The Triumph and the Achievement : A great wrong has been put right

Great armies are well-led and well-motivated armies. The Union Army, once Gen. Grant took command; the U.S. Army in World War II, and Napoleon’s Grande Armee are famous examples of such armies. The army of Iraq under Saddam Hussein obviously is not.

Or, more precisely, was not. For by the time the coalition forces under the operational command of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf were finished, the Iraqi army was a shell of its former self. As President Bush said Wednesday night in announcing suspension of allied military operations, “Iraq’s army is defeated.”

THE REPUTATION: But until that army had been engaged, much of what is now known about that military force was unknowable. Until it was tested in combat, it was its fearsome reputation--trained, after all, by the Soviet army, battle-tested and hardened after eight grueling years of war with Iran and triumphant from its cruel but effective blitzkrieg into Kuwait--that preceded it into combat. It was a formidable fighting force--one of the largest and best-equipped in the world, after, among others, the United States, the Soviet Union and China.

But that army utterly crumbled in the face of the well-conceived, well-planned and rather precisely executed campaign of the coalition forces. Is this all-but-complete victory a case of nothing more than a paper tiger meeting a real one? Is it possible to overestimate the magnitude of the U.S.-led military achievement? It’s true that the Iraqi army is led by one of the most overrated military leaders in history--commanded by an uncaring, inept, cruel, despotic and craven dictator. What army in the world--under such pathetic leadership--could possibly perform at a high level? No amount of hi-tech weaponry can compensate for the lack of leadership, the failure of moral sustenance.

THE ACHIEVEMENT: For all this, the victory of the coalition forces remains remarkable and extraordinary. Transported thousands of miles from their home bases, set down in a desert with an inclement environment and in a country with a completely alien culture, the forces of the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy--in an alliance with regionally indigenous Arab forces--devastated the enemy. All the credit for this must go both to the leadership that laid out a clear plan of victory, and to the troops on the ground, in the air and on Gulf waters who followed that leadership. This textbook game plan--in both its conception and execution--will no doubt be studied by aspiring generals in military academies throughout the world for a long time to come.

And the results will be applauded by freedom-loving people throughout the world. An evil tyrant has gotten a necessary dose of justice. A collective security effort, operating under the legal sanction of the United Nations, has acted decisively to cut a huge menace down to size. The world owes the men and women of the armies of this coalition a great debt and deepest gratitude. The great wrong of August has been righted by the men and women of February.