Twenty five years ago, one of the most brutal massacres in war history occurred in Iraq, along Highway 80, about 32 km west of Kuwait city. On the night of February 26\u201327, 1991, thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were retreating to Baghdad, after a ceasefire was announced, when President George Bush ordered his forces to slaughter the retreating Iraqi army. Fighter planes of the coalition forces swooped down upon the unarmed convoy and disabled the vehicles in the front, and at the rear, so that they couldn\u2019t escape. Then wave after wave of aircraft pounded the trapped vehicles for hours on end. After the carnage was over, some 2,000 mangled Iraqi vehicles, and charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers lay for miles along what came to be known as the \u201cHighway of Death\u201d. Several hundred more littered along another road, Highway 8, that leads to Basra. The scenes of devastation on these two roads became some of the most recognizable images of the Gulf War.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Grisly, huh? Well, except that it didn’t happen like that. I just happened to end our portion of that war on the Highway the following day – the first US troops on the scene. There was a lot of Destruction on the road, but not much Death. There weren’t “tens of thousands” of Iraqi soldiers strewn along with the vehicles. certainly there were a couple of dead, but not thousands, not even a hundred. It was pretty much like the pictures that accompanied the article at the link. Lots of scrap metal, but no bodies – my platoon found one dead body in our sector.<\/p>\n
The article continues on about how Saddam Hussein had announced to the world that he was withdrawing from Kuwait, that the war was pretty much over, but we bombed the poor Iraqis anyway, in violation of the Geneva Convention. <\/p>\n
First, I’d like to know what portion of the Geneva Conventions says that you can’t attack armed enemy forces that are on the field of battle. Notice the tanks in the picture above. You can’t get more armed than having a tank.<\/p>\n
Secondly, when the cease-fire came, we turned left and ceased combat operations, there were still Iraqis firing at us – bullets were pinging off my turret. A few days after the cease-fire began, the 24th Infantry Division was attacked by a Republican Guards division, which the 24th destroyed within a few hours – but it proves that not all of the Iraqis were ready to give up the war. <\/p>\n
A few weeks after the cease fire, my unit moved into Iraq for Operation Provide Comfort – to protect Shi’ite Iraqis from Hussein’s Ba’athists who were using what little equipment they had left against those minorities. They weren’t using the thousands of vehicles that were destroyed on the Highway that day. We spent two months deep inside Iraq, confident that much of the Iraqi Army had been destroyed while we were on our humanitarian mission.<\/p>\n
The Left loves to make the US out to be some barbaric hegemonic power that kills needlessly, but that “Highway of Death” thing isn’t the hill they should want to plant their flag on. It was completely justified and much more humane than they’d like it to be. The Air Force destroyed a lot of equipment that day and took very few lives along that road. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Someone sent us a link last night to this article about the “Highway of Death” along … That “Highway of Death” canard<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":65664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-historical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/65664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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