One of Josh Marshall’s readers notes that there was almost no press about yesterday being the 20th anniversary of the start of the Persian Gulf War. I don’t know exactly why, but I can speculate about reasons that the Village might not be too interested in loud commemoration of that event.
While that war was certainly anything but perfect, it had a clear, circumscribed aim. It was backed by a real coalition of willing partners, it was executed quickly and precisely with overwhelming force, and there was no nation-building involved. We got in, accomplished a limited task, and got out with a minimum expenditure of blood and treasure.
Because the Persian Gulf War made a hard thing look easy, Villagers didn’t learn the real lessons of that war. In their eyes, the Gulf War became a failure because we didn’t get Saddam, and Iraq remained a dictatorship. Even though he accomplished the fairly rare diplomatic feat of uniting a disparate coalition of countries that committed significant resources, George H.W. Bush was a wimp because the agreement that led to the coalition kept us from a glorious march to Baghdad. Despite the clear success of the Powell Doctrine, Colin Powell was too timid because he didn’t endorse an occupation of Iraq. Only Dick Cheney was wise enough to understand that the real lesson of Iraq is that we need to do it again, and that made him tough and serious.
The events of the last ten years have shown that the Village narrative of the Persian Gulf War was upside-down, and the reason we’re not having a commemoration is because it would be yet another opportunity for Village accountability. Their inability to learn the right lessons from the Persian Gulf War was the first step in the long road to their endorsement of the current folly in Iraq, and you don’t celebrate a fuckup like that.
liberal
Funny that you have good things to say, when recently the Wikileaked April Glaspie cable came out.
balconesfault
One narrative that always drives me crazy when arguing with wingnuts over the invasion of Iraq is their insistence that the US was having to spend money patrolling the no-fly zone, conducting inspections, etc while Saddam was still in power.
By my guess, we could have continued on that course until about the year 2235 for the price tag that invading Iraq saddled us with.
And by the year 2235, I predict we have blown up 6,322 radar systems that had “locked onto” one of our fighter jets patrolling the no-fly, still with no loss of American aircraft.
Joey Maloney
It was also sold to the public with stovepiped lies and misinformation, and by some of the same players that brought us the more recent adventure. I’m sure no one wants to be reminded of that.
But I think the real answer is, it was twenty years ago. SQUIRREL!
Ash Can
The Village Idiots have multiple reasons to ignore the Persian Gulf War. The Pentagon and H.W. Bush Administration played the press like the National Symphony during the fighting — the celebration of the Patriot missiles intercepting Scuds was a prime example — and made the news guys look awfully silly across the board in retrospect. On top of that, the strategic success of the PGW does more to make W’s Excellent Iraqi Adventure — which was roundly cheered by the Villagers — look like the clusterfuck it was than anything else. The PGW is a big ol’ flashing neon sign that says “This is how it’s done, and you guys know you led cheers for an abysmal failure, don’t you?” Small wonder they’d just as soon sweep it under the rug — it rubs the Villagers’ noses in their own worst shortcomings.
gnomedad
@Joey Maloney:
You said it better than I was about to. Also, I think “SQUIRREL!” needs to become a tag.
Otherwise, a great, insightful post.
sal
Amen. brother.
MattF
Yup. I remember, in the period before George I made the final decision, I was literally stopped on the street in DC by an Italian tourist who berated me (along with, presumably, all other Americans) for not immediately going into Iraq and fixing things. That sort of encounter hasn’t happened again, not lately anyhow.
bob h
The war brought a massive American presence to Arab lands for the first time, and the subsequent stationing of Americans in Saudi Arabia set Osama bin laden on a collision course with us.
cleek
it’s also kindof in bad taste to celebrate the start of something horrible that hasn’t yet stopped, 20 years later.
gnomedad
“Once you got to Iraq and took it over … what are you going to put in its place?”
stuckinred
But, but, they were bayoneting babies in incubators. And, also too, we exorcised the ghosts of Vietnam on the Highway of Death.
RareSanity
I’m in Japan for the week, and the only English language channels available are, CNN International and BBC World. CNN has been showing this 5-7 minute, circlejerk of a montage, of how they covered the war. You know, back when CNN, resembled something of a news organization.
BBC has mentioned it a time or two, but they are absolutely enthralled with the happenings in Tunisia and the ex-dictator returning to Haiti…and soccer….lots of soccer…and Tom Brady losing.
