Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 1, 1991 TAG: 9104010096
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KNUT ROYCE AND TIMOTHY M. PHELPS NEWSDAY
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
Its soldiers did not want to fight.
But they died anyway, some of them, in the last two days of the war. They were bombed repeatedly by American planes and attacked by American troops while doing exactly what the United States had originally demanded - getting out of Kuwait.
Some of the Americans called it a "turkey shoot," as an army that had put up virtually no opposition on the first two days of the 100-hour ground war tried to scramble to safety.
This one-sided struggle that ended the Persian Gulf War took place not only in Kuwait, on the roads north out of Kuwait City, but, according to new accounts from pilots recently returned home, in Iraq itself, where armed units of the Republican Guard were attempting to leave the border area.
Iraqi vehicles, some flying white flags, were backed up for miles on roads heading home when they were attacked over and over by airplanes dropping anti-personnel bombs, then finished off by devastating B-52 bombing runs.
"Like shooting fish in a barrel," was how one pilot operating from the carrier Ranger described his morning's work as the William Tell Overture blasted from every speaker on every deck of the floating military city and crews frantically reloaded planes for another swipe at the roads north of Kuwait City.
The picture of one-sided carnage emerges from an extensive review by Newsday of the American response as the Iraqis pulled back, both from Kuwait and to positions deeper in Iraq, in the last two days of the ground war. It comes from reconnaissance photographs, military, diplomatic and intelligence sources, interviews with pilots recently returned from the gulf and reports from reporters in Kuwait, as well as the hundreds of pool reports filed by reporters at the front during the war.
While support for the U.S. actions remains strong, particularly in the Pentagon, outside analysts, diplomats and even some military officials now privately express unease at what they believe was excessive use of force during the allied hot pursuit of a panicked Iraqi army trying to cross to safety on the other side of the Euphrates River.
"It was an outrage," said a senior Air Force analyst. "They were whipped."
But other Pentagon officials say that it is the nature of war. Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak said March 15, "When enemy armies are defeated, they retreat, often in disorder, and we have what is known in the business as the exploitation phase. . . . It often causes us to do very brutal things. That's the nature of war."
And a high-level official at the White House recently insisted, "These were the torturers, the looters, the rapists who were trying to get away from the scene of their crimes." Asked if there were any regrets about the attacks, he replied: "No. None."
But some foreign and American diplomats said that the United States may pay a price in the future for killing soldiers who weren't fighting.
"Many of those soldiers trying to get away probably had 10 or 11 children," said a Soviet diplomat who specializes in the Middle East. "And every one of those children is now a potential anti-American militant."
Some American diplomats privately agreed. They also said they were concerned about the geopolitical implications of the instability in Iraq caused by the war.
The first few hours of the allied ground assault that began at 4 a.m. local time on Sunday, Feb. 24 quickly dispelled any fear that combat would be long. Dazed and starved front-line Iraqi conscripts happily surrendered by the thousands, according to pool reports that day. The pounding from the air had taken its toll.
One U.S. intelligence source said that some Iraqi units began withdrawing from Kuwait as soon as the allied attack began.
The Iraqis not only did not fight to defend Kuwait, but in those first two days of the ground war offered little resistance in protecting their own country from an American flanking attack deep into Iraq that nearly cut off the much vaunted Republican Guard from retreat, U.S. officials said and reconnaissance photographs show.
In those first two days, the Iraqis inside Kuwait City appeared to be strengthening their defenses in preparation for a fight, Kuwaiti witnesses said.
But about 9 p.m. Monday, 41 hours after the allied attack began and 49 hours after Bush's deadline for Iraqi troops to begin withdrawing, they suddenly began to withdraw. Allied troops were still a day's march from the city.
Tariq al-Rujaib, a Kuwaiti public relations man, said he was talking to an Iraqi soldier who stopped to say goodbye when an officer shouted at the soldier: "Leave everything. If you want to be alive, let's go home."
The streets began to fill up with Iraqi vehicles as soldiers who had no transportation knocked on doors or flagged down drivers to commandeer cars or trucks at gunpoint, he said. With street lights out, vehicles - some crammed with looted goods - were ramming into each other in the chaos.
At 1:32 a.m. Tuesday, Baghdad radio announced that orders had been issued to Iraqi troops to withdraw from Kuwait. Saddam himself made a similar statement shortly before noon.
