Operation Desert Storm

The Liquidation of a Rogue

excerpts from the book

Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws

America's search for a new foreign policy

by Michael Klare

Hill and Wang Publishers

On July 16, 1990, U.S. spy satellites began picking up signs of unusual activity along the Iraq-Kuwait border-the movement of hundreds of Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles into assault positions just north of the Kuwaiti line. In the days that followed, more tanks and vehicles arrived, until some 100,000 Iraqi troops were deployed there, poised for attack. Meanwhile, intelligence analysts in Washington debated the implications of the Iraqi move: was it an enormous bluff intended to pressure Kuwait into making concessions in the oil price dispute then under way between the two countries, or a prelude to invasion? No conclusion had been reached when, on the morning of August 2, Iraqi forces ended all discussion by crossing into Kuwait.

Not only official Washington was surprised by the Iraqi move. Although Kuwaiti forces were, in fact, meager when compared to the million-strong Iraqi army, most Americans were unaware that Iraq was capable of planning and executing an invasion of this magnitude. But not all Americans were caught off guard: at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa, Florida, senior officers were already planning for a war with Iraq. At the very moment that Iraqi tanks were gathering in the desert near Kuwait, senior CENTCOM staff were testing their combat plans in a week-long simulated battle-code named "Internal Look '90" -between U.S. and Iraqi forces. As the Pentagon admitted in 1992, "the basic concepts for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm were established before a single Iraqi soldier entered Kuwait."

The Department of Defense (DoD) had developed these plans and concepts not because it had advance warning of the Iraqi attack (or even believed that such an invasion was imminent), but because it had decided that rising Third World powers like Iraq would gradually replace the Soviet Union as the primary threat to U.S. security. In line with this assumption, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in late 1989 had ordered the Pentagon's regional commands to develop and test contingency plans for conflicts with such powers. For CENTCOM-which exercised command over all U.S. forces sent to the Persian Gulf area-this meant preparing for a war with Iraq.

In March 1990, a team of five hundred military specialists from CENTCOM and other U.S. commands began working at Fort McPherson, Georgia, to develop a detailed blueprint for a U.S.-Iraqi war in the Kuwait/Saudi Arabia area. Known as Operations Plan (OPLAN) 1002-90, the resulting document, reportedly the size of a large city's Yellow Pages, covered every aspect of a future conflict. The plan "spelled out which [U.S.] divisions would go to Saudi Arabia, what radio frequencies they would use, where they would get their water, how they would treat their casualties, and how they would handle the news media."

Secretary Cheney confirmed in 1992 testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that preparation for such a war had begun in 1989, in response to developments in Eastern Europe, and not in mid-1990, in response to developments in the Gulf. "In late 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the retrenchment of Soviet power, the Department [of Defense] reassessed threats to key regions. For a decade, DoD planning for Southwest Asia had been primarily concerned with a possible Soviet threat to Iran. But the reassessment in 1989 led us to shift our planning focus to regional threats to the Arabian peninsula, particularly from Iraq.

At that point, Iraq was not viewed as the only, or even the most likely, Third World state to be headed for a showdown with the United States. Other potential adversaries, including Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, and North Korea, were also the subject of such contingency planning. But Iraq was seen as one of the few perfect examples of the type of enemy that the Defense Department was betting on: a rising regional power with modern military forces, a large supply of potent weapons, and evident hegemonic aspirations. By early 1990, Iraq, with its million-man army and potent arsenal of modern weapons, had risen to the top of the list of candidate adversaries, figuring more and more prominently in Pentagon statements on the emerging Third World threat.

But while a growing number of military officers were coming to see Saddam Hussein as an ambitious ruler who might give the Rogue Doctrine its missing human face and thus become the archetypal enemy of the post-Cold War era, officials in other government departments were not as yet prepared to view Baghdad in this manner. For eight years, from 1982 to early 1990, American leaders had viewed Iraq as a quasi-ally. Iraq's survival in its ongoing war with Iran had been considered essential to U.S. security. To help strengthen Iraqi defenses, the Reagan and Bush administrations had provided Hussein's regime with economic credits, secret intelligence data, and military-related technology. Even after the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war ended in an Iraqi victory, the Bush administration continued to aid Iraq in the belief that Baghdad-a longtime Soviet ally in the Middle East-might be drawn further into the Western camp.

