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

only with difficulty to avoid outright defeat.

    Saddam insisted otherwise, of course. Yet his claim of victory involved considerable misdirection. Much as a series of U.S. presidents would do when their forays into the Islamic world met with less than the promised success, he quietly modified his originally declared objectives.
    Even so, in a nearly seamless transition, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq now replaced the once-mighty USSR as the chief threat to CENTCOM’s AOR. Making the case that Iraq posed an imminent danger required placing greater weight on Saddam’s record of brutality and reckless adventurism than on his army’s record of demonstrated performance. U.S. estimates of Iraqi military power glossed over Iraq’s manifest failure to defeat Iran, emphasizing instead its substantial array of relatively modern tanks, missiles, and fighter planes. Quantity ostensibly implied quality. At Senate committee hearings in January 1990, Schwarzkopf himself pronounced judgment, reviving the view first articulated by Paul Wolfowitz a decade earlier. “Iraq is now the preeminent military power in the Gulf,” he testified, possessing the wherewithal “to militarily coerce its neighboring states.” 24
    By that time, down at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Schwarzkopf’s staff was already hard at work hammering out a revision of OPLAN 1002. In one sense, the result narrowed the scope of CENTCOM’s primary mission. Rather than purporting to defend the entire Persian Gulf from an outside attack, the updated plan focused on countering “an intraregional threat” to “critical ports and oil facilities on the ARABIAN PENINSULA.” 25 What this meant, in plain language, was that defending the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from a prospective Iraqi invasion had become priority number one.
    Unlike the largely fanciful Zagros Mountains contingency, here was a scenario that possessed a semblance of plausibility. It was, furthermore, the sort of problem with which the American officers were intellectually comfortable—suiting up against a sort of junior varsity version of the Red Army that U.S. forces in Europe had energetically been preparing to fight. Better still, for an officer corps perplexed by the implications of Hiroshima while still haunted by Vietnam, the outcome of any actual conflict with Iraq would be decided by the clash of arms on a conventional battlefield—no nuclear weapons and no guerrillas.

    CENTCOM planners had no difficulty incorporating into their new scenario the various preparations made for war against the Russians. The “overbuilt” Saudi facilities, the ongoing work at Diego Garcia, the stockpiles of military stores, the agreements providing access to ports and airfield: All of these retained their utility for staff officers formulating ways of dealing with the newly discovered Iraqi threat.
    The demise of the Warsaw Pact and the announced withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe even provided a bonus of sorts. The possibility of repurposing U.S. forces now presented itself. Units once earmarked for plugging the Fulda Gap were now becoming available for reassignment. War games evaluating preliminary versions of the revised OPLAN 1002 had revealed a shortage of available mechanized forces to counter the large number of Iraqi tanks. 26 By the end of 1989, the U.S. Army found itself awash with more tanks and tank crews than it knew what to do with, all made redundant by the Cold War’s sudden end. Here was a reservoir of combat power on which CENTCOM could draw.
    For those paid to think about potential wars in the Middle East, in other words, the fading danger of World War III meant opportunity. What some at the time were calling a “peace dividend” offered CENTCOM a way of expanding its portfolio of assets.
    The alacrity with which the United States fingered Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as its next Public Enemy Number One—a judgment seemingly validated by Saddam’s subsequent actions—offers one important