Missed Anniversary

I missed the anniversary:

February 24, 1991: The ground portion of the war in Iraq begins. On February 26 Iraqi troops began retreating from Kuwait, setting fire to Kuwaiti oil fields as they flee. One hundred hours after the ground campaign started, President Bush declared a ceasefire; Kuwait had been liberated.

Eighteen years and still going.

Another missed anniversary - from the end of the second year of the war:

February 26, 1993: World Trade Center bombing. Later (Feb/March 1995) Ramzi Yousef, "mastermind" of the attack, is captured in Pakistan and extradited to the United States. A search of his former residences leads investigators to believe he is financially linked to Osama bin Laden. Also, he had stayed at a bin Laden financed guest house while in Pakistan. Bin Laden himself would neither confirm nor deny a connection when asked in a 1998 interview, stating only that he did not know Yousef prior to the event.

3 March 1991: At cease-fire talks with the Iraqis at Safwan, General Norman Schwarzkopf warns the Iraqis that coalition forces would shoot down any Iraqi military aircraft flying over the country.

March 10, 1991: (Media) The New York TImes:

After the War: Politics; Another Gulf War?

The question the American soldiers ask as they board planes for home after seven months in the desert is the same one that worries the politicians that live in the region as they turn from preoccupation with military problems to the concerns of civil life.

Will we have to do it all over again? Will we have to find the money and the will, they ask anxiously, to assemble half a million troops to turn back another of Saddam Hussein's attempts to push his neighbors around?

It is the biggest unanswered question among several that hang in the air after the allies' stunningly decisive triumph in the Persian Gulf war, and it casts an ominous shadow over the jubilation here and in the United States. The man who started it all, the villain of the piece, is still around.

President Bush and the other coalition leaders elected not to push through to Baghdad to destroy Mr. Hussein's Government. Authorized by the United Nations only to oust Iraq from Kuwait, the allies went farther, fighting on despite a series of frantic peace bids until they were confident that they had shattered Mr. Hussein's best divisions.

But with their armies at Nasiriya and the highway to Baghdad, 150 miles away and all but undefended, the coalition leaders called a halt. Despite President Bush's inclination to compare this war to the conflict of his youth, World War II, the allies chose not to hound Mr. Hussein to death in his bunker, as they had hounded Hitler, and not to demand total surrender.

The Saudis wanted to press on, and so did their Egyptian allies, high-ranking officials in Riyadh said, but the Americans, the British and especially the French feared that they would embitter Arab opinion if they seemed bent on revenge or on installing a government of their choice.
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If Mr. Hussein were to make warlike noises again, he would not be told, as the State Department told him last year, that the United States was taking a neutral position. If he were then to take warlike steps, a counterattack would come at once, not after he had had months to dig in and ravage conquered territory. Or so American officials are promising.

So if the allies have not rid themselves of the Iraqi dictator, at least not yet, and if they had not engendered lasting stability in a region that has seldom known it, they appear to have done just about enough to make it unlikely that a second Persian Gulf war will erupt any time soon.

February 18, 1992: Special report of the Executive Chairman of UNSCOM regarding the visit of a special mission to Baghdad on 27 January 1991, recording that Iraq was rejecting any obligations imposed on it by Council resolutions 707 (1991) and 715 (1991) (S/23606).

February 19, 1992: Statement by the President of the Security Council approving the report of the special mission and expressing grave concern over Iraq's failure to acknowledge its obligations under resolution 715 (1991) and the plans for ongoing monitoring and verification, and supporting a decision to despatch a further special mission to Baghdad (S/23609).

February 21 - March 24, 1992: The first chemical destruction team destroys 463 nerve agent filled rockets, i.e. approximately 2.5 tons of agent.

February 28, 1992 Statement by the President of the Security Council, upon receipt of the special Commission's report, reaffirming that it is for UNSCOM alone to determine which items are to be destroyed under resolution 687, and condemning Iraq's failure to provide full compliance with the relevant Security Council resolutions (S/23663).

March 19, 1992: Iraq declares having more previously undeclared ballistic missiles, chemical weapons and associated material, and says they unilaterally destroyed this material in the summer of 1991 in violation of resolution 687.

March 2, 1995: The last U.N. peacekeepers are evacuated from Somalia.

Osama bin Laden, from a later interview:

John Miller, ABC: Describe the situation when your men took down the American forces in Somalia.

Osama bin Laden: After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. ... As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim.

Mar 1996: UNSCOM teams are denied immediate access to five sites designated for inspection. The teams enter the sites after delays of up to 17 hours.

March 19, 1996: Statement by the President of the Security Council expressing the Council's concern at Iraq's denial of access, which it terms a clear violation of Iraq's obligations under relevant resolutions. The Council also demands that Iraq allow UNSCOM teams immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access to all sites designated for inspection (S/PRST/1996/11).

February 1997: Iraq allowed UNSCOM to remove missile engines for " in-depth analysis outside Iraq". UNSCOM was blocked from removing them in November 1996, prompting a December "Statement by the President of the Security Council in which the Council deplores the refusal of Iraq to allow the Special Commission to remove certain missile engines from Iraq for analysis, and demands that Iraq allow such removal."

March 20, 1997: The first shipment of supplies is cleared for import into Iraq via the Oil for Food agreement.

February 1998: The United States and coalition allies prepare to launch Operation DESERT THUNDER:

As the United States prepares for possible strikes against Iraq, Navy and Marine Corps pilots are set to fly the majority of missions in an operation code-named "Desert Thunder" that will hinge, by all accounts, on downpours of precision munitions...

At the center of any U.S. air assault on Iraq would be the F/A-18 and F-14 fighter jets on this aircraft carrier and another, the USS Independence, along with about 250 Tomahawk cruise missiles spread among eight other ships.
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In addition to the U.S. and coalition forces already in Kuwait, a brigade task force from 3d Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga., rapidly deployed to Kuwait. Departing from Hunter Army Airfield, the brigade task force deployed 4,000 personnel and 2,900 short tons of equipment on 120 aircraft. Within 15 hours of landing at Kuwait City International Airport, the unit had drawn prepositioned equipment and was in battle positions in the desert. On Feb. 28, Coalition/Joint Task Force-Kuwait was prepared to defend Kuwait with a ground force strength of more than 9,000 personnel.

Argentina, Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, United Kingdom, and Kuwait rounded out the C/JTF by providing liaison teams, aircraft support, special operations elements, Chemical/Biological, Base Defense Units, MASH units, and medical personnel.

Added to forces on the ground was equipment for two more brigades (one Army and one Marine) afloat in the Arabian Gulf with the Maritime Preposition Force. These ships were poised to link up with soldiers and Marines who would draw their equipment and head to the front if required. Attack air provided by Navy, Air Force, and Coalition assets rounded out this formidable force.

February 23, 1998: In response, Osama Bin Laden, enraged by the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia enforcing sanctions against Iraq, marks the seventh anniversary of the start of the war by issuing a fatwa stating that Muslims should kill Americans - including civilians - anywhere in the world.

No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in "Al- Mughni," Imam al-Kisa'i in "Al-Bada'i," al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: "As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life."

On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.

Next: Missed Anniversary (II)