America At War - Concise Histories Of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexington To Afghanistan (37 page)

In 1975, the army of South Vietnam still had many men under arms. While underequipped due to cutbacks in U.S. military assistance, the ARVN was battle-tested and seemingly capable of stopping the invaders. Most American commanders thought the army would put up a good fight.

They were wrong.

In perhaps one of the more dismal performances by any army in the twentieth century, the ARVN, when confronting the NVA, quickly collapsed. True, some units fought well, but overall, southern forces easily gave way to the troops of the north. When NVA tanks broke into Saigon’s presidential palace on April 30, 1975, the war was over. South Vietnam, a country the United States, with its blood and treasure, had tried to keep afloat, ceased to exist.

The cost of America’s failure was high. The war’s memorial in Washington, D.C., a stark but compelling black wall, lists the names of 58,261 men and women who died in Vietnam. Their sacrifice appears to have been in vain.

Why did the United States lose the war in Vietnam?

Losing a war requires a definition of winning. In the case of Vietnam winning meant convincing the North Vietnamese to stop its efforts to overthrow the government in Saigon. Said another way, winning for the United States meant securing the independence of the South Vietnamese, enabling their government to be both sustainable and free. Unfortunately for America, Rolling Thunder and the two Linebacker campaigns did not persuade the regime in Hanoi to back off. Neither did the presence of more than half a million American troops.

But the underlying cause of America’s defeat, its first in a military history generally characterized by victory, was a matter of political will. The regime in Hanoi was more determined to succeed, more willing to persevere, more accepting of casualties than its counterpart in Washington. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon led a country that soon tired of the war in Vietnam. The United States lacked the stomach to make the sacrifices required. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, based in Hanoi, did not.

Could the United States have won the war in Vietnam?

Whether the United States could have won is, of course, a matter of conjecture. Academics such as George Herring, author of
America’s Longest War
, believe the war was unwinnable. They point to the lack of political cohesion among the South Vietnamese, to the inept leadership of the ARVN, and to the American public’s unwillingness to accept casualties. These academics make a strong case.

But so do those who believe victory was possible. These tend to be military men, who argue that the war was fought incompetently, especially from 1965 to 1967, when the North Vietnamese were not as strong as they became in later years. These men note that had U.S. political leaders done what the country’s military commanders advocated, the outcome would have been different. The American commanders in Vietnam wanted to hit Hanoi and Haiphong early in the war. They wanted to strike the Communist sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. They wanted to land marines halfway up the coast of North Vietnam, thereby splitting the country in half. Had the United States taken these actions, military leaders contend, the Communists would have been forced to halt their aggression in order to focus on the more immediate threat to Hanoi.

Whom to believe? The military men are correct in stating that America fought the war in a limited way. Why? Because as this narrative has stated, Lyndon Johnson did not want a repetition of the Korean experience, where hordes of Chinese soldiers crossed the border and crushed an American army. Whether the Chinese would have done so in Vietnam cannot be known for certain. Had the Chinese intervened, however, it is not unreasonable to believe that America’s armed forces would have been able to contain them.

Yet the academics too have a valid point. The government in South Vietnam was not effective and the people there lacked political cohesion, democratic traditions, and allegiance to the state. But with more—and smarter—persistence on the part of the United States, could not a sustainable government in the south have been established? Probably so.

How then to answer the question? Could the United States have won?

America’s war in Vietnam, this author believes, could have been won early on, by the more forcible application of military might. But victory was achievable only early on in the conflict, before the NVA gained in strength and before the American people grew weary of body bags. As it is now, the United States was then a military superpower, but its citizens’ willingness to accept battle deaths was and is such that victory must be quick, before casualties mount. Otherwise, the country cedes the outcome to its opponent.

