With all that in mind, Saddam planned for enduring a short air campaign and a fierce land battle. His troops constructed formidable defensive positions, with minefields, fire trenches, and presurveyed fields of fire for his artillery. When the war came to Kuwait and southern Iraq, perhaps his poorly trained infantry divisions would die in staggering numbers; but in doing so, they would inflict thousands of casualties and deaths on the Americans. Once the Coalition forces had been weakened, they could then be defeated or brutalized by his heavy armor and Republican Guard divisions. And even if all these plans failed and he did not win on the battlefield, the television coverage of the bloodshed would ensure his victory in the streets of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.

Unfortunately for Saddam’s brilliant strategy, things didn’t work out the way he planned.

The war started and the air came, but the air did not cease (as Saddam said it would), and the ground forces failed to take the bait. Unexpectedly, the Iraqi Army was being destroyed from the air. They were totally naked to Chuck Horner’s armada and had no clue about how to fight back.

Saddam had to do something to regain the initiative and resurrect his failing strategy. Otherwise his defeat would be absolute, and his regime might be lost.

★ The first such attempt occurred during the mad rush of Iraqi jets to sanctuary in Iran toward the end of January.

One day, enemy fighters took to the air out of an airfield in eastern Iraq, and AWACS controllers vectored nearby USAF F-15s in CAP orbit toward the fleeing Iraqis. Nothing unusual. But as the air-to-air jets screamed north, a pair of bomb-laden Iraqi Mirage aircraft took off and headed south. Though the AWACS crew spotted this new threat, they could not recall the F-15s, who had their hands full chasing their prey to the north.

Next in line were two F-14s at a CAP point in the northern part of the Arabian Gulf. Because the F-14s were controlled by a Navy Aegis cruiser that would not release them to AWACS (possibly because the Aegis controller feared leaving the Navy naked to the Iraqi bombers that were headed in their general direction), the AWACS controller was unable to vector these interceptors onto the Mirages.

Meanwhile, the Mirages were now flying down the coast of Saudi Arabia, approaching the huge oil refinery south of Dhahran. Saddam surely hoped that by bombing the oil fields, he would bring pain to Saudi Arabia, the same way Coalition air was bringing pain to him. For example, the pumping stations in the refineries have huge one-of-a-kind valves that would take years to obtain. If the Mirages had been able to hit the maze of pipes in the refinery, they could have put the refinery out of action for a very long time.