War Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

kind of weapon and ammunition. And they weren’t alone. Ordnance from the Soviet bloc continued to be delivered to Iraq via Egypt and Libya and, most of it, through Jordan.
    NATO turned a blind eye to Italian land mine shipments. The Germans sent explosives and chemicals. Belgian-made machine guns were delivered by the thousands. And until June 7, 1981, when the Israelis bombed the reactor at Osirik, the French provided parts and know-how to Saddam’s nuclear program.
    Yet despite the volume of weaponry, the Iraqi army could advance no farther. In early 1982, the Iranians started sending human wave attacks through the minefields east of Basra—killing tens of thousands of youngsters, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old—and drove the Iraqis back. Al Faw Peninsula fell to Iranian assaults, and Basra was left little more than a bombed-out wreck.
    By 1987, the war had degenerated into what had come to be called “the tanker war,” with Iraqi and Iranian air and naval units targeting oil tankers leaving each other’s ports. To keep the sea lanes open, the U.S. Navy began patrolling the Persian Gulf. Then, on March 17, an Iraqi pilot flying a French-built Mirage F-1 fighter fired two French Exocet AM39 missiles into the side of the USS Stark , killing thirty-seven U.S. sailors.
    Suddenly Iraq was back on the front pages of American newspapers, and it soon became apparent that Saddam had been regularly employing chemical weapons against the Iranians and had begun using them against his own people as well. In April, he ordered Ali Hassan al-Majid, the secretary-general of the Baath Party’s “northern bureau,” to use chemical weapons against a Kurdish guerrilla stronghold in the mountains of northwest Iraq. By February 1988, chemicalweapons—including mustard gas, hydrogen cyanide, and sarin, a nerve agent—were being routinely used against not only the Iranians, but also the Iraqi people.
    By the time Saddam and Khomeini agreed to a UN-brokered cease-fire on July 21, 1988, as many as one million Iranians and Iraqis were dead, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians and tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. More than 1,200 entire Kurdish towns had succumbed and 250,000 of the surviving Kurds were forcibly disarmed and relocated. When the killing was over, every single Iraqi who survived knew the name of someone who had been killed in the prior eight years of carnage.
    A year after the war ended, Saddam Hussein, resplendent in the dress uniform of a field marshal and mounted on a white stallion, led the Iraqi army beneath Baghdad’s newest monument. Called the Victory Arch, it comprises two massive forearms rising up from the ground at each end of the parade ground. Each hand holds an enormous sword, said to be replicas of the sword carried by Saad ibn Waqas, the leader of the outnumbered Islamic force that beat the Persian cavalry at Qadisiyah in 637 A.D.
    The symbolism was inescapable. Saddam didn’t want the war seen as a draw so he simply declared it to be an Iraqi victory. Yet not an inch of Iranian territory had been permanently taken. Ayatollah Khomeini was still in Tehran, exporting terror and fomenting threats. There were nearly half a million Iraqi casualties—many dead at the hand of Saddam, not Iran. Despite all of this, Saddam reinforced his “victory” by telling his people that they had stopped the Iranian revolution inside Iran. Saddam had won! That’s how the man on the white horse presented himself to the world—not as a man who had barely survived stalemate and defeat, but as a victor. Before all the dead could be counted, before his shattered cities were rebuilt, Saddam began thinking of other victories. In the land between the rivers hehad a million-man army, 4,000 tanks, chemical weapons, missiles, and long-range rockets, and he knew how to use them all. The only question was where and