10

THE GULF

1990–1991

Late in July 1990, Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq, personally assured Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, that despite the deployment south of Iraqi troops to the country’s border with Kuwait, he was not going to invade his much smaller neighbor. Foolishly, Mubarak believed Saddam. Why? Because, in addition to the Iraqi’s pledge, there was a tradition that Arab countries did not make war on fellow Arab nations. Saddam, of course, had lied. On August 2, 1990, one hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers, led by tanks of the Republican Guard, the Iraqi army’s elite force, crossed over the border, easily pushing aside Kuwait’s outmatched armed forces.

Once in control of Kuwait, Saddam increased the number of troops and again redeployed them south, this time to the boundary Kuwait shares with Saudi Arabia. Rightly alarmed, the latter’s rulers quickly agreed to consultations with America’s secretary of defense. This was Dick Cheney, who brought with him satellite images of Iraqi units massed along the border. These images confirmed the very real threat Saddam’s army posed to the Saudi kingdom.

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia was in a difficult position. He knew his conservative Islamic countrymen would object to American military forces being stationed in the kingdom. But the king also understood that the Saudi military was ill-prepared to stop the Iraqis should Saddam again order his troops into battle. The king and his advisors believed that if asked, the United States would come to the rescue of Saudi Arabia. No doubt, they were aware of a letter received earlier from an American president:

I wish to renew to Your Majesty the assurances . . . that the United States is interested in the preservation of the independence and territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia. No threat to your Kingdom could occur which would not be of immediate concern to the United States.

The president was Harry S. Truman. The letter was dated October 30, 1950, and delivered to Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, then king of Saudi Arabia. Much later, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan would write similar letters. These, like Truman’s, merely echoed a pledge made to the Saudis in 1945 by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Why did American presidents make such statements? The answer is simple. The pledges reflect a simple, well-understood deal: in return for a Saudi commitment to provide a continuous supply of oil to America and the West at a reasonable price, the United States would guarantee the independence of the Saudi kingdom. It was an arrangement that served the interests of both countries.

Before requesting America’s protection, King Fahd laid down three conditions. The first was that U.S. forces would leave the kingdom when requested to do so by the Saudis. The second was that the Americans would not initiate combat operations without first obtaining his permission. The third condition, one on which the king placed great importance, was that American soldiers in Saudi Arabia would respect the Saudi way of life. With President George H. W. Bush’s concurrence, Cheney accepted the king’s conditions. The secretary of defense then set forth one of his own. He said that the Saudis would have to pay for the costs of maintaining U.S. troops in the desert kingdom. When the king agreed, the stage was set for the deployment of American troops to Saudi Arabia.

The first soldiers to arrive were from the 82nd Airborne Division, one of America’s most elite combat units. In 1990, the 82nd was the U.S. Army’s on-call division, constantly ready to ship overseas should the need arise. On August 7, one of the division’s three brigades flew to Dhahran, a Saudi city on the Persian Gulf that became the port of entry for soldiers ordered to Saudi Arabia. A week later, more than twelve thousand troops had arrived. These were complemented by U.S. marines, whose number eventually would grow to forty-two thousand.

While American military personnel were transported to Saudi Arabia by air, their equipment came by sea. The United States had prepositioned military equipment aboard ships stationed in several locations around the world. These vessels, and others, were ordered to the Persian Gulf so that fairly soon after the troops arrived, so did their equipment.

At first, as the buildup began, U.S. troops would not have been able to stop a determined Iraqi attack. Jokingly, the troopers of the 82nd called themselves “Iraqi speed bumps.” Their presence was symbolic. They represented America’s commitment to defend Saudi territory. As their numbers increased, and as military aircraft flew in, naval vessels took up station, and the U.S. presence in the Gulf region became formidable. By November, it had grown to comprise well over two hundred thousand men and women. That month, Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s top military officer, told President Bush that the U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia were sufficient to defend Fahd’s kingdom. The operation to build up the force and make it ready to fight had been given the name Desert Shield.

