CHAPTER 15
By the middle of January 1991 the little settlement of Al-Khafji on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border was a ghost town. Life in the northeastern corner of Saudi Arabia had grown ever more hectic as preparations accelerated for the U.S.-Saudi military campaign to recapture Kuwait. But Al-Khafji stood deserted—a peppering of empty, angular buildings and forlornly looping power lines on the salt flats of the Gulf coast. Saudi guards had abandoned the northern frontier post to which the emir of Kuwait had driven in such distress on the morning of August 2, 1990. The town was undefendable, decided the commander of the Arab armed forces of the U.S.-Saudi coalition, Khaled bin Sultan, who dug in his first line of fortifications some twenty-five miles to the south.
The serious business of the war was being conducted overhead. Taking off from an arc of bases and hastily constructed desert landing strips in the early hours of January 17, 1991, aircraft of the U.S.-Arab coalition roared into action with a blitzkrieg of precision-guided bombs and missiles that would rain down on Iraq for thirty-eight days and nights, their mission to demoralize and, where possible, destroy, the Iraqi armed forces.
As it turned out, the weeks of remorseless aerial bombardment, followed by the classic outflanking maneuver that Norman Schwarzkopf executed to recapture Kuwait, produced a remarkable victory for the U.S.-Saudi coalition and their allies. Saddam’s army would surrender after less than one hundred hours of ground combat.
But such success seemed anything but guaranteed as January 1991 drew to a close. The Iraqi Army was huge and menacing, with a proven inventory of intimidating chemical weapons. On January 18, 1991, Saddam launched seven of his Scud missiles against Tel Aviv and Haifa, then directed twenty of the missiles at Riyadh and Dhahran in a succession of alarming nighttime attacks. There were disputes within the coalition—Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled clashed regularly, a pair of oddly similar man-mountains with egos to match. How much firepower should be directed against Baghdad? Should not more be done to degrade Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guard? The fear of everything that might go wrong was reflected by the coalition’s provision of chemical suits and by some eighteen thousand hospital beds in the theater of operations. It was at this moment, on the night of January 29-30, 1991, that Iraqi tanks of the 5th Mechanized Division, one of Saddam’s crack units, rumbled over the undefended Saudi border with troop carriers and occupied the town of Al-Khafji.
For the second time in less than six months, Saddam Hussein had successfully invaded another Arab country, and he lost no time in trumpeting his triumph. In Riyadh King Fahd was furious.
“I am lucky,” Khaled bin Sultan later admitted, “he did not strip me of my command that night!”
The king called his nephew incessantly, insisting that he take instant action to oust the Iraqis and demanding to know what had gone wrong. The prince’s strategy in abandoning Al-Khafji, which was at the mercy of artillery fire from Iraqi guns on the Kuwaiti border, had been based on the assumption that coalition airpower could deal with any Iraqi land incursions. But air cover of this no-man’s-land was the responsibility of the U.S. Marines based around the “elbow” of the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, thirty miles to the west, and they had been busy throughout the night fending off an Iraqi attack on their own positions.
The Saudi commander felt let down by his allies, and he got on the phone to Ahmad Al-Sudayri, the Saudi director of air operations.
“Forget about the Joint Forces!” he recalls himself shouting. “If the U.S. Air Force or the Marines don’t come at once, I want you to take our air assets out of the coalition and send them all to me! I need the Tornados, the F-5s, everything you’ve got!”
His ultimatum produced results. U.S. air command switched B-52s and AC-130 Spectre gunships to the coastal road, where they went into action on the afternoon of January 30, blocking Iraqi attempts to send down reinforcements. The thousand or so Iraqi troops who had occupied Al-Khafji were cut off.
But even as the prince was drafting his plans to recapture the town, he had an additional item of intelligence to digest. Two ANGLICO (Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company) teams—one of five, the other of six U.S. Marines—had been operating secretly among Al-Khafji’s deserted houses, using their advanced undercover position to guide and call down artillery and air attacks on the border. They had not had time to escape, and they now found themselves surrounded by Iraqi troops—though the Iraqis did not yet know that the Americans were there. Khaled realized immediately that this changed everything.
