bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 28–30
This account of Canada’s contribution to the 1990-1991 Gulf War is the third in a series of articles marking the 25th anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait. During an I month campaign more than 4,500 Canadian Armed Forces personnel were deployed to the region, with a peak of some 2,500 in theatre at one time. Pieced together from personal notes, archival material and conversations with former colleagues, this article gives shape to the rapid sequence of diplomatic and military actions that took place in January and February 1991.
By early January 1991 it had become increasingly clear that a purely diplomatic solution to the Gulf crisis was unlikely to be found. Despite last minute efforts by UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, several Arab leaders, and the French Government, none were able to shake an unyielding Saddam Hussein’s intransigence. For the first time since the Korean War – almost 40 years prior – Canadians faced the prospect of, and made plans for, a far-off war.
Nuclear power plants in New Brunswick and Ontario reportedly called in additional staff and increased surveillance. The Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Authority warned publicly that Canada was potentially a high-risk terrorist target and Transport Canada activated a special new Alert System for Canada’s airports.
With Canada holding a seat on the UN Security Council, then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was an early proponent of a coalition under a UN Mandate, and by mid-January more than 30 countries where active in the Gulf. Already, more than 1,800 Canadian Armed Forces personnel were at assorted posts deployed as part of Operation Friction. Canada’s Ambassador to Kuwait, Larry Dickenson, had been working behind the scenes at several locations in the months leading up to the war.
Canada had sent two destroyers and the supply ship HMCS Protector. The destroyers, HMCS Athabaskan and Terra Nova and their crew of 800 had been on active duty since arriving in the Gulf in early October 1990. Five modified Sea King helicopters were also attached to the Naval Task Group and used to locate and inspect shipping in the central Gulf. Two Canadian fighter squadrons of CF-18s and 450 support personnel from the NATO airbase at Baden-Soellingen were sent to provide air cover for the destroyers.
A diplomatic interface between our Armed Forces, and local conservative societies in the Gulf would be critical. External Affairs and DND would need to work closely together to fulfill their respective mandates in the weeks ahead. Ambassador Dickenson was dispatched to find “ramp space” for Canada’s F-18’s. Once in Manama, he learned the country’s facilities were already over committed to coalition forces. Moving on to Doha, he negotiated the necessary access agreement with the then Crown Prince/Minister of Defence.
The Canadian Armed Forces were under the command of an integrated Joint Headquarters, Canadian Forces Middle East established on November 6, 1990 led by Commodore Ken Summers and included a communications unit and various joint military staffs. An infantry company and, later, a field hospital at Al Qaysumah, Saudi Arabia with more than 500 personnel, rounded out Canada’s military deployment.
Canada established ’micro’, temporary ’embassies’ in both Manama and Doha to provide defence liaison and consular services. Defence cooperation included Ambassador Dickenson, at the request of Commodore Summers, negotiating access 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 warnings of Scud attacks for those who stayed behind. Canadians in Bahrain were also provided gas masks.
The first Gulf War, also known as “Desert Storm,” began with massive sustained aerial bombing and missile attacks on Baghdad and Kuwait 16-17 January. This started an air war that was to last thirty-nine days. It was the kind of high-tech assault that U.S. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the coalition forces commander, had long promised. The conflict lasted forty-three days.
The Gulf Task Force at External Affairs in Ottawa was headed by Andrew Robinson, who would go on to become Canada’s Ambassador to Jordan following the war. For those of us junior officers working on the Task Force, in shifts around the clock, work involved a mix of traditional diplomacy – such as hand delivering late night démarches in the form of diplomatic notes to Iraq’s Ambassador in Rockcliffe – and a kind of made-for-TV reality show that played out almost non-stop on CNN and other networks that we monitored and reported on constantly. Meanwhile, Ambassador Dickenson was providing shuttle diplomacy between Manama and Doha, and made a series of trips to the UAE, Oman, and to meet with the Government of Kuwait living in exile in Ta’if, Mecca Province, Saudi Arabia. This allowed Canada to pass sensitive messages and to insure that our interests were being considered. The significant presence of more than 30 Canadian media 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 the destructive force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the US in 1945.
Relentless waves of American, British, Saudi, Kuwaiti and Italian fighters and fighter-bombers targeted airfields in Iraq and Kuwait, a presidential compound in Baghdad and other government buildings, as well as widely dispersed Iraqi sites for launching Scud missiles.
Prime Minister Mulroney recalled the House of Commons and tabled a motion on behalf of External Affairs Minister Joe Clark on January 15, just hours before the coalition began its assault on Iraqi forces.
General John de Chastelain, Chief of Defence Staff, had already been authorized to put the country’s armed forces on an offensive footing; augmenting the squadron of fighter jets in the Gulf with six more CF-18s, an additional 130 service personnel, and a tanker aircraft to refuel the fighters in midair. This decision permitted Canadian CF-18s to provide support to coalition bombers attacking Iraqi installations, despite the lack of a parliamentary vote on the subject.
On Friday 18 January, Prime Minister Mulroney “snubbed” opposition critics and ordered Canada’s CF-18 fighters in Qatar, to escort and protect American, British and other forces in bombing runs over Iraq. Liberal Leader Jean Chretien accused Mulroney of lacking “the moral authority” for ordering such an offensive move. In the end, it took 15 hours of debate before MPs passed the Government’s motion on January 22, by a vote of 217 to 47. 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 installations and supply lines.
