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BACK TO : The Gulf War of 1991
The Gulf War: Not so clean by G Lopez 
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, September 1991 Vol. 47, No. 7 The Gulf War: Not so clean By George Lopez The U.S. strategy of Air-Land Battle closely resembles "total war." "Every war," claimed Dwight D. Eisenhower, "is going to astonish you." From the beginning, the Persian Gulf conflict produced a number of surprises. The enemy leader watched America's Cable Network News for war updates. States with very different motives and traditions quickly established an armed coalition. A huge array of sophisticated weaponry, some of it never before employed in combat, was amassed to implement a new style of war fighting--the Air-Land Battle. And at the end, the astonishing level of violence became clear. The victory for the coalition was the most lopsided in recent history in terms of numbers who died on each side. And the devastation to the industrial infrastructure of most of Iraq and portions of Kuwait, along with an unprecedented environmental disaster brought about by oil spills and Iraqi-set fires, will take a toll on people and resources for years to come. Yet from the U.S. perspective the surprises were mostly pleasant. In addition to the low number of allied casualties, there was the spectacular success of the air campaign in the first week, and the Iraqis' unwillingness or inability to use chemical weapons. The euphoria of victory was expressed in relief at the death of the "Vietnam syndrome" and in countless parades in the months after the war. But the most influential surprise of the war-the one that may dictate how future wars are fought--is the fact that air power proved far more successful over firmly entrenched occupying forces than commentators and original war plans had anticipated. Because recent history records cases in which civilian areas have been bombed purposely, and because the intention to limit civilian deaths often erodes under the pressure of combat, air war has always raised more serious ethical questions than other forms of battle. And since we are going to draw political and military lessons from this war, we must examine the ethics of the strategy used to fight it. Moral claims To the credit of U.S. political culture, policy discussions throughout the crisis included frequent references to certain ethical principles. In October, for example, the Bush administration correctly sensed that the American people would not support a war merely to protect U.S. oil interests; such a war would have to be fought from higher moral ground, and Iraqi injustices inside Kuwait became the "just cause" for U.S. military action. The normative principles of just-war thinking were woven into the final debates in Congress on the use of force. Later, they were evoked as responses to Iraq's attacks on Israel and Hussein's scorched-earth policy in leaving Kuwait. Questions of moral responsibility are still being raised as Iraqi civilians continue to die, not only as a result of civil violence following the war, but also because of the allied bombing that devastated the civilian infrastructure during the war. From the beginning, U. S. political and military spokesmen claimed that the policy in fighting the war was to limit civilian casualties. During the air war, military briefers often described their efforts to follow this policy. "We're using the appropriate weapon against the appropriate targets," Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf emphasized in a January 27 briefing. "We're being very, very careful in our directions of attacks to avoid damage of any kind to civilian installations." [1] Three days later, in the celebrated briefing in which he announced that the allies had gained air superiority over Iraq, General Schwarzkopf gave another nod to the principle of restraint. "We never had any intention of destroying 100 percent of all the Iraqi electrical power," he said. "Because of our interest in making sure that civilians did not suffer unduly, we felt we had to leave some of the electrical power in effect, and we've done that." The good intentions of U.S. military planners were questioned only intermittently--once after U.S. stealth fighter-bombers obliterated the Amiriya bomb shelter in Baghdad on February 13, killing 600-1,000 civilians. White House officials and some military briefers in Washington scrambled either to condemn Hussein for placing civilians "in harm's way" or to insist that the facility was, in fact, a military command center. On the other hand, Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly and others acknowledged that a mistake had been made. "We are going to examine our consciences very closely to determine if we can't do something in the future to preclude that," Kelly said. In the preceding essay, Nicholas Fotion contends that a war-fighting strategy that takes ethics seriously, as these statements indicate, is far enough from the ruthless, "realist" end of the spectrum to deserve praise. And he believes that because most of the bombing and other allied initiatives met ethical and legal criteria of action, the few exceptions--those cases in which standards were violated either by accident or by intention--do not provide grounds for major criticism of the war effort. But exceptions in one war may prove the rule in the next. This is especially true when new fighting strategies and new weapons are being used. For this reason, it is important to examine U.S. and allied behavior in this war in an effort to establish whether it matched the best intentions expressed by political and military leaders. And we must pay special attention to where it failed to do so, and why. Tougher questions The general principles of proportionality and discrimination--avoiding inflicting undue damage and refraining from targeting civilians govern the ethical use of force during war. Taking these principles seriously leads one to ask three tough question that move beyond the concerns Fotion mentions: " What constitutes unacceptable "collateral