Oh, What a Lovely War!

Recollections of the First Gulf War 1990–1991

I was living in Bahrain during the First Gulf War. This is not going to be an analysis of the war. I just want to recount a number of anecdotes about that war, share some of the atmosphere we experienced, and also convey some of the surprising humor that came out of it.

As everyone knows, Saddam Hussein ordered his army into Kuwait on August 2, 1990, ostensibly asserting a claim that Kuwait was in fact the 19th province of Iraq based on an old Ottoman era sanjak (administrative district).

The real issue that seemed to be behind this move was money. At the height of the Iran- Iraq war, the Saudis were providing approximately $1 billion a month in funding to the Iraqis, while the Kuwaitis were providing approximately $500 million a month. These were done as loans and, together with other borrowing; Iraq ended the war about $40 billion in debt. This was in contrast to having started the war with about the same amount in surplus.

I still can’t quite believe the folly that Saddam entered into in invading Iran. All he had to do for his entire life once he got firm control of Iraq was nothing. He could have taken his 10% of the wealth of the country every year, stashed it in Switzerland, stayed in his position for life, and then handed the country and his money off to one of his psychotic sons. Iraq, unlike any other country in the Arab world, had both huge oil reserves and extensive agriculture as well as a well- educated population. If Saddam had done nothing, it could be one of the richest states in the region today. Instead, it’s a shit hole.

Why did this happen? Well, for a start, Saddam Hussein was a megalomaniac with serious delusions about who he was and what his place in history was to be. As is well known, Saddam believed that he was going to be the new Salahhudin who was going to unite the Arab world and drive the Zionist invaders into the sea. The first step in this process was to gain control of the oil producing regions of Iran, thus with one stroke liberating the Arab tribes living in that part of Iran (called Arabistan by the Arabs and Khuzestan by the Iranians) and simultaneously gutting the power of the nascent militant Shi’i state run by Ayatollah Khomeini.

That the new Iran was seen as a threat by all the Sunni states of the Gulf was not in question. That the Iranians sought to export their own brand of Islam to the region is also not in question. Besides Saddam having delusions of grandeur, it has been widely rumored that both the Kuwaitis and, in particular, the Saudis egged him on as they all felt and still feel threatened by Iran. The fact that the Iraqi Army did not have the logistical capability to carry out its task apparently escaped Saddam and his senior commanders’ attention. The net result of this mis-adventure was eight years of trench warfare not unlike that on the Western Front in the First World War: a million dead, a complete environmental disaster in the southern Iraqi marshes, and devastating economic disaster to Iraq.

During 1990, Saddam was negotiating with the Saudis and, in particular, with the Kuwaitis for a forgiveness of Iraq’s debt to those countries. Growing frustrated, Saddam deployed his army on the Kuwaiti frontier in order to put pressure on Kuwait. There is some question as to whether he intended to invade at that time or even at all. He certainly tried to cover his options. As is well known, through the incompetence of the US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie he received what he thought was a signal from the Americans that they would not oppose his occupation of Kuwait. He erroneously believed that as we had not opposed the long-standing Israeli occupation of the West Bank, that we would view an intramural dispute between Arabs in a lesser light.

It is always a problem in the Middle East to obtain accurate information about anything. This is due to the lack of transparency in those societies. As a result, rumor abounds. There are always stories flying around about what happened which no one can verify. From what I was able to glean about our own intelligence services, they were not very effective in the region. It is well known that there have been a series of intelligence failures on our part, the two most glaring being the fact that we had no contacts in the Bazaar in Tehran and no clue about the depth of support that Khomeini enjoyed, nor how weak the Shah’s position was, and then, of course, there were the missing WMDs. We also missed the Yom Kippur (October) War as well.

In the case of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the CIA categorically told the elder Bush that it would not happen. To obtain an understanding of how appallingly bad our intelligence in the region has been, I recommend Against All Enemies by Richard A. Clarke, the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism from 1998–2003, published by Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004.

