The Allies: A Partnership to Remember

If General Norman Schwarzkopf did not march into Kuwait City last week proclaiming "I have returned," it was for two reasons. One was that he had never been driven out. The second was more important: the U.S. commander of Operation Desert Storm wanted the ravaged Arab capital to be liberated by Arabs -- exiled Kuwaitis as well as Saudis and kindred units in the anti-Iraq coalition. So strongly did Schwarzkopf feel about dramatizing the Arab role that he was expected to pass up any uninvited triumphal visit to Kuwait. In 1944 a jut-jawed General Douglas MacArthur had made a point of being the ceremonial first to wade ashore in the recaptured Philippines. In 1991 Schwarzkopf remained at Desert Storm headquarters in Riyadh extolling his command's "great coalition of people, all of whom did a fine job."

Whether U.S. forces alone could have liberated Kuwait is an academic question. The fact is that from the outset of the Persian Gulf military buildup intended to thwart Iraq, a multinational effort was politically necessary. Designed to demonstrate that the world community opposed Saddam Hussein, it was also meant to show that the Iraqi strongman was not the leader of an Arab-Muslim holy war against the infidel. That was the symbolism, a display of teamwork that skeptics thought would work only in an internationalist's fantasy. In practice, however, the alliance moved as a smoothly coordinated machine during the stunningly triumphant 100-hour ground war. While U.S. forces were the backbone of the operation, its success relied on the nerve and muscle of a variety of nationalities. Lieut. General Peter de la Billiere, commander of British forces, called the alliance's grand-slam performance "one of the greatest victories that we've ever experienced, certainly in our lives and possibly in history."

About half the combatants in the land campaign were non-American: mainly, in descending order of strength, Saudi, Egyptian, British, Syrian and French. The . small gulf sheikdoms -- including Kuwait's government-in-exile -- fielded 11,500 troops with the Saudis, while lesser contingents from 17 other countries carried out some aircraft, ship and behind-the-lines assignments. Most of the 28 coalition members performed noncombat duties or tried, as the 1,700 Moroccan troops did, to stay invisible: their dispatch to Saudi Arabia had become a focus of controversy back home. But Schwarzkopf took pains to tip his forage cap to the chief partners, all of whose missions he termed "very, very tough."

In the first hour of the ground war, two Saudi task forces launched an assault across the feared "Saddam line" of fortifications into eastern Kuwait. In the northward plunge along the coastline they had an unenviable double duty: to deceive Baghdad into thinking that all of the allies were massed for a frontal assault, and to deflect Iraqi defenders from U.S. Marine crossings farther west. The Saudi-led Arab forces "did a terrific job" in breaching "a very, very tough barrier system," Schwarzkopf said, noting that they had been "required to fight the kind of fight that the Iraqis wanted them to." Some Kuwaitis in the Saudi force kissed the earth on returning to home ground and were among those Arabs eventually privileged to be in the vanguard entering Kuwait City.