|
Nazar's PayPal Account |
|
Thank you for your donation.
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, 14 January 2009 21:49 |
|
Part One: The Beginning of the End The following paragraphs are the second half of the first part of the last section [the fall] of My book on Saddam Hussein , these complete the first part and it should be read with previous one, I am continuing this adventure on line because I am still short of a publisher, it is very clear that the publishing world is a closed shop and a very powerful one but I am very happy and content with the response and enthusiasm this adventure is receiving from a lot of people from allover the world. Enjoy it.
Saddam Three: The fall
The second half of the beginning of the end
THE Iraqi army started the invasion at exactly 2 AM [local time] on the 2nd of August 1990, 300 tanks backed by a 100,000 of the elite Republican Guards were pouring into the emirate towards Kuwait city, Kuwait’s armed forces which totaled about 16,000 were no match to the invaders and they were unable to present any serious resistance. The drive to the capital lasted about two hours but it was enough to alert the government to what was happening, it gave enough time to the emir and his immediate family and the al-Saba family and the government to leave their country in a fleet of armored plated Mercedes towards Tail in Saudi Arabia in what seems like a properly well rehearsed plan for that sort of situation. For the next 12 hours there was a fairly fierce resistance by few Kuwaitis like the one which took place between one the emir’s half brothers who was trying to defend the official residence of the ruler with a small bunch of soldiers who detailed to guard it they were able to stand their ground for nearly an hour but they were no match for their attackers and they were finally killed the emir’s brother on the steps of the palace, at this stage the resistance was soon crushed by the invaders and the city was subdued in a very short time.
THE outside world heard about what was happening from people who had access to mobile phones, but it became official when Baghdad radio released at 7:10 AM a statement claiming that God has helped the free men of Kuwait to depose the traitors who were ruling their country in the service of the Zionists and was participating in plots against their honest brethren in Iraq, they have the [Kuwaitis] appealed to the Iraqi leadership to support them from their torturers there was more in the statement which was apparently a hastily concocted lie made almost on the spur of the moment. The so called free and honest citizens never existed, it was a group of rogue officers who were in the service of his intelligence who have made the request after the occupation of the country has been completed but hell has already broken. The world was outraged and dismayed at the brutality and savagery of the invasion, condemnations started to come from all over the world, the position of the us administration was one of shock and disbelief, the president said this thing is not going to stand he called for an immediate withdrawal from the invading forces from the emirate and announced that the aircraft carrier USS Independence was heading to the gulf with a battle group, he also announced the freezing of Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets in the USS to prevent the outlaw regime from plundering it. Condemnations were coming from many other places from the British who also froze the two countries assets and called the invasion a threat to the stability of the area and to peace, from other countries who were hitherto more inclined to come to his side because of certain previous financial benefits were now forced under the pressure of world opinion to condemn his move, France the Soviet Union and Germany, also most of the Arabs excluding some of his apologetics who were to pay a great price for their hypocritical position at last and at the request of the us and Kuwait the united nations security council went into an emergency session after the end of it passed with a majority of 14 to one abstention Resolution 660 which condemned the invasion. Demanded that Iraq withdraw immediately and unconditionally all its forces to positions in which they were located on 1 August 1990. Calls on Iraq and Kuwait to begin immediately intensive negotiations for the resolution of their differences.
SADDAM did not blink he not only refused to comply with the resolution, he took all the foreign nationals in Kuwait and Iraq hostage, he ordered the mobilization of a million or so reservists and the popular army and began looting the 19th province and meanwhile he was trying to consolidate his grip on the occupied territories, Kuwait was officially annexed to Iraq and was declared the 19th province, he was saying we are going to stay here for a thousand years; he was continually pouring men and military hardware into it. But he was at the same time committing unbelievable atrocities and was engaged in a great robbery of the 19th province, the atrocities and the great robbery that Saddam has committed in Kuwait are a truly nauseating part of the truly nauseating history of the man and his regime. It was a history of rape and destruction of unbelievable scope and magnitude,
A YOUNG Iraqi operations theatre nurse who has worked for me fled the country to Kuwait because of the increasing difficulties and the problems resulting from the war with Iran, she was well trained and in a very short time she was nicely settled there in a big hospital, she was keeping in her small flat during the first days of the occupation a small family of Kuwaitis who were seeking shelter with her hoping that her Identity will provide them with some degree of protection, one morning a group of Iraqi soldiers were at her door demanding she hands them the Kuwaitis she was keeping in her flat, but in spite of her denials they burst into the flat and came out with the only male of the family a 14 years old boy, they dragged him into the street and in the presence of his mother and slightly older sister they shot him dead, his mother died immediately from a heart attack.