Although we can read any form of electronic communication, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the information contained in it is accurate or reliable. On the contrary, the lack of cultural understanding on our part often gets in the way of interpreting what is being said and what is occurring. From my experience it was always necessary to parse everything that one was told and to take nothing at face value. This is very hard for Westerners particularly Anglo-Saxons who pride themselves on being direct.

One of my most knowledgeable contacts, told me that one of the reasons that the CIA was not very effective in Saudi Arabia, for example, was that they spent too much time sneaking around and were so obsessed with their spy craft that they rarely obtained any pertinent information. He said that he found that preying on the Arabs’ paranoia usually got results. He would pick a senior figure in one of the Ministries and simply go and ask him what he wanted to know, but he would couch it as follows: “Look, you know we already know this in Washington, but I just wanted to double check something with you…” and then he’d ask straight out what he wanted to know. Invariably the reply would be, “Yes, we know that every time a camel moves in the desert someone in Washington is monitoring it…” and then he’d simply tell him.

In contrast, I found that the one area in which the Arabs truly excelled was spying, though mainly on one another. They seemed to have a tremendous ability to organize domestic intelligence services. They would then add layers to them, so that they had spies to keep an eye on their spies and spies to keep an eye on the spies that spied on the spies all the way up to a small, trusted circle around the ruler. Iraq seemed to be particularly well organized in this regard. Saudi certainly was, barring the mistake that Prince Na’if made in putting mujahiddin veterans of the anti-Soviet Afghan campaign into the Ministry of the Interior. Sheikh Isa in Bahrain was always very well informed about what was going on in his country. The Syrian state security apparatus was particularly effective and brutal. The Egyptians were fairly effective as well.

Us on the other hand, not so much. Again, most of the reason for that, in my opinion, is cultural. At the time of the First Gulf War, most of our people in the region were veterans of the Cold War and had had cut their teeth in the trade in Central and Eastern Europe. The methods they brought with them to the Middle East simply didn’t work. I heard one story of a CIA Station Chief wringing his hands and moaning, “How the hell do you blackmail a guy who when he checks into his hotel in Paris calls the front desk and says send up two fat women and a boy!?”

The Arabs seemed to be extremely effective at rooting out or knowing who any of our operatives were. Saddam found and killed all of our informants in Iraq; ergo we were basically blind there except for electronic intercepts.

So, did Saddam intend to invade Kuwait, or was he merely shaking them down for money? He certainly felt (and not unjustifiably so) that his prosecution of the war protected the Saudis and the Kuwaitis from the Iranian revolution. Once again, my contacts were of the strong opinion that if the Iranians had broken through in Iraq, that, despite their rhetoric, they would have marched on Mecca and not Jerusalem. That control of the two Holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina (the haramain) remains a long-term objective of the Iranian clerics should not be in doubt.

So, the story goes that in the couple of days before the invasion, the Saudis were hosting negotiations between the Iraqis and the Kuwaitis in Taif in Saudi Arabia and after a round of talks, on the 1st of August the Saudis told the Kuwaitis to just pay Saddam the $10 billion he was demanding. One member of the Kuwaiti royal family is reputed to have said to the senior Saudi Prince there, “Why should we pay him $10 billion when if we only spend $1 billion, we can have him killed?”

The Iraqi mukhabarat (secret police) had bugged the room and that night are said to have played the tape to Saddam, who, on hearing it, is said to have blown a fuse and ordered his Army in on the spot. I don’t know if this is true or not? It doesn’t really matter. The other great story that I heard in connection with the invasion is that when the Iraqis crossed the border that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad called the ruler of Kuwait Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmed Al Sabah on his private line in the bedroom of his palace and woke him up just to give him the news.

