America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History Read Online Free PDF Page A

stunts and promises. “No matter who is general secretary, no matter what proposals are made, no matter what public relations activities are undertaken,” he insisted, the Soviet danger persisted and, if anything, was growing worse. 21

    Concrete steps taken at Gorbachev’s initiative made it difficult to sustain that view. In 1987, he accepted U.S. terms for a treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. He also announced plans to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a tacit admission of defeat. The following year brought a commitment to withdraw five hundred thousand Soviet troops from Eastern Europe, no Western quid pro quo required. In February 1989, as promised, the final contingent of Soviet forces left Afghanistan for good. In the meantime, summit meetings between Gorbachev and his U.S. counterpart, first Reagan and then George H. W. Bush, took on an atmosphere of cheerful conviviality and good fellowship.
    By November 1988, when General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr., of the U.S. Army succeeded Crist, the jig was up, with Schwarzkopf astute enough to notice. In the things-got-better-on-my-watch perspective to which virtually all U.S. military commanders are prone, Crist boasted of guiding CENTCOM from “adolescence to young adulthood.” Even so, Crist had remained gripped by the prospect of massive Soviet intervention—several dozen divisions with thousands of tanks—aimed at seizing “some sort of hegemony over the oil.” 22 Schwarzkopf knew better. The likelihood of Soviet armored formations making a mad dash across Iran to seize the Straits of Hormuz was nil.
    So once installed in Tampa, Schwarzkopf took one look at OPLAN 1002 and recognized it for the dubious proposition it had always been. “We’d used the operating plan for years,” he later wrote, “but most generals knew it made no sense and would eventually be junked.” Schwarzkopf spelled out the plan’s deficiencies. “For one thing, it was suicidal. It called for Central Command to rush forces to the Zagros Mountains…[where] we would be seriously outnumbered, seven thousand miles from home, and destined to run out of supplies and troops in a matter of weeks.” Even so, the plan had not been without redeeming value, Schwarzkopf noting that “Central Command [had] used it for years to justify spending millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.” 23

    The disappearance of the (largely fictive) Russian threat to the Persian Gulf removed that justification, leaving CENTCOM without a compelling argument for spending more taxpayer money. An operationally defective war plan that had at least offered some budgetary leverage now became something worse: an operationally defective war plan devoid of bureaucratic utility.
    The solution to this problem was obvious: To stay in business, U.S. Central Command needed to identify a new threat. Conveniently, such a threat was even then presenting itself. With impeccable timing, Iraq, the adversary that Paul Wolfowitz had identified a decade earlier as a looming concern, was now finally coming into its own.
    In the bitter conflict between Iran and Iraq, Washington had feigned neutrality while actually playing a nontrivial role. As we will see in a subsequent chapter, that role combined incoherence with self-deception, both to become abiding hallmarks of America’s evolving War for the Greater Middle East. Suffice it to say here that as the Cold War was winding down, so too was the Iran-Iraq War—good news, in a way, for CENTCOM.
    The conflict that began with a naked act of Iraqi aggression reached its conclusion in August 1988 with that country on the ropes. Believing that the Islamic Revolution had left Iran militarily vulnerable, Saddam Hussein had expected an easy win. Not for the last time, he miscalculated. While sustaining huge losses, his army had not distinguished itself in battle. Even with the benefit of extensive outside financial and material support, Iraq had managed