The land war came to an end after exactly 100 hours; a White House official noticed the round number coming up at midnight Wednesday, and the temporary cease-fire was set to begin then. Operation Desert Storm, which started just six weeks before with the launching of the air war, produced a stunning victory for Bush, a triumph of almost Biblical proportions–his enemy slain in countless numbers, his own soldiers hardly touched by the battlefield’s scouring wind. His standing in the polls soared to even higher levels; the latest Newsweek survey gave him an 89 percent approval rating.
But success left Bush feeling a little blue. On Friday, when a reporter noted at a news conference that the president seemed “somber,” Bush conceded that he didn’t yet share “this wonderful euphoric feeling” that had swept up so many of his countrymen. He recalled World War II, the first great crusade of his life. “There was a definitive end to that conflict,” he said. But in the Persian Gulf War, “we have Saddam still there, the man that wreaked this havoc upon his neighbors. We have our prisoners still held. We have people unaccounted for.” Once all that was straightened out, there would be time for good feelings. “I’ll get there,” said the president.
What gnawed at Bush was the fact that he had a “little bit of an unfinished agenda” in the gulf. At the United Nations, diplomats hammered out the conditions for a formal end to the conflict. But the allied commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, still had to meet in the desert with Iraqi officers early this week to settle the details of a permanent cease-fire, including an exchange of prisoners. Secretary of State James Baker planned to tour the Middle East this week–including his first visit to Israel since taking office–to discuss long-term issues, notably how to secure a lasting peace in the region and what to do about the Palestinian problem. More immediately, difficult decisions had to be made about how extensively Iraq should be punished for its invasion of Kuwait and for the atrocities it committed there.
And by Saturday there was still no word from Saddam himself accepting the U.N. resolutions or acknowledging that his war machine had been crushed between the grindstones of allied warplanes and ground forces. There was a report, denied all round, that he might flee to exile in Algeria. There were unconfirmed stories of anti-Saddam unrest in Baghdad and in Basra, Iraq’s second city. The allies were eager to see Saddam go; they hinted that Iraq’s punishment would be gentler and its recovery quicker if he were replaced. But an alternative to Saddam’s discredited regime had not yet emerged. Despite the talk about war-crimes trials and reparations, the allies decided not to demand Saddam’s arrest or downfall. “His own people can deal with him,” said Prince Khalid bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian military commander. A senior administration official concluded: “It’s realistic to think he will find some way to stay, just as he always has. We would be more surprised if he left.”
Saddam’s forces began to disintegrate as soon as the allied ground offensive began. By last Tuesday, U.S. troops reached the Euphrates River, trapping Iraq’s armor in the Kuwaiti theater. American and British forces began to chew up the elite Republican Guard. Other allied units took Kuwait City, and when the occupiers fled in tanks and trucks and stolen cars, they were massacred on the highway. The Iraqis got lucky only once, when an off-course Scud missile slammed into a barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 American reservists, including three female soldiers.
By then, Baghdad was sending conciliatory messages. Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz offered to comply with one of the U.N. resolutions, then with three of them, insisting that the others be dropped. That was unacceptable to the allies. It wasn’t clear what the Iraqis were up to. Aziz, a Christian with little clout in Iraqi politics, could have been free-lancing. And his messages lost clarity because the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure required the communications to pass through Soviet hands on their way to the United Nations. Aziz’s first letter was written in Arabic, translated into Russian and then into English. When the Americans showed it to an Iraqi delegate at the United Nations, he had it translated back into Arabic and found that its meaning had been warped, as if in some giddy parlor game.
By midday on Wednesday, Washington time, the end was in sight. With Pentagon approval, Schwarzkopf gave a masterly press briefing in Riyadh, explaining the allies’ strategy and sketching out the scope of their victory. “We’ve accomplished our mission,” he said. Bush met with his advisers and was told, at around 2:30 p.m., that in another eight to 10 hours, the final battles with the Republican Guard would be over. “By tonight, there won’t really be an enemy there,” Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted as telling the president. When should the fighting be suspended? “If you go on another day,” Powell said, “you’re basically just fighting stragglers.”
Saddam had not yet been heard from, but Bush’s men concluded that they had him in a corner. They would not wait for his public acceptance of the U.N. resolutions. “The rout of the [Iraqi] Army was so fast and so cataclysmic that it was no longer necessary,” said a senior administration official. Bush alerted the allies and then went on television to announce the temporary cease-fire. He had timed his moment wisely. “It was a marvelous piece of statecraft,” said an allied diplomat, Mohammed Wahby of Egypt. “President Bush knew the job was done. If he kept on after that, it might smack of vengefulness, and that would cause repercussions in the Arab world.”
The shock was just setting in. At the United Nations, Muslim journalists were stunned when television pictures showed Iraqi POWs kissing the boots of an American officer. “That is wrong,” said an Iranian correspondent. “That is a position that should be reserved for Allah–not even for a prophet.” Most Iraqis still seemed oblivious to the full extent of their military defeat. But they were all too well aware that their country–one of the more advanced in the Arab world before the invasion of Kuwait–had been bombed back into the pre-oil era. In Baghdad, the electricity was out, and the public water supply, what there was of it, was turning foul. “The spread of epidemics like cholera and typhoid could force people to leave their homes,” warned Mayor Khalid Abdel-Munem Rashid. Conditions were equally bad in the south. “Basra is in chaos right now,” said a U.S. military source in Riyadh. “There seems to be a real breakdown in civil control of the populace there.”
