Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 3, 1991 TAG: 9102030068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: R.W. APPLE JR. THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: DHAHRAN, SAUDI ARABIA LENGTH: Long
In purely military terms, Khafji was a rout. It may well have been an error for the Iraqis to emerge from their bunkers, but that is by no means the only way to view matters.
At the American headquarters in Riyadh, the generals competed on Thursday to see who could be most dismissive of the battle.
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the U.S. commander in the gulf, made the widely quoted comment that the fighting in Khafji was "about as significant as a mosquito on an elephant."
Lt. Gen. Charles Horner, the air force chief here, belittled Saddam Hussein's probe as "the stupidest thing he could do."
The American briefer, Brig. Gen. Pat Stevens, vigorously denied that the fighting in and around Khafji was a major engagement.
But by Friday afternoon the focus in Riyadh had shifted with the news that the fighting had lasted for 36 hours and had resulted in more than 400 Iraqi prisoners of war.
At Friday's briefing, Stevens used the very word he had objected to earlier, calling Khafji "a major Iraqi defeat."
That reversal was not isolated. A week ago, American spokesmen, including Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, the Pentagon's operations chief, cited Iraq's failure to cross the Saudi border as evidence of Saddam's weakness. Now some cite the half-dozen border crossings in the last 72 hours as evidence of Saddam's weakness, or even of his desperation, as a few officers in Riyadh have argued.
For the Saudis, who were stung by widespread suggestions in Europe and the United States in recent months that they lacked the will to fight for their homeland, Khafji was a vindication. U.S. Marines at Khafji said the Saudi forces who retook the town needed "to have their backs stiffened a bit," as one put it. But even so, they out-fought the Iraqi invaders.
"They acquitted themselves terribly well," said Col. Jack Petri, U.S. Army liaison with the Saudi troops in Khafji.
Saudi officials, in Washington and Riyadh, were quick to trumpet their troops' accomplishments. None of them minimized Khafji's significance.
If allied figures are anywhere near correct - it is hard to know, since a British report that 300 Iraqis were killed at Khafji shrank to 30 by the time the Saudis gave a briefing a couple of hours later - the Iraqi leader was given a bloody nose in the fighting there. A battalion, and possibly two, were more or less demolished by the allies.
But while Schwarzkopf and his coalition partners look at the war largely in terms of the elimination of Saddam's capacity to remain in Kuwait, from which they are charged with expelling him, the Iraqi president has other goals, mostly political and politico-military, and they were very well served by his troops' success in pushing into Khafji and hanging onto it for a day.
American generals, now as in other eras, have a tendency to dismiss political goals in war, viewing them as distractions from the serious business of combat. But they sometimes matter a great deal, as they surely do to Saddam Hussein in this case.
Among those goals might be included: showing his civil population that their leader has not abandoned them to the tender mercies of Stealth bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles but is carrying the fight to the enemy on his home ground; shoring up military morale by demonstrating what the Baghdad radio called the ability of Iraqi soldiers to counter "the so-called superior technology" of the allies; continuing to drive home to Americans, through increasing casualties, the message that the war will cost them, even if they are sure to win in the end; and demonstrating to all Arabs that Saddam and Iraq can resist the West and reclaim the honor and glory of the Arab nation.
Those political points are made at a heavy cost, of course - equipment like tanks cannot easily be replaced, to say nothing of hundreds of troops lost.
But the Iraqi army is a vast one, the fourth largest in the world, by one count, and Saddam would seem to retain the capacity to make many more attacks like the ones at Khafji and farther to the west, or on a much larger scale. The history of the Iran-Iraq war shows that he is not averse to sacrificing men in terrifying numbers.
Eventually, his string will run out. As President Bush said Friday in North Carolina, Iraq's ability to wage war "is being systematically destroyed" by the allies. That point may come in weeks or in months. In the meantime, many Arabs and some Western students of Arab affairs say, Saddam makes more points for himself in at least some parts of the Middle East.
For the commanders of U.S., British and French ground troops stretched out along the Kuwaiti border, or at least a number of them, the message of Khafji was straightforward: If Saddam Hussein is determined enough to try spoiling attacks like those and if he still has the resources to do so, it means he has a lot of fight left in him, so we're going to have to take on either his fixed defenses or the Republican Guards, or both, and that may turn out to be a rather bloody proposition.
The choice, most analysts say they believe, will be an envelopment from the west directed against the Republican Guards, because a direct assault to the north, into the fixed defenses that the Iraqis have spent six months preparing, would exact too high a cost.
Having served in Vietnam, many U.S. Marine and Army officers at the regimental and battalion level think that Schwarzkopf, like the senior U.S. officers in Saigon, has overstated the extent of bomb damage inflicted on the enemy, even though he has been careful, for example, not to make any specific claims with regard to the Republican Guards. A large number are deeply skeptical of all after-action reports by pilots, who they suspect of habitual exaggeration.
Intensive bombing raids before D-Day, a front-line colonel remarked the other day, did not make it easy to storm Omaha Beach or to break through the hedgerows in Normandy, "and we face something that bad or worse, in my view, before we make our breakout."
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt said last week that the war would be over in a month. Even if the Egyptian leader is right, that will mean Saddam has succeeded in standing up to an immense Western juggernaut for six weeks, which is better than Egypt did against Israel in two tries.
If the Iraqi leader survives, he clearly believes that his defiant resistance to those whom he calls the infidels will give him a strong claim to regional authority in this vital but chronically unstable part of the world.
by CNB