You know, it's funny you should mention that...howdy, all. It's been a while.
Lines in the Sand: A History of the Gulf War
XX
“My father was a truly great man, but even great men may have their flaws. My father was too merciful with his enemies, too merciful to take that final step and do what was necessary to achieve victory for our people.” – Iraqi President Uday Hussein
“The explosion of that bomb in Jerusalem means the non-existence of a Palestinian state for the next 500 years.” – US Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney
“The oppressors have been chastised by the might of our people, and we shall continue to punish their arrogance until we are victorious and their illegal state lies broken beneath the heel of our boots.” – PLO leader Yasser Arafat
Excerpt from Fighting Through the Darkness: A Personal Account of the Arabian War
By HRH General Khalid bin Sultan al Saud Harper Collins 1995
On the night before the Arab Joint Forces were scheduled to depart for our first mission as a unified task force, I left headquarters to visit my father. Waving away fears concerning his safety, the rightful King of the Saudi Kingdom had chosen to make his new base of operations in the town of Al Hofuf. While it was certainly a decision with no small amount of risk involved given that only a matter of weeks ago the area and its local garrison had declared itself loyal to Prince Nayef and his usurpers, it was a move that illustrated my father’s forgiving nature, even in these dark times of crisis. Of course, there were more pragmatic reasons to be taken into account with his choice in residence. Al Hofuf was the largest city still under allied control in the eastern Kingdom, in fact our only remaining city, humiliating as it might be to admit. It also served as the forward headquarters for the U.S. Central Command and had swiftly become the gathering point for allied armies arriving from all across the globe to assist. The vast majority of these forces were off to the north and fully engaged with throwing the Iraqi invaders back across the border. It pained me immensely to not be able to take part in the campaign, but General Schwarzkopf had at length convinced my father and myself that the remaining strength of the Royal Saudi Armed Forces would be better employed in leading the counterattack against the New Ihkwan rebels and liberating Riyadh from their grip. Seeing as how at this juncture I had little more than a brigade’s worth of units comprising my command, there was some truth in noting that our brave men would be little more than a token contribution to the bloody and chaotic coastal theater.
So it was that my first assignment as the sword of the Saudi Kingdom was to be the deployment of our forces to Al Kharj, serving as a much needed bulwark for the beleaguered garrison and the strategically vital airbase from which many of the allied strike missions were still launched. Intensifying probes from New Ihkwan forces were threatening to cut the town off and force a general evacuation of our air units, but with so much territory already lost, the loss of such a vital staging post would make a counterattack against Riyadh considerably more difficult. Therefore, securing the area and preserving the operational integrity of Al Kharj Air Base was deemed to be of the utmost importance by command of the King, with General Schwarzkopf in full agreement.
I arrived at the royal residence shortly before midnight, though the lateness of the hour seemed of little concern to the constant flow of servants, military staff and variety of support staff bustling to and fro in their respective duties. The seat of my father’s power, as it were, consisted of a hotel complex that we had purchased for our use. Though it was the largest hotel in the city and far from spartan in its furnishings and comfort, it was a far cry from the palaces in Riyadh and Jeddah and it showed in the faces of my father’s advisors. I felt no small amount of bitterness over the circumstances that had forced our family into exile within our own kingdom, hanging on by a thread against threats both from without and within. The Saud family had ruled over our Kingdom with fairness and strength for decades, but the recent months had shown with graphic results just how fragile it had all been. Family, friends, neighbors…all split and turned against one another. Our mighty palace, thought to be stone, had turned out to be naught but glass and we had emerged from the rubble to find ourselves holding court in a hotel suite in the Eastern Province, little better than the Emir of Kuwait ruling over his people from a tower in Abu Dhabi.
