Iraqis, that the West really had the courage to go to war. (Bush’s problems in
persuading the American electorate to let him wage war contributed to Iraq’s
fatal misperception on this matter.)
When war came, suddenly and within hours of the ultimatum deadline, it
must have been obvious immediately to the Iraqis that they had made a serious
mistake about the nature of the allied war plans. The allies, mainly the USA,
but with significant help from the UK, launched the biggest strategic air
bombardment ever seen, without putting a single ground soldier at risk. For
nearly a month military and civilian infrastructure targets were systematically
destroyed with the loss of only a handful of allied air force personnel. Superior
allied technology rendered Iraqi targets almost defenceless. Meanwhile Iraq
retaliated with numerousScudmissile attacks into Saudi Arabia and, in a futile
attempt to sway Arab support for the allies, Israel. There was much speculation
over Iraq’s capability and intention to arm these missiles with chemical, or even
nuclear, warheads, but in the event all the missiles were conventionally armed.
The morale and fighting capacity of the Iraqi army was so destroyed that when
the inevitable counter invasion, the ‘land war’, started it lasted only 100 hours,
during which much of the Iraqi ground forces were destroyed, captured,
surrendered or driven back over their own border. True to the terms of the
UN mandate, the allies, on Bush’s insistence, refused to invade Iraq itself to
complete the destruction of Iraqi military power, a decision which later came
to be questioned when the regime of Saddam Hussain survived. The real aim
of the USA, and probably the British, had always been transparent—to destroy
Iraq’s war-making capacity, and to terminate the dictatorship of Saddam
Hussain. These unofficial war aims were not accomplished. Much of the Iraqi
army survived by fleeing, or troops had never been committed in the first
place, and Hussain easily put down rebellions against him by Shi‘ite Muslims in
the south of Iraq and by Kurds in the north. The UN appeared to be unable to
force Hussein to dismantle entirely his nuclear weapons programme, and Iraq
almost certainly remained a serious potential threat to stability in the Middle
East. In this latter sense it was a massive affirmation that, with the cold war
over, the UN really could be a powerful agent for peace, and that aggressive
military force could be stopped by collective action. Nonetheless by the
beginning of the 21st century Saddam Hussain was regarded as one of the
great enemies of the USA, and President George W. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’
seemed likely to escalate into renewed Western involvement with Iraq.
Gulf War