Near the end of the first day’s fighting, it seemed almost too easy. The attackers achieved all their initial objectives: a 20-mile advance into Kuwait by the heavy armored columns of the U.S. VII Corps and other forces and, far to the west, a 70-mile thrust into Iraq by U.S. airborne and tank units with the French Foreign Legion as their spearhead. There was an airborne assault on Kuwait City, probably by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. There were reports of amphibious landings by the U.S. Marines. Allied air forces were “surging,” mounting combat sorties at about double their normal rate. “Friendly casualties have been extremely light. As a matter of fact, remarkably light,” said Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander. With a news blackout in force, Schwarzkopf offered few details. “So far, we’re delighted with the progress of the campaign,” he told reporters in Riyadh. Asked about the direction of allied attacks, he said: “We’re going to go around, over, through, on top, underneath and any other way it takes.”
Saddam lashed back with his most practiced weapon: rhetoric. “Fight them, brave Iraqis,” he exhorted his Army and his people in a radio broadcast, vowing to defeat “Bush and his stooges.” Beating up on easy prey, the Iraqis continued to retaliate by setting fire to Kuwaiti oil wells; about 500 were in flames by Sunday. And there were reports that their Army of occupation was murdering Kuwaiti civilians and rounding up others to hold hostage against the allied attack. So far, however, Iraqi troops in the field weren’t putting up much of a fight. Schwarzkopf said more than 5,500 prisoners had been taken in the early fighting. Hundreds of Iraqi troops reportedly raised white flags before the allies even reached their positions. Chemical weapons had not yet appeared on the battlefield; Schwarzkopf said stories of the Iraqis using poison gas turned out to be “bogus.” He mentioned only one Iraqi counterattack, a thrust of unspecified size that the Marines repulsed with their armor, antitank weapons and air support.
The news blackout, announced by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, meant that an anxious home front would learn few details about the campaign for the first 48 hours or so. Cheney said the blackout would help protect “the men and women whose lives are on the line.” Even before the fighting began, Washington’s security arrangements proved to be remarkably leakproof. White House officials said President Bush secretly approved the approximate date for the ground war shortly after Cheney and Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, returned from Saudi Arabia on Feb. 10. The president and his advisers stuck to that schedule through some frantic diplomacy last week, as Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev tried to forge a compromise peace plan. Gorbachev got Saddam to promise that he would withdraw from Kuwait. But the Iraqi dictator ignored the far more stringent terms in an ultimatum from Bush. On Sunday, Moscow issued a statement regretting that a “very real chance” to end the war peacefully had been missed and insisting that a settlement could still be negotiated.
The allies had already decided to settle the Persian Gulf crisis by other means. Their strategy was based on speed, deception and massive armored assaults backed up by constant aerial bombardment. Iraq had its forces deployed in three tiers: the front line, the tactical reserves farther back in Kuwait and the theater reserves along Kuwait’s northern border or in southern Iraq. The essence of the allied battle plan was to engage each of the three levels as quickly as possible, from a direction or in a manner that those forces were not expecting.
Saddam’s best troops, the Republican Guard, made up most of the theater reserve; they were stretched out along Iraq’s border with Kuwait. The job of attacking them was assigned to Army Lt. Gen. Frederick Franks, the VII Corps commander, whose force consisted of four American divisions and elements of a fifth, as well as Britain’s “Desert Rats,” the First Armoured Division. For weeks, the news media had speculated that VII Corps would execute a looping “left hook” through Iraqi territory west of Kuwait. Expecting such an attack, the Iraqis moved a Republican Guard tank division and a regular Army mechanized division into the area west of a long, deep gulch called Wadi al-Batin. As the ground war began, however, it appeared that VII Corps was attacking farther east, near the Kuwaiti border, bypassing the forward Republican Guard divisions.
In the second major thrust of the ground campaign, Schwarzkopf and the commander of the U.S. XVIII Corps, Lt. Gen. Gary Luck, opted for an audacious plan known to their logisticians as “the leapfrog.” The ultimate objective is a deep thrust to block the Republican Guard’s lines of supply and retreat in southern Iraq. The attack was launched from a point about 200 miles west of the Kuwaiti border and almost due south of Baghdad - much farther west than the Iraqis seem to have expected. But deep thrusts depend vitally on logistics, a sure supply of ammunition, fuel, water, food and spare parts, ferried in by planes and trucks. The first task for the attackers - including the U.S. 101st Airborne Division and Third Armored Cavalry Regiment and the French legionnaires and light infantry - is to set up a string of supply bases in Iraqi territory. As each new base is set up, supplies will leapfrog to the head of the line. The attack was so daring, and came from such an unexpected quarter, that advance elements of the force, including the legionnaires, moved into Iraqi territory some 12 hours before the formal start of the ground offensive.