A NUMBER of republican guardsmen burst into the house of an Irish businessman who was sheltering three women three days after the invasion, the Irishman was held at gun point when the soldiers began raping the women one of them was pregnant and after four of the brave soldiers had finished with her they butchered her, a young conscript was staying at the back horrified by what was happening, he refused to participate but was forced by his officer to do it.
A DOCTOR was caught with a bottle of intravenous fluid in his pocket when he was leaving his hospital, he was accused of trying to help a member of the resistance he was shot in the back of his head in front of the kitchen staff, it turned out he was taking it home for someone in his own family who needed the drip.
A SHEIK was dragged out of his mosque had his beard torn off with a pair of pliers then beaten and shot and then his body was thrown in a garbage container in the street, they did things out in public it was a good lesson to the people a good way of frightening them, life in Kuwait has become so savage death became very common and familiar no one was able to do anything about it.
THE other major story is that of the looting and theft which was a well planed well organized and an extremely well executed operation, every ministry and all other government authorities was ordered to dispatch a team from its staff to go to its counterpart in Kuwait and bring back every thing that belonged to the corresponding ministry or authority in Kuwait. BUT what was happening to private property was even more outrageous, what was in the palaces that belonged to the emir his family and the Al-Sabah and the higher elements in the society were brought directly to the president and his immediate relatives and his cronies, the lower elements of the regime had to content themselves with a slightly less precious loot but still very grand. Kuwait was the store house for much of the northern parts of the gulf and the south of Iraq and Iran, everything was taken away. What was difficult to remove was destroyed on the spot. A complete list of what was robbed and destroyed is impossible to compile. Billions of dollars worth of anything that one can imagine, but all these billions went into the pockets of Saddam and his thugs and cronies, it was another misfortune which has dropped on the heads of the Iraqis who had to pay for them even when they were living under the very difficult conditions created for them by Saddam and the harsh sanctions regime which was imposed by the united nations.
ALL this time Saddam must have been blind to the military preparations which were proceeding against him, the Americans had evidently decided and from an early stage that the Kuwaiti crisis would not be solved by anything but force, and they were very carefully and slowly building a strike capability strong enough to guarantee the finishing of the job efficiently and in the shortest possible time, these preparations were associated with a very active diplomacy, there was during the first few days following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait a real fear that he might go on and attack Saudi Arabia and threatening its eastern oil rich provinces, so during a meeting of national security council on the fifth of august it was decided that the administration should send the defense secretary [Dick Cheney] to Saudi Arabia and convince its leadership to agree to the deployment of American troops in the kingdom for its own defense in case that became necessary, the Saudi king agreed to the proposal and allowed the stationing in his country of 250.000 Americans, operation desert shield has been inaugurated, but as the danger o the kingdom began to recede the administration was seeing the invasion of Kuwait as an opportunity to smash his military power and eliminate his weapons of mass destruction and reduce his threats to the region and from then on the military buildup continued until the storm erupted six months later.
SADDAM was playing now a very different game from that with Iran, he has claimed a great victory in that war, he has not won a clear victory then but he was also not defeated and a very good measure of that was he was now still in control of a very big army and was still in Kuwait, the Kuwaiti adventure was a completely different gamble it was a very high stakes poker a clear win there would have meant him sitting on more than a quarter of the world’s oil reserves, it would have given an unchallengeable position in the gulf and the middle east and beyond, it would have meant a real threat to Israel security and the vital interests of the united states in the area, so the united states was urging the united nations security council for more stringent resolutions so on the sixth of august resolution 661 was adopted which imposed very harsh sanctions on the country, to add more teeth to the resolution the Americans announced that they were boosting their military presence in the gulf, another aircraft carrier the USS Eisenhower was ordered to the gulf.
TO Saddam it was a matter of principle and practice to strike back when he was struck , but with the accelerating pace of the events and his and his pleasure in the progress of his activities in Kuwait and the celebrity status he was enjoying with the arrival of the ‘dignitaries’ he must have been blind to the storm which was gathering around him, the Americans seem to have decided early on in the crisis that that it is not going to be resolved by anything but force, and they were very slowly and quietly making intensive preparations to build a strike capability strong enough to guarantee the finishing of the job efficiently and in the shortest possible interval, but these military preparations were associated with an very active diplomacy, there was during the earliest days of the invasion real fears in Washington that following the capture of Kuwait Saddam would go on to occupy the Saudi Arabian oil fields in the oil rich eastern provinces of the kingdom, so during a national security meeting the us administration to send the defense secretary [Cheney] to Saudi Arabia to convince its leadership to agree to the deployment of American troops in their country for their own defense.