Once again, who knows? What is true, however, is that the Iraqi Army barely had the logistical capability to take Kuwait. There was and remains widespread speculation as to why he didn’t keep going and seize the Saudi wells in the Eastern Province. The answer seems to be that his Army simply couldn’t be maintained in the field with supply lines that long. The Saudis certainly couldn’t have stopped him and the paratroop elements we inserted in a show of force were for show only and could easily have been overrun. Given that his Army was incapable of seizing the Saudi oil wells, the one thing he could have done to paralyze Saudi Arabia and to depopulate Riyadh would have been to take out the water desalination plants on the Gulf coast. His Air Force certainly had the capability to do that. A few Exocet missiles and Riyadh was untenable. Why he did not remains inexplicable. Almost all of the water supply of Riyadh came from those plants.

We knew what was going on in Kuwait because the telephone lines to Kuwait were open. In fact, it took the Iraqis three days before they cut the lines. As a result, we were in touch with friends there and getting reports on the situation. We knew that people were getting out by driving through the desert with the help of local guides. What was most extraordinary was the official reaction to the invasion. On the Bahrain news it was reported that there was a “border dispute” and that the Iraqis had occupied a few Kuwaiti border posts. The Saudi news was even more surreal. We watched the 10 p.m. news on Saudi Aramco television that night and they went through the entire 30-minute program without any mention of the invasion whatsoever.

Then, at the end of the news program, there was a swell of music, and an announcer came on and said, “And now for a special announcement. Today His Majesty King Fahd, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques issued a decree calling upon all citizens to remain calm”. However, this announcement amazingly didn’t say why or from what. But this was typical of the news blackout and head-in-the-sand mentality towards information that prevailed in the region at the time. Because of this, the powers that be were put under pressure, and they allowed CNN to be broadcast. This was a revolutionary change in opening up the information age there, although I understand that the Saudis broadcast it on a twenty second delay in case they felt they needed to censor anything.

The newscasters on CNN became celebrities in the region overnight. Bobbie Batista, a brassy looking blonde, was particularly popular among Saudi men and, from what I heard occasioned numerous jealous fights with their wives over the fact that they’d drop whatever they were doing to watch her reports. Charles Jako was also very popular, and Radio Bahrain started a Charles Jako fan club. I was amused by the pathetic attempt at dissimulation that CNN reporters engaged in. On one occasion I recall Charles Jako doing a stand up from “an undisclosed location.” It was obvious that he was standing in front of the Dhahran International Hotel in Al Khobar. You just had to laugh.

In any case, the invasion of Kuwait was unsettling, and one of the first things I did was to send my wife and five-year-old son back to the United States for their safety. In retrospect it wasn’t necessary, but at the time we were very fearful. When it became clear that Saddam wasn’t going to invade Saudi Arabia, things settled down a little. When it started to look like the U.S. would intervene, the tension began to rise, and a waiting period ensued while Bush rolled out his diplomacy and lobbied for the vote in the House and Senate for war.

Then the jokes started.

One of the first that the Bahrainis started telling went as follows:

Sheikh Isa (the ruler of Bahrain) called Saddam on the phone and said, “How dare you do this thing, you bloody bastard, get out of Kuwait and get out now.”

Saddam said, “Who is this? Who dares speak to me like this?”

Sheikh Isa said,” Uh, uh, this is the Amir of Qatar.” And hung up.

But Saddam knew who it was and called Sheikh Isa back. When he got him on the line, he said,” This is Saddam Hussain.”

Sheikh Isa said, “Beep, beep, beep.”

Another one went as follows:

One of Saddam’s generals came to him and said “O Saddam, you are a brilliant commander. You are the greatest general since Alexander. It only took you two days to conquer Kuwait. How long would it take you to conquer Saudi Arabia?”

Saddam said, “I’d take it in a week!”

The General said, “How long would it take you to conquer the United Arab Emirates?”

Saddam said, “Three days!”

“What about Qatar?”

“A day and a half!”

“And Bahrain?”

Saddam said, “Bahrain! I’d just send a fax!”