My father appeared tired, his form slightly slouched as if weighted with the literal burden of his responsibilities, as I entered the suite converted to a receiving chamber. My fears were dispelled when he looked up at me and smiled, rising from his chair to warmly embrace me. His eyes were more deeply lined than before, but they still sparkled with vigor and strength, resolute for the task ahead. We exchanged greetings and spoke for some time on trivial matters of no import, simply glad to be in each other’s presence and eager to forget the war, if only for a moment. At length, we fell back into the world around us, the politely hushed murmurings of American military staff as they debated with royal advisors, the tap of polished shoes on tile floors as a servant moved about offering refreshments, the incessant rumble of heavy diesel engines from military convoys in the street below driving up towards the front lines. My father beckoned for me to come join him at the window, and we spent several moments in silence watching the river of lights slowly wind their way into the distance until they were swallowed up by the night.
“You realize that much will be asked of you in the days ahead?” My father asked, still gazing out the window. “It is a terrible thing that we must do. To fight and injure our people, our very family.”
I stiffened and set my jaw. “They have betrayed us. The usurpers have destroyed everything in their selfish quest, and now we all are paying the price. There is nothing terrible in seeking vengeance against those who leave children orphans and wives as widows.”
He waved a hand at me in gentle admonishment. “Vengeance? No, vengeance will only lead to more vengeance. Orphans will grow up with hatred in their hearts and strike down those who did their family harm, leaving orphans in their wake and beginning the cycle anew. God teaches us to love and respect our family, to open our homes to visitors and those in need, to welcome them as one of our own. We must not dismiss our own people, however misguided they may be, out of hand. My dear brother Nayef…I believe even now that he perceives what he is doing as right, that we are misguided and must be brought around to understand his position.”
“And are we misguided, Father?”
“We are many things, dearest son, but misguided is not one of them.” My father smiled at me again. “God will show my brother the error of his ways in time. What he chooses to do with that information is of course his decision to make. For the moment, we must do what we can to help convince him of our own position. Are your people prepared for the task at hand?”
I nodded. “They are. My staff has been working well with the heads of the other armies and we feel confident working side by side in the field. The training of our foreign volunteers is proceeding at an exemplary rate as well and we should be able to add their strength to our combat forces before long.”
“Excellent. I must apologize for my failure in not providing you with enough tools to get the job done, but given time I believe circumstances can be turned in our favor. General Schwarzkopf is already reporting successes in his advance along the coast and crushing the Iraqi forces on our lands. It would be remiss of us as good hosts to not showcase similar successes against the enemy. Do you understand?”
I did, and told him as much. With the setbacks we had suffered since March, morale was at a low ebb and a victory by our forces was greatly needed to convince the people that we could lead them out of the crisis. Prince Nayef’s militias had seized the Holy Cities and with them a great deal of legitimacy to rule as King. It was up to both myself and the Joint Forces to prove our worth and restore the prestige of the true throne. We embraced one last time, my father said he would pray for my protection and success, and I left the suite feeling greatly humbled by the enormity of my responsibility. A short time later, I was back at my headquarters and working long into the night to ensure that all was prepared for the deployment.
I had been to Al Kharj on many occasions, but as the first vehicles of our battalion rolled into the town it felt like I was visiting an entirely different place. Some of the locals ventured out to wave and cheer at us, but for the most part we were mutely watched from behind the safety of curtains, the town as a whole afraid of what the future held. New Ihkwan forces were invested in the outlying village of Hayathem and had made several abortive attempts to infiltrate the air base, so the presence of our brigade was a large relief for the local commander. For my part I was glad to have along the Qatari tank battalion and their heavy armor, which gave us a notable superiority in firepower over the New Ihkwan and its ad hoc vehicles. We would need every bit of it.
