America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (68 page)

Read America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History Online

Authors: Andrew J. Bacevich

Tags: #General, #Military, #World, #Middle Eastern, #United States, #Middle East, #History, #Political Science

 50.
Schwarzkopf’s deputy, Lieutenant General Calvin Waller, describes the process of drafting the terms of the ceasefire: “Norman Schwarzkopf said, how do we make this happen, what do we do, and we had a State Department representative in our war room and he said to the State Department representative, what is it we’re supposed to do, Mr. State Department rep., and the State Department rep. gave what we called the Iraqi salute, he didn’t know, so Schwarzkopf asked for his stenographer to come in and sat him down next to him, he turned in his chair and started dictating to him things that he thought, someone would think of something…and give him a little note, he in turn would read that note and, you know, phrase a sentence or a paragraph or whatever needed to be phrased in the proposed document, the navy yeoman went off and typed it up, brought it back in, and he made some slight modifications to it and then we sent it off to the Pentagon and the State Department—that’s how it was done.” “Oral History: Calvin Waller,”
Frontline,
pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/waller/1.html
, accessed January 2, 2015
.

 51.
Schwarzkopf,
It Doesn’t Take a Hero,
480, emphasis in original.

 52.
Schwarzkopf,
It Doesn’t Take a Hero,
483, 488–89.

 53.
Schwarzkopf,
It Doesn’t Take a Hero,
473–74.

 54.
Friedrich, ed.,
Desert Storm,
1, 3.

 55.
Susan Baer, “Millions Attend Ticker-Tape Parade,” Baltimore
Sun
(June 11, 1991).

 56.
Tom Clancy with General Fred Franks Jr.,
Into the Storm
(New York, 1997), 487.

 57.
Bill Clinton, “A New Covenant for American Security” (December 12, 1991).

 58.
Richard H. P. Sia, “General H. Norman Schwarzkopf: A Man Wise in the Ways of War,” Baltimore
Sun
(March 10, 1991); Ellen Goodman, “The New Model Male,”
Chicago Tribune
(March 17, 1991); “Schwarzkopf of Arabia,”
Richmond Times-Dispatch
(March 8, 1991); T. Mathews, “A Soldier of Conscience,”
Newsweek
(March 11, 1991); R. Watson, “After the Storm,”
Newsweek
(March 11, 1991).

 59.
Jim Kirksey, “Coloradan to Seek 5 Stars for Schwarzkopf and Powell,”
The Denver Post
(March 4, 1991).

 60.
George Bush and Brent Scowcroft,
A World Transformed
(New York, 1998), 486–87.

 61.
Gordon and Trainor,
Generals’ War,
435–38.

 62.
Thomas Friedman, “Selling Sacrifice: Gulf Rationale Still Eludes Bush,”
The New York Times
(November 16, 1990).

 63.
Robert Fisk,
The Great War for Civilization
(New York, 2006), 646–47.

 64.
George Bush, “The President’s News Conference on the Persian Gulf Conflict” (March 1, 1991).

 65.
Bush, “The President’s News Conference on the Persian Gulf Conflict” (March 1, 1991).

 66.
Ann Devroy and Molly Moore, “Winning the War and Struggling with Peace,”
The Washington Post
(April 14, 1991).

 67.
William Safire, “Bush’s Bay of Pigs,”
The New York Times
(April 4, 1991).

 68.
Jim Hoagland, “Monumental Folly,”
The Washington Post
(March 29, 1991).

 69.
Charles Krauthammer, “It’s Time to Finish Saddam,”
The Washington Post
(March 29, 1991).

 70.
“Oral History: Richard Cheney,”
Frontline.

 71.
Mary McGrory, “Bush’s Peace Problems,”
The Washington Post
(March 26, 1991).

 72.
Bush and Scowcroft,
World Transformed,
383–84.

 73.
For further elaboration on this point, see Andrew J. Bacevich, “The United States in Iraq: Terminating an Interminable War,” in
Between War and Peace,
ed. Matthew Moten (New York, 2011), 302–22.

 74.
George Bush, “Statement on Aid to Iraqi Refugees” (April 5, 1991). The United States owed Turkey. During Desert Storm the Turks had allowed U.S. forces to launch air strikes from Turkish bases.

 75.
“Oral History: Dick Cheney,”
Frontline.

 76.
“Oral History: H. Norman Schwarzkopf,”
Frontline.

 77.
Powell,
My American Journey,
532.

 78.
George Bush, “Remarks to the American Legislative Exchange Council” (March 1, 1991).

8. Good Intentions

 1.
Ann Devroy and Molly Moore, “Winning the War and Struggling with Peace,”
The Washington Post
(April 14, 1991).

 2.
In all, between early April and mid-July of 1991, air force transports supporting Operation Provide Comfort delivered some seven thousand tons of supplies. Daniel L. Haulman, “Crisis in Iraq: Operation Provide Comfort,” in
Short of War: Major USAF Contingency Operations,
ed. A. Timothy Warnock (Montgomery, 2000), 181–82. Army and Marine helicopters delivered additional supplies. Ronald T. Brown,
Humanitarian Operations in Northern Iraq, 1991
(Washington, D.C., 1995), 26–30. This monograph is the official U.S. Marine Corps history of Provide Comfort.

