His thinking was this: Air was killing him; and Coalition ground forces were surprisingly reluctant to impale themselves on his defenses. So, he thought, I’ll bring the battle to them. If I invade Saudi Arabia, the Coalition will have to counterattack. If that jump-starts the ground war, and the Americans rush into my defenses, then I “win” . . . insofar as American soldiers would die in great numbers. (It should be noted that at that point Gary Luck’s deception operation had lots of radio traffic coming out of an area just south of Al-Khafji, leaving the Iraqis under the impression that the XVIIIth Airborne Corps was poised to attack from there. In fact, the corps was already in transit west to their actual attack locations.) If my invasion succeeds, Saddam continued, then I “win,” because I can attack the Egyptians and Syrians near KKMC. That should inflict chaos on some of the Americans’ Arab lackeys. And who knows where that will lead?

The downside for Saddam was to continue to be destroyed from the air and certain defeat. His next decision was a no-brainer.

★ As a side note: because Saddam’s hopes for his invasion of Saudi Arabia were so resoundingly dashed, several commentators have imagined that the Iraqis could not have been really serious about it—that, in other words, the invasion was not an invasion but a “probe.”

For their “probe,” they used three divisions, one armor and two mechanized infantry, including their 5th Mechanized division, one of their finest armor units (it was considered just below the Republican Guard).65 Though exact numbers are not available, in all probability these three divisions contained something in the neighborhood of 20,000 troops (and perhaps as many as 40,000), a sizable force.

Meanwhile, Saddam himself thought the probe—or invasion—was of no small importance. After learning that his troops had entered the town, he announced that the attack was “the beginning and omen of the thundering storm that will blow on the Arabian Desert.”

Chuck Horner will take up the story from here.

AL-KHAFJI