Those Who Have Borne the Battle (37 page)

 

 

In 1991 Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf war, would provide what many considered a military purgative of Vietnam. It showcased for civilian and military leadership an example of American might.

When Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush began a major buildup in Saudi Arabia, in cooperation with many other nations. Warnings to Iraq were not effective. In January 1991 the House and Senate authorized the president to use military action in order to force compliance with UN resolutions demanding withdrawal of the Iraqis. The votes were not overwhelming in either house.

The “new” army did not enter the war as confidently as it might have, given the tremendous edge it had in training, technology, and firepower. Adrian Lewis observes, “While the army had recovered materially, technologically, and qualitatively during the Reagan Administration, it had not completely recovered emotionally and psychologically. As a consequence, the army greatly overestimated the combat potential of Iraqi forces, and underestimated its own capabilities. This lack of confidence greatly influenced the conduct of the war.”
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Military historian John Keegan notes that Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf controlled all of the planning for this war and that Vietnam haunted their work. They “fought for victory and the extinction of the slur of Vietnam.”
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They rejected any incrementalism in favor of a total and overwhelming military force at the very outset.

President Bush, meeting with marines in Saudi Arabia on Thanksgiving 1990, said, “I'll guarantee you there ain't going to be any other Vietnams. People at home say, ‘We don't want any more Vietnams.' That's right. There won't be any. Anybody's asked to fight—they're going to fight to win.” On another occasion at a press conference, the president assured Americans that “we will not permit our troops to have their hands tied behind their backs, and I pledge to you there will not be a murky ending.” He concluded, “I will never, ever agree to a halfway effort.” Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said on
Face the Nation
, “We do not believe in gradual escalation. We don't believe in sending in insufficient force. It seems to me we've got an obligation to make certain that there's no question about what the outcome would be should hostilities result.”
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What Saddam Hussein had warned would be “the mother of all battles” turned out not to be much of a fight. The Coalition forces initiated a major air campaign on January 17, 1991, and a ground campaign on February 23. The ground combat ended in one hundred hours—declared over when the Iraqi forces were expelled from Kuwait and had been significantly destroyed by massive firepower. It really took less than one hundred hours.

President Bush decided not to push on to Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein from power. He and Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf also agreed not to continue the campaign against the fleeing Iraqi forces. It had become a slaughter rather than a battle. The goal of freeing Kuwait had been accomplished, and there was little interest in further destabilizing the region. There were 246 Coalition forces killed in Operation Desert Storm, 148 of them Americans. There were an estimated 20,000–25,000 Iraqi military killed and several thousand civilians. More than a half million American troops served in the Gulf during the war.

A few months after the war ended, Colin Powell spoke of the experience: “If in the end war becomes necessary, as it clearly did in Operation Desert Storm, you must do it right. You've got to be decisive. You've got to go in massively. You've got to be wise and fight in a way that keeps casualties to a minimum.” Symbolically, he made these remarks at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on May 27, 1991. Having served two tours in Vietnam and having been so directly involved in shaping the post-Vietnam army, Powell had made, in the words of one scholar, “avoiding
another Vietnam his life's mission.” Here, it seemed, he could declare the mission had been successful.
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Vietnam seemed to have been purged on the field of battle. As General Barry McCaffrey said to the Senate Armed Services Committee following the war, “This war didn't take 100 hours to win; it took 15 years.”
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Coming as it did at the end of the Cold War, it marked militarily the end of an era.

The proclaimed ending of the Vietnam syndrome in the sands of Kuwait, as it turned out, did not quite mean that the shadow of the earlier war was gone. It would not go away, because political leaders continued to fear repeating what they considered to be the mistakes of Vietnam—or continued to lash out at opponents for their folly in doing exactly that. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, complicated as they were, would soon become more complicated by this political and intellectual interplay with history.

 

 

There was a bit of a break in the imposition of the Vietnam template when, following 9/11 and particularly in the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush and his team did not allow old nightmares to complicate new missions. Perhaps due to the unprecedented nature of the 9/11 attacks, there was little search of history for guidance. Two members of the Bush group affirmed the absence of any historical baggage: Richard Armitage said of 9/11, “History begins today.” And Richard Perle would claim, “Nine-eleven had a profound effect on the president's thinking. The world began on nine-eleven. There's no intellectual history.”
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Even a few years later, that confidence continued. One anonymous senior adviser to the president told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind could “study” reality, but the administration was creating reality. “We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
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The quick and decisive victory over the Taliban government in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 confirmed the self-confidence of the team. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Special Forces troops who had gone on horseback for one engagement with the enemy, “a demonstration of the kind of defense transformation that the President
envisioned.” They were marked by “a mentality of eyes-wide-open situational awareness, can-do determination, and creative adaptability.” It was an example of how to bring “devastating force to bear with relatively little American manpower on the ground.”
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It was a heady time. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution called the 2001 war in Afghanistan “a masterpiece of military creativity and finesse.”
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More than 80 percent of Americans agreed with the mission. Rumsfeld, while praising the adaptability of the troops on the ground, was nonetheless privately critical of the military leadership for providing nothing that was “thoughtful, creative, or actionable.” The Department of Defense was “a persistent and unacceptably dry well.”
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Fifteen days after 9/11, Secretary Rumsfeld met alone with the president. Bush asked then what the planning was for a war with Iraq. He hoped for some creative options. Rumsfeld shared the expectation but reported that the only Pentagon planning was an update on the decade-old Gulf War plans, with a half-million troops again invading from the south. He pointed out that with increased firepower, this would mean “a vastly more lethal force.” One of his advisers said it was “Desert Storm on Steroids.” According to Rumsfeld, this was not what the president was seeking.
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The military plan, presented by General Tommy Franks, was traditional—at least traditional under the terms defined by Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell. This was not adequate. Rumsfeld demanded a “bolder approach, one that placed less emphasis on large mechanized formations and greater emphasis on air power supported by special operations troops and lighter, more agile ground forces.” He looked for “novelty and dash.”
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By 2003 President Bush was on a mission, perhaps literally. He insisted that American troops “carry a message of hope, a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘To the captives, come out, and to those in darkness, be free.'”
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And he could point to plenty of support for his mission. The need for this war was not something imagined only in the offices of the Bush administration. From the Gulf War in 1991 to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, there had been more than one hundred polls inquiring about the possibility of using American ground troops to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Every poll
showed a majority in support.
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Donald Rumsfeld pointed to the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, where Congress resolved that the United States should seek to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It was passed by 360 to 38 in the House and by
unanimous consent
in the Senate and was signed by President Clinton. Several weeks after this, Clinton ordered another bombing campaign in Iraq.