Upon settling into the air base as the new command center for the Joint Forces, I was shocked to learn from the base commander that none of the remaining aircraft were available to conduct strike missions against the enemies perched on our very doorstep. Despite the looming catastrophe, CENTCOM had tasked every single jet with participating in airstrikes against Iraqi targets along the coast and Kuwait, and that the local National Guard garrison was expected to keep the New Ihkwan in check until such time as units could be tasked to assist us. Imagine, every day pilots would fly hundreds of miles to drop their munitions on Kuwait, only to observe a firefight a mere five miles away from their base upon their return that they were unable to assist! Confused and enraged, I contacted General Chuck Horner and tried to relay the gravity of the situation to him. He in turn explained that while he agreed it was indeed a very serious crisis at Al Kharj, nearly every air asset he had was occupied in the fight against Iraq and simply couldn’t be spared to fight until the fight in the north was decisively concluded. The evident implication was that CENTCOM had enough on its plate without wasting valuable resources on a relatively backwater theater. I continued to press my argument, noting that the pressure on the town would only increase as the New Ihkwan flexed its growing muscle, and if the air base was overrun there was little to stop Prince Nayef’s armies from expanding all the way to Qatar and threatening the allies at Al Hofuf. Finally, I gave the ultimatum that perhaps I should remove the remaining jets of the Royal Saudi Air Force from allied command and utilize them in defense of the air base if he felt nothing could be done.
As expected, the threat had its intended effect and Horner promised to look further into the matter and that he was certain that something beneficial could be arranged. Within a day, a portion of the fighter squadrons at Al Kharj were redirected to provide air support missions as our brigade counterattacked into Hayathem.
Excerpt from Mother of All Battles: A New History of the Arabian War
By Simon Anderson Naval Institute Press 1995
Retaliation
To understand the reasoning that led to the approval of Option Scimitar, one must first delve into the mindset of Yasser Arafat and the PLO in the summer of 1991. Since the organization’s founding in 1964, it had gained both prestige and notoriety in the global community as a force dedicated to the creation of an officially recognized Palestinian nation, a goal explicitly linked with the expulsion of Israeli occupation forces from the territories in Gaza and the West Bank and the eventual destruction of Israel itself as a state. In pursuit of this goal, the PLO quickly established itself as a paramilitary group and spent the ensuing decades facing off against the IDF with a series of bombings and terror raids, the most infamous of which being the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich by the Black September Organization. Denounced by Israel and the United States as a terrorist group, the PLO nonetheless managed to establish itself as the international face of the Palestinian cause and had even gained observer status in the United Nations by 1974. However, while Arafat loudly crowed over the group’s repeated bloody tweaks to Israel’s nose, the 70s and 80s found the PLO consistently embattled and on the run. In the aftermath of the IDF’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982 and its destruction of the PLO network there, Arafat’s group relocated to Tunis and attempted to continue its guidance of the conflict with mixed results.
Already at a low ebb in influence among the Palestinians given their literal distance from the situation in the Holy Land, the PLO’s perceived authority reached a new low in late 1987 when the First Intifada erupted in Gaza and the West Bank. What began as a protest over 4 Palestinians killed in an automotive accident by an Israeli driver swiftly escalated into a general uprising by the populace against the IDF’s occupation forces. While Israeli vehicles burned from Molotov cocktails in Gaza, the PLO found itself on the sidelines watching a situation unfold that it had no real influence upon for the first time. Despite being the official face of Palestine to the world at large, events on the ground were revealing Arafat and his PLO as unnecessary and redundant factors in the struggle for Palestine. Terrified by the prospect of becoming obsolete, Arafat suddenly found himself much more amenable towards conducting negotiations with Israel for a diplomatic solution to their ongoing feud. As of 1988 he had toned down his vitriol towards the Israelis and stopped called for the complete destruction of the Zionist enclave, a move that allowed the PLO to regain some measure of cautious approval from the United States and ensured the group’s dominant position at any proceedings regarding Palestinian statehood.
While the measure of truthfulness in Arafat’s change of heart at the time is no doubt up for debate given his meetings with Saddam Hussein throughout 1990, the outbreak of the Arabian War saw the leader of the PLO change tack yet again. Despite holding off on any violent rhetoric regarding Israel in public, Arafat made it perfectly clear that he wholeheartedly supported Iraq and its occupation of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. While his stance might seem odd in retrospect given his concurrent campaign to ingratiate the PLO with the United States, there were multiple factors at work behind the scenes, not least of which being the substantial support in military hardware an alliance with the Iraqi dictator brought to the table. Despite the newfound prestige Arafat had gained for his organization from 1988-91 among Western governments, the prospect of a warmer, friendlier PLO had made little difference to the proverbial man on the street in Gaza City. Overall, most Palestinians had dismissed the PLO as a relic of a bygone era and turned their support to newcomer groups such as Hamas as the Intifada raged on. In addition, Arafat’s earlier move towards an accord with Israel sparked intense opposition among the more radical elements of his organization and not so quiet muttering in the ranks began as members questioned his dedication to the cause of liberation. Pressured on multiple fronts and desperate to regain some measure of face and support both from his own ranks and the populace of Gaza and the West Bank at large, Arafat set events in motion that culminated in the Jerusalem market attack on May 20.