King Fahd agreed and allowed the stationing of 250.000 American troops in Saudi Arabia. Operation desert shield has been inaugurated. but as the danger to the kingdom began to recede the administration began to see the invasion of Kuwait as an ‘opportunity’ to smash his military power and eliminate his weapons of mass destruction and reduce his threats to the region and from then on the military build up continued until the storm erupted sixth months later.
BY late autumn there was a formidable military buildup in the desert but in spite of that president bush announced on the tenth of November a doubling of the American ground forces a 1.000 more tanks, the American’s have now adopted a different concept about war, it is going from now on to be a rapid strike using overwhelming power even more than what is necessary, gone were the Vietnam days when the united states would react to a military situation by a corresponding increase in its military assets there would now be an attack on the enemy’s capital which would target the its head and his decision making apparatus and his communications, but Saddam was still adamant and refusing to abide by the earlier demands of the international community for him to withdraw and return the stolen goods, so under a good deal of pressure from the united states government the united nations security council passed on the 29th of November under the clause seven of the charter resolution number 678 authorizing the use of force against him if he has not withdrawn by the 15th of next January. At that time he was gradually becoming convinced that the Americans were serious and meant business to which he responded by poring more men and equipment, he has recently mobilized 50 new divisions in the Kuwaiti theatre of operations but he was doing it on a very selective and a criminal basis, he was saturating Kuwait itself with men from the conscript army who were underfed, underpaid and very badly equipped and he left the other army his favorite, the elitist republican guards in the north of the KTO in a hopeless attempt to protect them from the coming storm.
THE skies were becoming increasingly cloudy and the possibility of war erupting were becoming a reality with every passing day, but there was still another diplomatic initiative, this was the president bush’s famous “going an extra mile for peace”, the president agreed to send the secretary of state, James Baker to Baghdad and to meet the Iraqi foreign minister in Washington for a last minute attempt at solving the problem, apparently that was not possible instead a hasty meeting between the two foreign ministers was arranged, the two would meet in Geneva on the 9th of January, the meeting was duly held on that day and the world kept its breath and when the meeting was taking longer than what was supposed people began to hope that a miracle may after all is going to happen, but the meeting was in fact doomed from the beginning with the Iraqis insisting on the United States taking the first step and agree to the already more than once refused Iraqi conditions and the Americans responding by saying that they were facing a formidable power and that they are prone to suffer a great deal to which now Saddam’s minister retorted by saying we know your power and we also know your war plan and the targets you intend to hit and refusing to accept a letter from the US President to his master and said that it was not couched in the kind of terms that one leader should use to another, the letter was left on the table at the same time his boss was barking in Baghdad that if the Americans would dare attack us we are going to make them swim in their blood, the two delegations returned home and the countdown to zero has begun.
THE mood in Baghdad was one of utter gloom and despair, they were thrust once more in a conflict in which they can only be losers, but they were at least hoping that the end of the coming war with bring with it the toppling of Saddam but they were in for another very nasty experience. The moment had arrived, at exactly 2.32 in the morning of the 17th January 1991, a tomahawk cruise missile was launched shortly after midnight from a second world war refurbished battleship the Wisconsin stationed near the eastern shore of Saudi Arabia a 1100 pounds of high explosives were heading towards a target in Baghdad, desert shield has turned into desert storm but it was worse than a storm it was a hell which has opened its doors, the first missile was followed by many others launched from ships in the gulf and the red sea and the Mediterranean, at the same time waves of the most modern aircraft in service anywhere in the world mostly American with a good number belonging to the allies were heading also towards pre-selected targets in Iraq and in Kuwait, the first targets were radar installations punching holes in the network around the country and communications and control centers which belonged to Saddam and his various residences and palaces but he has already fled into the darkness of the night like in his old days roaming the desert now in an old decrepit car and dressed in a peasant’s robe, the first aerial and missile attack lasted three hours 18.000 tons of explosives were dropped almost equivalent to the destructiveness of the atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima during the last days of the second world war.
THE air war lasted 38 days, Saddam has always boasted that a military confrontation cannot be won by air power but he was again absolutely wrong because the ground war which followed it was a great anti-climax because when it began his forces had fallen from a high of around 600.000 to a little more than 300.000 with practically all the tanks artillery pieces and armored personnel carriers in Kuwait itself were destroyed and has lasted only a 100 hours. The ground war began on the 24 of February but here again Saddam has made a very stupid mistake, he thought that the Americans would attack from the see where there was a fight there, a diversionary attack by U.S. Marines into southeastern Kuwait, but this was coupled with a huge outflanking move in the desert to the west of the Iraqi positions [the famed left hook] by one of America’s best fighting units the VII corps supported by a British and a French division which within four days have traveled about 400kms and then turning sharply to the right towards Kut thus encircling all the armed forces which were stationed south of Baghdad and were now threatening the capital itself. When the ground war came many of Iraq’s frontline divisions the conscripts army has disintegrated in a mass of surrender and flight put there were still the elite but these were now also useless they were trapped. But now another bizarre chapter in this drama was unfolding.