“Our first priority,” he told Sultan Adi Al-Mutayri, his major general in charge of the assault, “is not to free Al-Khafji. It is to get the Marines out.”
Four years later the prince was honest enough to admit his motives.
“I was extremely worried,” he wrote in his memoirs, “that Schwarzkopf might use American troops, either U.S. Marines in an amphibious attack or a heli-borne U.S. Army unit, to free my town in my sector. The shame would have been difficult to bear.”
Major General Al-Mutayri did not let him down. As dusk fell, a detachment of Saudi National Guard armored cars drove up the coast road, heading for the spot where the ANGLICOs were hiding. Iraqi snipers shot out the tires of the vehicles, immobilizing ten of them, but the fully armored tanks of the Saudi Land Forces were following up. By midnight the eleven Americans were liberated unharmed—if the Iraqis had known they were there, they might have fought harder. Now the Saudis faced the more formidable task, the full liberation of Al-Khafji.
“We were scared,” admits Suleiman Al-Khalifa, then a young captain under the command of Sultan Al-Mutayri. “We had never fought in a real war before.”
Al-Mutayri was an inspiring leader.
“He had been up twice to reconnoiter Al-Khafji itself,” remembers Al-Khalifa, “driving round the outskirts and getting shot at by the Iraqis. Our generals don’t usually do that.”
Al-Mutayri knew he must keep his forces away from the salt flats of the coast, where several Iraqi and Saudi tanks had got stuck in the swampy terrain. Tanks would be the basis of his assault—his U.S.-made M60A3s had double the range of the Iraqis’ Soviet weaponry. But the job would ultimately have to be done by his foot soldiers, advancing under cover of the tanks’ gun barrels and fighting from house to house.
“It was a two-pronged attack,” recalls Al-Khalifa, one of the foot soldiers who fought his way up Mecca Street between the salt marshes on one side and the greasy oil-change garages on the other. “Some of the Iraqis defended really fiercely. They kept on shooting to the end. There was one officer, I remember, in the beach hotel, who absolutely refused to surrender. He was a fanatic for Saddam. Then there were others who were loaded down with video recorders and women’s clothing—they seemed more keen on looting than on fighting.”
The attack started at 8 A.M. on the morning of Thursday, January 31, a combined maneuver by Saudi National Guardsmen, Royal Saudi Land Forces, and two mechanized Qatari companies that were part of the coalition. Eighteen Saudis were killed in the assault and thirty-two wounded, but by midday, Al-Mutayri’s troops were in the middle of Al-Khafji, having killed some thirty-two Iraqis and taken more than four hundred prisoners. The major general radioed the happy news to his commanding officer, who relayed it immediately to the king. Fahd was ecstatic, ordering his nephew to get up to the town itself as soon as possible with a contingent of press to show the world that Saddam’s men had been kicked out of Saudi Arabia.
It was sunset as Khaled bin Sultan reached Al-Khafji, where he was stopped at a Saudi Marine checkpoint. The officer in charge, Colonel Ammar Al-Qahtani, who had known the prince since childhood, pleaded with him not to go farther. There were snipers in the town, he explained, and the mopping-up operations were not complete. At that moment an incoming Iraqi shell exploded nearby.
“Court-martial me if you like,” cried Al-Qahtani, suddenly getting hysterical, “but I will not let you through!”
He thrust himself in front of the prince’s jeep, raising his arms in the air—then relented just as suddenly, reaching inside the jeep emotionally to kiss his commanding officer on the top of his head.
The truth of the colonel’s warning was revealed the next day, when a group of twenty armed Iraqis surrendered only three hundred yards from the spot where Khaled had chosen to give his press conference. From their vantage point, they said, they had had the Saudi commander directly in their gun sights. They could easily have killed the prince as he stood brightly illuminated by the lights of the TV crews, but they were not Saddam fanatics, and they had wisely calculated that to open fire would have resulted in their own deaths. They asked to be treated as military refugees, not prisoners of war, as a reward for not pulling their triggers.
