Let us begin with the most powerful: the United States. Whatever the imponderable long term consequences, the US victory in a war that it to a large extent desired goes far beyond the strictly military success — which was no surprise, almost without risks and certainly without any really merited military glory. Schwarzkopf is no more Montgomery than Saddam is Rommel. The coalition's military undertaking was, essentially, 95% a matter of air power and ballistics. In this area, the coalition's superiority was so overwhelming that it enjoyed near exclusive use of these means from the start of the battle. Apart from a handful of logically to the American Patriots and Scud missiles, which compared technoTomahawks are worth about as much as the German V2s of the Second World War, Iraq suffered, without any means of responding, a deluge of iron and fire which would have put an end to any land army submitted to the same treatment in the same conditions.
Playing video war games - with real victims
Thus, the coalition's land offensive, after more than five weeks of intensive bombing, was hardly more "heroic" than the mission of the pilots, who frankly 13 13 explained that they felt as if they were
March 18, 1991• #202 International Viewpoint women workers.
women workers.
GULF WAR playing video war games. The assault that began on February 24 was not, furthermore, a purely ground offensive, but a combined air-land operation. Alongside continued bombardment from planes and missiles went the Coppola-style charge of the "tank-killer" Apache helicopters. There was nothing original in all this. It was a 90s remake of the Nazi Wehrmacht's Blitzkrieg, with the immense advantage of complete control of the skies — an absolutely decisive factor in a desert war. Even if Baghdad had, despite everything, been informed (by the Soviet military for example of the movement of enemy troops preparing the "big surprise" promised by their commanders - that is, the deeper than originally intended breakthrough to the north and west of Kuwait — it would not have been possible for the Iraqi forces to take the necessary countermeasures.
This was not only because their command networks had been extremely disorganized, but also, and above all, because they could not make any move without air cover. Thus these forces had to passively and painfully submit to the hell that was unleashed on them for 40 days.
Coalition employs atrocious weapons
And hellish it was! After two weeks of bombing with indecisive results - shown by the Iraqi capture of Khafji on Saudi territory on January 30 — the US went onto a higher stage of violence, an "escalation" in the Vietnam tradition. As we predicted', the American bombing became less and less "surgical" and more and more devastating, with stepped up use of B-52s.
The troops massed in Kuwait and southern Iraq were systematically carpet bombed with weapons deceitfully categorized as "conventional". Among the more horrible of these, the fragmentation bombs, the massive 15,000 pound "daisycutters", napalm and fuel-air explosive
CBUs (cluster bomb units).
These killing machines, particularly the cluster bombs, already used in Vietnam, are more terrible than chemical weapons.