In command of all U.S. forces in the Gulf was Norman Schwarzkopf. He was a four-star general in the American army, the highest rank possible (in World War II Congress had established five-star generals, of which during the conflict there had been only four: Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Arnold). Officially, Schwarzkopf headed up Central Command. This was one of six joint commands the United States had established to cover large geographic areas. Encompassing nineteen countries, Central Command focused on the Arabian Peninsula and adjacent waters. At the time, it was the least prestigious of the six.

Schwarzkopf was a good choice for the job. During World War II his father, an army officer, had been stationed in Persia administering Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union. As a youngster, Schwarzkopf had spent time there, so he was knowledgeable of the Middle East geography and comfortable with Arabian culture. As chief of Central Command, Schwarzkopf would prove more than capable of handling the diplomatic chores of his position. And, as we shall see, he also knew how to plan a war.

Previously, Central Command had focused on a possible invasion of Iran by the Soviet Union. Prior to Schwarzkopf’s arrival that had been seen as the most likely scenario requiring a U.S. military response. Schwarzkopf, however, realized this scenario was no longer realistic. Once established in Florida, where Central Command was located, the general decided to have his planners take a new tack. “I was determined that the scenario . . . would be one in which the enemy was not the Soviet Union, but Iraq.”

***

Two factors explain why General Schwarzkopf identified Iraq as a threat to U.S. interests within the lands assigned to Central Command. The first was the ruler of Iraq himself. Saddam, a thug, was someone who had little respect for the lives of others. Ruling through fear and intimidation, he considered war a tool of statecraft and was unfazed by the resultant loss of life. Moreover, Saddam was unpredictable. What made no sense to an American general such as Schwarzkopf might well seem appealing to the leader of Iraq.

The second factor causing Central Command to redirect its war plans was the Iraqi army. With 1.1 million men under arms, this was the fourth largest army in the world. Well equipped with tanks and field artillery, the army numbered far more than the defense of Iraq required. Additionally, Saddam’s army was battle-tested. It had fought—and fought well—an eight-year war with Iran. Its units, especially the Republican Guards, were comfortable with combat, not just with parades in Baghdad.

One aspect of Saddam’s military was of particular concern to Schwarzkopf, indeed to any opponent of the Iraqi army. This was its possession of chemical weapons and the willingness to use them. Saddam had employed such weapons against his own people. No doubt, he would be willing to use them in a battle against an enemy force. When the Gulf War began in 1991, nothing worried Norman Schwarzkopf more than the chemical weapons he expected the Iraqis to use against his troops.

Having had their numbers increased shortly after the invasion of August 2, by the following January the Iraqi forces in Kuwait numbered 545,000. This was no token force. It was equipped with several thousand tanks and more than three thousand pieces of artillery. Many of the tanks were Russian-built T-72s. While not the Soviet Union’s top tank, the T-72 was well armored, had a powerful main gun, and in trained hands was a weapon to be reckoned with.

Saddam’s army in Kuwait was positioned to repulse any effort to dislodge it. Most of the troops were massed along Kuwait’s border with Saudi Arabia. Others fortified the Kuwait coast. There also were Iraqi troops in the west, but Saddam did not expect an attack from that direction because an invading force would have to maneuver through miles and miles of desert, something the Iraqi leader thought would be extremely difficult.

The Iraqi army considered itself expert in defensive warfare and with good reason. In the war with Iran, the Iraqis had constructed an array of integrated defensive positions that effectively repulsed many an Iranian assault. In Kuwait, in preparing for a possible attack from the south, the Iraqis built extensive fortifications. They laid down minefields. They rolled out barbed wire. They established supply depots. They constructed oil-filled trenches (to be set afire when the enemy approached). They dug antitank ditches. And they bulldozed large sand berms behind which partially hidden T-72s were deployed. Further, and importantly, they prelocated artillery “kill zones” onto which would rain massive amounts of explosives from the much vaunted artillery of the Iraqi army. Together, these obstacles created a military barrier that no invading force could take lightly.