Shock and Awe.

As the United States prepared for military action against Iraq, U.S. officials confidently named the U.S. battle plan “Shock and Awe” for the psychological impact that its overwhelming force would have on Iraqis. Vice President Dick Cheney predicted that the United States would easily win victory and that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. These positive forecasts, however, met with a much different reality, as U.S. troops encountered early fierce resistance from the enemy and as crowds of thankful Iraqis failed to materialize for U.S. and international television cameras. The real shock and awe for Iraqis, however, occurred a few weeks later when U.S. troops regained momentum and easily took the capital city of Baghdad, leading to the sudden collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime after decades of repression and terror. The U.S. Pentagon’s Shock and Awe campaign was supposed to begin with warplanes and ships launching between three and four hundred cruise missiles into Iraq on the first day, more than the total number of missiles launched during the whole of the first Gulf War in 1991, followed by a similar assault the following day. In a surprise move, however, on the evening of March 19, 2003, President Bush instead ordered a limited missile strike on a specific target in Baghdad believed to be the command post for Saddam Hussein and top leaders of his regime. The United States hoped to kill Saddam Hussein in one decisive blow and thereby decapitate his twenty-four-year-old dictatorship. The attack was launched using cruise missiles from ships in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf followed by bombs dropped by U.S. F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter jets. Later, U.S. secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld explained that the strike was carried out on the basis of very good intelligence information and confirmed that the target was a senior Iraqi leadership compound. Iraq responded to the missile attack by firing missiles at allied troops in Kuwait; many of those missed and others were intercepted before striking their targets. A few hours after the attack, however, Saddam Hussein appeared in a videotape on Iraqi television, raising the possibility that he had survived and that the U.S. mission had failed. Analysts later concluded that the voice on the videotape was Hussein’s but said it could have been recorded earlier. Moreover, military analysts said that although the Iraqi command bunkers were severely damaged and there was a dramatic drop in communication from the command post, there was no confirmation that Hussein and his aides had been killed. In addition to the attack on Saddam Hussein, the U.S. military began to set the stage for the planned all-out air and land assault on Iraq, a plan the military called Operation Iraqi Freedom. The United States and its allies positioned ground troops to the south of Iraq along the Kuwait-Iraq border, and on March 19 allied warplanes attacked Iraqi artillery pieces in this southern area because they posed a threat to U.S. and British troops stationed there. Also, the United States began a psychological operations campaign that issued instructions to Iraqi troops on how to surrender to allied forces once the war began. The messages were delivered by a radio station near the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border operated by American Special Operations forces, by an airborne radio station, and by leaflets dropped by allied aircraft. Iraqis were instructed to park their vehicles, put white flags on them, move more than half a mile away from their vehicles, and wait for further instructions. On March 21, 2003, the long-awaited Shock and Awe military campaign against Iraq began. The first round of air strikes dropped more than thirteen hundred cruise missiles and bombs on command and control targets in Baghdad. The strikes were intended to destroy Saddam Hussein’s ability to communicate with and control his forces. Targets included headquarters and facilities used by Hussein’s special armed forces, including the Republican Guard, Hussein’s most elite troops, and the Special Republican Guard, an even more elite group in charge of protecting Hussein and thwarting any coup attempts. The air assault continued unabated in the following days, pounding Baghdad day and night, taking out government facilities, destroying Iraq’s air defenses, and hitting Republican Guard positions that guarded the city. Also on March 21, U.S. Marine and Army and British ground forces numbering about 150,000 began a long march toward Baghdad as part of a southern front. The land assault originally had been planned to occur days later, after air strikes and special operations had prepared Iraq for invasion. In order to retain the element of surprise, however, the attack was moved up after the early strike on Saddam Hussein. In addition, Iraq had started fires in six oil fields in southern Iraq, and the United States was anxious to protect Iraqi oil. The campaign got off to a highly successful start, raising high expectations among the U.S. public that the war could be won easily and painlessly. Coalition ground forces advanced quickly through the weakly defended southern desert of Iraq; within the first day, troops raced to within 200 miles of Baghdad. Television images showed American bombs striking targets in Baghdad with great precision and American tanks gliding swiftly across the Iraqi deserts.

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