“The troops are doing a great job,” Schwarzkopf said on Sunday. But in many military offensives, the first day is relatively easy, as the attackers cross unoccupied territory or cut through thinly defended frontline positions. Saddam had placed some of his poorest troops along Kuwait’s southern border, as cannon fodder that might exact some small price in blood from the allied attackers. Senior Pentagon officials and commanders in the field weren’t sure exactly how much damage the air campaign had done to Iraqi forces, including the better ones deployed farther back. There was not enough proof that the 545,000-man Iraqi force dug in across Kuwait and southern Iraq had sustained significant losses. The CIA was skeptical about bomb-damage assessments from Schwarzkopf ’s headquarters in Saudi Arabia, where intelligence analysts reported that more than a third of the Iraqi armor and artillery had been destroyed. Schwarzkopf himself told a reporter last week that air attacks were “killing” more than 100 enemy tanks a day and that the Iraqi Army was on the verge of collapse. That, said one Pentagon official, “is not the Iraqi Army’s conception of itself, based on what we’ve gleaned” from intercepted radio transmissions.
There were other intelligence problems as well. Weeks of photo reconnaissance gave U.S. planners little assurance that Iraq’s supplies of poison gas and antitank weapons were being destroyed Despite the pounding that Iraqi units had taken from the air, many U.S. officers believed elite units would emerge from their bunkers to fight on. “There are some [Republican Guard] units out there that. are going to just kick butt,” one official said.
White House officials say Schwarzkopf’s battle plan was finalized during Powell and Cheney’s visit to Saudi Arabia on Feb. 9 and 10. Bush was briefed, and the approximate date of the ground war was approved, on Feb. 11. Then, last week, Gorbachev’s last-ditch peace initiative seemed to put the plan on hold. When Bush and his top advisers gathered on Thursday evening to discuss the U.S. response, Powell recommended that Saddam Hussein be given until noon Saturday to begin his withdrawal from Kuwait. That left Schwarzkopf just enough time to complete his preparations for the offensive if, as everyone expected, Iraq rejected the deadline. The White House mood was grim. As national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft told it, Bush and his men were increasingly concerned that “Kuwait was going up in flames.” They were also annoyed by Gorbachev’s attempt to undercut the U.S.-led coalition. “The Soviets have their own objectives in this that may not be parallel to the [interests of] the United States,” Scowcroft said.
At 1 p.m. Saturday, Bush publicly voiced his “regret” over Iraq’s refusal to comply with the U.S. deadline - and that statement was a signal for Schwarzkopf to proceed. Bush himself then called the leaders of allied nations to inform them of the general timing of the attack; none objected, according to White House officials. He had already talked with Gorbachev, who urged him to wait two more days before launching the ground attack to give the Iraqis another chance to back down. Bush declined, saying the coalition plan would proceed as scheduled; he did not tell the Soviet leader when the allied attack would come. He also called Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and alerted House and Senate leaders to the impending offensive. He made plans to address the nation at 10 o’clock Saturday night and took off for Camp David.
Despite the initial success of the Desert Storm ground offensive, no one in Washington believes that victory over Saddam Hussein will be cost-free. The task now for Schwarzkopf and his commanders is to keep U.S. casualties to a military minimum - and the task for Bush, as commander in chief, is to lead the nation to accepting the losses that are inevitable even in a successful war.
OPINION WATCH INTO THE BREACH Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? (Percent saying disagree)
If Saddam Hussein withdraws from Kuwait but remains in power in Iraq that will be a victory for the U.S. and allied forces
Allied military attacks have already eliminated the military threat Iraq had posed to the Persian Gulf area
The Soviet Union is playing a positive role in seeking an end to the war
For this NEWSWEEK Poll, The Gallup Organization interviewed a national sample of 768 adults by telephone Feb. 22. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.Some “Don’t know” and other responses not shown. The NEWSWEEK Poll 1991 by NEWSWEEK, Inc.
WEEK SIX: GOING IN ON THE GROUND Only eight hours after Saddam Hussein passed up his “last chance” to withdraw from Kuwait peacefully, the allied ground assault began. To safeguard the advancing forces, the Pentagon initially withheld all details of the operation. But military analysts said it would undoubtedly be a massive, multipronged attack by land, air and sea. The goal: to free Kuwait by breaking through Iraqi lines, cutting off resupply and escape routes and crushing the Republican Guard.
