He certainly had them and I don’t think Bush would have nuked Baghdad over it. I have heard that our announcement that we were sending “special weapons” to the Gulf had no bearing on his decision not to use gas, but I don’t know what caused him to decide against it. Launching sarin-laden SCUDs at Tel Aviv might have broken the coalition.
Thanks,
Rob
It would have guaranteed the US would go all the way and come in and remove him from power and put him on trial for war crimes.
Maybe he feared being captured and tried as a war criminal. Or maybe he just feared that would provoke actions to take him out of power.
No, but he might have taken it as sufficient provocation to invade Iraq proper instead of stopping at the Iraq-Kuwait border.
I suspect that he would have been afraid of the US reaction. No, the US would not have nuked Baghdad over it: instead, they would very likely have taken Baghdad, and tried to capture Saddam. It would not have broken the coalition: it would have made the coalition more resolute to deal with Saddam.
The beginning of the Gulf War involved pushing Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Bagdad wasn’t really a target. Theater nuclear weapons could have been used on outlying bases. They weren’t really necessary because modern warfare techniques were successful. Command and control was cut off, air superiority was established and ground equipment was destroyed from the air.
Saddam did not use use chemical weapons in the first Gulf War because he was not a stupid man.
I am not presupposing he was stupid. I am asking why he didn’t use gas (at least against Israel). Furthermore, if he was so concerned about the coalition pushing all the way to Baghdad why didn’t he pull out of Kuwait before the deadline?
Thanks,
Rob
The use of chemical weapons in modern warfare requires the capability to operate in a chemical environment–gas mask, NBC suit, field treatment options. Did the Iraqi army have the capability? Saddam used gas on civilians, but it’s never been clear to me that the Iraqi army was prepared to fight on a contaminated battlefield.
Bush might not have nuked Baghdad, but Yitzhak Shamir would have.
I think that would be true only if he targeted coalition forces. If he goaded Israel into the war, he may have broken the coalition. Israel didn’t rise to the bait when he used conventional explosives, but gas may have been another matter.
But Saddam and the army were not in Baghdad. I don’t know that it would have stopped the war, nor do I know if it would have prevented further gas attacks and I think it is more likely that nuking Baghdad would have lead to Arab withdrawal from the coalition. I may have caused other political problems as well (NPT obligations would force various Western powers to withdraw sponsorship and possibly lead to a regional arms race).
Rob
Even if he’d been given credible assurances that the coalition would remove Saddam? Nuclear deterrence is valuable insofar as it’s a threat to inflict unacceptable losses on your enemy - for Saddam, removal from power would have been an unacceptable loss.
Maybe, but on the other hand, Saddam would have lost Baghdad. Do you really think he would have risked his capital city for a possible minor strategic gain?
(Anyway, an Arab withdrawal from the coalition would have had a negligible effect, if any, on the coalition’s power).
The Israeli public would have demanded it.
Anyway, Israel never saw it as a war agaisnt Saddam, personally, but against Iraq as a whole. After all, we were at war with Iraq since long before Saddam came to power. The actual Iraqi in charge was just a detail.
For a number of reasons, though I think the biggest one being uncertainty. The US has a policy that we respond in kind to attacks from WMD. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’d nuke an Iraqi city if we were attacked with chemical weapons, but…well, there is a level of uncertainty there and Saddam et al my not have really known how we’d respond. It’s pretty clear from Iraq’s actions prior to the first Gulf War as well as their subsequent actions and history wrt the US after it and leading up the the second Gulf War that we were kind of a mystery to the Iraqi leadership…they really didn’t understand, at a fundamental level, either how the American political system works nor how the American people are involved in how that system works.
Also, Saddam may have been factoring in the negative impact that using such weapons would have on Iraq’s regional image, as well as world wide. Plus, someone may have pointed out to him that while using those kinds of weapons against unprotected civilians or inadequately protected Iranian conscript soldiers charging Iraqi lines worked fairly well, it wouldn’t work very well at all against US or most of the other coalition forces…so, it wasn’t worth the political fallout.
-XT
I think you are mistaken. America and Britain have only one response to the use of WMD. IIRC Iraq was specifically reminded of this.
Israel represented a bigger threat of nuclear weapons if Saddam used a WMD against a city.
That may be policy, but it doesn’t mean they can’t change it. And if Saddam were to nuke Israel, they could claim that such an act did not invoke the policy. As to whether Saddam being reminded of this fact had any bearing on his calculation not to use gas, I posed this question in the first place because I had heard that it was not a consideration (or may have been way down on the list).
My guess is he didn’t use gas against Israel mainly because they didn’t have their gas weaponized for use in their Scud missiles…and also because he may have (rightfully) calculated that hitting an Israeli city with a gas attack who force the Israeli’s to respond in kind (i.e. drop a nuke on one of Iraq’s cities). Saddam wanted Israel to attack…he didn’t want Israel to wipe out an entire Iraqi city, however.
As for why he didn’t pull out before the deadline, remember that Saddam et al were confident that their defense in depth would essentially get the US and the coalition into a war of attrition…which, according to their calculations, would inflict heavy causalities on us, and eventually force us to negotiate with the them. They BADLY miscalculated the relative military strengths, but this didn’t become obvious to them until after the ground war started…and by then it was far to late to pull out. In fact, they actually tried to pull out and redeploy (or run like hell for home), which turned the into a complete disaster.
-XT