The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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Dirty Little Secrets
Bill Clinton and the Invasion of Iraq
by James Dunnigan
September 23, 2005
Discussion Board on this DLS topic
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was not a spontaneous
thing, at least not when it came to planning for it. Throughout the 1990s, the
U.S. Department of Defense studied their options about how to deal with Iraq.
President Bill Clinton ordered up these plans, as well as a series of bombing
attacks, in December, 1998 (Operation Desert Fox). This was done to try
and force Iraq to abide by the agreement it had signed at the end of the 1991
war. Clinton pointed out, at the time, that Iraq was still a threat to
its neighbors, and the world, because UN inspectors were blocked from many
sites suspected of supporting the development of nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons. Two years earlier, two of Saddam’s senior generals (and
both sons-in-law of his) had defected, and revealed continuing research on
weapons of mass destruction. However, nothing much happened after 1998, until
2003.
Clinton, noting the failure of the 1998 air attacks, ordered up plans for more
vigorous operations against Saddam. These, however, were never acted on because
Kosovo emerged as a critical situation in 1999 (because the Serbs were driving
out the entire Albanian population of over a million people). Our NATO allies
were unable to deal with this themselves, the UN refused to condone a military
intervention, and the Europeans leaned on Clinton to send in American troops to
take care of the situation.
The post “Desert Fox” plans are classified. However, it is known that American
Special Forces frequently operated in Kuwait, that the CIA had developed some
agents inside Iraq, and the Department of Defense had created the capability to
quickly get several divisions of ground troops, and hundreds of warplanes, to
the region, on short notice. It was this capability that made it possible to
put together the 2003 invasion force on such short notice.
Typically, these plans stay classified for a long time. If you reveal the
details of those plans, you tell potential enemies a lot about your military
capabilities. You also scare the hell out of friends, and enemies, in the
vicinity. Thus the secrecy. The purpose of these war plans is to prepare, not
give aid to potential enemies, or make allies nervous.
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