employees were dead and Saddam was thumbing his nose at “American impotence,” and continuing his game of hide-and-seek with the UNSCOM (UN Special Commission) inspectors.

  Then, in August 1995, Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, the head of Iraq’s Ministry of Defense Industries and the man responsible for all of Iraq’s banned weapons, defected to Amman, Jordan. Before Kamil had a change of heart and returned to Iraq to be murdered by Saddam, he told British intelligence all he knew about Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruction. Using information supplied by Kamil, the UNSCOM inspectors found a treasure trove of information about Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs.

  In October 1997, Saddam accused the U.S. personnel in UNSCOM of being spies and ordered them out of the country. Richard Butler, the tough Australian heading the UN mission, withdrew the rest of his investigators. But when the Clinton administration dispatched a carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf, Saddam said it was all just a misunderstanding, and the inspectors returned only to find that most of the monitoring equipment they had left behind had been destroyed by Baghdad’s “concealment team.”

  For the next year, the on-again, off-again inspections continued. The Clinton administration threatened the use of force again in early 1998 but backed down when polls showed public opinion overwhelmingly opposed fighting another war in Iraq.

  By the summer of 1998, the Clinton administration was deeply embroiled in scandal, and Saddam was able to play the White House like a harp. On August 5, he threw all the UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq and announced that they would not be allowed back into the country. A few days after this announcement, an Iraqi defector, Dr. Khidir Hamza, formerly the head of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, appeared on my radio show. In response to a listener’s call, he said, “Saddam will d
o anything necessary to keep his ‘special’ weapons. It’s all he has to keep him in power. It’s too bad this White House doesn’t know what needs to be done.”

  Once again the UN dithered over what to do, and the Clinton administration, by now enmeshed in the Monica Lewinsky affair, deployed U.S. forces to the region—an action that some say was only intended to divert attention from his impeachment proceedings. On December 16, as the U.S. House of Representatives prepared to vote to impeach him, President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox—a twenty-four-hour-long aerial assault with guided bombs and cruise missiles—aimed at Republican Guard garrisons throughout Iraq. It didn’t change a thing. At the end of the day Bill Clinton was impeached, Saddam Hussein was still in power, and the UNSCOM inspectors never returned to Iraq.

  After Operation Desert Fox, in December 1998, the Clinton administration did its best to simply ignore Saddam Hussein. Smarting under criticism from its liberal allies about the cruelty of sanctions, the administration sought to describe the “new” U.S. policy toward Iraq as “containment.” It involved little more than U.S. and British aircraft based in Kuwait and Turkey, and on carriers in the Persian Gulf, making daily flights over Iraq to enforce expanded no-fly zones. Little or nothing was said or done about Iraq’s illicit oil sales, which financed Saddam’s WMD programs and personal enrichment. One U.S. Navy pilot described it to me this way: “Saddam ships oil to Bahrain in the UN Oil-for-Food Program. We buy the oil from the UN and refine it into jet fuel. We put the jet fuel in my F-18 and I go bomb Iraq for violations of UN resolutions. It’s nuts.”

  It might have stayed that way had George W. Bush not been declared the victor in the much-contested 2000 presidential election. Less than a month after he took office, Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles fired on a routine U.S. aerial patrol. The next day, after a hasty conference call between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, a twenty-five-plane U.S.-British air strike took out five Iraqi air defense sites. In the aftermath, the new president ordered an immediate review of U.S. policy toward Iraq. And in another dramatic shift from the prior administration, the Pentagon, not the State Department, was assigned the role of “lead agency.”

  By the summer of 2001 the debate was fully engaged in Washington, with the State Department doves pitted against the Pentagon hawks. When stories in the press described George Bush as leaning toward action to get rid of Saddam once and for all, congressional critics of the new president sought to depict him as a reckless cowboy. Then a series of leaked intelligence reports indicated that Saddam had reinstituted his nuclear weapons program while other reports accused Saddam of harboring terrorists, such as the assassins Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas, the mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking. Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress who had been exiled to London by the Clinton administration, was invited back to Washington. After learning that the CIA and the State Department had only dispensed $5 million of the $97 million that Congress had appropriated in 1998 for the Iraqi Liberation Act, the Pentagon was put in charge of the funding for Iraqi resistance activities. All of this might have remained a war of words but for an event that would change America forever: September 11, 2001.

  When nineteen Islamic terrorists seized four U.S. airliners and killed at least 2,731 people on American soil that terrible Tuesday, I was on Northwest Airlines flight 238 headed into Reagan National. While we were en route to Washington’s closest airport, American Airlines Flight 77, which had been hijacked as it departed Dulles Airport a few minutes earlier, slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon at 0937. My flight was immediately diverted to Dulles, and I eventually arrived at the FOX News studios in Washington hours later. By the time we finally finished broadcasting that night around midnight, questions were already being raised about what role Saddam might have played in the attack.

