Battle Ready

collateral damage, he doesn’t have to move it very far.”

“What we need to do,” Shelton continued, “is catch him with these things in place. If we can hit him without any warning, we can do a lot more damage.”

Zinni agreed.

“We need to do something that outsmarts him,” Shelton went on, “something that outfoxes him.” He laughed: “We ought to call the next strike ‘Desert Fox.’ ”

“Yeah,” Zinni laughed with him. But both generals were deadly serious.

“Really,” Shelton continued, “what that amounts to is this: We’ve got to set up the next strike with forces already in the theater, so he doesn’t see any buildup. Or if we have to build up, we do it quietly, or trickle it in bit by bit.

“So here’s my question: Can we do a strike with forces we have in theater, and with maximum operational security and limited numbers of people in on the planning?”

“Let me look at it,” Zinni said. “I’ll see what we can do, and I’ll get back to you.”

The answer Zinni came up with was “Yes”; and General Shelton’s suggestion was put in place in the next CENTCOM strike plan — Desert Fox.

The name proved to be controversial after somebody pointed out that it was also the epithet given to German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel — the bane of the British and Americans in North Africa in the early 1940s. “How can you name an air strike after a famous Nazi?” they asked… a thought that had not occurred to Shelton or Zinni. To them, it was simply a sly joke: They were going to outfox the fox.

In spite of the doubts, the name stuck.[6]

The threat posed by Desert Viper had not ended the Iraqi games. During the rest of November and the first two weeks of December, they continued to jerk Butler and his UNSCOM inspectors around.

Finally, in mid-December, Richard Butler pulled them out once and for all. As the inspectors prepared to leave, the twenty-four-hour clock started yet again, and Zinni once more took up position in his Tampa command center to lead the attack.

This time, there was no last-minute reprieve. Four hours after the inspectors landed at Bahrain, the surprise Desert Fox attack began. It lasted from the seventeenth to the twentieth of December, with an option to continue on if it seemed desirable, either to restrike targets or to go heavier.

The attack was perfectly executed. Over six hundred Air Force, Marine, and Navy sorties were conducted (including over three hundred night strikes), over four hundred missiles fired, over six hundred bombs and precision-guided munitions dropped, using more than two hundred aircraft and twenty ships. Surprise was total. None of the equipment or facilities targeted had been prepared for it. None had been moved (no shell game). All the targets had been hit — and hard.

The attack was so successful that Zinni decided not to move on into the hard option — especially since Ramadan began that year on December 21, the day after the fourth day of bombing.

“There’s no point in bombing for three or four days into Ramadan,” he told General Shelton. “We’ve done about as much damage to the WMD program as we’re going to do. Any more would just be bombing for bombing’s sake.”

Following the departure of the UNSCOM inspectors and the Desert Fox strike, Saddam became much more aggressive toward the planes still enforcing the no-fly zones. Nearly every other day, his air defense units would fire on coalition aircraft, or his Air Force would attempt to lure the planes into missile range. In response, the U.S. unleashed attacks on the entire Iraqi air defense system, resulting in significant losses in Iraqi Air Defense Command weapons, radars, and command and control assets. This attack-counterattack routine lasted from the end of Desert Fox (December 1998) until the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom (March 2003). Coalition forces never lost an aircraft and Saddam’s air defense forces suffered greatly for his folly.

DESERT CROSSING

Tony Zinni continues:

Desert Fox accomplished everything militarily that we wanted it to accomplish. But it also brought political consequences that none of us expected. These totally surprised me.

Soon after we turned off Desert Fox, we started to get really interesting reports from inside Iraq — from diplomatic missions and other people friendly to us — indicating that the attack had badly shaken the regime. They actually seemed shocked into paralysis.

Although they’d had suspicions that we would hit them when the inspectors walked out, it turns out that the absence of visible preparations for the strike and the approach of Ramadan seem to have lulled them into a lackadaisical approach to their own preparations. Somebody put out the word to move the equipment and documents, the way they normally did; but nobody was in a hurry to do it; so they got caught with their pants down. And they totally didn’t expect us to take out the Ba’ath party headquarters and the intelligence headquarters — the “House of Pain,” as Iraqis called it, because of all the torturing that went on in there.

For a time, they were so dazed and rattled they were virtually headless.

After an attack, we could usually expect defiant rhetoric and all kinds of public posturing and bluster. But there was none of that. And there were reports that people had cheered when the “House of Pain” was hit.

Some of us even began to wonder about the stability of the regime; and I began to hear stories (told to my Arab friends by senior officers in the Republican Guard) that there may have been a move against it if the bombing had lasted a little while longer.

That we had really hurt them was confirmed again in January 1999, in Saddam’s yearly Army Day speech, when he viciously lashed out at all the other Arabs — blaming them for all the harm they had sanctioned, threatening reprisals, calling regional monarchs “throne dwarfs.” These were all people he hoped would feel sorry for him — or at least for his people. Showing such fury toward them was unheard of; it meant we’d hurt him really bad.

All this got me thinking: What if we had actually tipped the scale here? What if we’d hit Saddam or his sons, and that had somehow spurred the people to rise up? What if the country imploded and we had to deal with the aftermath?

Before Desert Fox, we’d looked at the possibility that we would have to execute the takedown of Saddam; but we always thought that would come after he attacked a neighbor or Israel, used WMD again on his own people, or committed some other atrocity so outrageous we’d have no choice but to go in there and turn over the regime.

“But what if it just collapsed?” I began to ask myself.

It didn’t take me long to figure out the answer to that: Somebody’d have to go in there to rebuild the country.

“Who?” I asked myself.

“As the CINC, I have a plan for militarily defeating Saddam. Doing that isn’t going to be hard. But after we defeat him, who takes care of reconstruction and all the attendant problems?”

It was clear that we had to start looking hard at this possibility. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that if we didn’t, we could find ourselves in deep trouble.

“What we need to do,” I realized, “is come together and work out a comprehensive and joint plan. We need to get the other agencies of government — not only CENTCOM and the DOD [Department of Defense], but the CIA, the State Department, and their Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and USAID, and everyone else with something to contribute. And we’d also have to plan to bring in the UN, various NGOs, and Coalition members for this phase of the operation.”

“Who’s doing this?” I asked myself.

When I probed around Washington, I quickly learned that nobody was doing it; nor was there much interest in doing it.