damage" to civilians? Just-war theorists, as well as the U.S. Army Manual for Land Warfare, agree that attacks on sites that produce war materiel and sustain the war effort are bound to produce some civilian deaths. But these casualties must be unintentional and kept to a minimum. Complicating this rubric is strategist Thomas Schelling's recognition that the intense application of force inflicts pain "terrible beyond endurance." At best, he points out, this intensity is meant to end the war quickly by forcing civilians to withdraw support for it. At worst, such a strategy can lead to unrestricted terror attacks on civilians. Attacks on civilians, then, should not move beyond any realistic attempt to affect the war-fighting capacity of the enemy. And if they are meant to destroy the enemy's will to fight, they must have a realistic chance of doing so. " To what extent are attacks on the civilian infrastructure justified? This is related to the first question. Attacks on energy, transportation, communication, and industrial sites and the personnel who staff them may be justified only if they contribute to damaging the warmaking capacity of the enemy. These two questions address not only the issue of discriminating civilian from military targets, but the issue of proportionality as well. Those who plan and execute the war must judge if and when the damage done to a society exceeds the military gains to be realized. And the questions join the ethical criteria used in deciding whether to go to war with the ethics of how a war is fought. In the early days of the crisis, the most pressing question for the American public was whether Kuwait was worth dying for. But the more ethical dilemma is, at what point in the liberation of Kuwait was it immoral to continue killing Iraqis? " When does killing enemy combatants become murder? Field manuals urge commanders to achieve victory as soon as possible with the minimal amount of harm required. As long as an armed force encounters enemy resistance, it is to continue fighting to its best ability. But all sources on the ethics of war dictate protection of troops who have shown white flags, who are wounded, or who are otherwise seeking to surrender. Questionable actions The available evidence indicates that minimal numbers of civilians were killed either intentionally or by bombs that missed military targets. A report prepared for Greenpeace in May on the environmental impact of the war also investigated civilian casualties, based on extensive interviewing and research of government and news sources. The authors note 13 cases of collateral damage of varying severity. They treat the most significant cases of civilian death-the Amiriya shelter bombing and the bombing of the "baby milk" factory in Abu Gharaib January 22--separately, because they were apparently the result of faulty intelligence. There have been no precise estimates of civilian casualties during the war. The most intelligent guesses have been broad ranging: "5,000--15,000 Iraqi civilians died during the war, and 4,000-6,000 civilians died since the end of the war due to wounds, lack of medical care, or malnutrition," according to Greenpeace. The bitter reality is that the numbers of civilians who die in the war's broadening wake will soon dwarf the number of Iraqis, Kurds, and other refugees who died in the civil strife after March 1. And the United Nations estimated in July that 50-80 thousand infants are at risk of severe malnutrition because of the war. [2] The after-effects of the war are all too easy to understand. Nevertheless, growing evidence indicates that thousands of civilians also died during the war. How did this happen, if there were so few accidents, and if U.S. bombers were able to target so carefully? Several elements of the allied war plan contributed directly to civilian deaths: " The bombing of cities. The military necessity of waging war against first-order military and industrial-military support targets meant that targets within cities would be heavily bombed, and that civilians would die. This was particularly the case for Basra, which served as a major military communications and supply center, and to a lesser extent for Ramadi, Diwaniya, and Mosul. In Baghdad, precision-guided munitions were almost always used in attacks on command-and-control centers, but we do not know what occurred in other cities. The extent of bombing destruction in those areas is still unclear as well. Targets within cities were bombed at different periods during the war. Baghdad command-and-control facilities and Basra military installations were attacked almost hourly during the first two weeks. Then attention turned to dismantling Iraqi fighting positions in Kuwait and along the border, and to the air force units that had fled from the southern to the northern portion of the country. But it is curious that the United States bombed Baghdad heavily again after February 12, destroying new civilian targets such as the ministries of Justice and Municipal Affairs. This happened even though Baghdad's command-and-control facilities were so damaged that it was taking Saddam Hussein more than a week to get orders to a vanishing leadership in Kuwait. Later, as the ground phase of the war got under way, Baghdad came under its heaviest attack since the first two days of the war. [3] " The bombing of highways and bridges. Among the early major targets were bridges and highways leading south of Baghdad and Basra and from other Iraqi cities toward the Iranian and Jordanian borders. Some of the heaviest civilian casualties appeared to be among those taking these routes to flee the bombing of Baghdad. American spokesmen claimed that they had reason to believe that Saddam Hussein was moving Scud missiles and possibly chemical and biological weapons in civilian trucks and buses, and that the roads and bridges were being used to resupply units in Kuwait. Many claimed that fiber-optic materials important to communication were also strung across bridges. On January 30 the United States claimed "air supremacy." General Schwarzkopf revealed