A popular choice for locals and tourists alike, the Mahane Yehuda Market presented a suitable target to hit in the PLO’s opening salvo against Israel, given the ease in gaining access and potential for high casualties during the morning shopping hours. The explosion and its shrapnel killed 23 people instantly and demolished several stalls, but it was the bomb’s chemical payload that did the real damage. Over 200 victims were taken to packed local hospitals for treatment of varying levels of exposure to the gas, with 43 of them dying during the next few hours. Overall though, swift treatment and the presence of pre-stocked supplies to counter chemical agents from a feared Iraqi Scud strike helped keep the death toll from rising any further despite the formidable challenges in rehabilitating the survivors from the aftereffects in the coming days and months. With residual contamination in Mahane Yehuda still a major factor of concern, the entirety of the market was declared closed and sealed off from the public for nearly a month while disaster response units began the task of cleansing the area and learning what they could from the remnants of the blast site.
The nature of the chemical used was quickly determined to be tabun gas, which corroborated with victim statements telling of an overpowering stench of rotting fruit after the bomb went off as well as the number of casualties with nerve damage to their eyes in particular. The matter of who exactly was responsible for the bomb and how they had acquired it was another matter. Officially, a group calling itself the Palestinian People’s Liberation Brigade had declared itself as the party behind the Mahane Yehuda attack but it was the first time anyone in Mossad had ever heard of the organization, making the PPLB almost certainly a front for another group, with the PLO at the top of a very short list of suspects. Yasser Arafat himself had voiced words of support for the new group in a recorded address, declaring that the attack proved the strength and resourcefulness of Palestine in overcoming their oppressors and that Yitzhak Shamir’s government needed to come to suitable terms with Gaza and the West Bank, ‘lest they find themselves before long in the dustbin of history’.
As Arafat’s words played out on radio and television sets across the Holy Land, additional attacks were already underway. Car bombs with conventional explosives ripped through neighborhoods in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, while IDF patrols and checkpoints found themselves subjected to sniper and mortar attacks throughout the day. Though these attacks were primarily carried out by emplaced PLO cells, further strikes were carried out by Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades looking to seize a bit of glory for themselves in the new campaign. By the end of the day, serious attacks had occurred at over a dozen sites throughout the country and around a hundred isolated incidents such as fire bombs and stoning saw the previously simmering Intifada turned back up to a full blaze. Palestinian and Israeli youths were attacking each other on sight, multiple businesses on both sides of the border were reporting vandalism and looting, and news crews broadcasted images of citizens in Gaza City dancing in the streets and chanting ‘Burn Israel! Burn the Israelis with chemical fire!’
The Israeli government, still recovering from the shock of the day’s events, began moves to counter and retaliate against this latest siege. Curfews were declared across the country, additional checkpoints set up and the IDF began calling up reservists as tanks and personnel carriers ominously formed up on the borders to Gaza and West Bank while Israeli jets carried out patrol sweeps not far overheard. Vengeance was obviously demanded and the response needed to be swift and overwhelming to choke out the new insurgency before it truly got underway. Casualties for the day had amounted to 7 soldiers killed and 13 more wounded, as well as 34 civilian casualties in addition to those lost in the Mahane Yehuda attack.
