JFK and withdrawing from Vietnam, again

Godfrey Hodgson revisits one of the perennial what-if questions of US history in The ’60s great what-if: What would John F. Kennedy have done about Vietnam? Salon 06/07/2015.

Hodgson takes a skeptical position on whether JFK would have withdrawn from Vietnam.

But he had ordered a reduction in the number of US troops there. And I think the evidence leans toward the conclusion that he intended to continue to pull back from that war.

Jaime Galbraith did an article several years ago making that case. He based it not only on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's memoirs but also on John Newman's JFK and Vietnam (1992) and Howard Jones' Death of a Generation (2003). Both of which are good reads as well as good history.

I blogged about this in my first few months of blogging, JFK and Withdrawing from Vietnam 11/24/2003.

Galbraith's articles and related material from that time on this topic include:

Kennedy, Vietnam and Iraq Salon.com 11/22/2003

Exit Strategy: In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam Boston Review 09/01/2003

In a letter to Boston Review, Noam Chomsky challenged Galbraith's position, Letters from Chomsky and Galbraith on JFK and Vietnam 12/01/2003.

Galbraith said in his response:

In October 1963 there were 17,000 U.S. military “advisers” in Vietnam. They were doing some fighting, and taking some losses, but in the main their mission was to train and assist the South Vietnamese army, which was more than 10 times larger. They faced an insurgency involving as yet few North Vietnamese forces. U.S. withdrawal at that time would not have meant the early collapse of South Vietnam. It would not have ended the war—except from the point of view of direct involvement of U.S. soldiers.

It is therefore reasonable that, into the early fall of 1963 when official military forecasts were still fairly optimistic, the administration should simultaneously plan to “intensify the war effort” and plan for withdrawal of our soldiers. Three key facts that have since emerged are these. First, the official optimism was disbelieved at the very top of the Kennedy administration, notably by McNamara. Second, Kennedy set a course for a decision to withdraw, from which he was not deterred by what then became a deteriorating official military prospect. This explains Kennedy’s concern, evident on the tapes, that the withdrawal be implemented in low key and not be tied to the perception of military progress. Third, the decision to withdraw was taken and then carefully, but not altogether completely, edited out of the record available to historians until the late 1990s. [my emphasis]

Galbraith also notes:

Kennedy’s October 1963 decision to withdraw happened. But Kennedy was nevertheless prepared to leave U.S. soldiers in harm’s way for two more years, mainly (I believe) to reduce the political consequences of pulling them out before the 1964 election. This should have, as my essay states, an ambiguous effect on his reputation.

George Herring in his Ameria's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (2nd edition 1986) wrote:

Sometime in the early summer of 1963, [South Vietnamese leaders Ngo Dinh] Diem and
[Ngo Dinh] Nhu began to explore the possibility of a settlement with Hanoi which would result in an American withdrawal from Vietnam.
Kennedy appears to have been thinking along the same lines. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had initiated long-range planning on troop levels in 1962 to ensure a balance between the Vietnam commitment and America's other global requirements, and in 1963 had produced a plan calling for a phased withdrawal of American advisers to begin later in the year and to end in 1965. The plan seems to have reflected the Pentagon's persisting optimism about progress in containing the insurgency. Some members of Kennedy's staff have since argued, however, that the President's approval of it indicated his determination to avoid an open-ended commitment. Indeed, Hilsman and White House staff member Kenneth O'Donnell claim that by the summer of 1963 Kennedy had recognized the futility of American involvement and was prepared to liquidate it as soon as he had been reelected. "If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam," he reportedly explained to Mansfield, "we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands." The extent to which Kennedy had committed himself remains unclear, but the plan for a phased withdrawal does seem to reflect his growing concern about Vietnam and the increasingly strained relationship with Diem. (pp. 94-5)

In the end, though, whether Kennedy would have withdrawn all troops from Vietnam is by definition a matter of speculation. John Prados in Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009) is cautious on the question, arguing that "concrete evidence for the Kennedy withdrawal is sparse and subject to interpretation." He then notes, "There is, however, hard proof for a McNamara withdrawal." (p. 78) Prados notes that Kennedy authorized escalation of CIA operations in Laos in 1963 and his public statements in the weeks before his death, Kennedy was explicitly saying withdrawal would be "a great mistake" and reaffirming his support for the infamous and always badly mistaken "domino theory."