I’m kinda surprised that the CNN montage hasn’t been airing in the States. Just another example of highly choreographed and filtered “news” we get in the good ole US of A.
stuckinred
After the cease fire was declared, McCaffrey ordered his unit, the 24th Infantry Division, to push forward to a point where it would be in between the retreating Iraqi forces, who were coming up from the south, and the northern direction they were headed. He did so without explicit orders from his superiors. This put the division in position to make contact with retreating Iraqi forces.
McCaffrey claims his division received fire from an Iraqi. Units of the 24th Infantry Division, under McCaffrey’s direction, returned fire in under the doctrine of self-defense, according to the book. The Iraqi forces engaged were destroyed.
[edit] New Yorker article
According to an article written by Seymour Hersh published in 2000 The New Yorker, General McCaffrey committed war crimes during the Gulf War by having troops under his command kill retreating Iraqis after a ceasefire had been declared. Hersh’s article “quotes senior officers decrying the lack of discipline and proportionality in the McCaffrey-ordered attack.” One colonel told Hersh that it “made no sense for a defeated army to invite their own death. … It came across as shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone was incredulous.”[1]
These charges had been made by Army personnel after the war and an Army investigation had cleared McCaffrey of any wrongdoing. Hersh dismissed the findings of the investigation, writing that “few soldiers report crimes, because they don’t want to jeopardize their Army careers.”
Hersh describes his interview with Private First Class Charles Sheehan-Miles, who later published a novel about his experience in the Gulf:
When I asked Sheehan-Miles why he fired, he replied, “At that point, we were shooting everything. Guys in the company told me later that some were civilians. It wasn’t like they came at us with a gun. It was that they were there — ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time.'” Although Sheehan-Miles is unsure whether he and his fellow-tankers were ever actually fired upon during the war, he is sure that there was no significant enemy fire. “We took some incoming once, but it was friendly fire,” he said. “The folks we fought never had a chance.” He came away from Iraq convinced that he and his fellow-soldiers were, as another tanker put it, part of “the biggest firing squad in history.”
bleh
Remember that the Villagers are all little boys in big boys’ trousers, forever wanting to be the star jock but forever doomed to be the smart but unappreciated nebbish. They never miss a chance to demonstrate how tough-and-manly they are by advocating the expenditure of other people’s blood and treasure.
They have an appreciative audience in people like them, or men well past their prime who similarly are trying to be something they’re not. But otherwise, they’re a blight.
tomvox1
@bob h:
Bingo. As with PGW II, the things that you think may make you more safe in the short term may do precisely the opposite in the long run. PGW I’s aftermath–i.e. establishing infidel military bases in Saudi Arabia–was a good old fashioned imperialist failure of long term strategic thinking, which led directly to enabling 9/11 and the massive cock up that was/is PGW II.
And still the serious military & strategic thinkers want to keep bases in Iraq for our future “security”… The inability to understand the psychology of the developing world after the combined lessons of Vietnam, PGW I & PGW II just boggles the mind. But when you don’t look back and you don’t analyze the repercussions of your actions, it’s all new and unforeseen, I guess.
I’m going back to bed…
tomvox1
Oh, and great FP post by mistermix, BTW–kudos.
agrippa
Desert Storm was a success. The operation accomplished the mission. Compare the two operations. Which one was a success; which one was a failure?
Alwhite
Of course they didn’t learn the actual lesson of the 1st Gulf war, it was not the lesson they wanted to learn. Instead they substituted the lesson they wanted to learn for the actual one thereby allowing them to do whatever they damn well please.
OT, really hate the new alternating colors
Lee
IIRC, there was a lot of talk of how bad of an idea it was to keep our forces in Saudi Arabia.
I’m assuming it was dismissed as hippie talk and said hippies were then punched.
de stijl
PGW1 gave Rumsfeld and Cheney an itch.
They scratched.
Resident Firebagger
@gnomedad: Yep. That’s the one thing about Cheney that really makes me curious — how he devolved from the guy who made those relatively sane remarks about Iraq in 1994 to the shit pile of pure evil he became by 2000 or so…
geg6
@bob h:
THIS.
Yes, Bush I was a vastly better preznit than his cursed progeny. But I have witnesses who can vouch for me that I said exactly this at the time. Funny how easy it is and always was to see for those who are not blind.
