Desert Storm: The First War the World Watched Live, and What the Cameras Missed

At about half past two in the morning, Baghdad time, on 17 January 1991, three CNN correspondents were in room 906 of the Al-Rasheed Hotel with a telephone line that ran directly to Amman and did not pass through the Iraqi exchange. When the bombing started, Bernard Shaw, John Holliman and Peter Arnett simply described what they could see out of the window, and kept describing it, and the line held.

Everyone else lost their feed. CNN did not, and for several hours it was the only television in the world reporting a war from inside the city being attacked. It made the network, and it changed the expectation of what news is: not a report filed later, but the thing happening while you watch.

What that audience saw was accurate. It was also, in ways that took years to become clear, a very partial view of the war it was covering.

How it started

Iraq came out of eight years of war with Iran in 1988 heavily in debt, much of it owed to Gulf neighbours including Kuwait, and dependent on a high oil price to service it.

The dispute that followed had three parts. Baghdad accused Kuwait of overproducing beyond OPEC quotas and pushing the price down. It accused Kuwait of slant drilling into the Rumaila field, which straddles the border, and taking oil from the Iraqi side. And it revived an older claim to Kuwaiti territory outright.

On 2 August 1990 Iraq invaded and within days had occupied the country. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 660 the same day demanding immediate withdrawal, and in November passed Resolution 678, authorising member states to use all necessary means if Iraq had not left by 15 January 1991.

The coalition that assembled was unusually broad: 42 countries, led by the United States, with Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and Egypt among the major contributors. Several Arab states committed forces, which mattered enormously to the political framing and, as it turned out, to what the coalition could and could not do at the end.

The bombing, and the weapon everyone remembers

The air campaign opened on 17 January and ran for about five weeks before any ground assault.

This is where television and reality separate. The defining images were the nose-camera videos: a crosshair on a building, a bomb going in through a specific door, the feed cutting out. Precision-guided munitions were genuinely new at that scale and genuinely effective, accounting for a large majority of successful hits.

They were also a small minority of what was dropped. By the account of the US Air Force chief of staff at the time, General Merrill McPeak, guided weapons made up around seven percent of the tonnage delivered on Iraqi targets. The overwhelming bulk of the campaign was unguided bombs of the sort used since the 1940s.

So the war the world watched was assembled from the most accurate seven percent of it. That is not a conspiracy, it is simply which footage existed and which was releasable. But it left a durable impression that modern war had become surgical, and that impression went on to shape a great deal of public argument about later conflicts.

A hundred hours

The ground campaign began on 24 February and a ceasefire was declared about a hundred hours later.

The asymmetry is the fact that matters, and it should be given with its uncertainty. Coalition military deaths totalled 292, of which 147 were from enemy action. Estimates of Iraqi military deaths range from roughly 20,000 to 50,000, with more than 75,000 wounded and somewhere between 80,000 and 175,000 taken prisoner. Iraqi civilian deaths directly caused by the fighting are put at around 3,664. The ranges are wide because Iraq did not publish figures and outside estimates were made from incomplete information; treat any single number with suspicion.

What those figures describe is not really a battle. It is one force with satellite navigation, air supremacy and thermal sights meeting a conscript army that had been bombed for five weeks and could not see at night.

Highway 80

On 26 and 27 February, coalition aircraft attacked convoys retreating from Kuwait City towards Basra. Marine aircraft blocked both ends of the column with cluster munitions so that nothing could move, and aircraft from several countries worked the trapped vehicles for about ten hours.

Between 1,400 and 2,000 vehicles were destroyed or abandoned on that road. Many were military. Many were civilian cars, buses and trucks that had been commandeered. The photograph at the top of this piece is what was left.

The casualty figures are contested and should stay that way. Early reporting suggested 200 to 300 dead. A 2003 study by the Project on Defense Alternatives put it at at least 500 to 600 on Highway 80, with another 300 to 400 on Highway 8, so a minimum of 800 to 1,000 across both.

The legal argument that followed has not really been settled in public, though it is fairly clear in law. Attacking a retreating army is not the same as attacking a surrendering one, and retreat is a military movement rather than a protected act. What the images did do was make the scale visible in a way the nose-camera footage never had. A ceasefire was declared the following day. Whether the pictures caused that is still argued about.

Why they stopped

The coalition halted with its forces well short of Baghdad, and the reasoning was not sentimental.

The mandate under Resolution 678 was to reverse the occupation of Kuwait. It said nothing about removing the Iraqi government, and several coalition members, particularly the Arab states whose participation gave the operation its legitimacy, had joined on that understanding and would not have stayed for anything more. There was also no plan for what would follow, no agreed successor administration, and an obvious risk of an open-ended occupation.

So the war ended with the invasion reversed and the government that ordered it still in place, which is a coherent outcome and also an unstable one.

What was left behind

Encouraged by broadcasts and by the collapse of Iraqi forces, uprisings broke out in the south and the north in March 1991. Expected outside support did not come. They were suppressed, at very heavy cost to the people who had risen, and the no-fly zones that followed were a partial and belated response to that.

Retreating Iraqi forces had set fire to somewhere between 605 and 732 Kuwaiti oil wells. At the peak they burned four to six million barrels of crude a day. The last well was capped on 6 November 1991, roughly ten months after the first was lit, and the fires left around three hundred oil lakes and hardened tar over a significant fraction of the country.

Then came more than a decade of sanctions, whose effect on Iraqi civilians is its own long and bitter argument.

The road in the photograph was cleared years ago. What is harder to clear is the impression the coverage left, that a war can be watched in real time and still be mostly invisible, and that the seven percent of it with a camera on the nose is the part everybody remembers.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Gulf War" (the 2 August 1990 invasion, Resolutions 660 and 678 and the 15 January deadline, the 42-country coalition, the 17 January air campaign, the hundred-hour ground campaign, and the casualty figures including 292 coalition deaths and the ranges for Iraqi military and civilian deaths).
• Wikipedia, "Invasion of Kuwait" (the debts from the war with Iran, the Rumaila field and slant drilling accusations, and the overproduction dispute).
• Wikipedia, "United Nations Security Council Resolution 678" (the authorisation of all necessary means and the terms of the mandate).
• Smithsonian Magazine, "Operation Desert Storm Was Not Won By Smart Weaponry Alone" (General Merrill McPeak's account that precision-guided bombs were about seven percent of the tonnage dropped).
• Wikipedia, "Highway of Death" (the 26 to 27 February attacks, the blocking of both ends of the column, the 1,400 to 2,000 vehicles, the contested casualty estimates from 200 to 300 up to the Project on Defense Alternatives figures, and the legal debate).
• Wikipedia, "Kuwaiti oil fires" (605 to 732 wells set alight, four to six million barrels a day at the peak, the last well capped on 6 November 1991, and the oil lakes left behind).
• Wikipedia, "1991 uprisings in Iraq" (the risings in the south and north, the absence of outside support, and their suppression).
• UPI, "CNN keeps in touch as bombs hit Baghdad" (Shaw, Holliman and Arnett reporting from the Al-Rasheed Hotel over a dedicated line to Amman).