As I said, it seems to me that the bulk of the evidence argues that Kennedy in late 1963 had the intention to withdrawn US troops from Vietnam. But it was a very fluid situation and the Cold War consensus in both parties heavily favored supporting the Southern Vietnamese government in that conflict. And, obviously, Kennedy could have changed his mind as time progressed and conditions changed.

Wars in Iraq and Vietnam (3): War and Presidential deception

This installment of my posts on the book Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past (2007), Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds., is about the essay by John Prados, "Wise Guys, Rough Business, Iraq and the Tonkin Gulf."

Prados takes a look at some of the actions taken by the Cheney-Bush administration relative to war with Iraq even prior to Bush's late-January 2002 State of the Union address in which he used the now-infamous phrase "axis of evil" (Iraq, Iran, North Korea). Here are a few keys points in time to which he calls attention.

09/11/01: Rummy mentions to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers that his instinct was to attack Iraq in response to the terrorist attacks that had occurred in the US that same day.

09/17/01: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfofwitz suggests that Iraq be included on the administration's target list and Bush agrees, following up later by ordering CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks to plan for a war on Iraq.

Late Nov 2001: Bush asks Rummy about their Iraq options.

01/02/02: Dark Lord Cheney's "footprints first appear" in the Iraq War planning. Cheney and Scooter Libby meet with CIA director George Tenet to discuss covert ops against Saddam Hussein's regime.

Other indicators at around this time include Wolfowitz's demand for the CIA to investigate Hans Blix, the chief of the UN weapons inspection unit, and that Douglas Feith's shadow intelligence-analysis group, then known as the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCEG), began milking raw intelligence reports to cook up a case for war on Iraq.

Apr-May 2002: CIA Director Tenet was moving forward with new covert operations against Saddam's regime.

The timing of the decision-making is important, not only for historical reasons but possibly legal ones, as well. There is one inherently tricky aspect of pinning that down. The final decision to go to war isn't made until the war itself starts. Up until he ordered the actual invasion in March, 2003, Bush could have changed his mind and backed off the invasion. And preparing war plans isn't in and of itself hard evidence of a decision to go to war.

But it's very clear from his bad-faith conduct over the UN weapons inspections alone that Bush had made a clear decision to go to war well before the invasion. Prados concludes from the evidence available at the time he wrote:

Evidence indicates that the key decisions had been made by the time Bush met with British prime minister Tony Blair at the Crawford ranch in early April [2002]. President Bush issued orders for specific war preparations and for deployment of forces in June and July [2002].

The administration moved ahead with covert ops and diplomatic efforts to secure allies, the latter not having notable success. Congress held hearings on Iraq in July, and "realist" Brent Scowcraft's famous op-ed opposing war appeared in the Wall Street Journal in August, preceded by a Scowcroft TV interview on August 4. Scowcroft's intervention was widely assumed to have been as a proxy for Old Man Bush cautioning his son against invading Iraq.

The administration sales job went into full swing with Cheney's [VFW] speech of August 27. The famous campaign of bluster, leaks of cooked intelligence and a sloppy National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) followed. Congress approving a spectacularly ill-advised war resolution in October, which Bush nevertheless blatantly violated when he initiated the invasion of March 2003.

It's important to not let the fog of political "gotcha" points obscure the real situation then. After Bush's UN speech of September 12, 2002, which convinced columnist Robert Fisk immediately that Bush had definitely decided to go to war, only 33% of the American public supported a war against Iraq without specific UN authorization.