The other set of stories that were going around had much to say about the unsophistication of the Iraqi troops in Kuwait, such as the fact that when they looted the banks and other offices, they only stole the monitors from the desktop computers, thinking they were T.V.s and left the C.P.U.’s and keyboards behind. This was interesting inasmuch as these stories reflected the Kuwaitis sense of cultural superiority to the Iraqis but also in one case had echoes of a story dating from the Middle Ages that made me again wonder about aspects of cultural continuity in the region. According to the chronicler Ibn Al Athir, an historian who was writing at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th centuries, when the Seljuk Turks first showed up in Baghdad, they thought that camphor was salt and they put it on their food. In Kuwait, it was being said that the Iraqi soldiers were taking cans of shaving cream, and thinking that it was whipped cream, put it on their food. Who knows if either story was true, but I thought that it was indicative of a state of mind of the more sophisticated Arabs towards people they perceived as rubes that resonated through the centuries. Interestingly enough, the word Baghdad in Arabic means “civilized” and the verb form of it tabaghdada means “to make civilized”.

During the fall of 1990, the U.S. military buildup in the region began. Between August of 1990 and January 1991, about a half a million troops passed through the region on their way into Saudi. It was quite an interesting experience to be that close to a war, and I certainly hope not to ever actually be in the middle of one.

As it got closer to the date, anxiety levels started to rise, and a few comical events ensued. First, there was a deep fear in Bahrain about getting gassed by the Iraqis. This was not helped by the fact that on Radio Baghdad the Iraqis issued an apology to the people of Bahrain for having to kill them. This was couched as, “You have insects living amongst you and we have an insecticide for every kind of insect.” So naturally everyone thought that the Iraqis would shoot missiles full of nerve gas at Bahrain.

This broadcast led to a very obscure joke being told by members of the Shi’i community in Bahrain. It went:

“Saddam has the Al Hassan and Al Hussein missiles, but for us all he needs is a tafilat ar ridda missile.”

Tafilat ar ridda literally means “a child of the apostasy” and refers to infants that were killed (or martyred, depending on your point of view) at Karbela in 680 together with the Imam Hussein bin Ali a grandson of the Prophet (PBUH). That the Shi’i would find a way to reference the most important incident in their sectarian iconography to the contemporary war not only astounded me but is further evidence of the cultural continuity I have mentioned previously. I will comment more on the Shi’i’s undying obsession with that battle later.

The fear of a possible gas attack was heightened when the German embassy handed out complete chemical warfare suits to the German expatriates living in Bahrain. As everyone knew, the Germans had supplied components to the Iraqis that were used in the manufacture of nerve gas. As a result, everyone assumed that German intelligence had a better handle on what the Iraqi capabilities were and how much nerve gas they had and what kind of danger we were in. One of the Germans I knew had a chemical warfare party one night to which everybody showed up in their gas masks. He was wearing the full “noddy suit” as the British call it. As the American Embassy hadn’t given U.S. nationals any gas masks, I wore dishwashing gloves and a folded-up handkerchief over my mouth held in place by a rubber band. That was my ”chemical warfare suit.”

When the British and Canadian Embassies handed out gas masks to their communities, it started a panic amongst the U.S. expats. The Embassy then gave us chemical warfare ponchos, which, frankly, in the event of a nerve gas attack, would have provided no protection whatsoever. The outcry that ensued led to the Embassy holding a ‘town hall meeting’ to try to reassure the community. It was the usual canting farce that only Americans can stage. Members of the audience were hysterical, and demanding to know why, if every other western embassy in Bahrain was looking after its citizens, couldn’t the US? The Chief of Mission was handing out the usual pabulum of “the military having priority, etc.” Of course, the real answer was and is that the US Government doesn’t actually give a fuck about its people and the embassy staff were just place servers waiting to retire on half pay COLA linked for life, same as most of the members of the military. We couldn’t believe some of the bleating that was going on at the time by soldiers who said that they hadn’t joined the Army to fight a war; they had joined for the educational or technical training benefits, etc.

In any case, just as the pandemonium in the Embassy ‘town hall meeting’ was reaching a peak, one of the Embassy apparatchiks ran on stage in a deus ex machina move and announced, “I just got off the phone with Washington and we will be getting gasmasks!” The meeting broke up in joy. They arrived about four weeks into the air war so we would all have been dead in the event the Iraqis did gas us at the onset of hostilities.