 3.
“Operation Provide Comfort II,”
globalsecurity.org/military/ops/provide_comfort_2.htm
, accessed January 12, 2015.

 4.
In 1996, this no-fly/no-drive area expanded to the 33rd Parallel just short of Baghdad.

 5.
William J. Allen, “Crisis in Southern Iraq,”
Short of War,
189–95.

 6.
Allen, “Crisis in Southern Iraq,” 195.

 7.
For more on the Israeli concept of “current security,” see Eliot A. Cohen, Michael J. Eisenstadt, and Andrew J. Bacevich,
Knives, Tanks, and Missiles
(Washington, D.C., 1998), 71–73.

 8.
Frank Bajak, “U.S. Airplanes Inspect the Damage from Raid,”
Deseret News
(January 14, 1993).

 9.
For a detailed description of these encounters, see Paul K. White,
Crises After the Storm
(Washington, D.C., 1999), 15–28.

 10.
Andrew J. Bacevich,
American Empire
(Cambridge, 2002), 152.

 11.
For details, see
Operation Provide Comfort: Review of U.S. Air Force Investigation of Black Hawk Fratricide Incident,
a report prepared by the United States General Accounting Office and published in November 1997,
gao.gov/archive/1998/os98004.pdf
, accessed January 14, 2015.

 12.
The 9/11 Commission Report,
60; “Al Qaeda Is Now Suspected in 1996 Bombing of Barracks,”
The New York Times
(May 14, 2003); “Perry: U.S. Eyed Iran Attack After Bombing” (June 6, 2007),
upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2007/06/06/Perry-US-eyed-Iran-attack-after-bombing/UPI-70451181161509/
, accessed January 12, 2015. This United Press International dispatch quotes William Perry, U.S. secretary of defense at the time of the bombing, as saying that “the Khobar Towers bombing was probably masterminded by Osama bin Laden.” Al Qaeda was clearly linked to the earlier November 13, 1995, bombing in Riyadh that killed five Americans involved in training the Saudi National Guard.

 13.
The June 1993 attack, the first military action ordered by the recently inaugurated President Bill Clinton, was in retaliation for a foiled Iraqi plot to assassinate his predecessor during a visit to Kuwait. The December 1998 episode, Operation Desert Fox, was punishment for Saddam’s refusal to cooperate with UN arms inspections teams.

 14.
John L. Hirsch and Robert B. Oakley,
Somalia and Operation Restore Hope
(Washington, D.C., 1995), 3–24.

 15.
Hirsch and Oakley,
Somalia,
25.

 16.
“Don’t Forsake Somalia,”
The New York Times
(November 4, 1992).

 17.
“End Somalia’s Anguish,”
The Christian Science Monitor
(November 30, 1992).

 18.
Richard Stewart,
The United States Army in Somalia, 1992–1994
(Washington, D.C., 2002), 9.

 19.
George Bush, “Address to the Nation on the Situation in Somalia” (December 4, 1992).

 20.
Hirsch and Oakley,
Somalia,
46.

 21.
“Think Three Times Before You Embrace the Somali Tarbaby,”
U.S. News and World Report
(December 14, 1992). This reprints excerpts of Hempstone’s cable.

 22.
Michael R. Gordon, “Envoy Asserts Intervention in Somalia Is Risky and Not in Interests of U.S.,”
The New York Times
(December 6, 1992).

 23.
Michael R. Gordon, “TV Army on the Beach Took U.S. by Surprise,”
The New York Times
(December 10, 1992).

 24.
Hirsch and Oakley,
Somalia,
63–64. UNITAF was an acronym for United Task Force.

 25.
The quote is from Rear Admiral Mike W. Cramer, an intelligence officer with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifying before a Senate committee. U.S. Senate, Committee on Armed Forces,
Joint Chiefs of Staff Briefing on Current Military Operations in Somalia, Iraq, and Yugoslavia
(January 29, 1993).

 26.
Hirsch and Oakley,
Somalia,
69–70.

 27.
Quoted in Julia Preston, “U.N. Establishes Force for Somalia; All but 9,000 U.S. Troops to Leave by May,”
The Washington Post
(March 26, 1993).

 28.
Approximately four thousand U.S. troops were to remain in Somalia as part of UNOSOM.

 29.
“Interview: General Thomas Montgomery (Ret.),”
Frontline,
pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ambush/interviews/montgomery.html
, accessed January 18, 2015.

 30.
UN Security Council Resolution 837 (June 6, 1993).

 31.
“Review of the Circumstances Surrounding the Ranger Raid on October 3–4, 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia” (September 29, 1995), 19. This document provides the results of a U.S. Senate inquiry into the Somalia intervention. It is commonly referred to as the “Warner-Levin Report” after its principal authors, Senators John Warner (R-VA) and Carl Levin (D-MI).

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