Prados makes an important point about Bush's intent to go to war:

Prodded by allegations of Iraqi perfidy, and unimpressed by Saddam Hussein's September 17 agreement to readmit UN weapons inspectors, the Bush administration and Congress hammered out a joint resolution to approve the use of force. Bush's own draft text went to Capitol Hill two days after Baghdad agreed to the inspections, an additional commentary that goes to the point that nothing Iraq could have done short of preemptive surrender would have avoided this war. The resolution passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 296 to 133 and the Senate by 77 to 23. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution became Public Law 107-243. No part of the law permitted war for the purpose of regime change, to bring democracy to Iraq, or to force any other internal changes in that country's territory or behavior. (my emphasis in bold)

He notes further of that October 2002 war resolution:

The operative language in Section 2 allowed for the use of armed force to defend the United States against the "threat posed by Iraq," and to "enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." If Iraq posed no threat to the United States, that provision had no force. If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, under the existing Security Council resolutions Baghdad would be considered disarmed and the resolutions fulfilled, and the authorization for force voted by Congress would expire. Thus the Bush administration's legal authority to wage war flowed directly from the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and nothing else. Deception — of the public, of the Congress, and of world opinion — was central to the Bush administration's enterprise. Since the fresh Security Council resolution passed on November 8 also had the purpose of ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, and no more, President Bush derived no additional authority from it. (my emphasis)

I'm very glad to see Prados emphasizing that Cheney and Bush violated that 2002 war resolution in invading Iraq. They did violate it. That alone is an impeachable offense. And if there had been a Congress serious about its Constitutional responsibilities in office, they would have impeached both of them and removed them from office. Voting for the resolution was a terrible political mistake for Democrats. It played into Karl Rove's 2002 election strategy and put the Reps in control of both Houses of Congress. And the adminstration used it to give a "bipartisan" cast to its drive to war that the Democrats should never have given him. But the resolution did not authorize the war Cheney and Bush launched in March, 2003. That the Democrats (with some exceptions like Ted Kennedy) even today can't make that point clearly and forcefully is astonishing to me.

In one sense, though, Prados is understating the gravity of the violation of the war resolution. What he says is true, that without the WMDs, the resolution gave Cheney and Bush no authority to go to war. But there were two conditions for war in that resolution, both of which had to be met to satisfy its requirements. The second was that the administration had to show definite connections between Saddam's regime and the Al Qa'ida group of Osama bin Laden, specifically including Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

But Prados is dead-on in the following description of the behavior of the administration in the Iraq War:

... the hubris displayed by President Bush and his colleagues is painful to behold. These policy makers played as rough as Mafia wise guys. Not only did they depend on deception - and then changed their story even more as their original justifications collapsed - they failed to plan for the Iraq occupation, failed to respond to an incipient resistance, failed at the task of reconstructing the country destroyed in this maneuver, botched the Iraqi political realignment they wanted, failed at the alleged goal of making Iraq the basis for a democratic revolution in the Middle East, and all the while claimed victory, "mission accomplished." Today the United States pays more for war in Iraq than that country's own gross domestic product, and before this book is published the dollar cost of the Iraq war will exceed that for Vietnam. All of that is apart from the question of whether the Iraq war was even legal under U.S. and international law, which it was not. The Iraq experience gives new meaning to the idea of "the best and the brightest." (my emphasis)

I wish John Prados would start his own blog!

The Aznar document on Bush's meeting at Crawford in February 2003 had not yet come to public light at the time of Prados' essay. Mark Danner discusses the more recent report from the Spanish newspaper El País on that 2002 Crawford meeting in "The Moment Has Come to Get Rid of Saddam": Bush's Faith Run Over by History TomDispatch.com 10/17/07.

In his comparison of the Iraq War to the Vietnam War, Prados reminds us of a number of ways that Lydon Johnson was preparing for an intensification of the war in Vietnam, even while he was running as a peace candidate in the 1964 Presidential election against Republican Barry Goldwater. The administration already had the basic text of what became the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that was passed that year ready even before the Tonkin Gulf incident offered a pretext to send it to Congress.

The Johnson administration also grossly exaggerated the significance of the Tonkin Gulf incident itself to the point of outright deception.