My boss got me a Czech gas mask as a gesture of his care. Who knows what use it would have been? None of course, because all it takes to die from Sarin is a miniscule drop on your skin! You don’t have to breathe the stuff.

I heard that the problem with the U.S. supply of gasmasks was that besides we civilians being way down the pecking order that even our own troops were inadequately supplied and that the standard issue gas mask the U.S. Army had was of Korean War vintage and that there was only one factory in the United States that manufactured gas masks and that the congressman in whose district the factory was located had consistently blocked any attempts to set up a modern facility elsewhere. I don’t know if this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were.

The last amusing gas mask incident happened a few days after the air war started. A colleague of mine and I were in our office on the tenth floor of the Sheraton tower when the air raid sirens went off. We started walking down the stairs. He was carrying a plastic bag which I knew contained his gas mask. About two flights down the bag started beeping. This was alarming and I started yelling, assuming that he had some kind of chemical warfare alert system that something on the mask had picked up, something to set off a warning buzzer. So, we started running down the stairs with me yelling, “What the hell is that?” and him yelling back, “I don’t know! I don’t know!” When we got to the bottom, he opened the bag. It turned out he also had an alarm clock in the bag, and it had gone off!!!

During the buildup in the fall there were several encounters with servicemen of various nationalities. The main airport in Manama was converted into an RAF base. During the war they were flying Jaguars out of it during the day and Tornadoes during the night. One of the enlisted R.A.F. men that I met told me that after taking the measure of the social scene in Bahrain, he had decided to learn Tagalog, as he thought it would give him a much better chance of getting laid than trying to learn Arabic.

In the south of the island there was another airbase now known as Sheikh Isa Airbase but at the time was being kept secret by the Bahraini government for God knows what reason since everybody knew about it. It was in a restricted part of the Island and unauthorized personnel couldn’t go there. During the war, the U.S.A.F. flew F-15 combat air patrols out of it. One day I was stopped in Central Manama by two U.S.A.F. personnel driving a truck with what, from their outlines under canvas covering, looked suspiciously like bombs on the back of the flatbed. They asked me for directions to the “airbase.” I said, “Do you want the airport that’s been turned into an airbase or the secret airbase in the South of the Island that nobody knows about?” They laughed and said, “I guess we want the secret air base.”

As we prepared for the war, the westerners methodically went about buying 5-gallon jugs and filling them with water, extra food, flashlights, extra batteries, and tape for their windows. The Indian community seemed to be oblivious to the whole matter until about two days before the air war started, at which time they went berserk and emptied the souq (main market) of all of the aforesaid items. In addition to flashlights and batteries, etc. the U.S. embassy recommended that people acquire an electric can opener. How exactly this was supposed to work in the event of the power station being bombed escaped me. They made the same recommendation for Y2K so God only knows how obsessed with electric can openers the bureaucrat who had drawn up this list was. I tried to take comfort in the fact that if he wasn’t pocketing my tax dollars, he would probably be unemployed.

Although we all had a fair amount of anxiety about what would happen, it became apparent two days into the air war that the Iraqis did not have the capability of striking Bahrain with their air force and, in fact, had little air capability at all. One of the most mysterious incidents of that early part of the war was the fact that a large section of the Iraqi Air Force actually flew out of the country to Iran where the assets were seized by the Iranians. To this day I do not know why this happened, but my suspicion was and remains that an Iraqi air force general calculated that Saddam would lose and wanted to have military assets available for the post Saddam period. Doubtless he is long in his grave.

And yet more jokes were circulating:

“Because of the crisis King Fahd went to Washington to meet with the elder Bush, and, during the meeting, noticed that Bush had two phones on his desk: a blue phone and a red phone. When the King asked what they were for, Bush told him that it was the latest American technology and that on the blue phone one could call heaven and on the red phone one could call hell. The King was amazed and asked if he could try. Bush said, ‘Of course!’