American intelligence sources said Saddam had three planes standing by at a military airfield near Baghdad, apparently to fly him out of the country if the need arose. The influential French daily Le Monde claimed he might go to Algeria; the Algerians denied it. American intelligence thought he might head for Mauritania, but the government of that North African country denied a report in Le Monde that Saddam’s family was already there. No one knew who would succeed Saddam if he fled or fell; a diplomat in Jordan described his inner circle as “a cast of incognitos.” “Paradoxically, it might be better if he stays,” said Efraim Karsh of the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London. “At least you know with whom you’re dealing, and at least you know he has been weakened.”
In any case, the allies were not going to let the Iraqis off easily. When he announced the cease-fire, Bush gave them 48 hours to agree to a meeting of military commanders to discuss allied terms for a permanent cease-fire. Iraq accepted within 20 hours. “Somebody there knows how badly they’ve been beaten and how vulnerable they are, and is essentially saluting, at least up to this stage, when we tell them they need to do something,” said a U.S. official. The meeting, which was scheduled for last Saturday and then moved to Sunday because the Iraqis weren’t ready, was to deal with practical matters, such as the exchange of prisoners and the location of mines that Iraq had planted in Kuwait and the gulf. “It is not a negotiation,” said Brig. Gen. Richard Neal, a spokesman for Schwarzkopf’s Central Command. “It’s a meeting.”
At the United Nations, Washington prevailed on a new Security Council resolution. Principally because of anxieties among the Chinese and the Soviets, the United States did not insist on a statement explicitly authorizing the allies to resume military action if Iraq failed to comply with U.N. terms. Instead, the measure invoked Resolution 678, which authorized force in the first place. The rest of the new resolution was unrelentingly tough on Iraq. It said Baghdad must specifically “rescind” its annexation of Kuwait–the long-awaited admission of guilt–and must be prepared to pay reparations and return stolen property. And it reaffirmed all 12 previous resolutions, including those that imposed economic sanctions on Iraq.
That left several tough issues to be resolved in the weeks ahead. Among them:
At least some Western forces will remain on the ground in the region for months to come. But the allies will be anxious not to create the impression that they mean to stay. Instead, Washington wants a small tripwire force to be put into place by the Arabs or the United Nations, supplemented by pre-positioned equipment. Among other things, it isn’t clear whether the peacekeeping force would be stationed in Iraq or Kuwait.
Washington wants to retain the U.N. arms embargo indefinitely. Economic sanctions are another matter, but the decision on revoking them depends on whether Saddam remains in power, and for how long. “We can use [sanctions] in two ways–to moderate Saddam’s behavior and to convince the Iraqi people or the Iraqi military that they’d be better off with a different leader,” says a State Department official. Even if Saddam stays on indefinitely, sanctions on food and medicine are likely to be lifted quickly. But there will be trade-offs in other areas, notably Iraqi oil sales and imports of civilian technology. If Baghdad wants those restrictions lifted, it might have to pay reparations, reduce the size of its Army or promise not to develop certain weapons.
As they round up Iraqi prisoners, allied forces are attempting to sort out the war criminals and assemble evidence against them. The overall case is “open and shut,” says Benjamin Ferencz, a former Nuremberg prosecutor who teaches law at Pace University in White Plains, N.Y. “I would be delighted to prosecute these charges,” he says. “I’d win them, hands down.” But there may be few war-crimes trials–possibly none at all. Few high-racking Iraqis have been captured; smaller fry would have to take the rap for them. And if the allies hold Iraqis for trial, Baghdad may retaliate by detaining allied pilots and other POWs on war-crime charges. So far, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia want Iraqi wrongdoers to stand trial; other allies, such as Egypt, do not. Secretary Baker will try to sort out the problem during his trip to the region this week.
After World War I, Germany was required to pay reparations of $32 billion. It actually paid out only $5 billion, but even that caused economic hardship. The resulting resentment contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler. Exacting reparations for the gulf war might also be counterproductive. “We want to make sure we don’t wind up destroying Iraq in the process,” says political scientist Joseph Nye of Harvard. Iraq’s debt to the people and government of Kuwait could range up to $100 billion. Other governments and companies could demand repayment of their losses, and so could Palestinians and other foreign workers in Kuwait, driving the total amount of claimed reparations to several hundred billion dollars. Against that debt, Iraq has only one real source of revenue: its oil production, which yielded $14.5 billion in 1989. Yet Iraq already has a foreign debt of at least $75 billion. It has vast damage of its own to repair, and it may take years to resume full oil production.
The allies seem to agree that the principle of reparations is important. “To accept the idea means to accept the guilt,” says a senior Arab diplomat, “and they must accept the guilt. But making them pay? That’s another matter.” In the end, Iraq will probably be required to pay off part of its debt, perhaps with an agreed-upon portion of its oil revenues. Precisely how much of the reparations will be forgiven depends in part on how quickly Saddam passes from the scene. “The last thing we’d want to do is cripple a new government,” says a U.S. official. After suffering the mother of all defeats, Saddam still has a grip on Iraq’s future, if only as a force for misery.
By any measure, the low rate of American casualties in the war was, as General Schwarzkopf said, “almost miraculous.”
Killed in Action Vietnam (1964-73): 47,358 Lebanon (1982-84): 264 Grenada (1983): 18 Panama (1989-90): 23 Persian Gulf (1991): 90
title: “After The Storm” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-05” author: “Jessica Norman”
After the rains stopped, Andrew’s victims tearfully surveyed the damage. Many were without food or water, and federal aid was slow in coming. “Where the hell is the cavalry on this one?” one local official demanded. “We need food, we need water, we need people.”
