ISIL conflict misses lessons of Gulf War
If there has been a “good” conflict in the Middle East, the first Gulf War may have been it.
Twenty-five years ago this week, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of force to oust Saddam Hussein’s invading troops from Kuwait. A few days later Canada went to war for the first time since Korea.
Between Jan. 17, 1991, when allied warplanes began to light up the night sky over Baghdad, and Feb. 28, when Operation Desert Storm ended with a massive four- day ground assault, CF-18 Hornets carried out 56 bombing missions against Iraq.
U.S. general Norman Schwarzkopf, who cut a far more dramatic figure than commanders such as Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus later did in Iraq and Afghanistan, had 956,000 coalition troops under his command. About 4,000 of them were Canadians.
Then- U.S. president George H.W. Bush’s sole goal was to liberate Kuwait. Although Bush the Elder was harshly criticized at the time, when that limited goal was achieved and the sheikdom’s saviours quickly went home rather than roll on to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam. The president’s son went all the way 12 years later during the second Gulf War, spawning a disastrous occupation that lasted until 2011.
Operation Friction, as the Canadians called the first conflict, was a watershed for Ottawa and for the country. For the first time in decades Canada moved away from the defence of western Europe and peacekeeping.
But in a typical Canadian compromise that finds its echo today in Canada’s involvement in yet another war in Iraq, the Mulroney cabinet, after intense internal debate, chose to only send warplanes to kill the enemy, rather than put boots on the ground. Three warships and a field hospital were also deployed.
Rules about how journalists were allowed to cover coalition forces were far more relaxed then. I was able to go on missions with USAF and RAF tankers that flew tracks above the Iraqi border to transfer fuel to fighter jets bristling with weapons.
Being airborne with the tankers and in the cockpit of an RCAF C-130 Hercules that landed in the sand to insert special forces troops into Iraq, provided a dramatic window on Schwarzkopf ’s vaunted left hook.
In the war’s signature strategic move, the swashbuckling American four-star suddenly veered more than 100,000 troops, tanks and attack helicopters far to the west to encircle Saddam’s army in Kuwait and southern Iraq.
There were lessons that Bush the Younger and his Svengalis, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, could have drawn from the first Gulf War that they did not. One, obviously, was that to avoid the kind of quagmire that followed the second Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was best to get in and out quickly.
The earlier conflict also proved the wisdom of the Powell Doctrine. Named for Colin Powell, the retired U. S. army general who was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Bush the Elder, it held that the U. S. should only become involved militarily if there was a clear, attainable objective and if it brought overwhelming force to the fight.
Schwarzkopf could call on more than 2,250 coalition aircraft. I witnessed aerial ballets that involved packages of as many as 70 warplanes at a time mustering around tiers of tankers before they blitzed Iraq.
Now, even with a U. S. aircraft carrier back on station in the Persian Gulf after a gap of several months, Gen. Lloyd Austin, the almost anonymous commander of the war against ISIL, has only about 200 warplanes and sorties seldom involve more than a few attack aircraft at a time. Other than a handful of advisers and special forces commandos, Austin has no ground troops at all.
Canada has greatly scaled back its combat contribution, too. It sent six aircraft to attack ISIL in Iraq and Syria last year compared to 26 in 1991. Forgetting the Powell Doctrine, the U. S., Canada and the rest of the West have devoted only a tiny percentage of their mili tary power to defeating ISIL.
The wrong lessons from 1991 have been drawn about the need for clarity of purpose and for adequate resources to achieve the desired result. Go all out or why bother.