Hi All - I've been watching this post with great interest and thought I'd post a little essay (found most of the info on the internet)...
An Essay: The Theatre of War President Bush speaks: 2002
President Bush stated in his State on the Union address to Congress on January 29, 2002, "Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens....This is a regime that agreed to international inspections, then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the world. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger....We will be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
The Buildup to Breakdown: 1980-1988 During the Iran-Iraq conflict (1980-198
, the US political machine sponsored the Iraqi military with provisioned military equipment, emergent food credits, and "dual use" technology. The US chose to disregard or ignore intelligence reporting the use of chemical weaponry by Iraq. [1]
In 1982 Iraq was separated from states that support terrorism when it was removed from the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism. [2] Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary, fought all attempts to add Iraq back to the list in the 1980's and as far as I can tell - Iraq hasn't been reinstated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
In the face of the fact that Iraq brutally suppressed the Kurds who lived in northern Iraq and that his human rights record was atrocious - Hussein continued to receive Western aid and favored nation status. "The State Department talked of the importance of the U.S. relationship with Iraq and U.S. senators visited Iraq for Hussein's birthday in 1990, advising him that his image problem was merely a product of the Western media that could be corrected with a better public-relations (PR) policy." [3]
Collapse of Dual Purpose: 1990 -1991 On August 2, 1990 Iraq invades Kuwait. The UN Security Council calls for a full withdrawal. Saddam Hussein had the nearly hopeless task of justifying the invasion. He plead the fact that Kuwait had been part of the Ottoman province of Basra, a city in the south of Iraq. However, the Ottoman province collapsed after World War I and today’s Iraqi borders were not created until then. There was also a further and more obvious blunder in a bid to justify this illegal invasion. Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, had namely recognized Kuwaiti independence in 1963.
On November 8, 1990 President Bush announced a military buildup to provide an offensive option, “Operation Desert Storm,” to force Iraq out of Kuwait. The preparation of the operation took two and a half months and it involved a massive air- and sea lift. Finally, in January 1991, the U. S. Congress voted to support Security Council resolution 660 - It authorized using “all necessary means” if Iraq did not withdraw from Kuwait by January 15.
Shrugging off this final warning, Saddam Hussein resolutely maintained the occupation of Kuwait. The United States established a broad-based international coalition to confront Iraq militarily and diplomatically. The military coalition consisted of Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The war also was financed by countries which were unable to send in troops. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were the main donors. More than $53 billion was pledged and received.
The ground war began at 8:00 p.m. on February 23 and lasted exactly 100 hours. This phase featured a massively successful outflanking movement of the Iraqi forces. Schwarzkopf used a deceptive maneuver by deploying a large number of forces as if to launch a large amphibious landing. The Iraqis apparently anticipated that they also would be attacked frontally and had heavily fortified those defensive positions.
Schwarzkopf instead moved the bulk of his forces west and north in a major use of helicopters, attacking the Iraqis from their rear. The five weeks of intensive air attack had greatly demoralized the Iraqi front-line troops, causing wholesale desertions. Remaining front-line forces were quickly killed or taken prisoner with minimal coalition losses.
Iraqi representatives accepted allied terms for a provisional truce on March 3 and a permanent cease-fire on April 6. Iraq agreed to pay reparations to Kuwait,
reveal the location and extent of its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and eliminate its weapons of mass destruction. Subsequently, however, UN inspectors complained that the Baghdad government was frustrating their attempts to monitor Iraqi compliance, and UN sanctions against Iraq were kept in place.
Total casualties of the Gulf War. 300,000 Iraqi soldiers were wounded, 150,000 were deserted, and 60,000 were taken prisoner (an estimate of U. S. Defense Intelligence Agency). The United States suffered 148 killed in action, 458 wounded, and 11 female combat deaths. 121 were killed in nonhostile actions; they were mostly victims of friendly fire. [4]
The Road to War: Late 90's to Present In letters to the Security Council on 12 August 1998, Mr Butler and Mohammed El Baradei, the Egyptian Director-General of the IAEA, said that despite claiming that it would continue cooperating with monitoring activities, Iraq was refusing to allow access to some previously-inspected sites. This was already weakening ongoing monitoring and verification. (UNSCOM had suspended inspections of new sites on 9 August.) The UN Secretary-General sent his Special Representative for Iraq, Prakash Shah of India, to Baghdad on 13 August, with a firm message urging the resumption of cooperation.
Following Iraq's failure to respond to all calls to resume cooperation, the Security Council unanimously adopted SCR 1194 on 9 September 1998, suspending further reviews of sanctions indefinitely. The Council also agreed to the Secretary General's proposal for a comprehensive review of Iraq's compliance with its obligations under all relevant SCRs, but made clear that such a review could not begin until Iraq had resumed full cooperation with both UNSCOM and the IAEA.
On 31 October 1998 Iraq announced that it had decided to stop all forms of cooperation with UNSCOM and its chairman and to stop all its activities inside Iraq, including monitoring, until the Security Council reviewed the lifting of sanctions. Iraq demanded that UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler be sacked, and UNSCOM restructured to distance itself from the 'espionage, deliberate harm, and agentry' of the United States. The Security Council unanimously condemned the decision and demanded that it be reversed "immediately and unconditionally". [5]
There were ample reasons for the first President Bush not to go after Mr. Hussein. The current vice president and then the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, outlined some of them in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1992, when he said: "If we'd gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein assuming we could have found him we'd have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground someplace. He would not have been easy to capture. Then you've got to put a new government in his place, and then you're faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq?"
General Franks tells how he inherited an Iraq war-contingency plan from his CentCom predecessors that essentially called for a rerun of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, with a very heavy 500,000-man American force. In December 2001, at President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, Franks briefed Bush on that off-the-shelf plan.
Almost immediately Franks was presented with a plan to send in fewer than 80,000 American ground troops, supported by a heavy air campaign. Although Franks didn't specify where that plan came from, there has long been speculation that it was developed in Rumsfeld's office.
The war plan that was executed in March evolved after a year of study, four or five visits by Franks to Bush, and frequent phone conferences among his headquarters, the Pentagon and the White House.
Franks said that while the planning continued he ordered a virtually invisible shifting of assets from Qatar to Kuwait, moving more heavy Army equipment to Kuwait and emptying warehouses at a U.S. base in Qatar so they could be prepared to house a wartime command center.
The general said that in creating the war plan everyone involved examined a long list of what-ifs: urban warfare, use of weapons of mass destruction, burning the oil fields, launching Scuds.
"There was never any doubt in my mind that the quality of people, command and control, the equipment and the depth of resolve of our country took this beyond the point of negotiation before the fight ever started. If we fight, we win." [6]
Stepping Lightly into the Future: Future We'll have to wait and see....................