  A month later, I was aboard the USS Bataan with the Marines who were preparing to make a heloborne assault into Kandahar, Afghanistan, to take on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, and those questions were still being asked. A short while after I returned home, other U.S. forces found evidence that bin Laden had been trying to acquire nuclear material. Could he have gotten some from Iraq?

  And in February 2003, seventeen months after the Twin Towers in New York were brought down into two terrible piles of rubble and bodies, as U.S. and British forces prepared in Kuwait to attack Iraq, the answer still is not known.

  What is known is that Saddam Hussein had once again defied the United Nations weapons inspectors. The hapless Hans Blix finally gave up even the pretense of being able to conduct a realistic investigation into what Saddam may or may not have done with his tons of poison gas, chemical warheads, anthrax, and nuclear materials. Without credible human sources inside Iraq, no U.S. or British intelligence agency knows for certain either. But in the aftermath of September 11, the fear of Saddam using any of these—or giving them to others to use in a terrorist attack—was palpable in the governments of the United States and Great Britain. Not so elsewhere.

  In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush described Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as “an axis of evil.” He was derided for that depiction.

  In his September 12, 2002, address to the United Nations, President Bush chronicled all of Saddam’s past abuses and asked for a resolution with a clear deadline for compliance. France and Russia refused to pass the resolution.

  In Congress it was different. On October 10, a bill authorizing the president to use military force against Saddam passed the House by a vote of 296 to 133, and in the Senate by 77 to 23.

  Shortly before Christmas, the first U.S. Marine contingent arrived in Kuwait prepared to go to war in the land between the two rivers.

  PREFACE

  HQ, 3RD BATTALION, 66TH ARMORED REGIMENT 4TH INFANTRY DIVISION

  West of Tikrit, Iraq

  Saturday, 26 April 2003

  0100 Hours Local

  The satellite telephone vibrating against my chest awakens me with a start after less than half an hour of sleep. Many years ago, as a Marine officer, I learned to nap with a radio handset tucked into my helmet, up against my ear, so that an urgent call on the command net would rouse me. Since being in Iraq, I’ve done a similar thing, catching snatches of sleep with an Iridium satellite phone placed inside my flak jacket, up against my chest, so that I won’t miss a message from the FOX News Channel foreign desk. These calls have been coming nearly nightly for two months, alerting us to prepare for a live “hit” with a FOX News Channel host or correspondent in New York or Washington.

  But tonight’s communication is different, the message is both welcome and bittersweet. “Come on home,” says Brian Knoblock, the head of FOX News Channel foreign operations.

  I awaken Griff Jenkins, my very brave and resourceful field producer and cameraman. He arises, smiling, and starts packing our camera equipment and satellite broadcast gear in the dark. We are the last FOX News Channel field team still embedded in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Our cameras are full of sand. The portable generator has been gone for days—left for dead beside an Iraqi airstrip. Our manpack satellite broadcast gear has been cooked by the sun, soaked in the Tigris, and bathed in dirt. The rest of our equipment is just about shot. And so are we.

  Yet leaving these soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines we’ve been covering since before the start of this “Second Iraq War” isn’t easy. We have been eating the same meals, breathing the same dust, sharing their fears, frustrations, and euphoria—and enjoying their protection—for too long not to feel awkward at leaving them. We’re going home. They are not.

  Well before dawn breaks across the Tigris, while Griff sorts through our gear, I go into the Battalion Tactical Operations Center (TOC) to plug in my laptop computer and enter these final notes—a last Sit Rep (situation report) from the war we have been covering since before it started on March 20. At a computer and radio console inside the TOC, a watch officer—called a “battle captain” in this U.S. Army a
rmor unit—hands me a clipboard holding a printout of the daily Air Tasking Order. “Pick your flight and make your reservation early to avoid the rush,” he says with a smile. He points to a flight scheduled for shortly after first light—an H-60 Black Hawk—with space for two passengers headed for Baghdad. He puts Griff and me on the flight manifest and says, “We’ll miss you guys. The Colonel [Lt. Col. Larry Jackson] believes the toughest part of this war is still ahead of us.” Unfortunately, he’s right.

  The 4th Infantry Division—the 4th ID in military shorthand—is also known as the “Digital Division” because of all its high-tech equipment. These seventeen thousand highly trained and motivated soldiers were supposed to have entered the fight through Turkey, charging south toward Baghdad from bases that had been carefully negotiated by Pentagon planners months before the shooting began. But in the convoluted course between NATO headquarters outside Brussels, the UN in New York, and the State Department in Washington, the Turks said no and the plan fell off track.

  Instead of fighting their way into Iraq, the 4th ID had to come in weeks later, through Kuwait, and then travel by convoy to Saddam’s hometown over ground seized by other soldiers and Marines who had come before them. Many of the troopers in this prized unit regard their belated arrival as a terrible insult foisted upon them by the State Department. “They held a war and Colin Powell—the SOB—made us late,” volunteered one 4th ID officer.