America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (19 page)

Iran reacted—as U.S. commanders had hoped—by committing its modest surface fleet to the fight. The Iranians arrived piecemeal, further dissipating their limited strength. The result was a turkey shoot.

The 265-ton gunboat
Joshan
charged in first. While managing to unleash a U.S.-made Harpoon missile at the cruiser USS
Wainwright
—it missed—the
Joshan
paid a steep price for its audacity. Employing an overwhelming combination of missiles and gunfire, the U.S. Navy sank it. Next on the scene came the
Sahand,
a small British-built frigate dating from the Shah’s era. Attack aircraft from the carrier
Enterprise
disabled the
Sahand
as well. The destroyer
Joseph Strauss
piled on, leaving the Iranian vessel, according to one American pilot, “a smoking piece of junk.”
⁴³
It too soon sank.

Last to arrive was the
Sabalan,
flagship of the Iranian fleet and notorious scourge of neutral shipping in the Gulf. JCS chairman Admiral William Crowe had issued very explicit instructions regarding the
Sabalan
’s fate: “Put her on the bottom.”
⁴⁴
Aviators from the
Enterprise
sought to comply. After sustaining numerous hits, the enemy ship was soon aflame and dead in the water.

Monitoring the fight from the Pentagon’s War Room, Crowe relented, deciding that “We’ve shed enough blood for the day.”
⁴⁵
With the concurrence of Frank Carlucci, Weinberger’s successor as defense secretary, he ordered U.S. forces to break contact. Defying American expectations, the
Sabalan
stayed afloat and was towed back to port. For Iran, this provided small consolation. Having suffered an estimated sixty killed in action and another hundred wounded, its navy had all but ceased to exist as even a minimally capable fighting force.
⁴⁶
U.S. casualties during Praying Mantis totaled two killed—the pilots of a Marine Cobra helicopter that crashed at sea due to undetermined causes.

In an action that had lasted all of eight hours, the forces under General Crist’s overall command had won a clear-cut tactical victory. That said, the event more closely resembled 1898’s Battle of Manila Bay than 1942’s Battle of Midway. So although Praying Mantis was subsequently celebrated as “the largest surface action since the Second World War,” this was akin to designating the no-name palooka reigning as today’s heavyweight champ the greatest fighter since Muhammad Ali.
⁴⁷
Even if accurate, such a claim serves chiefly as a reminder of how long it’s been since a real champion has graced the world of boxing.

Still, Praying Mantis did mark a turning point in the U.S. military’s involvement in the First Gulf War. Old inhibitions fell away in favor of a more assertive stance. On April 29, Carlucci signaled the change by declaring that henceforth, U.S. forces would protect
all
neutral shipping transiting the Gulf, not simply the reflagged Kuwait fleet.
⁴⁸
Then on July 3, as if to drive home the point that U.S. forces were done playing nice, the cruiser USS
Vincennes,
one of the navy’s most advanced ships, shot down Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus A300 with 290 passengers and crew aboard. None survived.

For authorities in Washington the downing of a commercial airliner did not come as welcome news. Yet much as Saddam Hussein had done after the
Stark
episode, they promptly consigned the incident to the category of regrettable mistake. As had Saddam, they attributed the outcome to the victim’s own actions. While “operating in international waters” and chasing down a swarm of small Iranian gunboats, the
Vincennes
had detected an unidentified aircraft flying outside of the corridor allocated for commercial air traffic and descending in what appeared to be an “attack profile.”
⁴⁹
Identifying the plane as an Iranian F-14, Captain Will Rogers III took measures necessary to protect his ship from harm. In doing so, he acted in accordance with what President Reagan called “our inherent right to self-defense.”
⁵⁰

In point of fact, however, the American version of events consisted mostly of untruths. The
Vincennes
was actually sailing inside Iranian territorial waters, thereby violating international law. Transiting the Gulf from Bandar Abbas, Iran, to Dubai on a regularly scheduled flight, the Airbus was flying well within its assigned flight path. Most important, rather than descending, the aircraft was gaining altitude. In short, the assertion that Iran Air 655 had been closing on the
Vincennes
and thereby posing a threat was flat-out wrong
.
If mistakes had contributed to the downing of the airliner, Captain Rogers and members of his crew had committed the bulk of them.

Even so, the Reagan administration suppressed any inclination to admit wrongdoing. What had occurred was an unfortunate mishap, not a crime, U.S. officials insisted. Running hard for the White House and with elections just months away, Vice President George H. W. Bush made his own position clear: He wasn’t about to send flowers to any Iranian memorial service. “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are,” he remarked. “I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”
⁵¹
Enlightened opinion largely agreed with the vice president: Rather than wallowing in remorse, the United States needed to finish the job. As
The New York Times
editorialized, in order to thwart the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary aspirations, the U.S. Navy had been providing “a shield behind which Iraq attacks Iranian oil tankers” without fear of retaliation. “The Airbus tragedy does not alter the validity of that strategy.”
⁵²
As the
Times
saw it, “the onus for avoiding such accidents in the future rests on civilian aircraft.”
⁵³
It was their job to steer clear of the U.S. military. Opinion polls suggested that the public shared this view.
⁵⁴

Not surprisingly, so too did the United States Navy. Upon investigating the incident, it concluded that “Iran must bear principal responsibility for the tragedy.”
⁵⁵

By extension, the captain of the
Vincennes
had acted appropriately—indeed, according to Admiral Crowe, had “conducted himself with circumspection.”
⁵⁶
In contrast to his counterpart on the
Stark,
Rogers evaded disciplinary action, finished his command tour, and even received a handsome decoration for duties well performed.
⁵⁷
Certainly, there was no blaming him for failing to defend
his
ship.