The triumph of Al-Khafji transformed morale across Saudi Arabia. It was the largest battle fought on Saudi soil in modern times. The destruction of Iraq’s 5th Mechanized Division eliminated one of Saddam’s finest armored units and had provided a genuine test of Saudi (and Qatari) fighting resolve. Saudis had risked their lives—and lost their lives—to recapture a corner of their country. The government lost no time proclaiming the eighteen men who died in the retaking of the town to be martyrs.
Al-Khafji was, in fact, the only pitched battle of the entire Gulf War. Everything else, as Khaled bin Sultan later put it, was “just movement.” By the time the coalition’s aerial bombardment was finished and the ground troops went into action on February 24, 1991, the Iraqi forces had either fled or surrendered—which suddenly raised a question to which surprisingly little thought had been given: How to define “victory”?
Just over a month earlier, on January 10, 1991, James Baker, the U.S. secretary of state, had been talking frankly in Riyadh with the U.S. ambassador Chas Freeman.
“What do you think,” he suddenly asked, “our war aims ought to be?”
Hostilities were then only seven days away, and the ambassador’s first reaction was to find the question “shocking.” But on reflection he came to see that his boss’s inquiry was not as naïve as it sounded. Baker had wrought miracles to pull together a coalition the likes of which the world had never seen—prickly Arabs, skeptical Europeans, the suddenly ex-Communist Russians working with the West for the first time, the silent support of Israel. But lining up these disparate elements had depended on being vague. The allies had only resolved on the need to expel Saddam from Kuwait. Beyond that, the great coalition had no agreed aims.
Razored by five weeks of merciless bombardment from the skies, the demoralized Iraqi Army surrendered in just four days. But as Norman Schwarzkopf and Khaled bin Sultan went to Safwan airfield on March 3, 1991, to negotiate the details of the cease-fire with their Iraqi opposite numbers, they were told to restrict themselves to technical matters—the line of control between the two sides, the handling of prisoners of war, and restrictions on overflight of southern Iraq by Iraqi planes. No mandate existed to enforce an Iraqi surrender, nor to define in any way the total and catastrophic nature of Saddam Hussein’s defeat.
“The Iraqi generals,” recalls Chas Freeman, “must have had great difficulty as they walked out of that tent in restraining a smile.”
Lacking a definition of final victory, the coalition never compelled Saddam Hussein to admit that he had lost and they had won the Gulf War of 1991—the tyrant remained in his palace. As the years went by, that failure was to engender a train of painful consequences.
“In my personal view,” says Khaled bin Sultan, “the manner in which the Gulf War was concluded did not match up to the way it was waged. . . . The view of our American and British allies was: ‘Let’s not take any more. Let’s wrap up the loose ends and get out fast.’ ”
Received wisdom in the West would later argue that the coalition was wrong to have halted as it did on the outskirts of Kuwait, and that the victorious allies should have marched decisively onward to Baghdad. But that had never been the mandate of the coalition, and like every other Arab nation, Kuwait included, Saudi Arabia would have balked at such a plan. Apart from the wish to mend fences, King Fahd and his brothers were well aware that toppling Saddam would have handed Iraq over to its Shia majority, thus magnifying the mischief-making power of Iran.
Norman Schwarzkopf was opposed on military grounds. “Had we taken all of Iraq,” he wrote in 1992, “we would have been like the dinosaur in the tarpit.”
Later that year President Bush said essentially the same thing, writing with his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, in the journal Middle East Report. To have moved on from Kuwait to invade Iraq, the president argued, “would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. . . . We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. . . . Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”
Perhaps the most cogent arguments against invasion were delivered by Bush’s defense secretary, Dick Cheney.
“Do you think,” he was asked in 1994, “that the U.S., or UN forces, should have moved into Baghdad?”
“No,” he replied without hesitation in a CNN interview that has since been replayed by millions of viewers on YouTube. “If we had gone to Baghdad . . . there would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. . . . Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off . . .
“It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. . . . The question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, ‘Not very many’ and I think we got it right.”
Ten years later, as vice president to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney was to argue exactly the opposite. In that decade the former defense secretary had become a principal advocate of the argument that America should send troops to Baghdad to “take down” the government of Saddam Hussein and clean out the palace. This was partly because of events inside Iraq following the unsatisfactory conclusion of the Gulf War. But it was mainly the consequence of what happened next in Saudi Arabia.