The escalation of Canada’s air operation would require some time, however. Bombs had been left behind in Germany when the CF-18s Hornets first arrived in the Gulf the previous October, as there had been no assignment for air-to-ground duties. These weapons could be transported in a day to the Canadian airbase in Qatar and some of the 26 CF-18s were equipped to perform in an offensive capacity within days.
Once the “mother of all battles” was under way, Iraq began periodic ’Scud’ missile attacks on Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which lasted sporadically for most of the conflict. These Scud missile attacks on Israel often played out live on CNN pre-empting, in many ways, traditional diplomatic reporting from our Embassy in Tel Aviv. The early Scuds fired on Saudi Arabia and Bahrain were stopped by the first anti-missile missiles ever fired in combat. The so-called Patriot anti-missile system was later also provided to Israel.
Despite more than 8,000 sorties flown in the first five days, Iraq’s elusive, mobile Scud missile launchers, which I had seen close-up on flatbed trucks immediately following the invasion of Kuwait, remained a very real and serious threat. Using tactics applied during our stay in Baghdad, Iraq also claimed it had scattered prisoners of war as “human shields” at expected coalition air targets.
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.
At the end of the second week of armed conflict, in the largest ground battle up to that point, a battalion-size force of U.S. Marines (up to 800) fired artillery, mortars, TOW missiles, at Iraqi bunkers half-mile away in Kuwait.
On January 30, scores of Iraqi tanks and thousands of Iraqi troops advanced into Saudi Arabia. Attacks were countered by U.S. Marines, Saudi and Qatari troops. Eleven Marines died the skirmish. Two days later, Saudi and Qatari troops, backed by U.S. artillery, retook Khafji, Saudi Arabia and on February I the coalition heavily bombed a 10-mile-long Iraqi armored column that had also, reportedly, been headed into Saudi Arabia.
In early February Iran offered to mediate peace talks with Iraq and resume official relations with the U.S. Meanwhile, Soviet President Gorbachev warned that military operations in the war threatened to exceed the UN’s mandate and announced on 9th February he was sending an envoy to Baghdad for talks with Hussein.
After a month of war, the Pentagon said allied planes had destroyed at least 1,300 of Iraq’s 4,280 tanks, 800 of 2,870 armored vehicles and 1,100 of 3,110 artillery pieces. By Friday 15 February, Hussein said he was finally prepared to withdraw from Kuwait, but haggled over conditions (Israeli pullout from occupied Arab territories, forgiveness of Iraqi debts and allied payment of costs of rebuilding Iraq). President Bush dismissed the Iraqi offer as “cruel hoax.”
Iraq’s ambassador to the UN, Abdul Amir al-Anbari, on February 16 threatened Iraq would use “weapons of mass destruction” if U.S. bombing continued. The following day, Iraq’s foreign minister, Tariq 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 Soviet plan, would not rescind UN resolutions that demanded war reparations and imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. The deadline came and went.
On 22 February President Bush demanded Iraq withdraw from Kuwait by noon the following day to avoid a ground war. In response to the ultimatum, Iraq set ablaze one-sixth of Kuwait’s 950 oil wells and the allies stepped up their air attacks under clouds of thick black smoke.
As promised, on February 23, the coalition ground offensive began at 8 p.m Ottawa time. Soon after, U.S. officials announced Iraqi soldiers were rounding up Kuwaitis to torture and execute. In Ottawa, Prime Minister Mulroney said that the government was “disappointed that it has come to this.” The start of the ground offensive, however, cleared the way for a new role for Canada’s squadron of CF-18s, air-to-ground bombing, which Ottawa had approved only the week before.
The following day, General Schwarzkopf hailed the ground war as a “dramatic success,” with allied casualties very light and more than 5,500 Iraqis captured. Baghdad Radio reported on February 25 (Kuwait’s Independence Day) Saddam Hussein had ordered troops to withdraw from Kuwait, in accordance with Soviet peace proposal, but the war carried on. Coalition forces were now on the outskirts of Kuwait City, poised to take it back.
By February 26 Iraqi forces were in “full retreat” with allied forces pursuing along what became known as the “highway of death.” The liberation of Kuwait was reaching its final phase.
The sight of the “highway of death” had reportedly appalled even the U.S. 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 90 coalition troops.
Residents of Kuwait celebrated the end to occupation and suspension of offensive combat. After forty-three days of armed conflict, Kuwaiti troops raised their flag on February 27, 1991. The U.S. declared the suspension of offensive combat and laid out conditions for a permanent cease-fire.
Ambassador Dickenson and his team, along with Commodore Summers arrived in Kuwait to reopen the embassy at the end of February. He was the third Ambassador to return to the Emirate, arriving shortly after his British and French counterparts. It was an emotional affair, he recounted recently: “As we raised the flag on the roof of our embassy, cars came to a halt on the neighbouring ring road and a raucous crowd gathered to welcome us back as if we were rock stars.”
The first Gulf War and its aftermath sent tremors of instability throughout an already unsettled region that are still felt to this day. Those immediately effected by the conflict included several nations and millions of people – from the Gulf, to Jordan and North Africa. The confrontation also raised a number of questions in the months and years that followed: Did the hostilities end too soon, and should more have been demanded of Saddam Hussein during peace discussions?
As recent history in the region teaches us, regardless of the actual outcome of the conflict, the coalition’s policies postwar would be critical. As for Saddam Hussein, despite a brutal and relatively swift defeat, he would live to fight another day.
Gary Luton is currently Director of the Treaty Law Division. His most recent postings abroad were as Head of Mission in Doha, Qatar and, prior, as Consul General in Mumbai.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 28–30. Read the rest of this issue →