THE masses of Iraqi soldiers who were fleeing the battle were being subjected to a horrifying assault from the air when thousands of soldiers died and a huge number of weapons and vehicles lying destroyed on the Kuwait Basra road which was designated the highway of death which prompted the president to order a halt to the allied attack but a day later he said that the Iraqi people should put him aside and that would facilitate the solution of all these problems a bit later on the night of Friday march 1 the Shi’ite uprising erupted in Basra and now when the uprising in the south which was followed two days later by a similar uprising by the Kurds in the north, and when a lot of people were expecting the forces amassed less than 200kms south of Baghdad to start marching northwards to finish the regime there was a cease fire. Now it was Sunday, march 3 a group of eight Iraqi officers arrived at a tent in an air base in southern Iraq captured a week ago by the Americans called Safwan they were received by General Schwartzkopf who was very polite and respectful and instructed his staff not to embarrass them in any way, they were presented to the leading figures accompanying the American who were the Saudi commander, the British commander, the chief of staff of the Kuwaiti armed forces and some others. the whole meeting lasted for a little more than one hour and a cease fire agreement was signed in a hurry the Iraqis had undergone a horrifying experience and they were in a great hurry to leave.
ANOTHER war has been lost, a terrible adventure has failed with a colossal loss in human and financial assets even greater than those incurred during the Iran Iraq war, all his calculations and assumptions before the beginning of the hostilities in this conflict proved to be miscalculations and false assumptions, the mother of all battles was in fact the mother of a great tragedy it was followed by an even greater suffering and misery to the Iraqis having to endure an extra dozen years of his tyranny and have to pay hundreds of billions as reparation for the destroyed and stolen Kuwaiti assets, the Kuwait robbery was undoubtedly the greatest robbery in the whole history of theft and crime.
BUT now and in spite of all the hardships f his people and his very difficult financial situation, now he had turned his attention to his own people he was murderously crushing the twin uprisings in the south and the north of his own country aided by the united nations sanctions which were supposed to be a means of weakening his grip but were in fact becoming a very significant weapon in his war against his own people which has just started in the north and the south. President Bush’s decision to stop the Kuwait war is said to have been taken for the following reasons; The mandate by the united nations to go to war was only about the liberation of Kuwait except in case Saddam used weapons of mass destruction against the coalition forces or if he burned the Kuwaiti oil fields, he did not use WMDs but he burned the oil fields and polluted the gulf waters with hundreds of thousands of crude oil but there was still a cease fire.
IT was claimed by the administration that they had made no contingencies for an Iraq under their occupation they would lack the necessary logistical elements to run the country and feed the population they have not made any previous arrangements for that eventuality and they were also assuming that the Iraqis themselves would be able to take care of him now that he has been so greatly enfeebled he would not be capable of holding to power for much longer, one day before the war ended President Bush said the Iraqi people should put him aside and that would facilitate the solution of all these problems. It was very well known that the Saudis were advising that a fragmented Iraq with the south under Shi’ite domination would automatically bring fundamentalist Iran to their backdoor, a Shii regime in the south in the Saudis opinion was extremely likely to fall under the direct influence of Tehran.
THESE were the most popular reasons for the decision to stop the war but there are almost other hidden ones a decision which continued to haunt president Bush even after he left office and especially during the succeeding years when Saddam was playing his famous cat and mouse games with the Americans, but whatever were the reasons which dictated the cease fire decision it was a great disappointment to the Iraqis. The Iraqis were hoping that the war in spite of the great damage it has caused to their country it would at least get them rid of Saddam and his brutal regime, they have been suffering a terrible existence under his rule for more than twenty years, they were hoping that the end of the war will bring them a second chance for a better life under a more humane conditions, but the cease fire has given the second chance to their torturer and allowed him to stay at the top and to continue his torturing of his own people which he was doing now with more brutality and vengeance now that he was being aided in that endeavor by the un sanctions which were imposed as punishment because of his crazy adventure in Kuwait but were now one of his best weapons in his vindictive campaign of impoverishment and terror against the people to ensure his survival a great deal of that suffering was perceived by the Iraqis to be falling on their heads because of the American decision to stop the war short of toppling him.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Berkley, Michigan
Email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
|
|
|
|