Prados notes a bitterly ironic note at the very end of the Vietnam War in 1975, when Rummy was serving his firt stint as Secretary of Defense under that famous "moderate" President, Jerry Ford the national healer. The White House announced prematurely that all Americans had left Vietnam. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wanted to blame it on the Defense Department, though it actually resulted from an erroneous assumption by Kissinger himself.

Rummy put out the real story saying, "This war has been marked by so many lies and evasions that it is not right to have the war end with one last lie." Warms your heart, doesn't it?

Prados sees a serious problem int he Constitutional system as it currently functions, in that such serious deceptions by both the Johnson and the even more outrageous ones of the Cheney-Bush administration were able to involve the country in wars that have done such serious damage to the US:

In both cases an American president permitted - and actively participated in - deliberately misleading Congress and the American people on an issue of war and peace for the purpose of obtaining legal authority to conduct hostilities. In the Vietnam case the deception involved masking particulars of an incident whose true circumstances would have undercut the Johnson administration's demand for the grant of authority to make war. In the Iraq case the deception involved making up an "imminent" threat, contriving an image of an aggressive adversary out of whatever claims and charges could be patched together. In both cases a time element was inserted to galvanize Congress, and efforts were made to cloak the U.S. moves under the mantle of multinational action. The Bush administration's maneuvers on Iraq actually seem the more egregious because they started a war where no prior conflict existed, where the deception was open-ended and based upon no events whatsoever, and because the Bush administration "gamed" the system, domestic and international, playing Congress and the United Nations off against each other. ...

In the 2002 Iraq war resolution the example of the Gulf of Tonkin had not been entirely forgotten. That was one reason the resolution that passed was more circumscribed, predicated on enforcing a United Nations mandate and requiring periodic reports from the president. Congress tied the grant of authority to a second body, the United Nations Security Council. The executive branch proceeded to claim powers from a broader swath of UN resolutions that it asserted were activated as a result of its own deception, as well as to rely upon the commander-in-chief clause as if no restrictions on this exist. A similar arrogation of power based on deceit has characterized Bush's conduct of the entire war on terror.(my emphasis)

Prados is a senior fellow at the National Security Archives at George Washington University. An online set of article and documents from the Archives, edited by Prados, is available: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Late: Flawed Intelligence and the Decision for War in Vietnam.

Tags: iraq and the lessons of vietnam, iraq war, john prados, vietnam war

Comparing the Vietnam and Iraq Wars

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with Gen. William Westmoreland in Vietnam, 1965

Comparisons of the Iraq War to the Vietnam War are becoming more and more frequent. I hope that enough serious work with be done on that particular comparison that the comparison actually increases our understanding, and not just give us another bad historical analogy to use and lead us to more avoidable mistakes.

John Prados addressed the comparison in his essay, "The Drums of War", in The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach-In on U.S. Foreign Policy (2005) Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds. Although the book is dated 2005, Prados refers to writing in the summer of 2003. So his was an early take on the comparison.

Prados quotes one of Robert McNamara's postmortems on the Vietnam War: "Over and over again ... we failed to address fundamental issues; our failure to recognize them was not recognized; and deep seated disagreements among the president's advisers about how to proceed were neither surfaced nor resolved."

But Prados also reminds us that a number of Presidential advisers, including John Kenneth Galbraith and George Ball presented prescient warnings about the risks in remaining involved in the Vietnam War. But they were overruled and largely ignored by other advisers and by President Johnson. Though not entirely by President Kennedy. The evidence is convincing that Kennedy had decided by withdraw the US from Vietnam and had begun the process at the time of his assassination. (See my post JFK and Withdrawing from Vietnam 11/24/2003.)

