Operation Desert Fox

Interesting posts on both Eschaton and Seeing the Forest on "Operation Desert Fox" — the 1998 bombing attacks on strategic sites in Iraq.

That campaign almost overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein by accident. Thomas E. Ricks of The Washington Post describes some of this forgotten history in a Dec. 23, 2003 profile of Gen. Anthony Zinni, who oversaw Operation Desert Fox as the general in charge of Central Command at the time.

"I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq, which could happen if this isn't done carefully, is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now," he told reporters in 1998. "I don't think these questions have been thought through or answered." …

Now, five years later, Zinni fears it is an outcome toward which U.S.-occupied Iraq may be drifting. …

Zinni had started thinking about how the United States might handle Iraq if Hussein's government collapsed after Operation Desert Fox, the four days of airstrikes that he oversaw in December 1998, in which he targeted presidential palaces, Baath Party headquarters, intelligence facilities, military command posts and barracks, and factories that might build missiles that could deliver weapons of mass destruction.

In the wake of those attacks on about 100 major targets, intelligence reports came in that Hussein's government had been shaken by the short campaign. "After the strike, we heard from countries with diplomatic missions in there [Baghdad] that the regime was paralyzed, and that there was a kind of defiance in the streets," he recalls.

"Regime change" in Iraq was U.S. policy in 1998, under the Clinton administration, just as it was in 2003, under the second Bush administration. Yet the U.S. did not take advantage of Saddam's precarious state post-Desert Fox to topple his regime. Why not? Did Zinni and his then-commander-in-chief Clinton simply reject "regime change" in favor of Saddam's oppressive status quo?

No. But they realized that if they were going to get rid of the tyrant, they would need to fill the vacuum with something better. They needed a plan.

So they wrote one.

In 1999 [Zinni] ordered that plans be devised for the possibility of the U.S. military having to occupy Iraq. Under the code name "Desert Crossing," the resulting document called for a nationwide civilian occupation authority, with offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. That plan contrasts sharply, he notes, with the reality of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. occupation power, which for months this year had almost no presence outside Baghdad — an absence that some Army generals say has increased their burden in Iraq.

Listening to the administration officials testify that day, Zinni began to suspect that his careful plans had been disregarded. Concerned, he later called a general at Central Command's headquarters in Tampa and asked, "Are you guys looking at Desert Crossing?" The answer, he recalls, was, "What's that?" …

Gen. Zinni was criticized, in 1998, for saying then that "a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq … is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam." This has turned out to be true both for the world and for the people of Iraq, who have been liberated into chaos.

It's too late to implement "Desert Crossing," but it'd be nice to know that somebody somewhere was following some kind of plan.