A very busy week for news, the one ending this March 17th 1991.
President Bush described U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf in a news conference as “the finest combat force ever assembled,” thanked them for their “courage and resolve,” and promised they would I be coming home “soon.” “The stunning success of our troops was the result of superb training, superb planning, superb execution, and incredible acts of bravery,” Mr. Bush said in a speech taped by Armed Forces Radio for broadcast to the U.S. forces in the gulf. He added: “We promised this would not be another Vietnam.
And we kept that promise. The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.’ Two of Mr. Bush’s top aides, meanwhile, estimated that the withdrawal of the half-million men and women who participated in Operation Desert Storm would begin within one or two weeks.
At the end of the war one army was in ruins. Another army, relying heavily on technology and deception, startled the world with the speed and finality of its success. This sharp, violent conflict had its share of “the fog of war,” a favorite phrase of U.S. officers – feints, confusion, exhaustive rehearsals for battles never fought, real fog that hampered air strikes, a fog of words and the acrid black smoke from burning oil wells. Fighting ended, or at least came to a pause, when the U.S.-led coalition almost ran out of targets, so nearly total was the destruction of the army that Iraq expensively outfitted to occupy Kuwait.
By all accounts, after Desert Storm there wasn’t an army left to fight.
And Yasser Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein. Hussein’s avowed purpose has been to drive Israel out of the Middle East. His totally unprovoked attack on Israel with more than 30 Scud missiles said it all. If Israel was ever going to relinquish its control of the territories it occupied in the 1967 war, it must receive assurances that the Palestinians living there will not use the high Judean and Samarian hills to launch military attacks. The burden of proving peaceful intentions rests with the Palestinians. Arafat’s actions leave no doubt about the intentions of his Palestine Liberation Organization.
And finally, with a formal cease-fire yet to be negotiated, signs of civil disorder spread through Iraq yesterday, with the southern city of Basra and the surrounding area reportedly in “chaos” as soldiers and civilians mingled in the streets and tried to flee toward Baghdad. Reports by the U.S. military command suggested that the government of Saddam Hussein was losing its hold over Basra, Iraq’s second largest city and a key military headquarters. Allied forces, which bombed the city during the fighting, now occupy the area between Kuwait and Basra, but they have not entered the city. As many as 400 tanks and other armored vehicles that escaped clashes with coalition forces have jammed the remaining secondary roads connecting Basra to the north.
Iraqis have told Western reporters that civilians and soldiers in the city were openly criticizing Mr. Hussein, adding to an atmosphere of discontent.
And while Desert Storm was winding down, that’s just a small slice of what happened this week ending March 17, 1991 as reported by ABC World News This Week.