that 33 of 36 key Iraqi bridges had been bombed, that 75 percent of Iraqi command-and-control systems had been attacked, and that at least a third were "destroyed or inoperative." Yet allied planes continued to pound highways and bridges until the final day of the war, increasing the territory of the attack deep into the northern sectors of the country. This was partly to prevent pilots from dumping their bombs at random or at will when they found their primary targets-missiles and planes, for example-either already destroyed or obscured by weather. American commanders placed bridges around the country, especially in Baghdad and the northern provinces, on a secondary hit list for these fliers. " Other infrastructure attacks. The attacks that have come under the severest criticism were those launched after mid-February on electrical, water, and sewage facilities in Iraqi cities. These attacks are responsible for much of the continuing death and hardship among Iraqi civilians. The United States did not resort to terror-bombing in the Gulf, as it did in World War II or even in the Christmas 1972 bombings of North Vietnam. Yet the allies managed to inflict what a U.N. observer team would later call "near apocalyptic" damage to Iraqs infrastructure, leaving, by June 1, 70,000 homeless and as many as 20,000 others sick and dying in a state that had been bombed back to the "preindustrial age." Hell's highway Another action that needs to be scrutinized is the behavior of American commanders and forces who chased and trapped retreating Iraqi forces north of Kuwait City on the night of February 25 and the day of February 26. These units withdrew via the Jahra road on the way to Basra, an escape route that has become known as the "highway to hell." The sequence of events is still clouded because of the press controls that were in operation. The furious pace of political events in the last week of February added to the confusion. George Bush's press spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, said on February 23 that the coalition would not attack withdrawing Iraqi forces. But the "failure" of the Soviet peace initiative, and the White House's rejection of various Iraqi announcements that they would, in practice, comply with Security Council resolution 660 mandating Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, seemed to nullify that pledge. President Bush denounced Hussein's February 26 address as "an outrage". He is not withdrawing. His defeated troops are retreating." Retreating troops could be attacked. And the goal of the ground war was not only to dislodge the Iraqis from Kuwait but to continue destroying Iraq's military machine. Another factor in the event may have been the desire to give everyone a piece of the action. After U.S. bombing had stopped the lead vehicles, and marine and army armored divisions had sealed off other escape routes north, "kill zones" were assigned to various air units, including navy antisubmarine aircraft and various marine attack planes that had seen limited action during the war. The anarchic retreat became a multiple-mile traffic jam, then a shooting gallery. B-52s joined the fray, dropping cluster bombs. No one knows for sure how many Iraqi soldiers and Kuwaiti captives died; estimates have varied widely. According to the Greenpeace report, "One Army analyst familiar with the situation reports submitted by units involved in the attacks on retreating troops estimates that as many as 25,000 Iraqis were killed on the 'highway to hell," and in other retreating convoys from al Jahra to Iraq." But, as in other bloody engagements during the war, U.S. officials emphasized the dramatic losses in artillery and tanks, not lives. The February 26 battle provided such a "target-rich environment" that hundreds of Iraqi tanks were destroyed. By the time the cease-fire went into effect, the Pentagon estimated that nearly 4,000 of Iraq's 4,200 tanks had been destroyed. [4] Slippery slope This was a war of carefully constructed words, as much as it was a war of high-tech weaponry. The quotable quotes from the press briefings gave the impression that the allied forces were trying hard to maintain a high moral ground, preventing a slide down a slippery slope into indiscriminate killing of either civilians or soldiers. The relatively few reported instances of civilian deaths in "collateral damage" confirmed this impression. And it appears that the allied command was reasonably scrupulous in selecting and attacking targets to minimize harm to civilians in the traditional sense of direct or accidental "hits." But they may have been more careful in Baghdad than in other cities--and they certainly appeared to be more careful in the first 30 days of the war than in the last two weeks. The increased bombing of Baghdad during the 100-hour ground war raises serious moral questions. Even more serious were the last phases of allied bombing of the country's infrastructure. Targeting northern sections of Iraq and eliminating the final phases of water and sewer treatment plants after February 15 contributed little or nothing to stated war goals: the liberation of Kuwait and the destruction of Saddam Hussein's military capacity. There was never any real possibility of damaging Iraq's will to fight by bombing Iraqi life-support systems. Iraq is an authoritarian society; the idea that civilian protest, induced by war damage, could cause Saddam Hussein to surrender is absurd. The United States and its allies are responsible for deaths that are occurring now, after the end of the war, if they are attributable to allied wartime actions. By any reasonable standard it is fair to claim that the civilian population of Iraq is suffering disproportionately to any military gains made as a result of allied bombing after February 15. The "highway to hell" incident raises different issues. A strong tradition in military ethics is to give the enemy a chance to surrender. U. S. troops liberating the Kuwaiti theater did their best to meet this obligation, despite being overwhelmed with incredible numbers of surrendering