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POLYCONOMICS, INC.
MEMO ON THE MARGIN
May 24, 2000
General Barry McCaffrey, War Criminal?
To: Robert L. Bartley, Wall St. Journal editor
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: The Gulf War ‘Turkey Shoot’
I was happy to see you run the op-ed by General McCaffrey, defending himself
against "The New Yorker’s Revisionist History." I’d read the 25,000-word piece
by Seymour Hersh in the May 22 edition of the New Yorker, "Overwhelming Force,"
and found it very persuasive. I’ve known Sy Hersh and his work and have
considered him to be a first-class reporter, one who leaves no stone unturned
as he digs into a controversial story. The case he makes against McCaffrey, who
is now Clinton’s "drug czar," is one that has been in the rumor mill for the
last ten years, so I was happy to see Hersh decide to devote a year or more out
of his life to reporting and writing what might be termed the case for the
prosecution. That is, was McCaffrey justified in ordering an all-out attack on
the Iraqi Republican Guard two days after the Gulf War ended, as its army
headed back to Baghdad? As Hersh writes in the magazine article:
The Iraqis were driving toward a causeway over Lake Hammar, one of five exit
routes from the Euphrates River Valley to the safety of Baghdad. Overriding a
warning from the division operations officer, McCaffrey ordered an assault in
force – an all-out attack. His decision stunned some officers in the Allied
command structure in Saudi Arabia, and provoked unease in Washington. Apache
attack helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, and artillery units from the
24th Division pummelled the five-mile-long Iraqi column for hours, destroying
some seven hundred Iraqi tanks, armored cars, and trucks, and killing not only
Iraqi soldiers but civilians and children as well. Many of the dead were buried
soon after the engagement, and no accurate count of the victims could be made.
McCaffrey later described the carnage as "one of the most astounding scenes of
destruction I have ever participated in." There were no serious American combat
casualties.
In his defense on your Monday editorial page, Bob, McCaffrey argues that he
ordered the all-out attack upon learning that "Sagger missiles and enemy rounds
were fired" by the Iraqi army. He also points out that there was an official
inquiry and that he was cleared of wrong-doing. He also quotes a man we all
greatly admire, Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during
the war, who he says "called the article ‘an attempt at character assassination
of a soldier named Barry McCaffrey who served his nation proudly and did
everything he could to protect the GIs entrusted to his care.’" McCaffrey notes
that Hersh says "the Iraqi forces at Rumaylah were ‘in retreat.’ But he wasn’t
there, facing an Iraqi force spanning five miles and made up of hundreds of
tanks, trucks and armored personnel."
You have not yet commented on this clash of opinion and perhaps you will decide
to give McCaffrey the last word as far as the readers of the WSJournal are
concerned. I would, though, recommend you take the trouble of reading the Hersh
article, or at least that portion from pages 62 to 67 that describe the events
that led to McCaffrey’s decision. It would be easy to clear him of wrongdoing
in my own mind if there had been no time lapse between the time when reports
came in that shots were fired from the direction of the retreating Iraqi army.
But Hersh finds a significant time lapse before the order is given by
McCaffrey, who only heard of the shots fired after there were discussions among
his subordinates on what they meant and what should be done about them. He
quotes Patrick Lamar, the division’s operations officer, responsible, in war,
for relaying McCaffrey’s orders to the field units.
According to Lamar, the interval after the first skirmishing by Ware’s
battalion provoked a debate inside McCaffrey’s assault command post. "There was
no incoming," Lamar told me. "I know that for a fact. He described the entire
battle as a giant hoax. The Iraqis were doing absolutely nothing. I told
McCaffrey I was having trouble confirming the incoming." It didn’t matter,
Lamar added. McCaffrey wanted to attack.
If I were you, Bob, I would at least give Colin Powell a call and ask him to
confirm the quote ascribed to him by McCaffrey about the Hersh article. If
Powell really read the article and saw the time lines and quotes from senior
commanders and generals and still insists that this is "character
assassination," it would at least be reassuring. The reason I think Powell is
so loved by the American people is that he was the fellow who stopped the
"turkey shoot," the mass slaughter of young Iraqi men who were trying to get
home. You have written enough editorials over the years criticizing Powell for
not continuing the "turkey shoot" and going all the way to Baghdad, but I
assume your own national security advisors cornered you into that position.
You know, though, that I believe the Gulf War has been built on a series of
lies, lies being covered up one at a time. The lies began from the moment when
our ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told Saddam Hussein it was all right
with our state department if he chose to invade Kuwait in his longstanding
dispute over the Rumaylah oil fields. They have been covered up and covered up,
but history has a way of uncovering lies, Bob. They are now catching up with
McCaffrey and eventually history will discover the Gulf War was unnecessary --
that Saddam had a white flag up even before we first began shooting. We
continue the cover up even though in ten years the cost has been the lives of
at least a million Iraqi civilians, half of them children. And the lies
continue as cover-up as we bomb Iraq every other day, as further proof to our
Establishment that they did not make a monstrous mistake from the very first
day.
Do I want McCaffrey punished? Of course I do, if he was responsible for the
mass slaughter of troops who were flying a white flag. How much punishment?
Well, I would suggest he be removed as Drug Czar in the Clinton administration
and retired completely to private life. For him to suggest that Sy Hersh began
this assault on him because Sy objects to him fighting against drugs in
Columbia is itself disquieting, to say the least.
Why do I pick on you? Because the political class will not police itself.
That’s why we have a Free Press, isn’t it? But when the Political Establishment
controls all the major media, there is no policing, no discussion or debate.
McCaffrey’s just one fellow, but he is a metaphor for what has been happening
to our country as we sit triumphantly on top of the planet. To put a spotlight
on one man who decided to satisfy his own blood lust and was given medals by
our government as a result may help us turn a corner as a nation. We’ve become
the bullies of the world, bombing whoever gets in our way, and we kid ourselves
into thinking these are the necessary costs of being the world leader. It’s not
right. What doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his
soul? The same is true of a nation.
End<{{
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