Edited to add: Ok, maybe I didn’t mention bin Laden’s name. But I did predict a freakout by the radicals among the area’s population. Completely foreseeable and inevitable.
kerFuFFler
I remember being struck when The Daily Show juxtaposed two clips of Cheney—-one in ’94 defending the decision not to go into Baghdad because it would have been a “quagmire”, and the other (2006 ?) when Cheney was defending the administration from charges of incompetence since the war was taking so much longer and costing so MUCH more than projected. In the latter clip, Cheney said something along the lines of, ‘nobody could have anticipated that this would have become such a quagmire.’
Told me everything I needed to know about Cheney. It also revealed a lot about the other news shows—-it seems like they should all have followed the Daily Show’s lead on that story, but I suspect their animus for Jon Stewart for parodying them kept them from following up on an important story.
de stijl
@Resident Firebagger:
I blame nu metal. It got him all aggro.
Balconesfault
That’s the one thing about Cheney that really makes me curious—how he devolved from the guy who made those relatively sane remarks about Iraq in 1994 to the shit pile of pure evil he became by 2000 or so…
Halliburton. In ’94 Cheney had the mentality still of a doctrinaire conservative, even trying to map a strategy to control military spending after the end of the Cold War.
In 2001, Cheney was the all-in tool of the military industrial complex.
rapier
America’s mostly quiet over support of Saddam’s invasion and war with Iran and it’s generous overt support highlight the enduring ugliness of real politik international style.
A million Iranians eventually died it is commonly reported and Iraq’s losses were I think in that ballpark. It’s difficult to get ones head around such numbers. It’s easy yet difficult to grasp how Americans from the political class to the lower class don’t give a rats ass. I’m too lazy to do the math on what those deaths would be in terms of population but try to imagine America’s grudge if several million were killed in a war launched by a foreign aggressor or a domestic politician for political gain. Well the second might never be acknowledged.
That’s a hopelessly unrealistic thought experiment for a few thousand deaths brought on by a known foreign state would mean their destruction by nuclear weapons. And Americans would cheer. They would cheer millions of deaths.
Are Iranians justified in hating America for its part in sanctioning Iraq’s war against it that caused a million deaths? The thought cannot possibly be asked in America but if it was the answer would have to be no. Surprisingly to this day I would guess that the average American hates Iran more than the average Iranian hates America.
Well I won’t ramble on any more about this odd calculus.
Jay C
Some reactions to the 20th-Anniversary-of-Desert-Storm post:
1. OMG! It HAS been 20 years! Thanks for the post mm!
2. OMG! It has been 20 years!
3. I think your reasoning behind the relative media amnesia about GWI is basically correct, BUT:
4. Unless I’m hugely misremembering the last couple of decades (always a possibility, unfortunately): as I recall it, the “revisionist” viewpoint about the first Gulf War (“GHWB was a wimp; shoulda gone on to Baghdad; Cheney a tough wise visionary“, etc) was pretty much a minority view; established mainly among the neocon/PNAC crowd – who, prior to the advent of the Bush 43 Admin., were far from being the unified and dominant foreign-policy voice in Washington. Except, of course, until the attacks of 9/11/01 gave the assh*les their unique opportunity to sell their neoimperialist jackoff fantasies to the Village (and the public). The expectation that 2003 would be a re-run of the quick-and-easy “cakewalk” of 1991 was mendaciously fabricated and sold (and, worst, yet, generally accepted); it’s no wonder that “The Village” wouldn’t want to remember it….
Chris
Funny thing is, not only Powell but Cheney and everyone in the Bush administration agreed not to go to Baghdad at the time. The reasons had nothing to do with timidity and were, in order of importance,
1) They didn’t think the American people had the stomach for a long war when our interests were no longer clearly at stake. (Copiously born out by the current Iraq war, as well as the Vietnam War that was still on everyone’s minds).
2) Destroying Saddam would have destroyed the only buffer separating our allies in the Persian Gulf from our enemies in Iran and Syria, who would have used the chaos in Iraq for their own ends (again copiously born out by the events of this war).
3) It would have fractured the international coalition (whose goals were laid out at the beginning of the war and didn’t include the siege of Baghdad).
4) Invading Iraq kills pretty butterflies and upsets liberal pansies.
As cold and heartless as they were, neocons in 1991 still thought with their brains instead of their balls, which is the main difference between then and ten years later.
Chris
@bob h:
And another funny thing is, at that point, people were still operating on the “Shi’a bad, Sunni good” principle, as they were for quite a while until Osama’s attacks in the 1990s forced the government to start realizing that it wasn’t that simple.
stuckinred
@Chris: Yea that explains my massacre’s at the end of Desert Storm.
