Twenty-five years ago today, I was driving back from Fort Bragg after another ROTC Advanced Camp to the University of Vermont where I was the operations NCO of our instructor detachment. The fact that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait was just another news item on the radio.
Two months later, I was leaving the ROTC detachment and heading to a new assignment with the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry, 3rd Brigade of the 2d Armored Division (Forward) at Garlstedt, Germany and few weeks after my arrival, we were ordered to Saudi Arabia to participate in Desert Storm.
Richard Haas writes in the Wall Street Journal how the first war against Saddam Hussein was the “Classic War”, yeah, it probably was;
It is a stretch to tie the events of 1990-91 to the mayhem that is the Middle East today. The pathologies of the region—along with the 2003 Iraq war and the mishandling of its aftermath, the subsequent pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, the 2011 Libya intervention and the continuing U.S. failure to act in Syria—all do more to explain the mess.
The Gulf War was a signal success of American foreign policy. It avoided what clearly would have been a terrible outcome—letting Saddam get away with a blatant act of territorial acquisition and perhaps come to dominate much of the Middle East. But it was a short-lived triumph, and it could neither usher in a “new world order,” as President Bush hoped, nor save the Middle East from itself.
In my considered opinion, it’s not a stretch to connect events today to that war. After the war, we drove to the gates of Baghdad unopposed to shield the Shi’ites from the wrath of Hussein. We could have booted the tyrant easily, relatively speaking. His armies’ tails were clearly tucked and on the run. Iraq had suffered about 100,000 wounded and killed, another 300,000 were POWs. On our drive into Iraq after the war had ended, we encountered countless Iraqi stragglers who were walking back home.
If we had been allowed to wrest the government from Saddam Hussein and his minions, who would have been there to stop us? We who were there, knew that someday we’d have to go back, that the war wasn’t over at 8AM on February 28th when we were told to disengage from a firefight with dug-in Iraqi troops, just because the politicians decided that the war was over.
In the years between the end of the 1st and the start of the second war against Hussein, the Iraqis made several feints against Kuwait, triggering several deployments of US troops to man the pre-positioned equipment left in Kuwait for that purpose. Hussein’s air defenses took pot shots at US and UK pilots who were flying the UN-mandated “no fly zones” over northern and southern Iraq.
When the 2003 invasion was inevitable, Hussein handed out copies of “Blackhawk Down”, about the 1993 operations in Somalia, to his generals as an instructional video to defeat American troops and to sap the political will of the American people to engage in a costly war.
In 1991, we had sufficient troops available, and the logistical tail to support them, to take Baghdad, but, as is usually the case, the politicians lacked the guts to do what needed to be done. In the short term, the Gulf War was a success, but in the long view, and my impeccable 20/20 hindsight, it really accomplished nothing except the delay of the inevitable. Invading in 1991 would have predated the rise of al Qaeda and bin Laden…and Bill Clinton’s cruise missile war against terrorism.
But, despite what critics might say, the reason that the Gulf War was so brief and so successful in the short term is because we had trained for exactly that war for more than a decade – when we crossed the Saudi border into Iraq and and on to Kuwait, it was exactly like a two-hundred-mile Table XII (Platoon live fire exercise) run in Grafenwoher. It was our training that won the day. Skimping on training will cost lives in the future.