Late in 2002 Vice President Cheney laid out the case as emphatically and as unequivocally as anyone had done up until that time. He said, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambition will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors, confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth.”
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Especially in the post-9/11 world, it was a persuasive and frightening case for preemptive war. At least Congress was persuaded, and they agreed to authorize the president to take action as necessary. In the context of 9/11 and with all of the evidence that had been marshaled against Saddam Hussein and with the assurance that this would not be a major military challenge, it seemed easy to sign on—and politically complicated to vote no. There seemed little downside. After all, Rumsfeld consultant Ken Adelman wrote in the
Washington Post
, while this war would likely be more complicated than the fight against the Afghan Taliban was, the war in Iraq would still be a “cakewalk.”
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Americans discovered following the invasion of Iraq that the persuasive case had little basis in fact. Members of the Bush team, including notably Colin Powell in his speech to the United Nations, had justified war on evidence that proved nonexistent. Donald Rumsfeld in his 2011 book was very defensive on this matter. He wrote, “The President did not lie. The Vice President did not lie. Tenet did not lie. Rice did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.”
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My purpose here is not to judge between deceit and error. Others have dealt and will deal with this issue, and the debate will continue. For this
analysis, however, the wrong assumptions and erroneous projections, whether purposeful or mistaken, had real consequences. People did suffer and sacrifice for these decisions. The crucial fact is that relatively quickly, most Americans came to recognize that the reasons presented to justify the war were based on faulty information, some came further to believe they had been misled into war, and all Americans came to recognize that a war that the nation's leaders had assured them would be an easy military task proved not to be.

This circumstance led to political and cultural frustration, distrust, and cynicism. We had been there before in 1951 and in the late 1960s, and real students of history might well have learned an important lesson: Americans have little patience if they believe they have been led into small, contained police actions that become larger extended wars. In the American political system with its constant shift of issues, it is common for mistakes, or alleged lies even, to become no more than a transient frustration. Except transience is seldom a quality of war. In the cases of Korea and Vietnam, for a relatively small part of the population, and for these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an increasingly smaller group of Americans, these conflicts represent much more than patience that is tried. Extended wars require extended warriors. And in Iraq—and then again in Afghanistan—the troops would be seriously extended.

Secretary Rumsfeld was proved to be correct in his insistence that a small, mobile invasion force, with significant firepower, could defeat the Iraqi army. And in fact they did so even more easily than most optimists had assumed. But that was about the point where the optimists learned that wars are about more than battles.

Both Colonel Harry Summers and Lieutenant Colonel Walter Ulmer had prophetic experiences when they met with some North Vietnamese officers in 1975. Each had pointed out to their counterparts and recent enemies, “You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.” The consensus Vietnamese reply: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.” In Afghanistan, a Taliban detainee said to his American interrogators, “You have the watches, but we have the time.”
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Prior to the March 2003 invasion, some had insisted that the Iraqis, freed of the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein, would greet American
troops with flowers. It would be like the liberation of Paris in August 1944. Although there surely was widespread relief in Iraq when Hussein was deposed, it was restrained; there were few flowers. Nonetheless, the American forces had accomplished their goal. As one marine who had commanded a platoon in the March invasion said to me, when President Bush landed on the carrier
Abraham Lincoln
where the sailors had displayed a “Mission Accomplished” banner, the military had accomplished their mission; it was just that no one knew what to do with the next phase of the mission.

Two things altered significantly the circumstance in Iraq. And there clearly were some relationships between them. First, the nature of the mission there moved with little discussion beyond the goal of toppling a dictator and capturing weapons of mass destruction. Secretary Rumsfeld recalled being startled in the spring of 2003 to hear the president and some of his top advisers talk about the goal of establishing a democracy in Iraq. When President Bush spoke on the
Abraham Lincoln
, the president said that the “transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort.” And, the president vowed, “Our coalition will stay until our work is done.” Rumsfeld recorded, “That was not the way I understood our plan.” He worried about the consequences of such “far-reaching language about democracy.”
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