The King picked up the blue phone and a voice came on the line that said, ‘Hey, how are ya? How ya doin?’

The King picked up the red phone and a voice came on the line and said, ‘weeshu hatha?’ which means, ‘who’s that?’

The King was amazed and asked what it cost. The technician was called who informed him that to call heaven cost 10 cents but to call hell it cost $100.

The King asked Bush if he could take the technician back to Saudi Arabia and get the system installed in his palace, to which Bush agreed.

Later, back in Riyadh after the system was installed, the King was showing it off to some other senior Princes who tried it out.

When they picked up the blue phone a voice came on the line and said, ‘Hey, how are ya? How ya doin?’

When they picked up the red phone a voice came on the line and said, “weeshu hatha?”

The princes were amazed and asked the King what it cost to make the calls. The King called the technician in and asked him. The technician said, ‘To call heaven costs a $100, but to call hell only costs 10 cents.’

The King said, ‘Wait a minute, wasn’t it the other way around in Washington?’

The technician said, ‘Yes, but you have to remember, here, hell is a local call!’”

Another one went:

“Prince Sultan, the Minister of Defense, went out to inspect one of the airbases. Lined up on the tarmac were the planes with their crews in front of them. He went up to the first one and said to the Air man, ‘Where are you from?’

The man replied, ‘The United States.’

The prince said, ‘Very good and what do you do?’

The man said, ‘I’m the pilot!’

The prince went to the next man and asked him the same questions.

He said, ‘I’m from Great Britain, and I’m the bombardier!’

The prince went to the next man who said, ‘I’m from France, and I’m the navigator!’

The prince went to the next man who said, ‘I’m from Italy, and I’m the mechanic!’

Finally, the prince got to the end of the line, and the last person in line was a Saudi.

‘Ahlaaaan, Keefak, shu akhbarek. Good to see you! And what do you do?’

The Saudi pointed at the crew and said, ‘I’m their sponsor!’”

For those of you who don’t get the joke, in order to get a work permit or even a visitor’s visa to Saudi Arabia, you had to have a local sponsor.

The Brits, being generally disrespectful of everyone and everything, started a ‘Backs Against the Wall’ party at the Bahrain rugby club every week and printed up a tactless t- shirt to commemorate each occasion. These ranged from a picture of Saddam Hussein as a spider spinning a web around the Arabian Gulf with the rubric Iraqnaphobia all the way to a picture of a man sitting in front of a swimming pool with gorgeous babes in the background and beer cans on the ground on the phone to his wife saying, “Of course, you must come back dear, only not just now; it’s still too dangerous.”

However, the best one had a picture of Saddam Hussein on the front, and below the picture it said, “If anyone else compares me to Hitler, I’ll gas them!”

My wife actually wore this on the Washington Monument grounds and got nothing but dirty looks. Unfortunately, Americans just don’t have much of a sense of humor.

By about two weeks into the Air War, we were getting pretty complacent. I was sitting in a fake British pub called the Londoner one night when the air raid sirens went off. A group of Brits started shouting a variation of a chant used at football games, “Here they come, here they come, here they come!” We merely carried on drinking.

Because we had time on our hands, my colleague and I decided to drive to Riyadh to see business contacts and show solidarity with them. It wasn’t possible to fly, as all domestic flights in Saudi were shut down for the duration of the war. The official explanation of this was that it was for safety reasons, but the real reason, like so much else in Saudi, cloaked in lies, was that the U.S. Air Force was flying B-52 missions out of the Hajj (Pilgrims) terminal in Jeddah, and the Saudi authorities didn’t want anyone to see this.

So off we went. There was a Scud attack on Riyadh the night before we went, and on the day after we came back. We also saw a US tank that had slipped off its carrier down the embankment of the highway.