Prados cites a number of reasons for the bad decision to escalate intervention in the Vietnam War that he finds credible including underestimating Vietnamese nationalism; bad judgments on the intentions of the South Vietnamese regime, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese; an excessive faith in the ability of the latest whiz-bang technology; deception of the US public about the nature and goals of the war; lack of international support; and, overestimating the power of the US to solve the issues creating the war in Vietnam. Then Prados writes:

Almost every one of these explanations can be applied to the Iraq case. There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein intended to attack the United States. Bush administration authorities misjudged the response of the Iraqi people to an American conquest. Iraqi nationalism and ethnic and religious issues played differently than anticipated by Bush administration officials. The effect of the "shock and awe" Bush commanders expected from their weapons did not deter people from using their simple rifles to oppose America. President Bush deliberately attempted to avoid insofar as possible any "great debate" on attacking Iraq, hiding estimates of forces, costs, and international support behind platitudes. Obviously there have been unanticipated events that have changed the course of the occupation. And most clearly, the Bush people went into Iraq with the specific intention of remaking that country along lines they had selected.

These propositions fit Iraq very well, but they are largely second-order explanations. Why is still the question. The answer lies in President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and the people around them. They, too, assumed themselves to be "the best and the brightest." They had the answer to terrorism - make an example of some other country. They knew how to solve the Palestinian problem - start a democratic revolution in Iraq. The ideological blinders were on tight, not only did the neocons refuse to deal with any objections to their intended course, but administration officials and their political allies often responded to questions raised about their course by impugning the patriotism or motives of the questioner. They knew how to fight a "light" war, and how to conduct an occupation of Iraq; they had foreseen everything. Except that they had not. Just like Vietnam. These were proud, arrogant men and women. The quandaries George W. Bush faces in Iraq today are purely of his own making. (my emphasis in bold)

And the same is true here three summers later.

He elaborates on that particular point, reminding us that there were substantial warnings of the risks in invading and occupying Iraq, risks that Cheney and Bush managed to simply brush aside:

In summary, President George W. Bush was far from ignorant. The obstacles to war with Iraq at the international level were apparent long ID advance. Flaws in war plans were pointed out in good time by U.S. military officers, as were the dangers in the postwar occupation (NSC officials from the White House actually bragged about how well they had prepared for an occupation of Iraq). Political opposition to Bush's desired course was obvious. The president proceeded purposefully, carefully structured the evolving situation to provide the option he desired, and then ordered the war and subsequent occupation of Iraq. All of this shows startling similarities to the process of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ....

Tags: iraq war, john prados, vietnam war

The secret and not-so-secret air war against Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion

John Prados looks at a new aspect of A War Conspiracy Documented TomPaine.com 02/21/07. Prados explains why he sees a "smoking gun" in the correlation in the pre-invasion months between secret air war plans presented to the President in 2002-3 and the actual air war in Iraq:

A January 31, 2003 meeting between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair clearly shows the two leaders discussing ways to provoke Saddam Hussein so as to justify war, indicating premeditation. Last week the National Security Archive in Washington posted the U. S. war plan - the set of briefing slides used by Central Command (CENTCOM) chief General Tommy Franks to brief President Bush on "Polo Step," CENTCOM’s Iraq invasion scheme. The PowerPoint slides were prepared for a series of presidential meetings held from December 2001 to August 2002. The slides summarized CENTCOM’s buildup and maneuver concepts for Bush’s deliberations. Bush backed Franks’ concept of “adjusting” Iraqi defenses by executing what amounted to a covert offensive air campaign. They would use forces already in the Persian Gulf region for the ostensible purpose of enforcing no-fly zones created after the first Gulf War. TomPaine.com has previously covered this operation (“The War Before the War ,” June 24, 2005), but the new evidence establishes an explicit link between the aerial offensive and the Iraq war plans.

The air war in Iraq has been severely underreported. And that was the case long before 2002. After the end of the Gulf War, the US and Britain established "free-fly" zones in Iraq, zones always of questionable status in international law. As Prados explains, there was one in northern Iraq to protect humanitarian assistance going to the Kurds. Though in practice it led to a considerable amount of autonomy for the Kurds, creating a much stronger basis for them to see further autonomy or independence. And there was a free-fly zone in the south to deter repressive measures against the Shi'a - though the US had allowed Saddam's regime to send helicopters against Shi'a rebels in the south immediately after Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait in 1991. The rebels had wrongly assumed they had American support based on public encouragement from Old Man Bush and from American broadcasts. into Iraq. This left the Iraqi Shi'a intensely suspicious of American intentions and promises in the wake of the 2003 invasion.