Chris
As for why Cheney & co changed, lots of reasons, but I’d say a big one was the success of Gulf War I itself. In 1990, everyone was still wary of the Vietnam syndrome; we hadn’t won a major war since then and it made everyone cautious.
Desert Storm, OTOH, persuaded the neocons that everything was hunky-dory again and America could kick everyone’s ass (successes in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan only reinforced that notion). Hence the carefree attitude with which they supported going to Baghdad. Oops and oh shit.
Villago Delenda Est
On the subject of Cheney, recall that when he faced, as a young man, the chance of being a participant in his generation’s war, he repeatedly sought (and received) draft exemptions. Contrast with Al Gore and John Kerry.
Ditto George W. Bush, who found a nice safe NG unit to join that patrolled the dangerous US-Mexico border when John McCain was cooling his heels in a POW camp.
It’s said that one of the reasons John Wayne became such a super-patriot is that he missed, at the insistence of his studio, WWII, unlike say Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, and felt great guilt about it later. I know that I’ve talked with combat Marines of that era and they have nothing but contempt for John Wayne, who sat out the war in Hollywood and didn’t insist that he be allowed to join the war effort at the time.
So to with the Villagers. They missed their opportunity for war, now they’re making up for it…when they’re far too old to run any risk of actually putting skin into the game.
stuckinred
@Villago Delenda Est: And dat’s a fact Jack!
gene108
@rapier: You miss the bigger point about American-Iranian relations; the hostage crisis in 1979 was embarrassing. We cannot forgive them for that embarrassment, EVER!
Our position with Iran is simple: Never Forget, Never Forgive.
Only when the sufficiently humiliate themselves, will we consider normalizing relations.
PS
The First Gulf War was sold on lies, and nearly prevented by a large peace movement, of which I am proud to say I was part. The only credit I will give Bush the Elder is that he did go for a Senate resolution — which we nearly won: the vote was 52-47 (I just checked Wikipedia), with no less than 7 of the Yes votes citing a much-circulated rumor of baby-killing that was later proved to be false.
Actually, of course, it was a turning point for US engagement in that region from the use of diplomacy, bribes and threats to the active engagement of very large numbers of US troops that continues to this day and shows little sign of ending soon. It was a disaster, hidden behind a TV show of fake victory.
Our lords and masters cannot celebrate it without at least raising the possibility (mentioned above) that our actions, most specifically our bases in Saudi Arabia, provoked the reactions that led to the attacks of 2001. The only way they can maintain an illusion of their own goodness is to airbrush history. So they do.
joe from Lowell
@de stijl: He did it all for the nookie?
joe from Lowell
@Balconesfault:
A lot of people went a little nuts in the aftermath of 9/11. Most snapped out of it at some point, but some people are always watching the towers come down, and are pissed off at the rest of us.
mikeyes
I interviewed and treated 34 Republican Guard officers and soldiers while serving as a physician in the 41st CSH after their engagement with the 24th Infantry Division post cease-fire in 1991. None of them complained that they were fired upon first rather they viewed the battle as an accidental meeting of forces. These were the best troops that Iraq had at the time. They had the best training and the best equipment. The 24th ID was much better trained and had much better equipment so in that perspective it was a turkey shoot.
One of the best days of my life was when I heard the announcement that we were not going to take over Iraq. To a person we thought that if we did, we’d still be there 10 years later. By “we” I meant those of us who were in country at the time. It was well known that such an action would lead to the quagmire that Bush I abhored. When Bush II decided that we had to go to Iraq I opposed the notion as did a lot of Gulf War veterans. We had been there an in Viet Nam and knew better.
gmknobl
Going in may not have been a great thing but there was the Kuwait excuse that worked. Not getting Saddam was not good but coming in later was WAY worse. The biggest crime of the first gulf war? Telling people to rise up against Saddam then doing NOTHING to protect them. Shrub Sr., the Bush, has blood on his hands for that.
Scamp Dog
I’ll own up to thinking we blew it by not going into Baghdad the first time, thinking that it was going to be the kind of incomplete victory that WW I was. That part came true, but it’s because we weren’t smart enough to stay away, not because the situation forced us.
Plus I was naive enough to believe that we’d do things like plan for an occupation. Back then I thought our country was run by competent people. I now know better.