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APPENDIX H
Brief on Iraqi Forces by LtGen Bernard E. Trainor
rank. But once you get down and talk to another soldier and talk about soldierly things that only another military man would talk about, then your bona fides are established at least with the military fellow, if not the political guy bird-dogging you, and that’s what I was able to do. And they brought me down to—and I’m sure you all have a reasonable familiarity with the southern portion of Iraq. I went down to the area of al-Amarah, al-Majarr, as-Sulayb, down to al-Basrah and the Fish Lake* area where most of these offensives were taking place over the period of the four years of defensive operations that the Iraqis conducted. There was no greater intention than letting me get below division level, but when I got talking with the division commander and he recognized that I was in fact a military man, then he was very anxious for me—he was typical military, “I want to show you what my guys do,” and there was some business of compare and contrast—and I found this throughout the Third World. People, when they find out you were in Vietnam, well, everybody in the world knows about Vietnam, and they want to know how you did it in Vietnam and how you did it differently than the way they are fighting. The fact that I fought in Korea didn’t mean a thing; nobody even knew what a Korea was, but they knew what Vietnam was. This was a marvelous entrée. Whether I was talking with a young private in the Sandinista army or a major general in the Iraqi Army, this opened doors. So, this division commander, because he not only had military clout but he also had considerable political clout—and the two of them go together in the senior ranks of the Iraqi armed forces—he was able to go to the bird dog and get me down to where the fighting was and get right up on the lines. And I spent 45 minutes in an artillery OP [observation post] during an artillery exchange between the Iraqis and the Iranians—and you couldn’t get much farther forward than that. So I did get a good look at them, and what I’m going to tell you now is a judgment of their capability and their liabilities as I judged them during
On 10 December 1990, Lieutenant General Walter E. Boomer’s staff and senior commanders received a briefing on the Iraqi military from retired Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor. General Trainor retired from the Marine Corps in 1985 after a career that included combat service in Korea and Vietnam, and then he went on to become a war correspondent for the New York Times. General Trainor went to Iraq in the winter of 1987–88 to report on the IranIraq War, and his status as a retired senior officer convinced the Iraqis to grant him unusual access to the front lines and their operational units. GEN TRAINOR: I went to Iraq during the winter of 1987–88 during what was known as the Cobla 5/6 Offensive by the Iranians. The Iranians called it their final offensive, and indeed it was the final offensive, but not in the way that the Iranians intended. They intended it to be the final offensive wherein they would have toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. It turned out it was the final offensive before the collapse of the Iranian armed forces. But I got a good look at the Iraqis, and that’s what I would like to address today. I’ll give you an assessment, and then I think more importantly in the Q&A [question and answer], we can develop some of these things. One of the beauties of going and becoming a military correspondent—or analyst as I was for the New York Times—was that when I went out to all of these Third World wars that I covered, and I covered just about every one of them during the period I was with the Times, once I made contact with military people I was running free; I was able to do things and go places that attachés could never go, or other journalists would go. There’s kind of a brotherhood—a military brotherhood that exists—and it transcends national boundaries and ideologies, and once you are able to contact a military guy, in the position that I was in, all sorts of doors opened up to you, and that’s what happened when I went to Iraq. It [Iraq] is a very closed society, a paranoid society, a real police state, and you have attached to you a “bird dog” [close observer] and he never lets you out of his sight. When you go there and you say you are a retired three-star general from the Marine Corps who is now a journalist, you see the flicker in their eyes which essentially says “b——t,” and the assumption is that you’re a CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] agent and your military rank is a political
*
Fish Lake was a barrier created by Iraq on its border with Iran that was intended to prevent an Iranian assault. In addition to water, the lake was filled with mines, concertina wire, and highvoltage electrical lines.
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