As a result, Iraqi leaders preparing for the invasion of Kuwait faced two distinct realities in Washington: a Pentagon increasingly focused on possible conflict with Iraq, and a White House still committed to improved U.S.-Iraqi relations. Though the Pentagon's views were in ascendancy, Hussein must have assumed otherwise. Evidently believing that the Bush administration was seeking to retain friendly ties with Iraq and was prepared to overlook a certain degree of adventurism on Baghdad's part, Hussein planned the invasion of Kuwait with no apparent expectation of a hostile military response.

He was clearly encouraged to proceed on this basis by the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. In an extraordinary interview with the Iraqi leader on July 25, 1990, she told Hussein, "I have a direct instruction from the President to seek better relations with Iraq." She also stated that the United States had "no opinion" on inter-Arab disagreements, including Baghdad's border dispute with Kuwait. Hussein, who no doubt was pleased by Glaspie's subservient manner, probably found this sufficient diplomatic inference to conclude that officials at the highest levels in Washington would not object strenuously to an Iraqi takeover of Kuwait (or, at least, some portion thereof ) .

In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion, Glaspie's statements were much criticized in Congress. She was, however, merely articulating the prevailing White House view. What Glaspie did not say, and probably did not know, was that a significant segment of opinion in official Washington favored a more belligerent policy toward Iraq, and was even prepared to consider going to war against that country. Had Glaspie communicated that information to Hussein, or had he been informed of it through other channels, it is possible that Iraq might have been deterred from invading Kuwait.

Once the invasion began, however, the last vestiges of pro-Iraqi sentiment evaporated in Washington and the war party took over...

***

The "Rogue Doctrine" Confirmed

From the perspective of the U.S. military establishment, Operation Desert Storm represented a remarkable success. It constituted a decisive victory over a significant regional power, achieved with few losses and in a matter of weeks. For the first time in decades, American forces had worked together under a unified command and executed a combat plan that maximized their already massive advantages over the enemy. Pentagon officials may have greatly exaggerated the capabilities of the Iraqi military and employed an army far larger than needed, but there is no doubt that their forces exercised total mastery over the battlefield.

In fact, the real American achievement was the attainment of competitive supremacy in so many combat areas that the Iraq-Kuwait theater of operations was transformed into something of an experimental battlefield, an enormous testing ground for the Pentagon's new weaponry and combat techniques. With the Iraqi military suffering from so many vulnerabilities and deficiencies, not to mention the strategic incompetence of Saddam Hussein, the conflict was, in the end, little more than a systematic slaughter.

As an overwhelming battlefield success, it had the effect of leveling adversaries at home, as well as in the Gulf. When the victorious Generals Schwarzkopf and Powell faced Congress and the American public in the immediate aftermath of the war, they could declare the new U.S. military posture totally validated. Who, now, could deny the correctness of the operational concepts so recently adopted by Powell and his staff, or the global military doctrine cobbled together in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall's fall-a doctrine that, only six months earlier, had lacked an actual adversary?

For the Department of Defense, success was now at hand-not only on the battlefields of the Persian Gulf, but on the funding battlefields in Congress, the publicity battlefields in the mass media, the research and development battlefields of industrial America, and on that most important of all battlefields, the public mind. "Competitive strategies" seemed to be working in the United States itself; for, wherever one looked, adversaries of all sorts-their vulnerabilities exposed-were falling back in disarray. Not since the early years of the Cold War had the Department of Defense seemed to wield such a potent and winning strategic message-and Pentagon officials wasted no time in using it to promote the various dimensions of the Rogue Doctrine.

Scarcely was the Gulf conflict over before military officials began speaking of the need to prepare for armed combat with the "Iraqs of the future." On March 19, 1991, only two and a half weeks after the fighting ended, Secretary Cheney told Congress that "the Gulf war presaged very much the type of conflict we are most likely to confront again in this new era-major regional contingencies against foes well-armed with advanced conventional and unconventional munitions." However large its military, Iraq was not the only rising Third World power with potent arsenals. "There are other regional powers with modern armed forces, sophisticated attack aircraft, and integrated air defenses."

On this basis, Cheney called for the accelerated transformation of America's Cold War defense establishment into a Third World-oriented force. "We must configure our policies and our forces to effectively deter, or quickly defeat, such regional threats," he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. For the foreseeable future, most senior policymakers would second Cheney's basic premise: America's future military posture should be governed by the need to prepare for an endless series of Desert Storm-like engagements with rising Third World powers.

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