FOR MOST AMERICANS, the Iraqi missile attack on Kuwait City early Saturday morning represented a new stage in the current war. This one got through. All twelve missiles previously fired from Iraq into Kuwait had been intercepted by U.S. Patriot missiles. That, at least, was the official Pentagon line.
“At this point, a total of 12 missiles have been fired,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, at the CENTCOM briefing on Friday, hours before the latest Iraqi missile attack. “We believe them to be in the Ababil-100 or Al Samoud family, and those have been launched from within Iraq toward Kuwait. We’re seeing a rate of about one per day at this point, and all of the threatening launches have been intercepted by Patriot missiles.”
There’s one problem with this line: It does not seem to be true. Or if it is true by some hypertechnical military definition of the word “threatening,” it doesn’t seem to be true in any commonly accepted understanding of the word. Two Iraqi missiles had previously slipped through the allegedly impervious Patriot shield protecting U.S. troops south of the Iraqi border. For days, military leaders refused to confirm this. On background, they would concede that yes, well, we know about these. But they offered little else.
The problem became clear, to me at least, last Thursday night. I was taking a short break from writing, standing out on the balcony of the apartment we have rented here, about 20 kilometers south of Kuwait City. I heard what sounded like a low-flying aircraft zipping across the tops of the buildings in our complex. Other planes had flown over, returning south to ships in the Gulf, but this one was significantly lower, and consequently, much louder than the others.
Moments later, I saw a blinding flash of light across much of my field of vision. The incongruity of lightning on a clear, starry night registered just before the ground-shaking boom that sent papers from the coffee table onto the floor. My colleague, Matt Labash, emerged from his back bedroom to inquire about the noise. I told him what had happened and it was clear that he thought I was exaggerating.
The next day, though, he was no longer a doubter. Labash traveled to the site of that landing, where he came upon a scene similar to the one recorded at the mall–broken glass, the storefronts of two carpet shops blown away, and shrapnel littering the ground. The damage from last week’s attack was not as significant as it was at the mall, but it was damage just the same.
According to military sources willing to speculate in private, the missile that landed near the hotel was probably a “seersucker”–a low-flying missile that evades detection because of its proximity to the ground. It was one of two that landed near our hotel complex that night. The second was even closer, according the Paul Reid, a reporter for the Palm Beach Post.
Late Thursday, Reid told me, he was sitting with two U.S. soldiers on the promenade outside of the main hotel building here. As they chatted and enjoyed a smoke, they also heard what they assumed was a low-flying plane. They were, needless to say, surprised to instead see a missile plunge into the Gulf merely 1,000 feet from where they sat. Here’s how he described it for his paper the next day:
As the three stood under a nearly full moon and listened to the distant drone of U.S. jets heading north, a very low flying jet fighter–they presumed it was a fighter–screamed past, heading south. They couldn’t make out the shape, but they could follow the sound, for another second or two, perhaps, because with a white flash and a mighty whump, it exploded, about a half-mile up the beach, 1,000 or so feet off the shore.
One British Royal Air Force officer told the Sunday Times of London: “We heard it going overhead. We don’t know what they were aiming at, but we all could have been toast.”
That analysis certainly contradicts the dismissive reports from CENTCOM. United States military sources say those reports may have been downplayed because the Kuwaiti government is nervous about scaring its citizens. But unfortunately such incidents do little to reassure reporters, whose job it is to provide information, that information provided by the U.S. government is to be trusted.
Stephen F. Hayes is staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
