bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 28–30
to the port in Manama for HMCS Protector to allow for the urgent delivery of needed supplies and services. (Local authorities had initially refused to dock the massive supply ship saying that it was a floating gas station and thus a potential bomb.)
Soon a temporary resident of Bahrain, Canada’s Ambassador was joined by a small team that included Bob Mason and Christine Pereira from the Trade Section in Kuwait, and a few others from Ottawa. Steve Bennett was brought in from Cairo to head our embassy in Doha. Extremely effective warden systems, critically important in the event of war, were soon in place both to encourage people to leave before a conflict started, and to provide war nings of Scud attacks for those who stayed behind. Canadians in Bahrain were also provided gas masks.
in the region would also require a considered touch.
Correspondents for CNN provided particularly vivid telephone commentary from their Baghdad Hotel room. Maclean’s correspondent John Holland, also on-location, depicted the first day of attacks on Baghdad: “all the lights were off and phone lines were down, and an acrid smell and smoke hung over the city.”
One American, one Kuwaiti and two British planes were lost in the first day’s attack while the Iraqis professed to have shot down 55 coalition planes. Weapons experts claimed the first massive air assault on the ancient capital of Baghdad, which attempted to take-out Iraqi command and telecommunications centres, had 1.5 times decision was not, technically speaking, a declaration of war, but rather a loosely worded motion that reaffirmed Canada’s “support of the United Nations in ending the aggression by Iraq against Kuwait.”
When hostilities began, the Commander of the Canadian Naval Task Group, Captain Duncan “Dusty” Miller became the multinational coordinator for a significant naval combat area established in the southern Persian Gulf.
A rapid shift to an air-to-ground campaign, General de Chastelain explained at the time, was unavoidable. Canadian dual-purpose fighters, which until that point had been flying sweep and escort missions for U.S. bombers, could now also begin to help destroy Iraqi military ground By day six of the war Iraq had begun torching Kuwaiti oil wells and oil tanks. The propaganda war also began in earnest with Saddam’s claim that the allies had bombed a baby-formula plant, while the coalition said the facility was a chemical factory. The streaming of real-time images of the conflict and the accompanying war of words played out on television and helped intensify antiwar protests in Canada and around the world.
Aziz, arrived in Moscow for talks with Soviet President Gorbachev. He returned to Baghdad with a Soviet peace proposal, which President Bush said, fell “well short” of what was needed to end the war.
Bush, while politely thanking Gorbachev for his efforts, rejected for a second time a Soviet proposal that the Iraqis had accepted; which would have given Hussein three weeks to pull out. The Americans countered with an offer of one week and, unlike the commander-in-chief, Norman Schwarzkopf and helped persuade General Colin Powell to stop the war.
By this time Iraqi POWs numbered 30,000-plus and soon reached 63,000. At one point, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi occupation forces would withdraw completely. But it was too late. The death toll, when tallied at the time, was wildly uneven — an estimated 20,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed and about ON nnalitinn tranna
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 28–30. Read the rest of this issue →