The identity of those responsible was the foremost question on everyone’s mind. Israel's internal security organization Shabak was the first to go on the offensive, approving raids on suspected safe houses and abducting suspects off the street to black sites for thorough interrogation. Given the PPLB’s near definite role as a front for the PLO or Al-Qassam, inquiries zeroed in on how exactly the groups played into the attacks. Despite a number of false leads resulting in needless torture of innocents caught up during the initial sweeps, multiple sources quickly placed the blame squarely on the PLO. Of particular interest to Shabak was the group’s newfound chemical warfare capability in regard to their remaining stocks and where the weapons were coming from. On this front, information proved to be much more difficult to come by and most of the information gleaned from interrogation rooms was little more than hearsay. PPLB claims of developing their own homegrown CW program were immediately dismissed by intelligence as a bluff, meaning that the PLO had finite stocks of chemical bombs at their disposal without the arrival of additional shipments from a now thoroughly locked-down border. The origin of the weapons was another point of debate, with some elements of Shabak suspecting Syria or perhaps even the Soviet Union at fault, though the signs as a whole pointed towards Iraq as the culprit. The use of tabun gas was something of a surprise as it had been mostly out of use by the Iraqis in recent years in favor of sarin or mustard gas, but still well within their manufacturing capabilities.
Israel had their suspects, but how to go about exacting revenge became the next issue at play. The Mahane Yehuda attack had been met with condemnation worldwide and the UN had ordered an emergency session for May 21 asking the Palestinians and Israelis to step back before the crisis escalated further. For the moment though, Israel’s government was in little mood for calm discussions with the opposition. A livid Prime Minister Shamir brought in US Ambassador William Brown in addition to calling President Bush and General Schwarzkopf, demanding to know why exactly their repeated assurances of Israel’s safety had come to naught. While the conversations of the former two were conducted with the usual, if terse, diplomatic protocol, the exchange between Yitzhak and Schwarzkopf proved to be much more heated in nature. Convinced that Iraqi factories had produced the weapon in question, Yitzhak demanded access to CENTCOM’s IFF codes to allow IDF fighters through to hit targets inside Iraq with ‘appropriate munitions’, almost certainly meant to refer to the open secret of Israel’s nuclear capability. Having just rejected the option of unleashing nuclear weapons in response to the Iraqi chemical attack on Bahrain and in the midst of holding together an alliance increasingly fracturing over the matter of the Saudi civil war, Schwarzkopf proved to be the immoveable object to Yitzhak’s irresistible force of vengeance. Not only refusing to allow IDF jets through, there are unconfirmed stories that Schwarzkopf went so far as to threaten to treat any Israeli incursion into Iraqi airspace as a hostile threat to be engaged by allied forces. Over the course of the call, Schwarzkopf somehow managed to convince an outraged Yitzhak that CENTCOM was handling the Iraqis and the use of such extreme measures would instantly destroy any public sympathy for Israel.
To help placate the Israeli Prime Minister, Schwarzkopf did offer the concessions of promising to task additional allied aircraft to watching Iraq’s Al Anbar province for convoys or Scud launchers, as well as not so subtly hinting that the United States would support ‘all necessary and appropriate action’ against the PLO and the Palestinian territories, a gesture of support echoed by Secretary of Defense Cheney and President Bush. Effectively, America was giving Israel
carte blanche to respond to the PLO in the coming days with their cover and support in the UN. With clips of celebrating Gazans playing on CNN interspaced with images from the market attack’s aftermath and pundits screaming about Jews getting gassed for the first time since the Holocaust, Israel for the moment had a significant amount of leeway to respond in the Palestinian territories. In the early hours of May 21, IDF jets began hitting sites in Gaza City with tanks and bulldozers not far behind. Just to the south of Tunis at the PLO government compound in Hammam al-Shatt, jets bearing the Star of David on their wings screamed in from the coast and dropped precision guided munitions on structures rebuilt from the ruins of a previous strike during Operation Wooden Leg in 1985, utterly leveling the complex. An Israeli hit-team arrived on site almost immediately afterward and began combing through the wreckage with the intent of finishing off any survivors, but discovered only a token few bodies. The majority of the PLO leadership had already vacated the premises and gone to ground by the time of the Mahane Yehuda attack, leaving Israel with little more than a symbolic victory over their old nemesis. Further driving home the point, several hours later a second chemical bomb detonated, this time in the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv.