The Scud attacks were more of a nuisance than anything else, although by a fluke one hit a barracks in Al Khobar which accounted for about a third of the U.S. combat deaths in the war. Bahrain was hit by two. The first one that hit came down in the desert outside Manama and did no damage. My colleague called me up at 3a.m. in the morning demanding to know what the explosion was. I had no idea as I had slept through it. The second one was hit by a Patriot missile and broke up over the coast. Other than the terrible hangovers we suffered throughout the duration of the war that was the extent of any real peril we faced.

When the ground war started it was a foregone conclusion who would win. The fact that the vast majority of the fighting was done by coalition forces prompted the following joke:

“Did you hear that Saudi Arabia has a new national anthem?

Onward Christian Soldiers!”

The first encounter at Khafji actually saw Saudi National Guard soldiers abandon their vehicles on the field and run away. They were taken over by Qatari troops who acquitted themselves well.

What most people don’t know is that the strategy for defeating the Iraqis was not the brainchild of Norman Schwartzkopf but was that of the head of the coalition forces and overall commander in chief, General Prince Khaled bin Sultan Al Sa’ud, the son of the Saudi Minister of Defense. Yes, that’s right! It was Prince Khaled who was responsible, and “Stormin’ Normin” merely executed the prince’s brilliant plan.

After the war, Prince Khaled threw a party at which he had had a life-sized cake of himself made out of marzipan as the center piece. I understand that a number of the senior Saudi Princes who attended the party took one look at it and decided that Prince Khaled was getting too big for his britches and decided to take him down a peg or two. Whereas the English have a real dog in the manger attitude about success I always found that the Arabs had a similar attitude about power. They don’t like people sticking their heads up too high. And they liked to cut them down if they could. My boss was called Sahib as Samu’ (“lord of the sky”) behind his back because of his haughty attitude.

Now don’t think that Prince Khaled and his father conducted the war purely out of altruistic feelings of nationalism. It was widely reported that Prince Sultan made $2 billion in kickbacks on arms procurements and that Prince Khaled made around $1 billion.

It was also reported in the British press that Mark Thatcher, the son of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, made somewhere between 2 and 12 million pounds off of British arms sales to the Omanis. One of my more liberal friends in England was incensed at this and thought that Mark had really abused his position of privilege to have done such a thing. I said, “You’re looking at this the wrong way. If Prince Sultan could make $2 billion in kickbacks and his son $1 billion, and the son of the British Prime Minister only a paltry 2 million it doesn’t mean he’s corrupt, it means he’s incompetent and not someone you want to do business with!” But by then I had learned to think like the locals!

The ground war as we all know was a walkover. I feel very sorry for the poor Iraqi soldiers, most of whom were conscript peasants who had no idea what they were up against. Thousands were simply buried alive by armored bulldozers breaking through the sand berms they had erected. Even the much-vaunted Republican Guard lost an entire division of tanks and vehicles in a sandstorm with 50 yards visibility. We took them out with thermal sites from 2500 yards. The main gun on the T -72 had a range of about 1900 yards. They never stood a chance.

In fact, in some respects the entire war was a result of a lack of understanding of the capabilities of modern arms and technology on the part of Saddam. Saddam was used to having absolute power in Iraq and, as a result, he thought that he was more powerful than he actually was. He, like so many people I met in the region, did not really have a grasp on the fact that it required a much more vigorous education and training to use the toys that they had bought from the West and were incapable of creating or making themselves. To give one small example: I once heard a Saudi and a graduate of the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran say, “What do we need these foreign experts for anyhow? You put a pipe in the ground and the oil comes out, khalas, finished!” There is still a terrible disconnect between the pre-modern and the modern world throughout the region. I think in some ways, the same thing happened with Saddam. He simply didn’t know what his limitations were or what he was up against. And yet he almost pulled it off. Bush only won the vote to go to war in the Senate by one. Saddam’s bluster and ability to intimidate nearly allowed him to bluff his way to victory. If it had been left up to gutless people like Senator Mitchell, he would have.