Essentially, the US bombed Iraq off-and-on from the end of the Gulf War in 1991 until today, actually. Prados writes of the pre-2003 bombing:

Until 2001, it had been standard practice for U.S. and British aircraft participating in these missions to retaliate against Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, missiles, and radars that had fired at the planes. CENTCOM had a plan it called "Desert Badger" that established standard operating procedures for such strikes.

Gen. Tommy Franks developed a set of revised procedures for the bombing of Iraq in early 2002, part of a plan called Polo Step that included the plans for invasion. The National Security Archive of George Washington University (Top Secret Polo Step) has posted the declassified documents.

What Prados focuses on in his article is not simply the existence of war plans; it's not at all surprising that war plans would be available for Iraq and that they would be periodically updated, given the fact that the US and Britain (along with France until December 1998) were maintaining the "free-fly zones". Instead, he looks at the correlations between actions on the ground and the evolution of the war plan and its discussion at senior levels of the government.

The pre-2002 air campaign against Iraq is critically important background. The national press tended to treat repeated bombings of Iraq in those days as routine items, when it covered them at all. But some of those actions were substantial. GlobalSecurity.org presents a detailed order of battle for one series of air attacks called Operation Desert Fox (1998-99). Whoever came up with the code name apparently wasn't bothered by the fact that German Field Erwin Rommel had been widely known as "the Desert Fox". GlobalSecurity.org summarizes:

There are currently [12/23/1998] over 34,500 military personnel in the area, including 2,600 soldiers, 20,300 sailors and Marines [of whom about 2,500 are ashore and the rest afloat], and joint headquarters and other joint units comprised of 1,000 people. The Air Force total, which was some 7,500 last week, increased by about 70 aircraft and 2,500 Air Combat Command personnel, reflecting deployments in mid-December. Forces in the region include land and carrier-based aircraft, surface warships, a Marine expeditionary unit, a Patriot missile battalion, a mechanized battalion task force, and a mix of special operations forces deployed in support of US Central Command operations. To enhance force protection throughout the region, additional military security personnel are also deployed. Currently, there appear to be slighly over 250 aircraft in the area, which total includes air to air, air to ground, dual role, support, and attack helicopters. The cruise missile force is twice the pre-December 1998 level and can be augmented significantly within days. (my emphasis)

The occasion for Operation Desert Fox was Saddam Hussein's decision to block access for UN weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter was a lead inspector on the UN team at the time and has given numerous accounts of those events. The official Iraqi justification for blocking their access was that the US was using it for espionage against the rules of the inspection. Ritter and the US government itself has since confirmed that it was indeed the case. As a matter of historical fact, the frequently-repeated assertion that in 1998 Iraq "kicked out the inspectors" is not true. The Iraqi government did block access. Chief UN inspector Richard Butler decided to pull out the team after the Clinton administration recommended they leave prior to the Desert Fox aerial bombardment. Ritter himself said at the time:

I think that it's inevitable that there will be military action tonight. [12/16/1998] ..Iraq failed to live up to its obligations and the US feels that it's time to strike...I'm dead set against this military strike. I think Iraq must be held accountable but I think a military strike even of a three-day nature, a massive strike that will inflict grievous harm on Iraq, will not solve the disarmament issue, will only make innocent Iraqi people suffer more and in the end will backfire and allow Saddam Hussein to generate international support and eventually he'll get sanctions lifted and keep the weapons. This is a bad idea, it's a bad time and I don't think we should do this at this point in time.

The core of the action was four days of intensive bombing. George Robertson, British Secretary of State for Defence, described the operation on 12/19/1998 after the third night of the operation:

Targets that were attacked by the RAF [Royal Air Force] aircraft last night included Republican Guard headquarters which are the lynchpin of Saddam's regime. ... If the Republican Guard ceases to support Saddam his brutal regime is under immediate threat. We want the Republican Guard to know that the cosy life that they have led under Saddam is under attack and we think they have got that message very clearly.

