The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War

By Rick Atkinson

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Saddam considered his Arab brethren both inadequately grateful for his challenge to Iran and indifferent to plummeting petroleum prices. He had, with some cause, accused Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates of cheating an oil production quotas and flooding the world market. This latest offense compounded other Iraqi complaints against Kuwait, including the “theft” of more than $2 billion by slant-drilling into the vast Rumaylah oil field, the bulk of which lay beneath Iraqi territory.

Iraq also had long disputed the border with Kuwait and even the emirate’s sovereignty, claiming that both were imposed by colonial powers earlier in the century. (Here Baghdad ignored several inconvenient facts: Kuwait’s historical autonomy within the Ottoman Empire; the two-hundred-year rule of the emirate by the al Sabah family; and Kuwait’s status as a British protectorate from 1899 until independence in 1961.) Saddam felt particularly aggrieved by his neighbor’s possession of two Persian Gulf islands, Bubyiyan and Warbah, which effectively controlled Iraq’s access to the sea. 

Bankrupt, desperate, and congenitally bellicose, he chose to attack. In seizing Kuwait – a country slightly smaller than New Jersey – he gambled on Arab apathy toward the fate of a nation long resented for its arrogance and wealth. (Per capita income in Kuwait was twenty times that, for example, of Egypt.) He also counted on Western indifference toward a feudal monarchy where only 4 percent of the population was enfranchised, where parliament and the national constitution had been suspended, and where advocates of democracy had been suppressed with police truncheons and mass arrests. 

By annexing the emirate as the 19th Province of Iraq, Saddam would reap a windfall of $20 million a day in oil revenues. He would control 20 percent of the world’s petroleum reserves. And he would demonstrate the perilous consequences of ignoring Iraqi demands. 

(Atkinson 1993, pp.28)

A diplomatic juggernaut accompanied the military buildup. White House telephone logs in the month after the invasion listed sixty-two calls from the president to various foreign leaders. Bush and Baker cajoled, pleaded, and offered sundry compensations to weave together their alliance: Egypt was forgiven its $7 billion debt to the U.S. Treasury; Turkey got textile trade concessions; China was again pardoned for suppressing dissident democrats in Tiananmen Square; Syria received absolution for many of the same sins of which Saddam now stood accused, including state-supported terrorism. The president also avoided sharp condemnation of the Soviet crackdown in the Baltics in order to keep Moscow as an ally in the gulf. 

Bush’s diplomatic virtuosity was matched by his deft political touch at home. On November 30, a day after the Security Council authorized “all necessary means” to liberate Kuwait, the president offered to exchange envoys with Baghdad in an attempt to resolve the crisis short of war. To further mollify a divided Congress and a wary American public, he subsequently agreed to a congressional vote on whether military force should be used against Saddam. Gradually, the president outmaneuvered those advocating an indefinite reliance on economic sanctions to choke Iraq into submission. 

Bush consistently couched his Persian Gulf policy as a crusade “for what’s right,” but he was not beyond the use of deception. He initially denied considering American military intervention; exaggerated the Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia; deliberately minimized Arab efforts to effect a diplomatic solution; dissembled regarding the size of the American deployment and his willingness to link Saddam’s withdrawal from Kuwait to the settlement of other problems in the Middle East; and concealed his own belief, arrived at soon after the invasion, that war was more likely than not. Whether the president was uncertain of his own mind or simply convinced that the end justified the means is difficult to assess; perhaps a bit of both. 

(Atkinson 1993, pp.54-55)

Whenever [Schwarzkopf] assumed a new command, he advised his subordinates: “I never get mad at you personally. I wear my heart squarely on my sleeve. When I like something, you’ll know it. And when I don’t like it, you’ll know it … I don’t get mad at people, I get mad at principles, at things that don’t happen.”

He was not unaware of his shortcomings, including the temper, which he once described as “without question my major weakness as a commander.” At six-foot-four and 250 pounds, Schwarzkopf knew that he intimidated those of lesser stature. Whenever he assumed a new command, he advised his subordinates: “I never get mad at you personally. I wear my heart squarely on my sleeve. When I like something, you’ll know it. And when I don’t like it, you’ll know it … I don’t get mad at people, I get mad at principles, at things that don’t happen.” Those who worked closest with him, however, including Waller and Glosson, thought the rages immature and dysfunctional. Like the French field marchal Joseph J.C. Joffre, he appeared to want generals who were lions in action and dogs in obedience. General de la Billiere suspected that some of the CINC’s “storms” were “laid on to keep people sharpened up”; if so, the British commander concluded, Schwarzkopf overplayed his hand and badly inhibited “the free thinking of his staff.” Waller worried that he was creating a band of yes-men; several times the DCINC urged him to be more gracious and to encourage debate. You’re right, Schwarzkopf would concede, only to explode anew at some infraction and plunge the staff once again into their stunned-mullet stupor.

