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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
At the GOP debate Tuesday night, Ted Cruz came out swinging wildly.
Blitzer: Senator Cruz, you have said you would, quote, “carpet bomb ISIS into oblivion,” testing whether, quote, “sand can glow in the dark.” Does that mean leveling the ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria where there are hundreds of thousands of civilians?CRUZ: What it means is using overwhelming air power to utterly and completely destroy ISIS. To put things in perspective, in the first Persian Gulf War, we launched roughly 1,100 air attacks a day. We carpet bombed them for 36 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.”
Ted Cruz has impressive educational degrees and is a wily if not a smart man, but he most often is ignorant about the things of which he speaks. This statement demonstrates that he has never so much as read a book about the Gulf War, and doesn’t know anything at all about military history. He shouldn’t be in charge of the Pentagon. He shouldn’t be in charge of a henhouse.
The Iraqi army circa early 1991 was a tank army that had invaded Kuwait and had lined up tank battalions along the Kuwaiti border. The US bombed the tank lines in order to soften them up. But actually Gen. Schwarzkopf did not punch through those lines. Having blinded the Iraqis and deprived them of command and control, he executed what he called a “Hail Mary Pass,” going up to the west of the Iraqi lines and going around them.
Despite the US bombing for 3 weeks, the Iraqis had plenty of tanks left. The Battle of Burqan was the largest tank battle since World War II.
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