"The Mother of all Battles"

 

 

"In this world, there truly are some very bad people"

I was still in the Navy when the United States was involved in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. In fact, while stationed at Fort Meade, my last duty before retirement was to prepare a paper on the "lessons learned" on the Gulf War. However, that was over 20 years ago. Things back then were much different.

Saddam Hussein was indeed a very bad man. In some respects, he made Bashar Assad look like a light weight. Saddam was feared in the Middle East as he had assembled quite the standing Army. By 1990, Saddam's army numbered over 1,000,000, which made it the fourth largest in the world. All that military power gave Saddam a sense of bravado, which led to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. It was naked aggression in the most clear definition of the word. The world did not like what is was seeing, and many thought Kuwait was just a stepping stone to Saudi Arabia. The prize - world domination of the oil markets and all the power and wealth that went with it.

The vast majority of the world's nations believed what Saddam was trying to do was wrong. It would be a game changer for the region, as well as the world economy. The United Nations was fully in agreement that Saddam had to leave Kuwait and the occupation had to end. A huge coalition of the willing was assembled to set up a "firewall" on the border of Kuwait to ensure the aggression could spread no further. Troops and arms began to flow into the region at a breakneck speed. Battle plans were prepared. Hundreds of tanks, artillery and APCs were repainted from jungle to desert camouflage.

How much did this scare Saddam? Not a bit. He knew there was a battle coming. He did not care. He really thought he could win it. He told the allies to prepare for the "Mother of all Battles". Regardless of what was found after the war, most everyone knew Saddam had chemical weapons, and was ready to use them. How did we know? He had already used them on the Iranians during the eight year war. Yes, to defeat Saddam on his home turf was going to take a battle strategy like we had not put together for years.

The rest of the story is history. We all know how it ended. A magnificent victory for the world and a bloody defeat for Saddam Hussein. This was a clear cut case of bad guy vs. the world. In Syria however, we are finding a much different story. A couple days ago, a man was on one of the TV shows telling how he recently spent much time in Syria, mostly working with the rebels. His words - "The original rebels are for the most part gone. They have been replaced with Al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic extremists." He then went as far to say the gassing of civilians might have been done by the rebels to bring the United States into the was against Assad.

In 1991, the end game was clear - crystal clear. Evil was almost universally identified and the world was united against it. In Syria, we have a classic civil war. There really are no good guys fighting. However, there are hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. It seems that our President is going to get us involved in a fight between Syria's version of the "Hatfields and the McCoys". It is a fight we should walk away from. There will be no winners - only losers. We can't afford to be one of the losers.