Strike Eagle: Flying the F-15E in the Gulf War by William L. Smallwood

Author:William L. Smallwood
Format: epub

Political Pawns

"If these missions are all going to be like this, it's going to be a long war."

Lt. Col. Robin "Scotty" Scott

About the time Flight Surgeon Ingari was dispensing medicine to the distraught fliers in Scott and Bowers' tent at Al Kharj, seven Scud missiles were launched from western Iraq. Their primitive computer brains were programmed with coordinates in Israel, and moments later when one of them exploded in an apartment complex in Tel Aviv, Saddam Hussein had announced to the world, via wailing sirens and garish night-scope footage on CNN, that his war of revenge was underway. If attacked, he would burn half of Israel with chemical weapons, he had vowed earlier. Now, it appeared that he was keeping his promise.

But the Scuds were not carrying chemical warheads. And the minuscule 160-pound explosive warhead with which the Scud was armed, was, according to General Norman Schwarzkopf, "terrible for anyone it happened to land on, but in the grand scheme of warfare, a mosquito."

For decades the Israelis have had their own grand scheme of warfare as they have struggled to exist as a nation while surrounded by Arab nations determined to destroy them. Their grand scheme is called instant, massive retaliation, and they have unleashed countless attacks in retribution for minor assaults with one-pound hand grenades. So it was really no surprise that 160-pound high-explosive warheads, descending in the dark of the night to explode on a terrorized civilian population, would unleash a quick and vicious retaliato ry response. Their grand scheme, when boiled down, was essentially, "kill one of us and we will kill one hundred of you." Undoubtedly, ratios of that magnitude were on the minds of the Israeli commanders when they launched "dozens" of their attack jets two hours after the first Scud landed in Tel Aviv.

In Riyadh, Schwarzkopf received word of the Israeli jets being launched and in his memoirs he confessed, "We waited grimly for them to strike Iraq in retaliation." Except to chase our own jets out of western Iraq to eliminate the danger of inadvertent conflict, there was nothing else Schwarzkopf or anyone else in the theater could do. If the Israelis pursued the "grand scheme" that had guided them since their existence, Iraqi targets would be attacked and the precarious coalition of Muslims and infidels that Schwarzkopf had forged was probably doomed.

That did not happen, of course, and in the way of explanation, all Schwarzkopf says in his memoirs is that a tired-sounding Colin Powell called that morning saying that "Washington" had persuaded Israel to recall its jets, at least for the present.

But the next night three more Scuds exploded in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Israeli tempers boiled over now and any attempt to restrain them would be like trying to restrain Americans after Pearl Harbor was bombed. "Get the yellow bastards!" was the revenge cry the author heard as a boy when hundreds of thousands volunteered to do just that. And Pearl Harbor at that time was not even in the United States.

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