Sudden Invasion of Kuwait Was Blitzkrieg, Showing That Force Trumps All Rules

It was a nightmare come to life, 300 tanks and 100,000 Iraqi troops suddenly moving in the desert night, rumbling into Kuwait on a highway built from petro-dollars.

So unexpected was the onslaught that it caught the border virtually unguarded; not one of Kuwait’s 35 air force planes even took to the sky. Battle-hardened Iraqi soldiers, prepared to dismount and fight, met so little opposition that few left their vehicles until they reached the capital.

One Kuwaiti checkpoint sought to stand its ground. But as Iraqi fighters roared overhead, the lead armored column let fly with overwhelming firepower, leaving dozens wounded, and rolled along unstopped.

This was blitzkrieg at its bluntest, a hell-bent offensive that demonstrated anew that force trumps all rules.

Indeed, the thrust was so sudden and overwhelming that Iraq’s massive firepower was scarcely needed: There was almost no significant resistance. American planners had hoped that a Kuwaiti force might hold off an attack for 48 hours; instead, the Kuwaitis lasted seven.

Except for the absence of serious resistance, and thus of heavy firing, the invasion was reminiscent of the German attack that gave such armored sallies their name: the thrust across Poland in 1939 that left stunned world powers off balance.

By mid-morning Thursday in Kuwait, an emir had been overthrown, a tiny army all but vanquished. And Iraqi soldiers, dismounted at last, patrolled the streets of a nation that gave Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein control over one-fifth the world’s supply of oil.

A triumph of speed and deception, the surprise attack again marked a case, as historian Michael Howard suggested, in which “geography made possible a very rapid victory before anyone could do anything about it.”

In Kuwait, as in Poland before--almost before other countries could catch their breath--the virtual elimination of a nation left the world, in Howard’s words, “faced with the problem of gearing up for a long, bloody war or letting the whole thing go by default.”

Exactly what happened in the seven hours between 3:14 a.m., when a three-pronged Iraqi vanguard surged across the border, and the mid-morning lull in Kuwait city when crisis managers in Washington knew that all was lost, remains far from clear.

There were few observers in the desert, and poor communications from Kuwait have limited other eyewitness accounts. Bush Administration officials, whose intelligence resources provided a detailed picture of the attack, were unusually reticent in describing it. Without elaboration, they warned that disclosure of what the United States knows might compromise its response to the attack.

But an account pieced together from Pentagon, State Department and congressional officials, as well as from witnesses in Iraq and military analysts, makes clear that this was a war that, on any day, would have been over soon after it began.

What made this victory so swift and sure was a combination of calculated deception beforehand and then, when the moment came, purposeful execution that scorned half-steps.

The sudden attack Thursday came only a few hours after an Iraqi official stomped his way out of a negotiating session in Saudi Arabia, complaining that his Kuwaiti counterpart had not seriously tried to resolve the issues that divided them.

On its surface, the dispute was over oil: its price, its production, even where it was drilled, with Iraq accusing its tiny neighbor of having stolen billions of dollars in oil that was rightfully Iraq’s.

But oil also confers power--particularly in the Persian Gulf--and in 16 days of orchestrated escalation, Hussein had made that connection explicit. Even before the negotiations collapsed, more than 100,000 Iraqi troops had massed along Kuwait’s border, a not-so-subtle hint that Hussein was determined to have his way.

Most experts--including top Bush Administration officials--dismissed the show of force as saber-rattling.

Hussein might be up to no good, one ranking Administration official said he thought at the time, but he certainly was not going to attack. Kuwait saw no need even to bolster its defensive force.

But U.S. officials now believe that Hussein may already have made up his mind. Certainly, they say, the 130,000 Iraqi soldiers massed along the border by midnight had been told exactly what they were to do.

In the moonlight, just after 3 a.m., along a highway that in more peaceful times often carried tipsy Kuwaitis homeward after booze-it-up sessions in southern Iraq, came a sight guaranteed to induce instant sobriety.

Hundreds of tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks, moving in echelons and carrying tens of thousands of troops--more than the entire Kuwaiti army--bore southward. Fighters streaked through the sky, ready to overwhelm any resistance the ground troops might find. Helicopters churned along overhead, carrying teams of commandos ordered to attack the Kuwaiti palace and other high-priority sites.

And along secondary roads on either flank, out of sight of the main highway, more tanks, trucks and troops moved in columns, adding two more prongs to the attack.

Except for the opposition at the one checkpoint, resistance was virtually nonexistent. With no aerial opposition, Iraqi planes were used mostly for intimidation. The fact that it took 3 1/2 hours to reach Kuwait city mainly reflected the slowness of tanks--even on superhighways.

The pace only delayed the inevitable. The Kuwaiti Defense Ministry took to the radio at 4:31 a.m. to urge Iraq to “stop this irresponsible hostile action.” Already, however, much of the country’s leadership was apparently in flight, headed for havens outside the capital.

The phony war turned real as it reached the capital, with rockets and bombs beginning to strike at key targets just before 5:30 a.m. A fierce battle broke out on the grounds of the emir’s palace as the helicopter-borne commandos sought to storm the residence, killing, among others, the emir’s brother.

South of the city, bombs rained down on the airport. At Kuwait’s Sea Island terminal, a Greek-owned tanker found itself in the cross-fire as Iraqi tanks and helicopters exchanged shots with Kuwaitis in the harbor. Kuwait Radio broadcast an SOS.

But the end was near. By 7:30 a.m., reports circulated through the city that Iraq had won control of the emir’s palace. Throughout Kuwait city, the newly arriving Iraqi troops jumped out of their tanks and personnel carriers and took control of the streets.

Isolated pockets of resistance, particularly at a Kuwaiti barracks at Shuwaiken, was to continue for nearly a day. A resistance-group radio station, broadcasting from a secret desert site, managed to stay on the air until 7:11 a.m. Friday.

But even at mid-morning Thursday in Kuwait city, while sporadic shots still sounded, the scene at busy intersections made clear that the blitzkrieg had passed. The Iraqis, victorious invaders, were directing traffic.