Huma Kirmani

By the Rivers of Babylon Huma Kirmani

What had gone wrong? The Marines' attack on Kuwait City had been meant to tie down the vaunted Republican Guard in combat long enough for the Army's massive left hook to come in behind those elite forces and destroy them. But the Marine thrust had been so devastating and fast that it precipitated the Republican Guard's rapid withdrawal back into Iraq. By the time President Bush had called for a ceasefire to prevent the appearance of unnecessary slaughter-a political rather than a military decision-fully half of the Republican Guard divisions and hundreds of their armored vehicles had escaped deep into Iraq unscathed. Meanwhile, as the dust settled and cooler heads prevailed in the think tanks and war colleges, it was widely agreed that General Schwarzkopf and his staff had greatly overestimated the capabilities of the enemy. By and large the Iraqi army was creakily obsolescent, poorly led, and brimming over with demoralized conscripts who had deserted their posts en masse rather than stand and fight. Desert Storm was the first major test of an all-volunteer U. S. military that had been rebuilt from the ground up following the debacle of Vietnam, and the impact of that experience on the services was everywhere in evidence. From the point of view of doctrine and training, the new American military eschewed protracted and messy insurgencies and inconclusive "operations other than war" in favor of conventional conflicts against regular armies. Saddam, believing the United States had no stomach for a conventional war bound to produce heavy casualties in the tinderbox of the Middle East, proved intractable. On the morning of January 17, 1991, phase one of Operation Desert Storm-the air campaign of what the world would soon know as the Persian Gulf War-began.