(Atkinson 1993, pp.71)

The war dominated church sermons, classroom lectures, and coffee shop chatter. Teachers and parents found themselves struggling to reassure children frightened at the prospect of terrorist attacks or bombs that could somehow fall at home rather than in the Persian Gulf. Signs of tight security became ubiquitous: bomb-sniffing dogs at airports, sharpshooters on the roofs of public buildings, policemen in bulletproof vests everywhere. 

Public unease was reflected in the media and compounded by the press corps’s own disgruntlement at home and in the war zone. Sixteen hundred journalists had massed in Saudi Arabia, roughly four times the number in Vietnam during the late 1960s. Unlike Vietnam, however, where reporters could roam escorted into the field and file uncensored dispatches, in the gulf they were subject to controls similar to those imposed during the Korean War and World War II.

Such controls represented a legitimate attempt to manage the media throngs in Riyadh and Dhahran. Yet they also reflected a desire by the Bush administration and the military to shape the war’s image in order to avoid giving aid and comfort to the enemy, maintain public support, and keep the allied coalition intact. 

(Atkinson 1993, pp.159)

If his generals had been molded by La Drang, Khe Sanh, and the pathetic images of Saigon abandoned in a pell-mell rout, George Bush had been shaped by Pearl Harbor, Normandy, and the viceroy MacArthur aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The Second World War had been the defining experience of his youth. As a young Navy pilot, shot down and rescued in the South Pacific, he had absorbed the prevailing belief in just wars that pitted the good and the selfless against the evil and the rapacious. 

Bush’s world was largely white and black; shades of gray baffled and annoyed him. The war against Saddam provided him with a clear-cut moral cause, animating his presidency with a sense of purpose that had been absent during his first two years in the Oval Office. The Persian Gulf crisis forced Bush for the first time – and, as it happened, the last – to rise above the limitations of his character, vision, and political philosophy to become, briefly, an extraordinary man. 

Few would have expected it. He was often derided as a “wimp” or a “lap dog” or someone “who reminded every woman of her first husband.” When unsure of his footing, Bush appeared frenzied, screechy, and inarticulate. He habitually dropped personal pronouns and wandered into syntactical thickets that implied intellectual befuddlement. He was ridiculed for his shallow enthusiasm and an unseemly willingness to shift positions – on economic policy, abortion, civil rights – for political expediency. 

(Atkinson 1993, pp.191-192)

“Domestic policy can get us thrown out of office,” [Bush] once said, quoting John Kennedy, “but foreign policy can get us killed.”

In foreign affairs, clearly his first love, he was more active. Preserving the status quo abroad required eternal vigilance and a willingness to practice big stick diplomacy. Bush was vigilant and he was willing. “Domestic policy can get us thrown out of office,” he once said, quoting John Kennedy, “but foreign policy can get us killed.” Irrepressibly gregarious, he had spent more than two decades – as ambassador to the United Nations and China, as CIA director, as vice president, and now as president – cultivating personal ties with world leaders. After the invasion of Kuwait, those ties served him very well. With a sense of mission and with leadership skills he rarely displayed on domestic issues, Bush had rallied the world to his side.

He also rallied America, although not without a struggle. “In the life of a nation,” Bush had said in announcing the first deployment of U.S. troops in August, “we are called upon to define who we are and what we believe.” During the next five months, Bush sought to define what the country should believe in and to explain why half a million Americans should be placed in harm’s way to restore the throne of a sybaritic emir in a tiny country most Americans could not find on a map. The muscular assertion of vested national interests – such as denying an avaricious despot control of 40 percent of the world’s petroleum – would seem crass and ignoble if espoused by the Oval Office. Searching for a loftier objective, he had hopped from rationale to rationale. Redeeming Kuwait’s right to self-determination, thwarting Saddam’s quest for nuclear weapons, preserving jobs in Western democracies – Bush had tried all of these lines without convincing his nation that collectively they represented a legitimate casus belli.

