The Republican Guard's Last Hour.
Momentous national strategic mistakes were made in the last days of February 1991 as the 2nd Cavalry Armored Division attacked the Iraqi Republican Guard frontally from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait, and Doug Macgregor was on the scene leading the team of M1A1 tanks and Bradley assault vehicles to witness the events. In December, LTG Fred Franks had been given the order by LTG Schwarzkopf to break the Republican Guard and capture Baghdad. Franks asked for VII Corps, a massive armor army then in Germany to fight the Soviets who had disappeared the previous year when the Kremlin fell to Yeltsin. Two months later, VII Corps was arranged opposite the Republican Guard, and on February 25 the ferocious artillery barrage and air strike wave struck against the front lines of the Iraqis at what was then about 70 Eastling (map coordinates). Macgregor describes the barrage as a mistake, because it gave the Republican Guard time to flee. What had been 80,000 troops with T-72s and BMPs. Macgregor's unit struck at 1600 hours on February 26 and the battle was over by nightfall, a complete unconditional defeat of the Iraqis, the last hour of the Republican Guard as a credible fighting force. The action described is vivid, stunning, and demonstrates that at that moment in time, America possessed the best and most efficiently violent fighting force ever assembled on the Earth, a machine-like Behemoth that could not ever be stopped once it chose an objective and received the order to go.The Mistake
That evening, 26-27 February, the George H. W. Bush administration committed the mistake that created the conditions for the disaster in Iraq for the president's son, George W. Bush, when the original order to smash the Republican Guard and take Baghdad was called off. The men of VII Corp were stumped and frustrated at the time, and more so today, nineteen years later. Macgregor relates the tales of a captured Iraqi Brigade commander, who told him on the evening of 26 February, in his excellent trained-at-Fort Benning English, that the American army should keep going, go all the way to Baghdad and get rid of Saddam Hussein. The major indicated that Saddam would flee with his hand-picked weasel generals, and the Iraqi army could be put in charge of the fragmented state until the UN held elections. It was a battlefield speculation in 1991 that was credible. Nothing happened. The Iraqi major couldn't understand why we stopped. Neither could Macgregor. Neither can I. Can you? I know the excuses, but still, all mistakes have explanations. They are still mistakes that change history. The father's sin of commission, giving an order that he later rescinded, cursed the son, who gave an order to take Baghdad in 2003 and lost his presidency to the sinister nature of the region that had time, between February 1991 and April 2003 when we captured Baghdad, to arrange a quagmire in the sandy reaches of the Euphrates River valley.
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Not to excuse Bush the elder, but the mission was to save Kuwait. Kuwait was saved. The end. Allow flesh-and-blood Bush a little slack here. He got a bit carried away with himself when he ordered the hit on Baghdad. A phone call from some Saudi prince would set him right.