U.S., Kuwait celebrate 20th anniversary of victory in Iraq

Stars and Stripes ^ | February 26, 2011 | By KEVIN BARON

[airborne]

You can thank RINO Colin Powell for talking Bush 1 into stopping before taking Saddam out.

[OldGoatCPO]

I personally went into Iraqi bunkers and saw ammo boxes from Russia and Jordan. These boxes had been shipped during Desert Shield, so they lacked Iraqi military markings and still had the country of origin markings. I was inside a Iraq T-55 Russian made tank and they flew French Mirage F-1 and Russian Mig-25. The Europeans were doing allot of business with Saddam before and after the war. If I remember correctly the French and Russian's made big money reconstructing he Iraq infrastructure and Comm systems after 91.

[OldGoatCPO]

I personally went into Iraqi bunkers and saw ammo boxes from Russia and Jordan. These boxes had been shipped during Desert Shield, so they lacked Iraqi military markings and still had the country of origin markings. I was inside a Iraq T-55 Russian made tank and they flew French Mirage F-1 and Russian Mig-25. The Europeans were doing allot of business with Saddam before and after the war. If I remember correctly the French and Russian's made big money reconstructing he Iraq infrastructure and Comm systems after 91.

[OldGoatCPO]

Good call Airborne, if it had not been for Strom’n Norman we would still be sitting there playing Desert Shield. Powell vacillated on attacking while Storm’n Norman tried to hold the dogs of war on a leash. God, was it good when he let go of the leash.

[Billthedrill]

I recall saying at the time that the decision to stop was a military blunder. The principal strategic objective, however, was to drive Saddam back out of Kuwait, and that objective was attained. The decision to cease prosecution of the offensive was not a military decision, it was a political decision. That is one of the prices we pay for the otherwise sound and indispensable policy of civilian control of the military: that sort of decision sometimes takes things into account that work against it in the long run. I think that the decision by Congress not to fund the South Vietnamese self-defense efforts after '75 was a similar phenomenon.

The Second Gulf War was not inevitable at the outset but it was made so by certain European financial interests and an international campaign against embargoes that allowed Saddam to rearm under the auspices of the Oil For Food program. These were fueled by doctrinaire anti-Americanism in the international media and on the Left that were happy to turn a blind eye toward Saddam's butchery if it meant the ability to shout against the United States. A number of these volunteered to act as human shields for important Iraqi installations and were shocked to find how cynically they were received. These same activists altered their tune shortly thereafter into one that still resounds among those with more ideology than historical memory: that George W. Bush "started" the war some 10 years after Desert Storm. People told practically anything incessantly will come to believe, or at least to repeat it.

I was no longer in uniform at the time but I was acting as a civilian contractor for the Navy. What I saw was a large, unwieldy international coalition that constituted the last gasp of international collective security, largely because the actors each brought his own agenda to the table with him. There were Syrian units on our side, for example, ostensibly out of fear that Saddam would turn his forces their way; in actuality pursuing their own interests with results we would encounter in country during the second Gulf War. Bush senior was and remains an internationalist at heart, and I believe, as his own testimony indicates, that the decision to halt the advance was made under internationalist precepts of order and collective security. I also believe that the current ruling class, both Republican and Democrat, consists nearly exclusively of internationalists who learned nothing but how to spin their own errors and deflect blame, and contributed materially to the hardship we later found in occupation.

It hardly seems like twenty years, though. My grateful thanks to those who dodged bullets while I was sitting safely on a ship; my apologies to their successors who had to do it all over again.

[MinorityRepublican]

Why didn’t W listen to his father?