Pool reports indicate that the move out of Kuwait prompted quick reaction from American forces. At 10:05 a.m. Tuesday, the third day of the ground war, officers of the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions and the Army's Tiger Brigade, still in southern Kuwait, decided to charge forward to cut off the escaping Iraqis.
"The intent is to block enemy forces from escaping into Iraq," said a radio transmission overheard by a reporter.
American policy had come full circle, from trying to force the Iraqis out of Kuwait, which was the U.N. Security Council mandate, to destroying the core of Iraq's army and eliminating its offensive threat for years to come - a goal that Schwarzkopf said was largely achieved. Diplomats say this weakening of the Iraqi military has contributed to the internal fighting that followed the ground war.
Two administration officials said the unstated policy had changed long before the launching of the ground war Sunday morning.
"The administration was not trying to reach a compromise at that point," said one, a Mideast specialist. "The intent of the administration was not to convince him to withdraw. The intent of the administration was to destroy [Saddam's] military machine."
On the third day of the ground assault, pool reports began to quote pilots as saying that a massive "turkey shoot" was on against withdrawing Iraqi troops. But, a U.S. Central Command spokesman in Riyadh told reporters that morning that there was no "real evidence of any withdrawal at this time." The spokesman added, "There's no significant Iraqi movement to the north."
But a radar-imaging photograph taken well before that announcement showed three massed columns of Iraqi troops clogging roads and rumbling across the open desert in a northward dash out of Kuwait.
In Washington, the administration, including Bush himself, said Iraq's attempts to escape were a tactical retreat under allied pressure and not a withdrawal. The Iraqi troops continued to be a threat to allied forces, the administration said, because they were likely to regroup and counterattack.
Bush said Saddam's forces intended "to regroup only to fight another day."
But, a recently retired intelligence officer who reviewed a computer-enhanced radar image of the Iraqi columns said that the Iraqis appeared to have been on full withdrawal and not on tactical retreat.
He said the continuous columns indicate that the Iraqis made no "efforts to conceal or defend, to preserve the force." He said that had the Iraqis wanted to conceal their movement, "they would have moved in smaller groups, dispersed the movement." Further, he said, they would have created flanks to protect the columns.
Many of the targets were not military vehicles.
Rear Adm. Ronald Zlatoper, commander of the Ranger battle group, said that he reminded his fliers Tuesday, on the third day of combat, not to hit non-military targets. "Our job is to take out Iraqi armor and armored personnel carriers and not buses," Zlatoper said at the time.
But still photographs and television film of one section of highway just north of Kuwait indicate that there, at least, the planes had done exactly that.
The vast majority of the vehicles photographed were cars, buses and military and civilian trucks apparently carrying Iraqi soldiers and some civilians.
Chuck Myers, a retired military pilot and former deputy undersecretary of defense in charge of air warfare, said that while fleeing tanks or artillery might be fair game, there did not appear to be any need to attack the soldiers.
"Why you're beating up on rows of hundreds of thousands of people that are fleeing, I don't understand. I don't know the military value of it. It's not clear," he said in an interview.
A senior White House official said that "the guidance that was agreed on was that troops who put down their weapons and abandoned their vehicles would not be fired upon." He continued, "It was unclear during that period whether some of these units might have been trying to reassemble, to get themselves back into fighting shape."
The number of people who died amid the wreckage is not publicly known. The U.S. Army and allied Arab forces buried the Iraqis in mass graves before most reporters reached the scene. The army has refused to release any figures on deaths there.
Zane Finkelstein, a retired Army colonel who once served as legal adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the allied pounding of the fleeing troops was proper because Saddam had failed to comply with Bush's ultimatum to begin to pull out from Kuwait at 8 p.m. Baghdad time on Saturday Feb. 23 and to publicly announce the withdrawal.
The distinction made by Bush between a withdrawal and a retreat under pressure for a possible counterattack may be relevant in international law, one expert on military law said. The lawyer, who asked not to be identified, said that Section 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which governs treatment of prisoners of war, protects "persons taking no part in hostilities" - which he interprets to include withdrawing soldiers.
But Robert Goldman, an American University law professor who teaches a course on the Geneva Conventions, said there is no legal distinction between a withdrawal and a retreat.
He said the bombing of withdrawing troops was "more a question of fundamental principles of humanity as opposed to any strict legal injunctions or prohibitions."
by CNB