Why Containment Works: Power, Proliferation, and Preventive War by Wallace J Thies

Author:Wallace J Thies [Thies, Wallace J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: United States, Military, Political Science, Wars & Conflicts (Other), History, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781501749483
Google: 6XW4DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 48817469
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fighting the Last War

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had numerous military assets and advantages at its beckoning, including a very large army made up of more than one million soldiers, dozens of divisions, and thousands of tanks, artillery pieces, and armored personnel carriers. Second, Saddam Hussein had at his disposal Iraq’s enormous oil wealth, which could have done a lot to strengthen Iraq’s armed forces and its civilian economy, provided the money was spent judiciously and not squandered on items that were beyond the Iraqi armed forces’ capabilities. Third, Iraq was seven thousand miles from the United States, which suggested that Saddam had some room for maneuver, provided that he was careful about whom he provoked and for what reasons. Fourth and finally, Iraq’s location meant a considerable asymmetry between the burdens that another Middle East war would place on Iraqi and US forces. US forces would have to fly seven thousand miles to reach Iraq; the Iraqis had only to drive across a desolate frontier to reach Saudi Arabia. The Americans had many interests that made repeated demands on the first Bush administration’s full attention. Small states like Kuwait might occasionally topple off the Bush administration’s radar screen. How much longer could the Americans be trusted to keep Iraq contained, at a reasonable cost? Would the Americans grow weary of protecting the gulf region again? American commentators and pundits were often in awe of Saddam’s million-man, tank-heavy army, and the Iraqi Army did indeed look formidable on paper or at the parade ground. Even so, we can see now that there were indeed multiple reasons why Iraqi assets and advantages proved not to be worth much at all.

First, Saddam was seriously overconfident. Saddam wanted to fight the first Gulf War, and to fight it much the same way he had fought the Iranians, only this time against the United States and Britain. Saddam had not accumulated all those tanks and artillery pieces and the soldiers needed to run them by accident or inattention. Saddam instead wanted all those weapons to fill two roles: first, to allow Iraq to intimidate, or even invade, neighboring states; and second, to stop another state’s counterattacks before they could penetrate too deeply into Iraq itself. Iraq’s army may have been a good one (by Middle East standards), but the coalition’s forces were much better. Much of Saddam’s army consisted of poorly trained conscripts whose idea of a fortified position was a three-foot-high wall of loose gravel, which accomplished little other than providing the Americans with aim points. Conversely, most of the coalition’s soldiers were long-term professionals, who expected to be sent on expeditionary campaigns rather than huddle in bunkers and wonder when the Americans would arrive.

Second, not even Saddam himself could hold together indefinitely a million-man army made up largely of teenage conscripts. How could Saddam hope to fight the Americans and still survive? One possibility here would be to resurrect what Saddam believed to be an Iraqi military triumph, and then fight it all over again.

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