Posted on 03/27/2007 10:28:12 AM PDT by quidnunc
On the morning of Feb. 28, 1991, more than a half-million U.N.-sponsored coalition troops from land, sea and air were poised to crush the final core of Saddam Hussein’s army that just seven months earlier had stormed into Kuwait and ravaged it.
A day earlier, tanks from the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division, sweeping in a vast pincer movement into Iraq from the north and west, had demolished rear elements of Saddam Hussein’s fleeing Republican Guard. In less than an hour, American armor and supporting aircraft blew apart 60 heavy T-72 tanks, nine T-55 tanks and 38 armored carriers. One analysis of the Gulf War described the duel as “more like a one-sided clay?pigeon shoot than an armored battle.”
What was left of Saddam Hussein’s best troops at dusk on Feb. 27 were four or five Republican Guard divisions, nearly cut off near Basra and facing the same fate as earlier fleeing Iraqis from Kuwait who were pounded relentlessly by coalition air power. So within hours, Saddam’s entire military-political infrastructure would be nearly wrecked – and thus any chance that Baathist Iraq could threaten its neighbors or even rein in its restive minorities.
But then suddenly, at 8 a.m. Feb. 28, the coalition stopped. A cease-fire was declared – a mere 100 hours after the land war began, less than six weeks after the start of the punishing air campaign. In the words of Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs, who was the leading advocate of cessation, “There is chivalry in war.” He added that they should all worry about the “psychic cost” of butchering a supposedly defeated enemy.
And besides, a 100-hour-war had a nice ring to it.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at legion.org ...
Ouch.
what ever happened to the saga of April Glaspie, our then-Ambassador to Iraq, who allegedly allowed Saddam to assume the US didn't mind if he invaded Kuwait?
But when that was accomplished, the authority was exhausted. Whether that President Bush should have, theoretically, "finished the job" is not the issue. Whether he had the authority to do that OUGHT to be of interest, especially on a website whose participants claim to respect the Constitution.
Congressman Billybob
*
"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right… and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq." --- Dick Cheney, U.S. Secretary of Defense (August 1992)
Mr. Cheney needs to explain to the American people why he thought the U.S. would get "bogged down" in 1990-91 when it had 500,000 troops available for a military mission in Iraq, yet he thought it was a great idea to invade Iraq in 2002 with only 130,000+ troops.
My memory is that she told Saddam that the US had no postition as to who was right in a dispute between Iraq and Kuwait as to just where to draw the border between the two nations.
Saddam took that as carte blanche to invade Kuwait and erase the border between the two nations. Hardly her fault.
Hanson gets that one correct. This is, in fact, one of the two biggest Second Guesses surrounding the two Gulf Wars (the other one being breaking up the Iraqi army after the fall of Baghdad).
Personally I lay this one at Powell's door but I see where he was coming from. He was and remains an internationalist with a strong belief in collective security, and his principal motivation for the ceasefire was the maintenance of the coalition and the UN sanctions under which it operated. It was a sound political and diplomatic decision (the political and diplomatic missions were, after all, accomplished by the ejection of Saddam's forces from Kuwait) and a disastrous military one.
A consideration of his performance subsequently as Secretary of State will confirm this set of priorities. It is a perfect example of a failure of transition between tactical and strategic thought. IMHO, of course - I'm no Colin Powell fan but hindsight is 20/20.
They could have finished off the Republican Guard, east and south of Basra. That would have crippled Saddam's government. They could have refused to allow the Iraqi generals to ride anywhere, let alone fly. They could have provided arms and trainiong for the Kurds and Shia old 41 called on to rise, and then abandoned to the realpolitik of that idiot, Baker. They could have done any, or all, of that without violating the Constitution. They did nothing.
That always was a bad rap. Glaspie was addressing the accusation on the part of Saddam that the Kuwaitis had been drilling at an angle that led them to filch Iraqi oil. She said (I think perfectly reasonably) that it was an internal matter that needed to be dealt with between the two countries.