For his part, General Crist fully expected Iran to strike back. “It’s the old ‘Rambo’ thing—first blood,” he told a reporter. “The Iranians have paid for their attempts to interfere with our ships, and I think they would like to get back at us.”
⁵⁸
Instead, when less than three weeks after the shootdown the Ayatollah Khomeini agreed to accept a ceasefire with Iraq, American observers were quick to detect a causal relationship: Rather than eliciting retaliation, CENTCOM’s more confrontational stance had persuaded Iran at long last to concede. Here was a welcome demonstration of what American military power could achieve in the Islamic world. On this point, Weinberger himself was emphatic: “We had now clearly won,” he wrote in his memoirs. The United States had prevailed. Iran had conceded defeat. “We had accomplished everything we set out to do,” Weinberger bragged, with a momentous foreign policy success the direct result.
⁵⁹

Journalistic opinion concurred in this self-congratulatory verdict. “By blocking Iran’s move to intimidate Iraq’s allies in the Persian Gulf,” an approving
New York Times
editorial observed, U.S. forces had “played a critical role in ending the Iran-Iraq War.”
⁶⁰
The hawkishly liberal
New Republic
came to a similar conclusion. “In the name of free passage through the oil straits that Iraq had been the first to impede, the United States [had] intervened decisively, if not massively, against Iran.” Iran’s agreement to end hostilities amounted to “an admission that the Islamic revolution is finally spent.”
⁶¹
According to the conservative
National Review,
“Iraq [had] won the war” thanks “to the firmness of the Reagan Administration’s resolve.” While Operation Praying Mantis had “virtually wiped out the Iranian navy,” shooting down Iran Air 655 had provided “the straw that broke the Ayatollah’s back.”
⁶²
This much was certain: “Without our tilt toward Iraq, the Ayatollah might have won the war and destabilized the entire region.”
⁶³
Far-sighted action by Ronald Reagan had averted that prospect.

More than a quarter-century later, such judgments appear either naïve or obtuse. What lingers today from America’s undeclared war against Iran is the disconcerting symmetry of the twin incidents bookending the campaign. In using terms like
accident
or
tragedy
to describe the deaths suffered by the
Stark
and inflicted by the
Vincennes,
U.S. civilian and military officials at the time had sought to drain each event of moral or political significance. They were either oblivious to or simply chose to ignore the implications of writing off the American sailors killed by Saddam Hussein’s air force or the Iranian civilians killed by American sailors.

Yet these two episodes imparted to Washington’s preferred victory narrative a stain that the passage of time has done little to eradicate. U.S. military participation in this first of several Gulf Wars began with a mix of cynicism and betrayal. It ended with an atrocity. Long after Earnest Will, Nimble Archer, and Praying Mantis have disappeared down the memory hole, these discomfiting facts merit reflection.

In the event, the suspension of hostilities between Iran and Iraq offered Americans little reason to celebrate. Winning paid few dividends. If the United States intervened on Saddam’s behalf in hopes of promoting regional stability, then that intervention rates as an abject failure. If anything, U.S. military action produced the opposite effect, fostering new sources of instability destined to draw the United States more deeply into a costly and ultimately bootless military enterprise.

Back in 1917, Woodrow Wilson had promised Americans that sending Pershing’s troops to Europe would settle things. It didn’t. Wilson had erred. Soon enough, a second world war ensued. This entailed U.S. intervention on an even larger scale and cast a shadow over the epic victory said to have been won just two decades earlier.

Something of the same thing occurred with the First Gulf War. American claims that the forces under General Crist’s command had settled things proved sadly premature. Within a mere two years another war to determine the fate of the Persian Gulf erupted, Washington’s designation of Saddam-as-Hitler entailing U.S. intervention on a substantially larger scale. With the onset of the Persian Gulf War’s second phase, Americans simply chose to forget their involvement in the first. In forgetting, they learned nothing.

Through the first decade of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, a certain gingerly quality had characterized Washington’s approach to the problem at hand. The United States was in, but not all in. Indeed, through the Reagan era, the very nature of the problem that the U.S. military was expected to solve remained ill-defined. Commitments, therefore, tended to be both modest in scope and revocable.

Along with the CIA, the air force, navy, and Marine Corps had taken turns as Washington’s preferred instrument of policy. The United States Army, the largest of the services, had remained on the sidelines, preoccupied with commitments in Europe and Northeast Asia that dated back to the 1940s.

In 1990, that began to change, with the larger role now assigned to the army symbolizing that change. Wherever the American army shows up, it tends to stay awhile. In the wake of long-term commitments come enlarged ambitions.

Decades before, during the initial stages of the Cold War, the great moral theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had chided Americans about entertaining “dreams of managing history,” a temptation to which he deemed his countrymen peculiarly susceptible. “The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama,” he warned, “have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.”
¹
Now as the Cold War was winding down, Americans regarded themselves as exempt from such warnings. In Washington, managing history looked like job one, with military power the means of doing just that.