Iraqi soldiers. But the command evidently did not develop strategies to entrap retreating troops so that the soldiers could be taken prisoner rather than killed when their vehicles and materiel were commandeered. When the Israelis encircled the Egyptian Third Army in another Middle East war, in 1973, U.S. policymakers pleaded with the Israelis not to engage in a turkey-shoot. The Israelis complied, after much political pressure including U.N. Security Council resolutions imposing a cease-fire. But when U.S. forces were in a similar situation, they gave way to inhuman excess. Total war Why were these things done in what was meant to be a justly fought war? One explanation may be that from the beginning, the allies vastly overestimated Iraq's fighting potential, and they continued to do so throughout the war. In the fog of war, it becomes difficult for leaders to decide when enough is enough or to process reliable information about how well the war is going for their side. Another explanation is that the depth, complexity, and uncompromising nature of the Air-Land Battle strategy-which relies on sophisticated but relentless bombing-may not give military planners a chance to step back, assess damage, and adjust attacks accordingly. More than anyone might have expected, the U.S. strategy resembled the "total war" described by James Turner Johnson in Can Modern War Be Just? And that raises new ethical questions. The first is the president's near abdication of his role as moral manager of the war when he pledged "not to micro-manage the war." The issue is not whether the military can be trusted; it is that civilian and military leaders choose distinct roles when a democracy goes to war. In any war, the temptation is for military strategy and opportunity quickly to become equated with military necessity. Arguments about military necessity dominated the discussion of this war, and an Air-Land Battle strategy calls for an expanding target list and eventually massive destruction, as military necessity, of the enemy's infrastructure. Rather than using the argument of military necessity as the exception to the rule of protecting civilian life-support systems, Air-Land Battle strategy invokes such bombing as the operative norm of war. With this kind of strategy in use, the traditional definition of collateral damage is inadequate to calculate the suffering that war imposes on civilians. The military importance of power, communications, and water must be calculated; the longer-term environmental and social costs must be considered. It is also clear that using precision-guided munitions does not necessarily make a war more humane. In this case it meant that war planners were able to dramatically expand the number of targets, including non-military ones, because they knew the bombs would not endanger many civilians when they fell. At some point this will violate the laws of war by obliterating life-sustaining systems. The Iraqi civilians who are dying from deprivation or disease should be considered intentional targets, just as if bombs had been dropped directly on them. The lesson that Americans seem to have learned is that the most successful U.S. war experience in the last 40 ye is the one with the largest number of enemy killed compared to Americans. This kill ratio was partly the fault of Saddam Hussein's tactics, and terrain was a factor. But carpet-bombing Iraqi troop positions also contributed, as did the slaughter of retreating soldiers at the end of the war. Striving to repeat this kind of lopsided success in the next war is a particularly dangerous goal to institutionalize. Nor is morality served when this strategy is carried out while refusing to talk about body counts as a measure of progress in the war. It is true that in Vietnam body counts encouraged immoral actions because commanders were encouraged to WE large numbers of people in order to show some sign of success. But in this war, the Pentagon's preference for reporting hardware "kills" rather than human casualties contributed to an erroneous, antiseptic picture of the campaign. Information control deprived officers and citizens alike of the data needed-about targets, the state of the enemy's fighting capacity, and the level of success of earlier missions-to determine when military necessity ended and murder began. To prevent war crimes, citizens and soldiers must be trained to make ethical judgments, but they need information in order to do so. What is worse, the main victor is still unwilling to discuss civilian and military casualties after the fact, even as independent agencies are issuing their reports. This leaves the sense that the American conscience cannot focus on American errors and responsibilities. Forty years ago, John Mason Brown wrote: "Every modern war, however fortunate its outcome for us, has changed the world by subtracting from it abidingly. Every modern war has had to represent, in order to be won, a temporary abdication of ethical and humane standards. Every modern war has, in other words, demanded a certain retreat even of its victors and meant that they have lost in the very process of winning." [5] The extent of Americans' retreat in Operation Desert Storm from their best intentions and most serious codes for the fighting of war is becoming clearer. It must not happen again. 1. Quoted in William M. Arkin, Damian Durrant, and Marianne Cherni, On Impact-Modern Warfare and the Environment: A Case Study of the Gulf War (Washington, D.C.: Greenpeace, May 1991). Much of the information in this article is based on this report. 2. Susan Sachs, "U.N. Scales Back Forecast of Iraqi Infant Death Toll," Philadelphia Inquirer, July 11, 1991, p. 12. 3. Joby Wright, "War's End," Air Force Times (March 11, 1991). 4. R.W. Apple, Jr., "Iraqis Reduced to a 'Rabble,' General Asserts," New York Times, March 1, 1991, p. 1. 5. John Mason Brown, "Seeing Things," Saturday Review (Aug. 12, 1950). By GEORGE A. LOPEZ George A. Lopez is associate professor of government and international studies and faculty fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana |