Southern Focus

Apologies for the sidebar. But the somewhat self-congratulatory P-3 story ("We clever Marines kept our assets from those evil AF guys by putting a Colonel on them!") struck a bit of a nerve. Suffice it to say there will always be tensions in air asset allocation because the needs almost inevitably outweigh the resources. It's also true that I lack background on the details of the specific missions being discussed for P-3s.

Ed, I agree that Southern Focus was primarily an air defense suppression campaign. And for many of us in the Intelligence Community at the time, the WMD presence was inconsequential -- contrary to what the drafters of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq WMDs were saying. In my own agency, the DOE Office of Intelligence, the conviction of our experts was that Iraq had no nuclear program. (Sadly, only the State Dept.

While I haven't read it, somehow I don't think this particular story made it into Benjamin S. Lambeth's, "THE UNSEEN WAR: ALLIED AIR POWER AND THE TAKEDOWN OF SADDAM HUSSEIN"

This is a story of how the USMC kept the USAF from poaching it's "Manned UAV Surrogate" support during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

John, The references to Southern Focus in Chapter 1 say go to Chapter 2 for details. The discussion of Southern Focus in Chapter 2 seems to be almost entirely in the section "Prewar Defense Suppression Moves" (pp 60-71). This describes Southern Focus as an attack on Iraq's air defense system. It does not suggest that attacks on WMDs were a goal, even a minor secondary goal, of Southern Focus.

I can see no suggestion in this section that Southern Focus was believed to have degraded Iraq's WMD capabilities even a little bit.

Ed, Chapters 1 and 2, especially two. I talked about this in 2014 in my review for Dave Winkler and the Naval Historical Foundation.
Here is a link to that review. https://www.navyhistory.org/2014/04/book-review-the-unseen-war-allied-ai...
And yes, I do not go into that issue in the review, when I was writing my Military Disasters book I went back to Lambeth (as well as the Iraqi Perspectives Project by Pease et al.) and came to the thesis I have lobbed here as an incendiary.

John - You say I should read Lambeth. Can you specify a page or pages on which Lambeth suggests that Southern Focus even came close to destroying all the Iraqi WMD facilities?

Lambeth makes occasional references to the Americans having discussed attacks on WMD facilities when drawing up plans for the war. But I cannot find any indication that the planning specifically for Southern Focus included attacks on WMDs, or that the Americans believed Southern Focus seriously reduced Iraqi WMD capabilities.

This would not be the first time military ops were justified on the basis of pretext.

As to the Iraqi situation, It is very obvious the 'exaggerations' were contrived to create an justification for taking out the Iraqi regime based on dissatisfaction by political elements in American politics that still existed, to allow for a complete invasion of Iraq after the Gulf war victory of the US.

Those in that Administration who did not like stopping at the Kuwait border wanted to march into Baghdad and this made up event let them do exactly that outcome.

Read Lambeth, The goal was to reach a point of success in neutralizing these sites to give ground forces assurance of protection from chemical attacks. This was a sine qua non for the invasion, but the raison d'etre for the invasion was existence/threat of these very threats! so if the was threat gone (or gone enough), the reason to invade was gone (or gone enough).

The US government believed that Iraq had a lot of active, currently functional WMD sites. If this belief had been correct, a significant fraction of them would have been neither known nor suspected by the US. Destroying all known or suspected sites would not have meant destroying all, or even almost all, currently functional WMD sites.