Last night, we also struck at key elements of Saddam's air defence system and at tank facilities. Air defence is a key element of Saddam Hussein's war machine and his tank force is a substantial element of his ability to conduct offensive military operations against his neighbours. Other coalition [US and Britain] targets overnight have included command-and-control facilities which allow Saddam to use his chemical and biological weapons. So far in this campaign coalition aircraft have flown several hundred manned-aircraft sorties including over 100 bombing raids, some 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles have been fired and around 100 air-launched cruise missiles have been used.

Coalition forces have attacked about 100 separate, precise military targets; some of these sites are very large military complexes which have required a significant number of attacks, others are single buildings which house key facilities. Around a third of these sites are related to Saddam's chemical and biological weapons, another third of the targets were part of Iraq's air defence system, either missile sites or command facilities; 20 targets are related to the overall control of Saddam's military machine and the balance are Republican Guard or other military sites such as airfields. We are still assessing the full impact of the damage we have inflicted and we hope to have a better picture later in the day. However, it is already clear that we have inflicted substantial damage on Saddam's chemical and biological war machine and set back his ambitions to threaten his neighbours. (my emphasis)

This series of attacks, involving as he himself said 100 bombing raids and 400 cruise missile strikes against around100 targets, Robertson describes as a "precise, limited operation."

A later evaluation examines the Desert Fox operation: Operation DESERT FOX: Effectiveness With Unintended Effects by Mark Conversino of the Air War College Air & Space Power Journal 07/13/05. He writes of the results of the 4-day bombardment, which he describes as a "major armed confrontation" between the US/Britain and Iraq:

In the end, DESERT FOX was a militarily effective use of airpower. Terminating the already very brief operation short of a change in either Iraqi behavior or leadership, and limiting targets to a relative handful, however, was a political decision. Yet the lure of achieving a bloodless yet devastating military victory while making a rapid exit possible, if necessary - what Eliot Cohen called "gratification without commitment" - ultimately, perhaps inevitably, led to the misapplication and abuse of airpower. Many airpower theorists had long cautioned against using airpower in penny-packets or in hyper-constrained political environments. "When presidents use it," Cohen wrote, "they should either hurl it with devastating lethality against a few targets (say, a full-scale meeting of an enemy war cabinet or senior-level military staff) or extensively enough to cause sharp and lasting pain to a military and a society." The 70-hour operation became what Cohen cautioned against: an attack on Saddam with a "sprinkling" of air strikes that would merely "harden him without hurting him and deprive the United States of an intangible strategic asset", an asset that Cohen called the post-Gulf War "mystique of American airpower."

Perhaps a longer, more punishing air campaign would have upended the regime. It is unclear, however, why anyone could imagine that such a brief air campaign had the slightest potential of driving from power a ruthless tyrant - and notorious "survivor" - like Saddam Hussein. In fact, post-OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] interviews conducted by the ISG [Iraq Survey Group] with high-ranking members of Saddam’s fallen regime revealed that the Iraqis were "satisfied" with the results of DESERT FOX. "They said, given a choice of sanctions with inspections or sanctions without inspections, they would prefer without." Likewise, the 2004 ISG report stated that in 2003 Saddam discounted the threat of an American-led invasion and considered the air attacks associated with DESERT FOX as the "worst he could expect from Western military pressure." This is hardly the attitude of a leader who was confronting the possible collapse of his regime in December 1998 in the wake of those air attacks. It seems clear that both American and British leaders considered the regime’s fall a possible result of this air campaign, though they apparently did not intend to sustain the attack in a manner sufficient to bring about that collapse. That they also were not prepared to either exploit or contain the results of a potential airpower-induced regime implosion revealed political short-sightedness. (my emphasis)

I've included some of that history as a framework for understanding the way in which the Cheney-Bush administration could make the aereal strikes that Prados describes in 2002-3 prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq without attracting a great deal of attention or debate. Although the two paragraphs just quoted emphasize the insufficiency of Operation Desert Fox to bring down Saddam's regime, it was clear a signficant set of military strikes. Congress, the press and the public had come to view even a "major armed confrontation" with Iraq like Operation Desert Fox as a routine occurrence that demanded no particular attention.

