Supply shortages took other tolls. For example, low-priority infantry units had very little to eat, with some receiving food supplies no more than once every three or four days. When the war came, several units surrendered because they were hungry.

Perhaps most tellingly, when the Iraqi generals were ordered to travel from Basra to Safwan for the cease-fire talks (a distance of thirty miles), they requested permission to make the trip by helicopter, because the road was impassable.

★ Meanwhile, there were losses. Though these were surprisingly few, any loss hurt.

On the night of 18 January, an A-6 went missing. The crew were never recovered. An A-10 was shot down on the twenty-third of January, and its pilot was captured. Early in the predawn hours of 3 February, an electrical generator failure caused a B-52 from the 430th Bomb Wing to crash into the sea while landing at Diego Garcia. When the pilot activated the wing flaps on his final approach, the electrical demand caused a massive loss of electrical power, which led to the loss of fuel to the engines. Fortunately, three of the crew ejected and were safely rescued.

TANTRUMS

Not all Iraqi sallies in the direction of regaining the military initiative took a conventional form, and some were until that time unique—deliberate assaults on the environment of Kuwait and the region. Though calling these actions “military” is stretching the term quite a lot, there may in fact have been some small military utility.

Was military gain the prime motive for the Iraqi desecration of the environment? Hardly. The motive was pure and simple revenge. “You’re hurting me. I’ll hurt you back. You’re going to undo my theft of Kuwait. Then I’ll turn Kuwait into a wasteland and leave you with nothing there you’d want.” Saddam Hussein made threats like these openly and often. He tried to carry them out.

On 25 January, the Iraqis opened the pipelines that carried crude oil from the huge storage tanks south of Kuwait City out to tanker terminals just offshore. Thousands of tons of oil were now gushing into the waters of the Arabian Gulf, polluting beaches, killing waterfowl. Since there was some likelihood that the oil would float down the Gulf and eventually clog up the desalinization plants on the east coast of Saudi Arabia, this particular act of environmental terrorism may have given Saddam a small military victory. The Saudis depended on those plants for much of their water. But again, was military gain his aim? Not likely. He was just plain being ornery.