The ground war began before dawn on February 24, 1991 Iraqi time, a few hours after the ultimatum expired. The offensive succeeded beyond the most optimistic hopes of the American generals. The Marines, augmented by Arab troops, struck northward and raced toward Kuwait City. US Army divisions with their British and French allies, all having moved secretly westward in the previous ten days, struck across the Iraqi border in a flanking movement designed to shut off an Iraqi retreat. Iraqi troops reeled under the double assault and fled from Kuwait in tanks, military vehicles and stolen trucks and cars, heading toward the southern Iraqi city of Basra for refuge. Allied planes bombarded the retreating Iraqis. The bombing left one long Iraqi column of more than a thousand burned-out cars, trucks, tanks and other vehicles with the bodies of two hundred to three hundred Iraqis lying nearby. American television and newspapers ran fearful images of the devastation and dubbed the scene "the highway of death." Sights like these troubled the conscience of Americans. For months, American officialdom had described the enemy as the fourth largest army in the world. But the Iraqis were no match for the Americans and fell to pieces under the onslaught.
On the afternoon of February 27, President Bush, General Powell, Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of Defense Cheney, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and others assembled in the Oval Office of the White House to decide the fate of the war. According to the account of Michael Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor in their history of the war, the president wanted to know when Powell and his field commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, felt they could end the war. General Powell, whose military ideology embraced attack with overwhelming force followed by quick withdrawal without any nettlesome occupation, told Bush, "We are in the home stretch... Norm and I would like to finish tomorrow, a five-day war." The president agreed. 'We do not want to lose anything now with charges of brutalization," he said. "We do not want to screw this up with a sloppy, muddied ending." Addressing the nation on television, Bush said that the war would end the next day, February 27, 1991, one hundred hours after the start of the ground offensive.
Most analysts concluded later that Bush had ended the war too soon. The US had chased Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. But the military trap was opened before it could shut off the escape of tens of thousands of Republican Guard troops. Saddam Hussein, though he reigned over a crippled country, had enough military force to put down rebellions by the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south to keep himself in power.
From United Nations: The First Fifty Years, by Stanley Meisler. Copyright 1995 by Stanley Meisler. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