In 2002, the name for the enforcement of the free-fly zone in southern Iraq was changed from Operation Southern Watch to Operation Southern Focus. As Prados explains:

Southern Watch air attacks resumed in May 2002, coincident with one of the Polo Step briefings, following a six-month period in which there had been virtually no air action. In August, when Franks presented near-final versions of his war plan, Rumsfeld changed the rules of engagement for the air forces and Southern Watch became Southern Focus. Suddenly, in early September, there followed a four-day series of sustained strikes hitting Iraqi military communications, headquarters, anti-ship missile and air defense communications facilities, all considered key targets in "adjusting" Saddam’s defenses. Two-thirds of more than 21,000 attack sorties, or flights counted by single aircraft, that took place before the invasion occurred in the Southern Focus timeframe beginning in August.

The September strikes corresponded to the White level that General Franks described in May and August slides. That was described as an air operation of five to seven days’ duration involving about 1,000 flights by coalition aircraft. This effort was supposed to have been triggered by the shootdown of a U.S. aircraft, an Iraqi link to a terrorist act, or confirmed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) within Iraq. After that strikes concentrated overwhelmingly upon shaping the battlefield rather than their supposed purpose of countering interference with the no-fly zones. In January 2003, it was reported that there had been almost two attacks on higher echelon Iraqi military targets for every one aimed at air defense or radar sites.

We know from history that Saddam’s air defenses never did destroy an aircraft in the no-fly zones—not even a Predator drone. Nor were there Iraqi terrorist attacks or prewar confirmations of WMDs. Saddam refused to supply the provocation that Bush wanted. Not to be put off, Bush simply dispensed with the triggers and moved ahead on his aerial offensive. When, at the height of the 2004 electoral season, President Bush told reporters that before the war his administration had been dealing only with Desert Badger [the procedures for attacking targets in enforcement of the free-fly zones], he was being disingenuous. This decoupling of the air attacks from any relation to actual Iraqi activity is the smoking gun that makes plain Bush's aggressive intent. (my emphasis)

Because the press commentary rarely explains the significance of some things, Prados' use of the word "aggressive" in that last sentence implies an illegal action. It certainly provides another piece of the picture showing that the Cheney-Bush administration and their loyal servant Tony Blair intended to go to war against Iraq well before the new weapons inspections began that were called to a halt when the invasion was launched.

Bush has been known to say on more than one occasion that Iraq refused to let those inspectors in prior to the invasion, which is simply not true. The UN inspectors were doing their work and were asking for more time to search for evidence of the (non-existent) WMDs.

In the following interview, we see Rummy in an interview with court historian Bob Woodward with Rummy, with Rummy ducking questions about the sort of air war plans developed prior to the March 2003 invasion (censored transcript of 10/23/03 interview at GlobalSecurity.org):

What Rummy refers to as "Desert Badger Plus and a Desert Badger Plus Plus" is apparently the evolving set of plans released as Polo Step which Prados discusses.

Tags: iraq war, john prados, operation desert fox, polo step

Covertly shooting ourselves in the foot

John Prados in Rendering The CIA Useless TomPaine.com 02/16/07:

The broad international support for the United States after 9/11 has evaporated, and the old Cold War attitudes in America that accepted the use of these techniques are long gone. The Bush administration’s covert operations have been as catastrophic as its conventional military campaign in Iraq, yet it is now posturing itself for unilateral action. This is a disaster waiting to happen. America needs a rational foreign policy. The country cannot be saved by a new posse of covert cowboys.

Like all of Prados' work, this one is worth a read. He talks about the implications of the recent EU action on "rendition" (kidnapping and deportation to a third country) and the unhappiness of our allies over the CIA's shenanigans under Cheney and Bush.

Tags: cia, john prados, rendition