War is the explosion of the volcano of human aggressiveness, which is suppressed into the abyss of people's collective soul and often demands an outlet. Far from solving any problem, wars inevitably produce endless wars. Sixteen years after "Desert Storm", the world must look back and question whether the bloody adventure that marked the beginning of the so called "New World Order" has achieved anything for World Peace, any "order" at all. In my conviction, it hasn't. But we must learn the bitter lessons of history, and this is the reason I shall quote here some characteristic excerpts from notable reports of that period. I won't make any other comments save that the 1991 "high-tech" Gulf War, far from being a great "Victory", was simply an EXECUTION... Here we go, then:

"Looking for a cheap, quick kill, the Pentagon first hopes to destroy Saddam Hussein with the air option..." (1)

"For the Iraqis, the first 24 hours will be the worst day of the war in terms of tonnage dropped, shells fired, tanks and armor moved... (...) An army trained to take on the Soviet superpower should be able to beat - and beat quickly - a Third World force..." (2)

"With the thunderous razzle-dazzle of a Tomahawk missile launch, the United States and its allies unleashed the full fury of modern warfare on Iraq last week. The first results were spectacular and terrifying..." (3)

"...Only CNN was able to keep its lines open and report live throughout... As viewers watched a still screen, disembodied voices described what was happening in graphic, excited, sometimes over-wrought language. Holliman: 'It looks like a Fourth of July display at the Washington Monument... We just heard-whoa! Holy cow! That was a large air burst that we saw'. Said Shaw at one point: 'This feels like we're in the center of hell'..." (4)

"To Television watchers, the bombardment of Baghdad seemed like a kind of video game, at once impersonal and fantastic..." (5)

"...American weapons that had never been fired in anger worked as well as if the war were some elaborate training movie. Initial Iraqi resistance was so weak that U.S. Air Force Captain Genther Drummond, who took part in the opening assault, remarked, 'It was as if we had no adversary...' (...) Just before 1.a.m. in the Middle East, pool reporters at U.S. air bases in Saudi Arabia heard and felt the ground-shaking thunder of wave after wave of jets taking off. The planes headed north toward Kuwait and Iraq. At about the same time, more jets were winging off six U.S. carriers in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. Eventually, about 2,000 planes of the U.S. and six allied nations - Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Saudi Arabia and the Kuwaiti government-in-exile - hit targets throughout Iraq and Kuwait... (...) Last week it all worked. After the first raids, U.S. and allied planes pounded targets throughout Kuwait and Iraq around the clock, not so much in waves as in a steady stream. Drawing targets from a 600-page daily-computerized assignment book, they were concentrating at week's end on missile sites, command and control units, troop complexes and artillery sites. They also hit Baghdad again before dawn Saturday, knocking out the city's electricity and water and destroying the central telecommunications facility. By Sunday they had flown more than 4,000 sorties (one plane flying one mission). About 80% were said to have been effective..." (6)

"(...) 'Our strategy to go after this Army is very, very simple', Gen. Colin Powel...said at a Pentagon briefing. 'First we are going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it'. (...) Iraq's air defenses were badly damaged, its radars mostly silent and its warplanes in hiding below the ground. Allied attackers roamed the sky virtually at will, with fewer losses than might have been expected from a training exercise. Gen Norman Schwarzkopf... said he was surprised by the enemy's 'total lack of aggressiveness. Given his rhetoric before', said the general, 'we thought we'd be in more of a fight. (...) Despite allied precautions, Iraqi civilian casualties were higher than either side had acknowledged so far, sources said, though no precise figures were available. U.S. satellite pictures showed heavy damage to a civilian area in the southern city of Basra, apparently caused when a bombing run on an air base overshot its target. (...) 'We aren't going to start a ground war until they're damn near dead anyway', said a senior White House official. 'We're going to roar B-52s down there until you can't see the sky'. Already the Iraqis were being forced to fight partly deaf, dumb and blind. (...) Iraq did not admit to the full extent of damage it suffered in civilian areas, presumably for fear of demoralizing its own people. But it did begin to denounce the Americans for hitting individual civilian targets, such as a purported 'baby-milk plant'. (...) Saddam's efforts to retaliate were military insignificant. (...) 'I 'd frankly be more afraid of standing out in a lightning storm in southern Georgia than I would be in the streets of Riyadh when the Scuds come down', groused the general Schwarzkopf..." (7)

