The Nimitz in UN Service: 1998

The November 1998 issue of Proceedings, the journal of the US Naval Institute
is no longer online. However I discovered a cached copy on my hard disk in the
process of cleaning it out. One of the articles it contained was the third part
of a series of six entitled Five Fleets: Around the World with the Nimitz by Lieutenant Commander William R. Bray, U.S.N. The events of that long-ago blockade on Iraq before the War on Terror took on a fascinating aspect in retrospect. Bray describes how the Nimitz was taking part in a UN sponsored mission to contain Saddam Hussein. One of its tasks was to support a U-2 flight over Iraq that Saddam had threatened to shoot down. The U-2 was an American aircraft assigned to a United Nations mission. What Bray described next was how the French tracked the Nimitz task force almost certainly on behalf of Saddam.

Faces in the war room were long, pale, and tired, yet an intensity hung in
the air as each staff officer offered final thoughts on the day's events and
what to expect the following day when a United Nations-sponsored U-2
reconnaissance plane would fly into denied Iraqi air space for the first time
since Saddam Hussein explicitly threatened to shoot it down. ...six-and-a-half
years after the Gulf War, the United States is ensnared in multilateral
confusions, unable to force the critical denouement that would lay bare
Saddam's elaborate program of deception in dodging U.N. weapons inspections. ...

On 16 October, Richard Butler, the new chairman of the U.N. Special
Commission on Monitoring (UNSCOM) charged with carrying out weapons
inspections in Iraq, delivered his six-month review on Iraqi compliance and
progress toward sanctions relief to the Security Council in New York. ...
Ambassador Hamdoon, on instruction from Baghdad, delivered a letter to U.N.
Secretary General Kofi Annan on 29 October, detailing conditions for future
Iraqi cooperation with UNSCOM. Foremost on the list was a demand for U.S.
weapons inspectors to leave Iraq by 6 November and for the United Nations to
immediately cease using the U.S. U-2 for monitoring missions over Iraq. On the
very same day, Iraq began barring U.S. inspectors from inspection sites.
Baghdad clearly was trying to isolate the United States from the other members
of the Security Council. It seemed incredible to most in the United Nations
that a vanquished aggressor state such as Iraq would so boldly dictate the
terms of its own chastisement and assume such an affront would hasten its
reentry into the family of nations after seven years of isolation. ...

Militarily, the crisis was centering around Iraq's aversion to the UNSCOM-chartered
U-2 flight, which had evolved from an implicit to an explicit threat to shoot
down the plane if it flew into Iraqi territory. The UNSCOM U-2 flew
approximately four missions per month, and the first flight scheduled for
November had slid to the 10th, thus allowing the seriousness of the Iraqi
threat to be properly ascertained and a response to any aggression thoroughly
planned and agreed upon. ... Inside the skin of the ship, however,
intelligence personnel and the aviators they support were working furiously,
planning detailed missions against Iraqi targets tasked to be struck if the 10
November U-2 was fired upon. ...

On 3 November, one of the Nimitz's escorts reported being overflown by a
plane bearing similar characteristics to the French built Atlantique, a
twin-propeller engine aircraft used for maritime surveillance and
antisubmarine warfare. Task Force 50 assets were unable to positively identify
the aircraft, although it appeared the plane tracked back to the west, either
to Saudi Arabia or Qatar, following its mission. No Gulf country has the
Atlantique. On 9 November, an Atlantique-type aircraft again flew a maritime
patrol profile in the northern and central Arabian Gulf, even dropping a
passive acoustic listening device near a U.S. submarine operating on the
surface. This time the aircraft was tracked back to Doha, Qatar. It was later
learned that two French Atlantiques, deployed to Djibouti on the Red Sea, had
flown to Qatar on 29 October for a bilateral training mission. The French made
no excuses for their activity, but it seemed strange that they should use a
bilateral training exercise to fly maritime surveillance patrol against U.S.
ships during a period of heightened tension.

Likewise, in early November, the French frigate Jean de Vienne mysteriously
deviated from her published schedule, which called for port visits outside the
Gulf, and instead loitered close to U.S. ships in the northern Arabian Gulf
until the crisis abated. The Jean de Vienne never actually obstructed U.S.
operations, but her presence and odd behavior were highly suspect and a public
statement from the French mission in Kuwait that the Jean de Vienne was
operating in close coordination with her coalition partners had a disingenuous
ring to it.

It would be naive to assume that the French, with their close and
sympathetic ties to Iraq, are not collecting intelligence against their
coalition partners. What is not known is how much of this information finds
its way to Baghdad. One thing is certain, however. The French are not trusted
members of the coalition and their presence must serve some grand political
objective in Paris that involves having it both ways--appearing the concerned
contributor to a collective-security arrangement while at the same time
working to undermine that arrangement's very raison d'�tre. That, as I'm sure
Joseph Conrad's Martin Decoud would agree, is the practical approach.

The Russians were ready to play their part. While the movements of the Nimitz
and the rest of the Fleet were being reported by French warships, the Kremlin
induced Saddam to retreat ever so slightly from the brink, but not all the way,
leaving the Iraqi dictator with a net gain. They played the hero to the American
heel. More from LCDR Bray:

As the Nimitz operated in the northern Arabian Gulf on the morning of 19
November, Russia's Foreign Minister, the crafty former KGB spymaster and
accomplished Arabist Yevgeny Primakov, was on his way from Moscow to Geneva to
discuss with his U.S., British, and French counterparts a yet-to-be revealed
eleventh-hour way out of the crisis. Primakov had just hosted and cut a deal
with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, still Baghdad's lead man on all
foreign policy concerns. Aziz, who swaggers into the hallowed corridors of the
United Nations with so much panache one wonders if he doesn't realize he's the
head statesman of a first-rate thugocracy, had just finished stops in New York
and Paris and was in North Africa when beckoned to the Kremlin. There the
Russians promised Aziz they would work harder in the Security Council to get
sanctions lifted, as long as Iraq immediately allowed all UNSCOM inspectors to
return to work and complied with all existing resolutions. Baghdad accepted,
and on 21 November the inspectors returned to Iraq, temporarily defusing the
crisis.

The United States was being played like a fiddle, its huge fleet and aerial
assets led in circles in the sham blockade that we now know was set up by 'friends' on the Security Council who were running a covert rearmament effort called the Oil-for-Food Programme. History may show that Oil-For-Food; the corrupt regime of UN inspections, the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation industry -- and much else -- were all of a piece. Future generations will be astonished, not at how terrible that September day in New York was, but at how lightly the US got off for the folly of the 1990s, escaping not so much through vigilance as sheer good fortune.