Death Highway, Revisited

The pictures were among the most stunning to come out of the gulf war: mile after mile of burned, smashed, shattered vehicles of every description -- tanks, armored cars, trucks, autos, even stolen Kuwaiti fire trucks -- littering the highway from Kuwait City to Basra. To some Americans, the pictures were also sickening. Weren't the Iraqis in those vehicles pulling out ^ of Kuwait, exactly as the U.S. wanted them to? Did the American planes that wreaked this carnage really have to keep up the bloody assaults on an already beaten foe?

Absolutely, say American officers. The aim of the U.S.-led coalition at that point was not just to push Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait but also to destroy the offensive capability that had made it a regional menace. A great deal of that offensive capability consisted of vehicles on the road to Basra. The Iraqis driving them in many cases were members of Saddam's Republican Guard who at least initially were conducting an orderly fighting retreat. The allies were determined to give them no breathing space to pull themselves together to make a stand -- or to regroup for an assault on the American Army, which had cut them off to the north and stood between them and Basra; the Iraqi armor was heading away from one battle but toward another. In any case, many a general has bitterly rued the day he let a beaten enemy army get away to turn around and fight again.

True enough, the tanks and armored cars got tangled up with civilian vehicles. These mostly were driven by Iraqi soldiers bugging out from Kuwait City, carrying along staggering loads of loot and Kuwaiti civilians apparently to be used as hostages; the troopers unwittingly drove smack into a bigger battle than the one they were fleeing. After the war, correspondents did find some cars and trucks with burned bodies, but also many vehicles that had been abandoned. Their occupants had fled on foot, and the American planes often did not fire at them. That some Kuwaiti civilians who had been kidnapped by the fleeing Iraqis probably also perished on what became the highway of death is a true tragedy. Which proves once more that even in an era of precision weapons, war is hell; it can be civilized to some extent by rules of conduct, but the most humane thing to do is to end it as quickly as possible.