He spoke – in his State of the Union speech, in fact – of “a new world order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind.” However elevated, the aspiration rang hollow, like the abstract musings of a blind man struggling to describe sight. For no rhetorical flourish could obscure the reality that this was a war on behalf of the old world order, a war waged for the status quo of cheap oil and benign monarchies. It was only when he framed the conflict as a moral crusade that George Bush found his voice. The British would take credit for stiffening his spine, claiming that Margaret Thatcher, before stepping down as prime minister, had “performed a successful backbone transplant.” Yet in truth his resolve was bred in the bone, nurtured half a century before in the war against  fascism. “How can you say it is not moral to stop a man who is having children shot on the streets in front of their parents?” Bush had asked in extemporaneous comments to the Republican National Committee on January 25. “Was it moral for us in 1939 to not stop Hitler from going into Poland? Perhaps if we had, hundreds of Polish patriots would have lived, perhaps millions of Jews would have survived.” 

(Atkinson 1993, pp.193-194)

“Just as the desert is incapable of compromise, battles fought therein result in total victory or total defeat.”

Bryan Perrett

“Just as the desert is incapable of compromise, battles fought therein result in total victory or total defeat,” wrote the historian Bryan Perrett. Desert combat possessed a grim purity, the unencumbered clash of force on force in what Admiral Horatio Nelson described before Trafalgar as “pell mell battle.” Clausewitz referred to the direct swap of fire between two opposing armies as a “cash transaction”; in the desert, such commerce often left but small change.

In the gulf war, as in North Africa, the armored tank served as the sharp point on the spear. Developed by the British during World War I as a “landship” – again the nautical parallel – capable of breaking the stalemate of trench warfare, the tank was so named because early versions of the secret weapon left the factory beneath tarpaulins deceptively labeled “water tank.” (The first combat model, however, was dubbed “Mother.”) The chief of staff of the Royal Tank Corps during the Great War, Colonel J.F.C. Fuller, imagined armored contraptions of great speed and range capable of penetrating the enemy front and overrunning his command centers. It took only a quarter-century for this vision to be realized: in World War II the German Panzer commander Heinz Guderian effectively massed his tank fleets, punched through the enemy, and then swept behind the lines in a devastating encirclement. A generation later, Israel used Guderian’s blitzkrieg tactic to near perfection during the Six Day War, in 1967. 

(Atkinson 1993, pp.251)

“When you start to take yourself too seriously, that’s when you get in trouble.”

Lieutenant General Gary Luck

The corps commander was a wry, laconic Kansan with brawny forearms, a fondness for Skoal cherry tobacco, and a folksy drawl. “When you start to take yourself too seriously,” Lieutenant General Gary Luck once warned, “that’s when you get in trouble.” Disdaining pomp and convention, Luck reportedly had transformed the dining room of the commander’s mansion at Fort Bragg into a pool parlor; his dog, a black Labrador retriever named Bud, trotted about the cops headquarters with a nonchalance that perfectly reflected Luck’s informality.

(Atkinson 1993, pp.308)

This nuance was not pursued during the meeting in the Oval Office. For Powell, who could read a map as well as any soldier, the issue was subordinate to the larger one of military objectives. The chairman noted that some pilots had begun returning from their sorties with qualms about strafing and bombing a prostate enemy. “There’s almost a psychic cost to be borne if we ask our troops to continue military operations when it’s clear we’ve won,” he warned. Bludgeoning a defeated foe was not only distasteful but also “not American,” Powell believed. “There is,” he added, “chivalry in war.” 

(Atkinson 1993, pp.471)

“By God, we’ve licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

George H.W. Bush

The war’s achievements, of course, went well beyond the resurrection of a few fast-food franchises in liberated Kuwait. “By God,” Bush declared after the armistice, “we’ve licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” This sentiment was neither fatuous nor insignificant. For twenty years the debacle of Vietnam had bred self-reproach, mistrust, and an abiding doubt in the efficacy of military power. The competence and potency of the American military was now beyond question. 

“It is not big armies that win battles,” Maurice de Saxe noted in 1732. “It is the good ones.” The United States had built a military that was both big and good. The nation demonstrated that superpower status was calculated not simply in nuclear megatonnage but also in more prosaic capabilities: only America could have amassed more than nine million tons of materiel, hauled it six thousand miles to the Middle East, fought a war, then carted the stuff home again. (Nearly 90 percent of the cost of the campaign had been underwritten by the Japanese, Germans, and Arabs, thanks to aggressive American officials, who collected $54 billion in fund-raiding expeditions dubbed Tincup I and Tincup II.) All in all, weapons and tactics worked well, troops performed with admirable skill, commanders showed themselves equal to the challenge. 

(Atkinson 1993, pp.493)

“It is not big armies that win battles, it is the good ones.”

Maurice de Saxe

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References

Atkinson, Rick. 1993. Crusade. N.p.: Houghton Mifflin.

ISBN 0-395-60290-4