On 19 March 2003, the United States, along with a token handful of other countries, invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The invasion, arguably one of the biggest strategic blunders in American history, has resulted in at least 1,000,000 Iraqi deaths and has spawned an insurgency, a civil war, and an international terrorist group (Daesh). As the fifteen year anniversary of the war approaches, we would like to go back and examine some of the events surrounding the war. In Part 1 we will discuss the background of the war and the disposition of the Iraqi military in 2003.
The opening shots of the war were actually fired, depending on who you ask, anywhere from two days to twelve years before that night. Following Saddam’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990, the United States had led a coalition of nations to expel the Iraqi military from the occupied lands. At the conclusion of major Coalition combat operations against Iraq, the US and United Kingdom (among a few others) launched Operation Provide Comfort, a military operation which, among other things, established a no-fly zone over Northern Iraq/Kurdistan into which Iraqi military aircraft could not travel. The operation also included attacking any Iraqi air defenses which activated and targeted US/UK aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone. In late August 1992, Operation Southern Watch, a similar no-fly zone, began covering Southern Iraq, below the 32nd/33rd parallel. Operation Provide Comfort later became Operation Northern Watch. Starting in 2002, missions with decreasing no-fly zone enforcement utility began occurring at a more regular pace, including a 100-aircraft attack against Iraq’s main air defense site in Western Iraq on 5 September 2002. This attack, and others like it, were part of a series of attacks designed by US General Tommy Franks to “degrade” Iraqi air defenses in the lead-up to the war. Thus, from 1991 and through the 2003 war, American aircraft never actually left the skies of Iraq.
US military personnel uncover a buried Iraqi MiG-25 Foxbat
By 2003, the Iraqi military had been through a disastrous war, twelve years of sanctions, and an ongoing war of attrition. The Iraqi Navy was essentially nonexistent by the time of the American invasion, and even at its height the Iraqi Navy would never have stood a chance against the outstanding power of the American naval fleet. The Iraqi Air Force had been almost entirely lost during the 1991 Gulf War, not due to Coalition weapons, but under orders from Saddam Hussein to fly to refuge in Iran. The exact details behind the incident are hard to come by, but based on open-source materials it does not appear the Iraqis discussed the idea of refuge prior to flying their aircraft to Iran. The Iranians never returned the majority of the aircraft. In 2003, Iraq had a total of 180 combat aircraft (fixed-wing and rotary-wing), down from almost 1,000 at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Of these, the majority were not in flying condition. They consisted mainly of MiG-21s (40), MiG-23s (50), MiG-25s (12), MiG-29s (10), and about 50 Mirage F-1EQ fighter aircraft. After invading Iraq, Coalition soldiers found many Iraqi fighter aircraft in various states of disrepair; some were even buried intact in the sand, the idea being that they could be retrieved at a later date and restored to service (after America had been defeated, according to Saddam).
Iraq’s air defenses were based on the French-designed KARI command and control system with mostly Soviet missiles and equipment attached to it. In addition, Iraq followed Soviet air defense doctrine rather closely, which gives little flexibility for local commanders and situations. In addition to the issues of flexibility, the system was simply not designed with fighting the United States in mind. With precision weapons and a massive aerial armada, combined with the damage incurred by the Iraqis in 1991 and throughout the slow-burning war of the 1990s, Iraq’s air defenses stood little chance of significantly impacting the outcome of the 2003 war.
A Lion of Babylon tank captured by American forces in 2003
Iraq’s army, once the largest in the region, continued to suffer from the setbacks of the 1991 war. Crippling sanctions in the 1990s prevented Iraq from rebuilding or repairing damaged tanks, and purchasing new ones was out of the question. Iraq did develop its own variant of the T-72, called the Lion of Babylon, but few were fielded in 2003. Iraq’s army was facing equipment shortages and dismal morale by the time the 2003 war began, which was compounded by Coalition psychological operations. In the early days of the war, American aircraft began dropping flyers on Iraqi Army positions, warning the soldiers there not to fight back, and further threatening to bomb them the following evening should they still remain in place. This, combined with the memory of the overwhelming force arrayed against them in 1991 (and facing precision-guided munitions), led many Iraqi soldiers to desert far before Coalition troops ever arrived near them. Further, various flyers and radio announcements had told the Iraqi military that, should they be clean of war crimes, they would not face retribution from American forces and would be allowed to keep their jobs. As we will later see, this would not hold up. Iraqi Army equipment was significantly inferior to the equipment fielded by the Coalition, its soldiers far-less trained and prepared for war than their Western foes.
The Republican Guard, an elite, parallel military originally designed by Saddam Hussein to prevent a coup by the Iraqi Army, was a little better prepared by 2003, but not by much. They faced many of the same issues the Army was seeing, including a lack of information about their enemy (or their own territory; neither the Guard nor the Army had any maps of Baghdad with which to prepare a defense). The Republican Guard was largely equipped with newer T-72 tanks and ostensibly was trained in night fighting and advanced combat techniques, but by 2003 the viability of any of these factors was in doubt. Again, the effect of the sanctions of the 1990s cannot be understated.
Logo of the Fedayeen Saddam
Various militias supported the regime, including the Fedayeen Saddam, headed by Saddam’s oldest son Uday. They Fedayeen Saddam were fanatical, devoted, and poorly trained/equipped. Armed primarily with AK-47 rifles and RPG-7s, they would become infamous among Coalition forces for their suicidal charges out of Iraqi cities and into the countryside to strike Coalition convoys which were moving through the deserts. Plainly visible by day and lit up by night via night vision goggles and infrared technology, the Saddam Fedayeen were cut down in their thousands by the onrushing American forces. Their sacrifices made a negligible impact on the outcome and course of the war.
Finally, Saddam himself factored into the problems facing the Iraqi military. Always one to take charge personally during battles (and fond of showing off his knowledge of WWII battles like Stalingrad), Saddam by 2003 was increasingly far from the mark in terms of adequately preparing his military. Up until American troops entered the country, Saddam was convinced the US would simply not invade. As of March 2003, the primary threat (from the regime’s view) was the Shia population of Iraq, which had risen up once before in 1991 and been brutally suppressed. The second biggest threat was still not the US, but rather Iran. American action was only a distant third place in Saddam’s eyes (hence burying aircraft in the desert instead of destroying them or fighting back with them).
British troops wearing their chemical warfare gear in Southern Iraq
Despite the presence of the Al Qaeda-affiliated Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Northern Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein had no connection to the organization. It operated in an area outside of Iraqi government control, in an area administered by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). Saddam’s chemical weapons programs, once used to massacre Kurdish civilians and Iranian soldiers alike, had been halted at some point in the 1990s, and while it was true that UN inspectors had witnessed Iraqi technicians at the former facilities frantically cleaning up, it was less nefarious than it seemed. They were, after all, being asked by the UN to end and clean up their chemical weapons program. What was being witnessed was the “cleaning up” part of that task, although it was not interpreted in this way by the US.
Thus, as the days ticked down to the start of the 2003 war, Iraq’s military was facing an enemy which was substantially militarily superior in every way. It was to be less of a war and more of a slaughter on many of the battlefields. And despite the rapidity with which American/Coalition troops dispatched the Iraqi military, the war in Iraq would continue, in various forms, all the way into the present. The people of Iraq have not known relative peace since 2003, and while the future has much potential at the moment, there is also much to be concerned about.
In Part 2 we will examine the events directly after the 2003 invasion