"Schwarzkopf said the Iraqis' surprise attacks were no more meaningful than 'a mosquito to an elephant'." (8)

"'We want to bomb as long as we can, cut off their rice and water and wait until they can't walk', one U.S. administration official said..." (8)

" (...) 'I think we were in the 14th century. It is very gloomy over there', said Dr. Rizk Jaber Abu Kashef, a Palestinian surgeon who spent two weeks at Baghdad's Red Crescent Hospital and toured five other medical facilities there. 'When an air raid comes, they switch off the generators and someone holds a candle or a flashlight next to your hand', said the doctor, (...). 'You need to continue your operation. You cannot tell the patient to go to sleep until the attack is over.' Abu Kashef said one doctor broke his leg when he tripped while climbing the stairs in the dark at the Red Crescent Hospital. Another was injured, he said, when their convoy was strafed by an allied plane on the road from Baghdad to the Jordanian border, although cars carried Red Cross, Red Crescent and UN markings. Power cuts, fuel and water shortages, a lack of blood for transfusions, and a dearth of antibiotics and painkillers have reduced medical care in Iraq to primitive standards, compelling doctors to concentrate on rudimentary first aid and resort to unorthodox procedures. Doctors reportedly do not have adequate supplies of water to scrub before operations or to clean operating rooms. Hospital hygiene is on the decline, and mortality rates have climbed from 6 per cent to 20 per cent of emergency patients, Abu Kashef said, 'not only due to injuries but because of hygiene and hospital infections'. Abu Kashef's most gripping recollection was the case of a six-year-old Bedouin boy whose family of 12 was wiped out when weapons carried by allied planes allegedly hit their settlement. 'He had shrapnel in his thigh, and we amputated it. Relatives brought him on horseback. He arrived so late, it [his leg] was gangrenous'. (...) Abu Kashef said conditions in hospitals outside Baghdad are even worse because of petrol shortages. But even in the capital, hospitals are running out of X-ray film, which can cut down the time needed for surgery. 'You get someone with a shrapnel wound. The X-ray machine is available, but there is no film. So you have to operate and explore the abdomen', he said. (...)" (9)

"Schwarzkopf reeled off impressive figures last week: 33 of 36 bridges hit on the supply lines between Iraq and Kuwait; (...) But one or two of his claims might raise a skeptical eyebrow. The number of sorties flown against bridges divided by the number of bridges hit works out to almost 24 sorties per damaged bridge, which seems to indicate that a lot of 'precision-guided' bombs and missiles are missing..." (10)

"Masoud Barzani, overall commander of Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas opposed to President Saddam Hussein, estimated in an interview that allied bombing has killed or wounded 'about 3,000 civilians' in the Kurdish districts of Northern Iraq alone. (...) But he also noted raids on a sugar refinery in the Kurdish city of As Sulaymaniyah, textile plants in Baghdad and Mosul, a cement plant at Badosh; various provincial government palaces; the Ibn Betar hospital and the central prison, security headquarters and a domestic heating gas plant at Mosoul, as well as various Ba'ath offices throughout the country. (...) But the Kurdish rebel said that although some allied bombing was 'very accurate', in other raids there were civilian casualties because bombing appeared 'inaccurate'." (11)

" 'The U.S. pretended to come to free Kuwait, but instead it is bombing the Iraqi people', says Mohammed Kamal, a Jordanian senator and former ambassador to Washington. Even in Saudi Arabia, many citizens, disturbed by the ferocity of the air strikes on Iraq... harbor doubts about the wisdom of the war. (...) (...) The massive scale of the allied bombings on Iraq has stunned and outraged many. 'We thought Americans were civilized', says Sheik Muhammad al-Faiz, a prosperous landowner who lives south of Amman. 'But now we see that they are savages'. (...) Many Saudis, naively, were shocked to learn that the war will be neither fast nor painless. 'Truly this war is worse than Saddam', says a religious teacher in the Eastern province... 'The Americans are testing their weapons on our Arab people'... The shifting objectives of the U.S. have raised suspicions. Some Saudis complain that first the Americans said they would use military might only to defend Saudi Arabia; then they would use force to push Saddam from Kuwait; now they are making it plain that by pursuing targets deep inside Iraq, they also mean to emasculate the Iraqi military. Says a Saudi journalist: 'I think they want to leave the Arab countries as weak as they can for the sake of Israel'. Some Saudis are also questioning the high profile of the U.S. in their country. 'The Americans are running the government', grumbles a high-ranking industrial executive..." (12)