The fact that we decided to end the war for a sound bite tells you how little grasp of geo-strategic concepts our leadership had. ‘The Hundred Hours’ War!’ Sure, it sounds great, but a sound bite is not the basis for a sound public policy. Then, of course, everyone assumed that Saddam would fall. In the real world he would have, but we left the main apparatus of his state intact, and he used it to immediately stifle the opposition. The devastation he wrought in southern Iraq was extraordinary. I travelled through the area many years later and he left the marsh areas an utter wasteland. The salt shows white on the soil, and it is utterly inhospitable.

Then there were the fires. As is well known, the Iraqis blew all the wells in Kuwait in retaliation for losing. Luckily, they were incompetent in the way they did it. The way to blow a well is to set the charges at ground level. It was clear that the Iraqi soldiers that did it simply walked up to the wells and set the charges at arm height. Thus, the charges were above the Christmas Tree, the set of valves on the well. When the fire was extinguished by using a charge to temporarily deprive the fire of oxygen, it was then possible for an engineer to go in and simply shut the valves to stop the flow of oil.

I’ll never forget the way the sky looked when the fires were burning. The northern sky was gray, but not like a rainstorm. It possessed a preternatural light unlike anything I have ever seen or ever will see again. After the fires were out and the border with Kuwait opened, my colleague and I drove to Kuwait. Khafji was fairly well shot up and southern Kuwait had huge pools of standing oil and burned-out Iraqi tanks still littered about. People in Kuwait were shaken but extremely grateful to the U.S. and the West. They soon got back to partying fairly quickly and many recovered some interesting souvenirs of the war. One friend of mine took an Iraqi armored personnel carrier that had been abandoned on the street with its motor running and simply parked it in his garage.

After the war ended, I was driving down the streets of Manama one day and saw some US servicemen who were looking lost, so I stopped and picked them up. They were officers off the battleship Wisconsin. I took them to dinner, and they reciprocated by inviting me to lunch in the officers’ mess on the ship the next day. Both the Wisconsin and the Missouri were riding at anchor off the port, and I could see them from the window of my office. They are magnificent ships with a surprisingly low silhouette to the water line.

A British guy I knew (who will go nameless, as he was an idiot) said that he had sailed his boat past the Wisconsin the previous day and that sailors on board had kept rifles trained on him the whole time he went past. He said, “It would be so easy to take it out. All I would have to do is load my boat up with dynamite and ram it into the side of the ship. That’s why they kept us under their guns. There were certainly some brown trousers on board that day.”

The level of some people’s arrogance and ignorance knows no bounds sometimes. I said, “ Dude, the Wisconsin has 22 inches of steel at the waterline and was designed to withstand the impact of a torpedo with a 500lb warhead. If you rammed your boat full of dynamite into it, the only thing you would do would be to scorch the paint off the hull!”

“Oh, really, I didn’t know that!”

Prat!

As we all know, Al Qaida managed to do this to the Cole in the port of Aden, but the Cole was built out of aluminum and not steel, and so was vulnerable to this kind of attack.

One other interesting aspect of the Naval force we had was that the battleships carried a complement of cruise missiles. The Admiral commanding the 5th fleet, Admiral Katz, told us that they were using CNN as forward artillery spotters and switched targets after seeing broadcasts of Iraqi government buildings they had damaged in Baghdad.

So that was my war. It wasn’t “Over There”, nor did we save the world for democracy, and the Kuwaitis went back to the heavy exercise of lifting their money after trashing all the hotels in Saudi Arabia. There were 5000 Kuwaiti refugees living in the Algosaibi hotel in al Khobar for the duration. They literally wrecked the rooms.

Yasser Arafat backed the wrong horse which led to the retaliatory expulsion of all the Palestinians from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They were replaced by Egyptians and the quality of service in the hotels and restaurants fell through the floor.

Saddam hung on for another twelve years til Buwaish (W) decided to finish the job his daddy didn’t; the arms dealers banked their profits; the troops went home; the Generals wrote their memoirs, and General Sir Peter de la Billiere got a job selling mutual funds for the Merchant Bank Robert Flemings!

Oh, what a lovely war!