In the planning for the offensive air campaign, a master target list had been created. The list included thirty-three targets designated as command-and-control centers, though what exactly they commanded and controlled was not totally clear. Number thirty on the list was the Al-Firdus bunker in Baghdad, which was initially scheduled to be struck on day three of the war, a day when many targets were scheduled to be hit. (Day-three targets tended to be the leftovers, after the really important targets were struck on the first two and a half days). In the event, Al-Firdus and the other thirty-two bunkers slipped in priority, as the demands of Scud-hunting, more time-sensitive targets, and weather were met.

Still, in the eyes of the Black Hole planners, Al-Firdus remained a legitimate target of some importance to Saddam’s war machine. It was definitely constructed to house military command and control, and it was camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded (though in truth, hardly anything in Iraq was not camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded). What Black Hole planners did not know was that hundreds of Iraqi civilians were using the bunker as an air raid shelter.

At last, after nearly four weeks of war, Al-Firdus made it to the top of the list. Planners proposed it for the night of 13-14 February; it was approved as legitimate by the lawyer in the plans shop who watched over the legal aspects of target selection (he could and did veto targets), and then it was approved by Schwarzkopf in the evening briefing.

Chuck Horner reflects:

In retrospect, I should have asked harder questions. For one, if we could wait almost a month to strike this bunker, what made it so important now? For another, how was the bunker actually being used to command Iraqi military forces? Since the real reason we were attacking the bunker was almost certainly the availability of F-117 sorties (we’ve got lots to spend; if we don’t use them, they’re wasted), I doubt that anyone could have given me a good answer to those questions. In the absence of a satisfactory answer, I could have erased that target from the list, and hundreds of Iraqi lives could have been saved and a terrible tragedy avoided. But all of that is hindsight. The reality is F-117s hit the Al-Firdus bunker, and we killed several hundred people.

However, the questions I failed to ask aren’t the only questions that need asking here. For instance, why use the bunker as an air raid shelter? To the Black Hole planners and the F-117 pilots flying the missions, it is inconceivable that any Iraqi in Baghdad would want to be anywhere but in his own home during air attacks. American bombs did not hit family homes. Pilots were painstakingly careful to bomb only militarily significant targets. Their bombing was accurate.