"(...) 'There will be no change in our military operations', Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said. 'We have a plan, we are following it now and we will continue to pursue it until our objective is achieved'. (...) From the military's point of view, the possibility that Saddam Hussein may be sincere in offering to withdraw from Kuwait is simply irrelevant. The Iraqi army is being systematically pulverized with relentless bombing, and the moment for the long-awaited ground offensive is drawing nigh. (...) Meanwhile, they said, the allies have begun to use fuel-air explosives and 15,000-pound 'daisy cutter' bombs to blow holes..." (13)

"Through the powerful night-vision gunsights, the Iraqi soldiers looked like ghostly sheep flushed from a pen - bewildered and terrified, jarred from sleep and fleeing their bunkers under a hellish fire. One by one, they were cut down by attackers they could not see. Some were blown to bits by bursts of 30mm exploding cannon shells. One man dropped, writhed on the ground, then struggled to his feet; another burst of fire tore him apart. (...) W.O. Balak described his first combat mission in a 20-year flying career: 'You always envision some scenario of how combat will be. But I just didn't envision going up there and shooting the hell out of everything in the dark and have them not know what the hell hit them...' L.A. TIMES" (14)

The comments are yours. More excerpts on Iraq's execution in Part II.

END NOTES:

1. "How We Would Fight by Land, Sea and Air", by John Barry - NEWSWEEK, December 10, 1990.

2. "This Time, a Winnable War", by Tony Clifton - NEWSWEEK, December 10, 1990.

3. "Desert Storm" - NEWSWEEK, January 28, 1991.

4."Far Ahead of the Pack", by Suzan Tifft, reported by Joseph J. Kane/Atlanta and David E. Thigpen/New York - TIME, January 28, 1991.

5. "A New Kind of Warfare", by Russel Watson and Gregg Easterbrook - NEWSWEEK, January 28, 1991.

6."So Far, So Good", by George J. Church, reported by Ron Ben-Yishai/Tel Aviv, William Dowell/ Saudi Arabia and Jay Peterzell/Washington - TIME, January 28, 1991.

7. "Hard Days Ahead", by Russel Watson with John Barry, Douglas Waller, Thomas M. DeFrank and Ann McDaniel in Washington, Melinda Liu in Riyadh, Theodore Stanger in Jerusalem and Daniel Pedersen in London - NEWSWEEK, February 4, 1991.

8. "In the Heat of Battle", by Tom Morganthau with Ray Wilkinson in Khafji and Douglas Waller and Thomas M. DeFrank in Washington - NEWSWEEK, February 11, 1991.

9. "Hospitals in grip of chaos", by Nora Boustany in Amman - THE GUARDIAN, February 11, 1991.

10. "Combat in the Sand", by George Church, reported by William Dowell/Dhahran, Dan Goodgame/Washington and Dick Thomson/Saudi Arabia - TIME, February 11, 1991.

11. "Allied bombs 'kill 3000 civilians' in Kurdish area", by Jonathan Randal - THE GUARDIAN, February 12, 1991.

12. "The Fuse Grows Shorter", by Liza Beyer, reported by Margot Hornblower/Paris, Lara Marlowe/Dhahran and James Wilde/Amman. - TIME, February 18, 1991.

13."The Troops March On", by Tom Morganthau with Douglas Waller and John Barry in Washington and C.S. Manegold and Tony Clifton in Saudi Arabia - NEWSWEEK, February 25, 1991.

14."Video horror of Apache victims' deaths", by John Balzar, northern Saudi border - THE GUARDIAN, February 25, 1991.

About the Author

Maria Seferou was born in an agricultural family of Dendron, a small village of Peloponnese, Greece. She studied Civil/Structural Engineering at National Technical University of Athens and had a successful 20-year professional career both in Greece and in England. For the last 22 years she has been a writer of non-fiction books and articles on religious, philosophical, political and social issues.