When the Fighting : Stops Too Soon : Results of Bush decision in Gulf War linger

Five years after allied aircraft attacked Iraq in the opening phase of the war to liberate Kuwait, Saddam Hussein remains solidly in power while George Bush, who organized the victorious anti-Iraq coalition only to suffer defeat in his 1992 presidential reelection effort, concedes that serious mistakes were made in how that war was abruptly ended.

Bush’s acknowledgment that he “miscalculated” in thinking that Iraq’s humiliation on the battlefield would lead to Hussein’s overthrow implicitly supports the conclusion of many independent analysts that the war was ended at least several days too soon, denying the allies a fuller military and political victory.

Hindsight, of course, is 20-20 and it’s always easy to proclaim the superior wisdom of alternative strategies after battles have been fought. Those who are required to make life-and-death decisions in war must act in real time and are inescapably influenced by the circumstances of the moment. At the time Bush made his decision to end the ground war against Iraq after 100 hours, two considerations, humane but also political, were uppermost in his mind: to avoid further U.S. and other allied casualties and not to be perceived as continuing the needless killing of Iraqi troops who were fleeing back to their homeland.

Decision makers, though, must weigh all the consequences of their actions, not just those that are most expedient. In the case of how the Gulf War ended, that first of all meant the consequences of letting tens of thousands of Hussein’s most loyal troops escape to Iraq, taking with them, according to CIA figures, 842 tanks and 1,412 armored personnel carriers. The argument that the alternative would have been to pursue those forces into Baghdad, with all the horrors of urban guerrilla warfare that suggests, misstates the options. There was no need to march to Baghdad, only to use overwhelming allied power to keep the remaining Iraqi troops from fleeing.

Even more inexplicable was the almost casual approach to key issues taken when the armistice formally ending the conflict was signed on March 3. The Iraqis, apparently on the basis of a snap decision made by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the coalition commander, were allowed to keep flying their armed helicopters over Iraqi territory. That gave them the means to brutally suppress the uprisings by the Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north. Moreover, the allies missed the chance to require Hussein or at least his most senior aides to take part in the military surrender, which would have further sapped the regime’s prestige by visibly tying it to the crushing battlefield defeat. So Saddam Hussein has survived, and over five years the suffering of the Iraqi people has deepened. It could well have been otherwise. Bush admits he “miscalculated.”