That issue was Saddam's casus belli but stretching her statement into a justification of, or even permission for, an outright armed invasion is, I think, distortion way beyond reason. She clearly meant that the two sides should negoatiate the matter. That was, after all, her job.
Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs who said, in sum and substance, "First we're going to cut them off. then we're going to kill them". We did neither. And as Chairman of the JCS, he could have: [a] argued forcefully against stopping. He didn't.[b] Tendered his resignation when ordered to stop as a protest. He didn't. It's a LOT easier for politicians when they get to use pliant soldiers as cover. They developed that into a fine art during Viet Nam.
Succinct and correct. Thanks.
Until the difficult postwar occupation of Iraq commencing in April 2003 to the present, the communis opinio of the 1990s was that the Americans had committed a serious moral and strategic error in allowing Saddam to survive. Almost everyone involved in that administration’s decision of 1991 would later turn on each other in recriminations when hostilities broke out again in 2003. Scowcroft stood by the decision. And so he severely criticized George W. Bush’s choice to remove Saddam – and then declared himself vindicated by the subsequent insurgency that has tied down the United States.
Powell wavered on the second war. As secretary of state in the younger Bush administration, he reluctantly made the case for the pre-emptive war with arguments that he rejected 12 years earlier. Former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney defended the stop order after leaving office in 1993. But as vice president a decade later, he apparently came to believe, in the post-Sept. 11 climate, that he had been mistaken, given Saddam’s violations of armistice and U.N. accords during the 1990s. In any case, he became a vehement advocate of re-entering Iraq.
But the oddest development was the tension that inevitably arose between the elder George Bush and his son. In the hours after the 1991 armistice the first President Bush himself had seemed troubled: “And now Saddam Hussein is still there – the man who wreaked this havoc upon his numbers.” But later, in his memoirs and through public interviews, the elder Bush never voiced official regret about leaving Saddam in power – even after the dictator’s constant violation of the no-fly-zones and rumored attempts to kill Bush himself. In the end, he never recanted his official post-bellum proclamation, “Kuwait is liberated. Iraq’s army is defeated. Our military objectives are met.”
Yet, much of his own son’s rationale to remove Saddam in 2003 was predicated on the “mistake” of leaving Saddam in power in 1991. Thus the first Bush was left with the dilemma of either criticizing his own past conduct or his son’s present decision, just as the younger Bush was forced to be largely silent about his contemporary critics lest he fault his father’s earlier choice. Indeed, much of the actual plan of 2003 to invade through Kuwait, move northward along the Tigris and Euphrates corridor, and end up in Baghdad was based on a secret Pentagon contingency operation called “The Road to Baghdad,” developed in 1991.
Negoatiate = negotiate. Sheesh.
As of right now, "finishing the job in Iraq" for the Second Gulf War means taking out Iran and Saudi Arabia, who are funding, supplying, training, and manning the "insurgency".
Remember also that Colin Powell was a national security advisor type. He never commanded any unit larger than a battalion in the Army [if I recall correctly]. One of the risks when you promote a DC insider over combat soldiers.
He didn't resign in 2002 despite his opposition to the current war, either. So he's never been anything more than a political hack, in my book.
Powell could have maintained the coalition and the UN sanctions and still destroyed the Iraqi Republican Guard on the ground in Kuwait and on the border. Powell was motivated more by not killing anymore Iraqis than geopolitical concerns. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Personally, after touring the highway of death by air via helicopter and on the ground plus going through the burning oil fields, we had the perfect excuse to go after Saddam for war crimes and an environmental catastrophe. By allowing Saddam to stay in power and his elite forces to escape, we were sowing the seeds for the next conflict. That said, the coalition's objective was to eject Saddam from Kuwait not to remove him from power or occupy Iraq. Doing so would surely have had repercussions from the arab members of the coaltion and for reasons know now, Russia and France would have objected vehemently.
Basically correct. Powell had a brief tour as V Corps Commander in Germany -- 5 months I believe.
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