America's Battalion: Marines in the First Gulf War

25 The Years After

Captain, now Colonel, Molofsky was right—as were others of the 3rd Battalion , 3rd Marines who wished Saddam Hussein had been toppled in 1991 or who predicted that the job would have to be ¤nished at a later date. They had to wait for a dozen years for it to happen. The ¤rst Gulf War showed America and the world that we once more had a ¤rst-rate military organization and that we had the will to use it in the name of freedom and democracy. The immediate aftermath of the war, however , weakened that perception. For one thing, although the elder President Bush encouraged Saddam’s opponents to rise up against their oppressor, he left Saddam and his Baathist Party with the means to cruelly and effectively suppress any competition to their murderous regime. They took full advantage of this, and there is no evidence that their hold on power was ever seriously challenged. The United Nations and the United States did place restrictions on Saddam that remained in place for the period between the wars. One restriction was the establishment of no-®y zones in both the northern and southern parts of the country. Another restriction was the agreement with the Saudi government to leave U.S. forces on Saudi soil to provide an area presence and discourage Saddam from further adventures at the expense of his neighbors. This latter arrangement had far-reaching and tragic consequences when the presence of in¤dels on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia provided resentment in the Muslim world, particularly with its violent and antiAmerican agent Osama bin Laden. 25 / The Years After But this problem was yet to manifest itself. Less than two years after the stunning U.S. victory in the desert, the American public, whose thoughts were centered on the economy rather than on foreign affairs, rejected the reelection of President George H. W. Bush. The Clinton administration, with no experience in foreign policy, exacerbated the problem of America’s image in the Arab world with its seeming weakness of will. The debacle in Somalia in 1993 signaled to Saddam Hussein that he could play cat-and-mouse with American and U.N. restrictions. His forces sometimes signaled their de¤ance of the no-®y order by ¤ring on aircraft that were enforcing the policy. Then there was the question of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Before the 1991 war, the world had concrete evidence of Iraq’s WMD. Iraq had, without question, used them against Iran in their long, mutually disastrous war and against the Iraqi Kurds. Most important of Saddam’s de¤ant actions was his in®exibility regarding the U.N. inspection teams headed up by Dr. Hans Blix. The ¤nal ejection of the U.N. inspectors from Iraq rang alarm bells throughout the world. The echoes of these bells reverberated even louder after 9/11, when the United States had good reason to fear that a rogue nation like Iraq might pass WMD along to terrorists for use against the United States. Less than a year after 9/11, the world’s opposition to the Saddam regime was fractious. To much of the Muslim world Saddam was a hero, despite his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In the eyes of millions of Muslims, he was the de-¤ant leader against the colossus United States, which was, after all, still on sacred Muslim soil and the main supporter of the hated Jewish state. Among the nonaligned countries of the U.N., many were looking to trade opportunities with Saddam and were agitating for the lifting of sanctions. Of America’s traditional western “allies,” only Britain, through Tony Blair’s efforts, stayed the course. The Germans, whose avoidance of war is a by-product of our post–World War II policies, opted out early. The French, always on the lookout to make a quick franc, abandoned us for trade reasons and for their continuous quest for a French-dominated Europe. In March 2003 the denouement of the Baathist drama in Iraq began. Coalition forces, consisting mostly of U.S. and British military units, launched simultaneous ground and air attacks. Using maneuver warfare, and technology that had improved dramatically in the years between the wars, coaThe Years After 219 lition forces decimated or routed the Iraqi army in weeks. Over the next few months, Saddam Hussein’s murderous sons were located and slain when they refused...